L. C. Rees

Crap Cleaner

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Though my own use of Microsoft Windows has fallen off sharpely, I still have family (that I will acknowledge) who use Windows. Since I’m a “computer guy”, I’ve been called in before to clean family computers that have grown slow from crap building up on their hard drives. There’s a lot to clean: since Windows isn’t housebroken, it tends to gather all sorts of garbage: TEMP files (*.tmp), bad Registry entries, bad data discovered by Window’s chkdsk hard drive scanner (*.chk), log files, cached internet files, and all sorts of other junk. And this doesn’t include that malware, viruses, and spyware that are ubiquitous on Windows.

CCleaner, a freeware utility from Piriform, has long been my goto Windows cleanup utility. It’s graphical user interface is self-explanatory enough that my father and my late mother could be taught to use it and they are/were in their late sixties. My years spent doing technical support have revealed one inescapable fact: most people over 65 have difficulty making the mental leap needed for use personal computers effectively. The leap can be made but the largest component of their mental block, a paralyzing fear that they’ll “break” their computer, is hard to overcome. Explaining that having Windows on their computer meant that their computer was already broken was rarely comforting.

Now I learn that there’s a version of CCleaner for MacOS X. MacOS X is superior to Windows in almost every way (mostly because it “lacks” the Windows Registry). But it is not immune from accumulating crap on your hard drive. So far, CCleaner is just as good at cleaning out obscure corners of MacOS X (I’m using MacOS X 8.0 “Mountain Lion”) as it is at cleaning out obscure corners of Windows.

If you’re using MacOS X or Windows, download, install, and run CCleaner regularly. Given the price (free), it’s a no-brainer.

Now they just need to bring their disk defragmenter Defraggler to MacOS X and HFS+ and my MacOS X system maintenance collection will be complete.

[Disclaimer: I am not an agent provocateur from Piriform]

Mr. Market, Mr. War, and the Uncanny Trinity

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To demonstrate how the stock market works, Benjamin Graham created the parable of “Mr. Market”:

Imagine you had a partner in a private business named Mr. Market. Mr. Market, the obliging fellow that he is, shows up daily to tell you what he thinks your interest in the business is worth.
 
On most days, the price he quotes is reasonable and justified by the business’s prospects. However, Mr. Market suffers from some rather incurable emotional problems; you see, he is very temperamental. When Mr. Market is overcome by boundless optimism or bottomless pessimism, he will quote you a price that seems to you a little short of silly. As an intelligent investor, you should not fall under Mr. Market’s influence, but rather you should learn to take advantage of him.
 
The value of your interest should be determined by rationally appraising the business’s prospects, and you can happily sell when Mr. Market quotes you a ridiculously high price and buy when he quotes you an absurdly low price. The best part of your association with Mr. Market is that he does not care how many times you take advantage of him. No matter how many times you saddle him with losses or rob him of gains, he will arrive the next day ready to do business with you again.

When the stock market is irrationally pessimistic about a stock that you estimate worth more than its current price, you exploit the market’s irrationality by buying the stock at a discount. When the stock market is irrationally optimistic about a stock that you estimate is selling at or above its true value, you exploit the market’s irrationality by selling the stock at a premium. Most stock market investors do the opposite: they sell a stock as its value plunges and they buy a stock as its price skyrockets.

This is the exact opposite of what they’d do if they were buying a shirt. If the shirt was on sale, they wouldn’t deliberately hold off until after the sale was over just for the privilege of buying the shirt at a higher price; they’d buy the shirt while it was on sale. Yet, when stocks are on sale, investors often sell instead of buy. Instead of exploiting Mr. Market’s shifting moods to buy low and sell high, they join in his madness and sell low and buy high. They fail to notice, as Graham said, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”

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Mirror, Mirror: Comedy for a Friday Night

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Occasionally I watch a talk show hosted by Charles Peete Rose, Jr. Rose’s forum is where aspiring ruling elites go to tell other aspiring ruling elites what to think. What they discuss is uninteresting. Who says what how, when, and why is. Here are glimpses of the current balance of power between agendas, competing and complimentary, within the network of personal relationships that form the real org chart of government, society, and business.

While most viewers get caught up in tactical theatrics of interaction between Rose and guests, it’s the underlying shifts in the tectonic plates of power, for which Rose’s guests, the timing of their booking, and their chosen storyline for the evening are the seismometer, where real entertainment lies. The prevailing ideology of Rose’s guests is that soft tyranny of low visibility known as “libertarian paternalism”, where business savvy needed for successful modern rent seeking meets the aspirations of 1960s leftist social engineering. They rarely use outright coercion to advance their goals (at least not at the moment). They draw on cutting edge fields of social control like behavioral economics and prospect theory to create “sensible defaults”. You get the freedom to choose something other than the defaults but you have to make an effort to do so. The research that libertarian paternalism is based on suggests that most people will never make the effort. This is how “sensible” defaults become insensible realities.

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The Politics of Politics

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I don’t remember why I took Debate 101 my sophomore year of high school.

I’m not an enthusiastic public speaker nor was I inclined to become one. Perhaps I was interested in learning advanced debating techniques. Then I’d be ever triumphant in the important debates of daily life:

“You think you deserve that last piece of pizza? Let me tell you why you don’t.”

The explanation may be much simpler:

  • my experience suggests that teenagers aren’t terribly bright
  • my later experience as a junior and senior suggests that sophomores aren’t terribly bright either

Entering Debate 101, I was:

  1. a teenager and
  2. a sophomore.

The evidence, however circumstantial, is sufficient to convict.

If I was interested in learning debate technique, I was disappointed: the debate class wasn’t designed to systematically instruct students to taking apart their own position, reassemble it into a stronger position, and then use their new strong position to destroy their opponent’s position. This debate class was designed to cull skilled debaters out of the general student body who would then go on and compete in regional and state debate competitions. Some technique was dispensed in miserly bursts but mostly it was one instruction-free speaking assignment after another. Those with innate debating instinct went on to join the school team with all the glory that bestowed (not much). The rest of the class had to live with disappointment (again, not much).

One debate format we were taught, Lincoln-Douglas (LD), was roughly similar to this format laid out by Wikipedia:

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Follow Up: Passing of an Internet Gem

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Following up on Twilight of an Internet Gem, eschatological blogger John J. Reilly passed away Wednesday, May 30, 2012 from a disease that unfortunately proved to be, as Wikipedia clinically observes, “incurable and invariably fatal”.

Mr. Reilly’s obituary from the The Jersey Journal:

JOHN J. REILLY, JERSEY CITY, John J. Reilly of Jersey City, 58, passed away on May 30, 2012. Beloved son of Jean Reilly (nee Harkins) and the late John Reilly, dear brother of Donna Reilly (Dennis Goonan), Mary Spence (Jack Spence), Nancy Reilly Zollo (Louis Zollo) and Nora Reilly, and uncle to David, Jennifer, Elizabeth, Kathryn and Michael, he was also cherished by many compassionate friends, especially those with whom he worshiped at Holy Rosary Church. After graduating from St. Peter’s College and earning his law degree from Georgetown University, he embarked upon a career as a writer, editor and attorney. His keen intellect and wry sense of humor resulted in many publications and a world-wide network of correspondents. His intellectual preoccupations ranged from theology and in particular eschatology to politics, alternative history, and the philosophy of science and literature. He published four books includ-ing Apocalypse and Future, Notes on the Cultural History of the 21st Century. John regularly appeared in First Things, Kirkus Reviews, and had been an editor at Culture Wars before he withdrew in protest to a drift toward anti-Semitism which he publicly denounced. John also maintained a blog, The Long View, where John serenely surveyed the world and opined that, indeed, everything is going to be OK. John’s intellectual interests also expressed themselves in various societies in which he was active including The International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, the Center for Millennial Studies, the Simplified Spelling Society, and American Literacy Council. A man of breathtakingly ecumenical feeling, he was without compromise a true and devout Catholic. It must have been his faith and his character formed by it and by his loving family that made him without a doubt the most optimistic expert on apocalyptic movements and dystopias. John explained himself thus: After long thought, I realized that the most important thing in life is to be helpful. So, I have taken to explaining things, carefully and empathetically, and often at very great length. ‘Spengler with a Smile’ is how I usually characterize the organizing principle. The loss of John’s self-effacing cheerful genius has left the world a darker place and, for those who were privileged to share his company, a son, brother and friend whose absence will always be felt. A wake will be held on Friday, June 1, from 4 – 8PM at McLaughlin’s Funeral Home, Jersey City. A requiem mass will be held at 10AM on Saturday, June 2, at Holy Rosary Church followed by interment at Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington. In lieu of flowers, John would have appreciated donations to Holy Rosary Church. McLaughlin Funeral Home 625 Pavonia Avenue Jersey City, NJ 07306 (201) 798-8700
Requiescat in pace.