Nietzsche‘s misogyny.

He had little good to say about the type “man,” or Germans, either. His misogyny is just a special case of his misanthropy.

From the FCIC hearings.

Discourse like this terrifies me (from an article in the Financial Times):

“That is what a market is,” said Mr Blankfein, leaning across the desk as his rivals sat stone-faced beside him. he did not get to finish his sentence. “I know what a market is,” said his interrogator.

This commission is going to be even more useless than the 9/11 Commission with its far-fetched, quixotic (unfortunately enacted) recommendations. The whole thing is utterly moot and totally childish. As far from sober, dispassionate analysis as is probably possible.

Random thought on The Cloud™.

I've been reading the FT coverage about Google's recent China-related security breach and there's a little section next to the article I'm reading titled “cloud warning” about the security risks associated with The Cloud™. I never had a strong aversion to the idea of cloud-type hosting (although it seems somewhat atavistic since it's a model that was used in the 70's—think “dumb” terminals connected to a mainframe), but I'm starting to think it might be a problem because of the following reasoning. As more people use cloud services the incentive for an attacker increases. It almost reminds me of the “too big to fail” problem with banks during the financial crisis. It only takes one breach and you have millions of people's e-mails whereas if you breach a single mail server you might only get access to a few hundred or thousand accounts. Decentralization is a feature of the Internet that has contributed in large part to its robustness.

Identity problems.

Can we really consider ourselves one thing, entity, element, object, etc.? Are we really a singularity? Yes, in some senses we are. We “individuals” are autonomous to a great degree. It is interesting though that when we reflect on ourselves how much of others we might realize is within us. Their standards, maybe even their tastes. And how often, I wonder, do we confuse ourselves for someone else? When we remove the stratification, who are we? That's probably a silly question to ask. We are the stratification, its affirmation.

Hypothetical memoirs.

If I ever become a famous economist I'm going to entitle my memoirs Time Well Spent.

Secrets of Krugman, Mankiw, et. al.

Krugman at the end of his recent blog entry Secrets of the WSJ writes:

All of this is par for the course; the WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe?

I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth — one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.

The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?

And what does Krugman really believe in? Mankiw recently wrote:

On the issue of tone, I again think I understand Paul's point of view. He likely believes that civility is overrated. He seems to think that in the blogosphere, and perhaps in the public debate more generally, you score points simply by insulting your intellectual adversaries. Sadly, I am afraid he may be right.

“Scoring points” indeed seems to be the goal. And it's easy to score points when you create false binary oppositions; Mankiw-Krugman retain this friendly opposition and it probably increases traffic to both of their sites... maybe they're really just the same, though...? Self-promoting bitches. Krugman does have a Nobel Prize, though. (lulz!)

Editorial standards at the Financial Times.

Stephen Garrett writes a retarded article in the FT whose central thesis seems to be that piracy destroys value. Perhaps he should have titled his article Piracy as Nihilism. Then he might have realized how fucking stupid his premise was.

How in the heavens did the FT editors allow this shit to pass? I'm flabbergasted. The Goddamn article isn't even well written. In fact, it reads like a parody of bad writing; rarely does one come across such a cluster of overstatement like the closing paragraph of the article:

Having the right to use the internet to access entertainment brings with it the responsibility not to act in a way that endangers every future film, TV show and music track. In particular, the UK government needs to use Tuesday’s Digital Britain report to compel ISPs to work with us on a graduated system of penalties for file-sharers. Doing nothing bolsters the notion that nothing has value. The logical outcome is that, within our lifetimes, there will be nothing of value left.

Fucking clueless.