Archive for July 2013
Is Weiner an alpha male?
There appear to have been many hot blonde babes working for his campaign.
Don’t appear on a reality TV show if you are doing illegal stuff
This story contains an important life lesson. If you are engaged in illegal activities, you should avoid doing anything that would attract unwanted attention to yourself. And yes, that includes appearing on a popular reality TV show.
You should also click on the link and look at the pictures of the people involved, because it will help you to follow the advice I’ve previously given which is to avoid marrying anyone who looks like she could be on a “Real Housewives” show.
U.S. officials should read the Lion
From an article in today’s Wall Street Journal about Egypt:
Many administration officials are mystified by the harder line being taken by both Gen. Sisi and the Brotherhood. “None of us can quite figure this out,” a senior U.S. official said. “It seems so self-defeating.”
Yes, how could senior U.S. officials possibly have seen this one coming?
Maybe if they had read my blog. Back on July 3, I wrote:
I don’t think that the bad guys [that’s the Muslim Brotherhood] will go out quietly, because they have the worldview of Islamic terrorists. There could be a civil war just like what’s going on in Syria.
You should continue to read Lion of the Blogosphere for better analysis of world events than is available to senior officials in the Obama administration.
Beautiful beats ugly by 10 to 1
There are 64 million photos on Instagram with the hashtag of #beautiful, but only 6 million with the hashtag of #ugly.
$5 million is the new million
There’s a Wall Street Journal video explaining that a UBS survey found that only 28% of investors with investable assets between $1 million and $5 million considered themselves to be “affluent.”
If you think about the term “millionaire,” it is an old term that was used to describe rich people back in the days when a million dollars was worth more like $10 million or even $20 million in today’s dollars.
If rich means that you should be able to live the rest of your life with no financial constraints (within reason) and not have to work if you don’t want to, then it should be obvious that a million dollars isn’t rich because you can’t even buy a decent one-bedroom condo in Manhattan for a mere million dollars, and that doesn’t even include maintenance and real estate taxes.
In my opinion, rich should means that you can afford:
- 3-bedroom apartment in Manhattan
- Private school education for two children, through graduate school
- Summer home in the Hamptons
- Extra money for two international vacations each year.
And I think that list requires more then $5 million, but can be had for less than $10 million.
To be a member of the working rich, and assuming one’s working life is 30 years, and that you need to earn $15 million to meet this lifestyle because half of your income goes poof in taxes, that means you need a family income of $500,000/year.
Another death by cow
Joao Maria de Souza, 45, had been in bed with his wife Leni when the animal fell through the ceiling of their home in Caratinga, southeast Brazil.
The cow is believed to have escaped from a nearby farm and climbed onto the roof of the couple’s house, which backs onto a steep hill on Wednesday night.
A cow that wandered onto Interstate 40 in West Tennessee may have caused a car crash that killed four people.
Arkansas City police say an Oklahoma man died while working inside a cattle pen at Creekstone Farms.
…
Police say Gates was inside the cattle pen trying to move cattle when he was knocked down and injured by other cattle. An autopsy will determine his cause of death.
All these deaths occurred just this month. Beware of cows.
Woman makes up fake rape
A taxi driver from Nottingham was accused of rape. But luckily for him, he voice recorded his entire cab shift using an app on his smartphone. So now the woman who falsely accused him is in prison instead.
But this story makes you wonder, how many men are in prison for rapes they didn’t commit?
The case AGAINST high-tech immigrants
From the PBS Newshour website, of all places:
When Bill Clinton was president, wages for American IT workers were climbing and American students were clamoring to become computer scientists. Fifteen years later, average real IT wages are no higher. It is no coincidence that high-tech industries are now using guest workers to fill two-thirds of new IT jobs.
And now they’re asking Congress to provide them with an even greater supply of guest workers — a supply that by the IT industry’s own estimates would equal 150 percent of the expected number of new IT jobs each and every year going forward. With its passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill, the Senate has complied, putting out a sign for IT jobs that says, “We prefer guest workers.”
The summary at the end:
Currently, U.S. colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than find employment in those fields every year — about 200,000 more — while the IT industry fills about two-thirds of its entry-level positions with guest workers.
At the same time, IT wages have stagnated for over a decade. We cannot expect to build a strong STEM workforce and encourage domestic innovation by developing policies that undermine the quality of STEM jobs. Before asking government to intervene in labor markets by handing out more guest worker visas and green cards to STEM graduates, we should ask for audits of shortage claims and workforce impacts as a first step toward developing evidence-based policy on this issue, an issue critical to the nation’s future.
Weiner in the NY Times
Weiner’s lastest sexcapades have made even the NY Times.
What a loser. Why is this guy running for mayor if he still can’t keep himself from doing what got him in trouble the first time around? Is he stupid?
Doesn’t he know that you have to choose from only one of the following?
- Indulge in weird sexual fetishes.
- Run for public office.
And I’m not making any judgments as to which one is morally superior. I’m just saying that it’s a bad idea to do both.
How to get popular on Instagram
I previously wrote about Instagram.
The question here is how do you get people to look at your photos? (Maybe that leads to a higher level question of why it matters if people look at your photos? Well, having over a hundred thousand followers might have some real-world pecuniary benefits. But increasing your followers from one hundred to one thousand is just pure vanity and narcissism.)
It’s clear that merely having photos that don’t suck (only 5% of Instagram users or less have photos that don’t suck) doesn’t really do that much for your popularity. Even on the most popular page where Instagram shows you photos that have thousands of likes posted by users with tens of thousands of followers, most of the photos suck.
Many of the most popular people on Instagram are popular outside of Instagram. For example, if Britney Spears (or whoever is really popular these days) started posting photos of herself on Instagram, she’d instantly get hundreds of thousands of followers as soon as she announced her account.
In order to boost my followers from a measly few dozen to over 300, I tried to be more strategic in my use of Instagram.
My first strategy was just to put a lot of hashtags on my photos, so people browsing that hashtag would see my photo. This doesn’t actually get as much attention as you might think. Generally, even a quality photo, loaded up with hashtags, is only going to attract ten likes at the most from hashtags.
The next strategy I tried was to like a lot of photos posted by other uses with the same sort of hashtags that I use. I had to learn to hold my nose with respect to clicking the “like” button. I had to remember that “liking” a photo isn’t about actually liking the photo, but about attracting attention to myself.
But then I learned the best way to get followers is to follow other people. According to what I read on the internet about this, by following someone, there’s a good chance they will feel some sort of moral obligation to follow you back. At first, I didn’t want to follow people posting crappy photos because then I’d have to see their ugly photos in my feed. But this week I learned to be more sociopathic in who I follow. As soon as you see them post a crappy picture of themselves looking into a mirror, a crappy picture of what they ate for lunch, or some something from a meme generator, you just unfollow them! There’s no downside to unfollowing someone. Instagram doesn’t tell you when people unfollow you.
With my more strategic and sociopathic Instagram strategy, I have managed to get my followers up to 300, and a photo I posted this morning already has 61 likes. But it was way too time consuming. I think the next thing I have to do is learn to use a robot to do this for me, although using a robot runs the risk that Instagram could ban your account.
Lion of the Blogosphere 