undead astronauts

chinese preference for sons may have led to the bubble in the US. the theory is that boys’ families have to compete for marriagiable girls w/ high savings b/c of the girl shortage, and the high savings rate led the chinese gov’t to buy US treasury bills and depress interest rates in the US. i speculated years ago that chinese girls would necessarily become a highly valuable commidity. u can’t have a huge artificial shortage of something in demand w/o consequences, but i didn’t think about it leading to a US bubble. i did figure that chinese men would outsource the problem to poorer nations by marrying women of southeast asian origin.

another bubble may be close to popping. the cost of higher ed. has been rising far faster than inflation, but w/ the recession, many potential college students may head to community colleges instead of big name ivy schools. what’s in a name?

so the proposed solution is again to outsource the problem. prestigious colleges are thinking of propping their prices up by opening more spots to rich overseas applicants who don’t mind so much about paying inflated prices. yet.

Three of the undead astronaut team decided to make a grand excursion to the rave multimedia complex to watch the recently released Michael Bay epic ‘Transformers 2′, an elegant, comprehensive addendum to Bay’s earlier masterpiece  simply known as ‘Transformers’.  The work opened with a giant transformer wreaking havoc on the city of Shanghai.  I hope one day we will be able to do something similar, in the metaphoric sense at least.

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the ricci vs destefano ruling came out today 5-4 in favor of ricci. for those that haven’t heard, this case was about a firefighter promotion test. this test had been used in past years to promote the city’s firefighters, and there had been no problem b/c at least 1 of the members who passed the test has been black. as long as they had at least 1 black person pass, they could say the test didn’t have disparate impact, which is difficult to prove in court. but in 2003, only 2 minorities (hispanics) passed, even tho the racial averages were about the same as previous years. (more…)

late, yeah i know. but this video really reminded me of how much influence michael had, and that pop culture used to accept uplifting songs that challenged ppl to be better.

here are some tribute vids:
filipino prisoner tribute (filmed 10 hrs after news arrived @ prison)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK25cfzdTTg

jane liu cover of: you are not alone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRKf9K5Tyg8

far east movement, quest, wongfu: dance like mj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCtEvOdOZvg

there are a few moments in history that i just remember the feeling of and what i was doing. the challenger explosion, the berlin wall falling, the first moments of the first iraq war, 9/11. and now, maybe mj’s passing. his songs have been playing all weekend, and it’s just amazing how many of his songs are famous and how much he affected the pop culture of my youth. my dad was even talking about how he admired mj’s song & dance and tried to sing a line or two of billie jean to my utter horror. when my dad talks about pop culture affecting him, u know it’s gotta big.

here’s the 45 minute short version of the movie. the longer cut is coming out this winter after the evo tourney.
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So I havent posted in a while. The last few weeks have been very busy for me. I’m switching jobs, out of this Chinese law firm into a British risk management company. The nature of the new work seems very interesting, its call business intelligence and investigations. Essentially what that means is that they look into a company to see whether or not they are doing bad things. The bad things may include fraud, bribery, forgeries, falsifying documents, nepotisim, stealing company assests, etc. The clients the company would serve would usually be foriegn companies who wish to do business in China. They might not trust their Chinese business partners, or their suppliers, or even their own China branch managers and employees. The methods the company uses to investigate may include conducting interviews with relevant parties, doing audits on their documents, going through their emails, chat logs, other communications, visiting their facilities. Sometimes the client would be a country government who believes that the company has violated some kind of anti-corruption or anti-bribery law. The biggest example would be the US Foriegn Corruption Practice Act (FCPA). Last year the FCPA fined Siemens over 1 billion dollars. Apparently siemens had an elaborate system set up to bribe foriegn official. When they were discovered, Siemens cooperated to disclose all their actions, the discolsure along costed another 1.5 billion in attorney and consulting fees, all absrobed by Siemens. Apparently even though Siemens is a German company, the fact that their corruption scheme at one point funded some money in USD through a US bank, it was enough to give the US jurisdiction over the matter.  So basically a lot of international firms are now worried because its very easy to fall under the big umbrella of the FCPA. And as China is filled with corruption, the business has a lot of potential here.

That being said, I have been trying to negotiate the contract with the new place while keeping it a secret from my current firm. Sometimes it gets awkward because I always have to sneak out during the middle of the day to meet my headhunter or attend a meeting with managers from the risk management firm. But the final signing should be this Friday. And from there I will inform my current firm next week. That will be a giant mess as well.

over at the aptly named overthinking it, there’s an article analyzing the economic fallout from a zombie apocalypse. it assumes that post-apocalypse survivors would figure out how to tame the insatiable hunger for brains and use zombies for work.

In fact, rather than labor, one can view zombies as inexpensive factory tools, which require no maintenance or upgrades. If a government were to permit the use of zombies in the private sector, businesses would see marked improvements in their annual production levels, GDP would gradually rise, and the economy might stabilize more quickly. (more…)

here’s a repost of what steve sailer posted earlier.

Here’s a simplified thought experiment to demonstrate the impact of generation length on the size of future populations:

Two babies girls are born today. They both will give birth to twins and to no other children, so their lifetime fertility will be at the idealized replacement rate of two. The only difference is that Tiffany will give birth to her twins at age 24 and Emma at age 32. Their descendants will continue these patterns: giving birth to twins at either age 24 or 32 years apart. Ninety-six years in the future, Tiffany’s 16 great-great grandchildren and Emma’s 8 great-grandchildren will be born.

since iq is correlated w/ having kids at a later age (in industrialized nations anyways), the implications are obvious assuming assortative mating. (random mating implicates nothing as the total gene load from tiffany and emma is the same b/c great-great grandchildren will have 1/16th each and great-grandchildren will have 1/8th each, which adds to 1.)

the takeaway here is that having a high iq will benefit u personally in the form of positive life outcomes, but is evolutionarily unfit b/c the environment is selecting against it.

two studies have come out saying that international aid programs aimed at improving health in poor nations have little to show for all the spending.

In one paper, WHO researchers examined the impact of various global health initiatives during the last 20 years.

They found some benefits, like increased diagnosis of tuberculosis cases and higher vaccination rates. But they also concluded some U.N. programs hurt health care in Africa by disrupting basic services and leading some countries to slash their health spending.

this is what happens when u give stuff away for free. u kill any industry or gov’t spending that supported it, and so it’s happened in africa. ppl who manage aid programs need to prioritize giving away things that local industry simply cannot provide, like correct diagnosis of TB. they also need to realize money is fungible and if these corrupt gov’ts see outsiders are willing to throw tons of cash at a health problem in their nation, the leaders will direct gov’t money elsewhere. like their own pockets presumably. (more…)

caught this over at disgrasian. i’m feeling the theme right about now w/ all the overtime i’m doing.

for the making-of, see here.

oh, and here’s the firecrackers at the US naval academy.

wow, this brings back memories…

Newsweek has come out w/ their yearly ranking of public high schools. some birmingham hs comes in 3rd surprisingly. auburn hs comes in the 300-400 area, and grissom ranks 927 this year. this is lower than grissom has ranked in the past, but every hs on the list ranks w/i the top 6% of the nation.

PS: i took a look at the birmingham school and apparently in 2008, they were considered too elite for the list. that put it in the category of stuyvesant, bronx science, thomas jefferson sci/tech. not sure why they’re back on the list this year.

w/ boa’s flop, i was thinking the korean attempt at entering the US music market was a complete failure. but news has leaked that the wonder girls are going to tour w/ those sickly sweet jonas bros. not sure how jyp managed to work that in, but i suppose it’s another chance for asian pop stars to “make it” in the US.

but boa’s not taking her album failure lying down. she’s apparently headlining the 2009 SF gay pride parade and will perform on the main stage. far be it from me to say boa shouldn’t jump at every opportunity to market herself, but i wonder how well her core fanbase of asian americans is going to mesh w/ the other paraders.