Old people don't know more than young people

You hear it all the time, and it seems like it came up again after the new Ken Burns documentary about WWII showed: these damn kids today, they don't know anything. They don't even know who commanded the British Eighth Army before the First Battle of El Alamein! Can you believe how stupid they are, with their Britney Spears tapes and their reality television?



I see two problems with this line of thinking. First, it assumes that because you know one (or three or five) facts and another person doesn't know them, the other person is stupid or ignorant. And in order to believe that, you have to think that what you know is important and what someone else knows is unimportant. That's not a position I'd want to take.

Second, people forget that when they lived through events, that makes them news, and not history. To a kid born in 1990, knowing details about the Vietnam War is the same as someone born in 1950 knowing details about the Paris peace conference of 1919. If I had to bet, I'd bet neither person knew anything about either one.

So if you want to say nobody knows anything, maybe I'd agree with you.

Southwest Airlines finally finds an inappropriately dressed passenger

It has been 40 years since Southwest Airlines launched, and congratulations are in order: they finally decided that someone on one of their flights was dressed inappropriately. Here she is:



Does there appear to be some surgical enhancement? At any rate, her name is Kyla Ebbert, and she's a 23-year-old waitress at Hooter's, who was flying to Tucson for the day. Tucson, where it's so hot, I'd have to take five showers a day if I ever went outdoors.

So what gives? Southwest is the the worst airline! They make you sit on the ground at the airport while you're waiting to get on your flight. Their employees are dressed like camp counselors, in Hawaiian shirts and safari shorts. And let's be honest - Southwest's focus on low prices, reduced service, and a relaxed employee attitude doesn't exactly convince their customers to show up dressed in their finest attire.

This is just one moron employee deciding to make up some regulation. Southwest flights to Vegas look like a recruiting class for a strip club. Has anyone ever gotten thrown off of that route? People are hammered all the time too. I don't get it.

Anyways, if you want everybody to dress like they're important, then get a first class ticket. And if you're offended by a hot girl, there's something really wrong with you.

Whiny Teacher quits job because student didn't need him

The actual headline was A Teacher Grows Disillusioned After a ‘Fail’ Becomes a ‘Pass’. Here is the dude in question, a math teacher named Austin Lampros:



Basically, it sounds like he had a girl in his class who never showed up and never did her homework. At the end of the year, another math teacher tutored the student for two days, and she took the final exam and passed. So the school gave her a D instead of an F. But the math teacher is pissed off because he wanted to fail her!

That makes no sense to me. She passed the final exam, which basically means she had mastered the concepts in the class. It's not like she got an A - she passed with a D. It doesn't matter whether she had a good attitude or turned in assignments - but I'm guessing that if she'd been one of the teacher's favorites, she could have failed the exam but passed the class.

Lampros is full of 'woe is me': “It’s almost as if you stick to your morals and your ethics, you’ll end up without a job.” And the article tries to claim that this episode pokes holes in "the Department of Education’s vaunted increase in graduation rates" and reflects "pressures from administrators to pass marginal students."

Seems like everyone's lost sight of the big picture. A teacher worked with a student one-on-one for two days, and she passed her final exam. Maybe with four days, she could have aced it? It seems to me that 1) the student isn't marginal; and 2) the teacher who tutored her showed that the school system could make huge strides in student achievement with a little more effort.

Far too many teachers value students following rules over students actually knowing the course material. This was one of those cases - not everybody learns by sitting still in a chair all semester, and Lampros should stop worrying about whether kids show him enough respect and spend more time worrying about whether the kids actually learn the material.

Feeling good and Fooling yourself about lifestyle choices

I read something today about this apartment building in Manhattan, The Helena:



It's being hailed as a huge advance in "sustainable design" because it includes a bunch of different energy-efficiency measures, like water recycling, 13.1 kW of photovoltaic cells and energy-efficient appliances and building materials. Overall, it will supposedly use 35% less energy than similar buildings.

So if you live there, you can feel good about helping the environment, right? Hardly. First of all, how is a 38-story building "sustainable"? What if the power goes out for four days, as has happened several times in New York? How do you get up to your apartment?

Barring disaster (even though we should be planning for disaster), it's still the wrong scale to be building at. Single-family homes on large lots aren't efficient, so why would we expect huge buildings at the opposite end of the spectrum to be efficient? Everything costs way more per person in a big building than in a 3-5 story building. Plus the damned thing needs huge pieces of steel and a tremendous amount of concrete, which requires cranes and a huge number of diesel vehicles to bring all the materials in. Renovating an existing building would have used way less energy than building a new one.

As usual, in the quest to feel good about their environment choices, people have lost sight of the forest for the trees. Buying a used Toyota Camry - even though it only gets 30 mpg - is way better for the environment than buying a new Toyota Prius because you've saved the energy used in manufacturing a new car.

It would be nice if there was actually some evidence of energy savings. We would all save money if people didn't buy things just because they're marketed as good for the environment.

'Sicko' and 'The Black Swan'

I'm a big fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's take on the world of investing, which he has described in very slight detail in his two books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

I'm not quite as much a fan of this gun owner:



But I did go see 'Sicko' on opening night in Santa Monica (very friendly Michael Moore territory, btw.) I wasn't particularly impressed by the movie for a variety of reasons, and I think Moore missed a real opportunity to make some points that couldn't be disputed by some PR hacks somewhere. More on that in another post perhaps...

Back to Taleb: he refers to the investment strategy employed by most stock pickers as something to the effect of "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller." In other words, most investors have exposed themselves to a tremendously large risk while they grab very small profits. Of course, they don't see the steamroller until it hits them - otherwise known as "blowing up." The unexpected event that steamrolls them is "The Black Swan."

Moore's movie makes the same point: health insurance in the United States leaves us, as a group, picking pennies in front of a steamroller. Predictable events, like a physical or a mammogram or a monthly prescription, are handled relatively well by insurance plans, and don't usually cost the insured a particularly large amount of money.

But a big, unexpected problem - cancer, a car accident - generally falls outside of what's manageable under a health plan. Remember all the first responders who went to the World Trade Center site after 9/11 to dig up bodies and rubble? Many of them developed serious respiratory illnesses. Those who worked for large fire and police departments are generally covered by extensive health plans designed to handle the frequent illnesses and injuries that emergency workers encounter. These are expected events.

But what about all of the people who came from volunteer fire departments in suburban and rural New York and New Jersey? They generally have inadequate insurance with large co-pays, limited drug coverage, lifetime maximums, and limited access to the treatment required for the serious problems they have.

The problem, of course, is that they never anticipated these kinds of events. Unfortunately, their health plans did, and protected themselves. But this isn't somebody dropping a stack of chips in the stock market, hoping to dump a hot company for a quick buck. These are emergency workers who got steamrolled by their insurance companies following a 'Black Swan'.

'Black Swans' in the health care system are very different from their counterparts in the stock market. In health care, individuals don't expect to get cancer; but the insurers know to expect a certain percentage of their subscribers to get cancer. They can set their payment schedules so that they still make money even if their group cancer rates are in the 99.99th percentile.

This strikes me as unacceptable. When we know that a certain percentage of people will get cancer, every individual must be protected from that 'Black Swan'. If it's a good strategy for a stock portfolio, it's essential for medicine.

Who could hate free internet?

San Francisco wants to have free wireless internet across the entire city. Sounds like a good idea - they already have it in Mountain View, where my office is, courtesy of Google.



What should have been a no-brainer has turned into a hugely-contentious issue. Some people argue that the city isn't getting enough money from the ISP that installs the network for exclusive access to its customers. That sounds like a reasonable argument, and one that should be resolved by determining the valuation of the internet service and negotiating the right price.

But what's insane is that all kinds of people think that installing wireless internet on telephone poles is going to kill them or give them cancer.

The biggest problem is that these people don't even know what's dangerous. If they were opposed to microwave ovens and cordless phones - in addition to cell phones and wireless internet, then I could at least accept that they're consistent in their mindless worrying. If their health concerns were legitimate (which they're not), worrying about "cellphone radiation" but not microwave ovens is like cutting out red meat but not smoking.

The stupidest thing about the whole argument? It's not like their neighbors won't all have wireless internet access points in their homes anyways! So the level of exposure they get is the same regardless of whether the city runs the internet or not!

How is it possible that in the most technologically-savvy city in the entire country, if not the world, people still want to put on their tin foil hats?

What Happens When You Do Not Label DVDs

I will tell you what happens. This all went down about two hours ago. Before I start, I am nominating myself for the classiest guy of the year award.

I am currently on vacation, visiting my parents in Canada. So after dinner, my mom, dad and my cousin Zac sat down in the living room to watch the Flames game on TV. In between the second and third period, I wanted to show off to Zac how badass my dad's sound system in the living room was. Of course, my dad had no qualms about this. So here is where my bootlegged copy of Ghostrider is about to come in handy. DVD quality and all. I run up to my room, pull this unlabled TDK DVD-R out of my back pack, bring it back downstairs, and throw it into the DVD player as we all anxiously await the insane THX 7.1 sound that is about to be unleased in the living room.

The only problem is that it was a copy of some nasty lesbian porno movie that I downloaded from the internet (and obviously burned onto a similar looking DVD.) Done and done. I just won the award.