For those of you that get worked up at how the advertising media portray men to women, a blast from the past from Ace of Spades. Click on the picture at the bottom of the post.

Also, check out the fake kick from the same post. Exquisite. Pity it was just in a preseason game:

At “Free Money Finance”, a blogger offers up regular shots of “tips on how to save money”, but also has collected a “top 10” list of the advice that was absolutely reviled by readers. Like any list, it’s subjective, but I feel the need to take a few of these apart myself:

10. Be healthy — Let’s face it, people don’t like being told they are fat and lazy. I think that’s at the core of the disdain for a healthy lifestyle – Here at HC, we regularly go rounds on why it is people live unhealthy lifestyles. In truth, the supposed “ultra healthy” types (bodybuilders, gym rats, etc) kind of weird me out too. If anything, those people are a portion of the problem with getting people to exercise – I found it a lot harder to go to certain “upscale” exercise chains that are regularly full of gym rats, than I did during my time with a YMCA membership where (for the most part and with only a few outlying exceptions) the people exercising looked a lot more normal.

9. Move to a foreign country (or even visit for health care) – as they admit, this one is probably best for retired folks, since otherwise finding a job is a prerequisite (oh, and did we mention the language barrier’s going to make that extra difficult as well?). That being said, the suggestions of “cheaper” areas to live reminded me of why nobody in their right mind should live there (especially Mexico, which is due for a violent revolution any time now even if you don’t consider the current constant war between police and drug-running gangs to be one already).

7. Buying used — Let’s list the things people hate about buying used: 1) it’s not new; 2) someone else has used it; 3) did I mention it’s not new? – 4) you don’t always know what you’re getting, 5) it’s out of warranty. Yes, I know things go out of warranty on their own anyways, and many warranties are of the “not worth the paper they’re printed on” variety. Yes, I speak as someone who usually extols the virtues of either buying used, or knowing how to repair your own gear. That, however, is just it: I know how to evaluate something if I’m buying used. I know how to get the most out of it and do the repairs myself. For people without that knowledge/skillset, buying used may not be the brightest of concepts, since they may wind up with useless junk sitting around and just going off to buy more used junk. The blogger goes on to list that “most of us have generally accepted that a good-condition used car is less expensive than a new car” – and again, horror stories of people who bought used-car lemons abound.

2. Not buying a pet – even the blogger admits this may be bad advice. Yes, pets can add up as an expense. On the other hand, they’re cheap entertainment, they’re good for raising kids and teaching them responsibility (not to mention strengthening immune systems), they’re good for keeping your blood pressure under control, and they keep your feet warm on cold nights.

1. Moving to a lower cost-of-living city — This one really puzzles me. Not only is it that people don’t like this idea, but they REALLY don’t like it. As in “you’re the stupidest financial blogger ever” sort of don’t like it. But what do I care? I still have my day job. 😉 – I’ll say it: “you’re the stupidest financial blogger ever.” People move for a variety of reasons, but unless you have 6 different job offers in 6 different cities, there are pretty much three general criteria people follow when picking a location: #1, proximity to job. #2, proximity to family (whether you pick “real close”, “kinda close”, or “other side of planet” is your call, but everyone wants it somewhere on that spectrum for their comfort zone), #3 Everything Else. This one is reviled because, quite plainly, it comes across as sanctimonious nonsense. If you’re independently wealthy? Go nuts. If your “job” is something that can be done anywhere you can get your hands on an internet connection? Maybe. If you’re like most (employed) people, however, you’re tied to your job, and the idea of “I’m gonna move out of my house/apartment, load everything into a moving van, and haul ass to somewhere unknown and hope I can find a job there to live cheaper even though the reason that things are ‘cheaper’ there is that all the jobs in the area pay peanuts” is… well… read it again. THAT is what this “advice” amounts to, and why people peg it for the terrible advice it is.

The other day I saw a billboard for 2010 models for Saturn, the soon to be defunct GM brand. I thought to myself “Who in the world would buy a Saturn now?” Saturn has always had the reputation of being a risky brand because they make their cars a little bit differently than the competition. My ex-girlfriend Julianne used to drive one. I thought that they were great right up until a driver suddenly decided to stop at a green light in some weird panic and Julie failed to break in time. That wasn’t the Saturn’s fault, but the repair bills were astonishing (and Julie was declared at-fault, and the other driver was unlicensed and uninsured anyway, so she had to foot that bill). It’s hard to imagine that the repair bills are going to get any lighter even if GM is saying that they’ll still service them. That’s the same sort of thing that makes me lukewarm on the prospect of buying an Isuzu (who recently pulled out of the US market).

Anyhow, for those of you that don’t know, Saturn was originally supposed to be bought by Roger Penske but that fell through when they couldn’t line up a manufacturer.

It’s a shame that a solid brand name and an existing distribution network is about to fall by the wayside. Presumably GM will incorporate as many as they can for their other badges, but since Saturn was a distinct enough brand that they’re going to have to worry about market cannibalism and will close more than a few. What’s interesting is that what Penske had in mind was a variation of what I was thinking that a foreign carmaker without an American presence should consider. I was thinking about it back when the dealerships were going to be cut loose and I had a slightly different idea, but it would apply doubly to Saturn and Pontiac and other to-be-discontinued brand names.

My idea was thus: An Indian or Chinese (or whatever) car company should consider buying a discontinued brand name from a US dealership. The most obvious one that came to mind was Geo, which was an import badge anyway (meaning that GM didn’t make Geos, they bought models from Suzuki and other manufacturers and rebranded them). Geos were known for being inexpensive cars, that Indian company (Tata) was known for producing inexpensive cars, so it would be a natural fit. Most people wouldn’t know that the new Geos were not the GM-branded cars of old, but it would at least be instantly recognizable. Then they could let the dealerships that were being cut loose on cannibal grounds (as opposed to profit/loss ones) in on the ground floor.

Penske had a similar idea, except with the less dusty Saturn brand. Get GM for a couple of years and then bring in foreign cars. An article in the New York Times was ambiguous as to whether or not these cars would be rebranded Saturn, though my impression is that they would have been. Saturn is certainly more expensive than buying the Geo brand would have been (if GM had been willing to sell it), but the distribution network in place was a much better idea than my hodge-podge gang of reject dealerships. Plus, Saturn is well-regarded by some while Geo is probably unknown by what would be Tata-Geo’s target demographic (young people). In any event, it looks like neither model is workable.

Of course, all of this is running around the fact that we are dealing with three automobile manufacturers that are unable to compete in the modern marketplace. It’s easier for foreign car companies to come into the US and make cars here profitably than it is for local manufacturers. The Big Three are bogged down in pension obligations and union contracts that soak up funds that could otherwise be directed towards engineering a better car. Maybe the recent re-orgs will work out, but it’s a shame that we can’t start over from scratch and deal on a level playing field with Hyundai and Honda and Toyota cars that are also built here.

And while I’m throwing my (ahem, relatively ignorant) opinions out there, I also wonder if one of the foreign companies that don’t have any existing contracts in the US couldn’t actually make a go at primarily selling through the Internet. I know that in my car search the dealership model is proving decidedly inconvenient. I’ve been contemplating the ramifications of going to a dealership and giving them a “Build a Car” from the dealer’s website, but the logistics leave a lot of room for maneuvering in the low-trust environment of auto sales (though Linus makes it sound like less of a hassle than maybe I fear). Instead, I wonder if there’s room for a business model out there where they can keep “test drive” vehicles at affiliated locations (I’m thinking used car dealerships, rental car agencies, or repair shops). Or make a deal with a rental agency and if someone wants a test drive they can rent the car at a special rate or an hourly rate or something and get a feel for it. But most selling would take place over the Internet. With their dealership agreements, it would be nearly impossible for a current automaker to sign on to such a model, but I think it’s something that one trying to break into the US market should consider.

• Roman Polanski has managed to do the impossible. He has united feminist liberals, law & order conservatives, the American public, and even the French public. I haven’t seen this sort of consensus since 9/11.
• When this all started, the picture (at least presented by the media) was a little bit different. It was presented as France/Europe vs. America, controversial, and a subject in which reasonable people disagreed vociferously. The Washington Post’s editorialists split in three different directions:
  • Obama-voting, right-leaning Anne Applebaum was outraged. She also declined to disclose that her husband is a Polish official seeking to set Polanski free.
  • Liberalish Richard Cohen wasn’t outraged but felt that Polanski should be set free.
  • Liberal Eugene Robinson was exasperated that anyone could defend him.
• I find it fascinating (and a little depressing) how quickly the lines formed on this and the assumptions involved:
  • For people that recoil at American sexual puritanism, they immediately jumped to a number of conclusions, many of which demonstrably false (more on that later), that fit their narrative that this is a case of American exceptionalism in the face of a more enlightened foreign consensus.
  • Critics of Europe’s more liberal attitudes towards sex and of France in general immediately jumped to the conclusion that the French officials were speaking for the French people
  • Conservatives immediately accused “liberals” of defending Polanski, though few actually are.
• The fury with which many in Europe leaped to Polanski’s defense was truly bizarre to me. It’s one thing to take Cohen’s squeamish stance at the prospect of arresting a 70-something year old man for something done 30+ years ago wherein even the victim doesn’t want this to drag out. I disagree with that, but I can understand it. It’s another to find the notion outrageous. And apparently in the opening hours, there really was a lot of concern among the French that this was American overreach, if this Bruce Crumley article is accurate.
• Then, of course, things changed. Polls amongst the French showed a 2-to-1 majority believing that the arrest was legit. This leads me to believe one of two sets of things occurred:
  1. The people Bruce Crumley talked to were among the 30%. This is possible because he’s probably more likely to talk to the segment of the population more interested in the notion that the US is a Puritanical state that wants to punish sex. It’s also possible that Crumley himself (not only a heathen journalist, but one who got posted in France!) acribes to this mentality and so he projected his own views onto the French people or otherwise sought out sympathetic tongues.
  2. More likely, though, is that before the facts came rolling in, assumptions were made about the facts of the case. That it happened at a party. That the girl consented. That Polanski didn’t have reason to know how old she was. Also along these lines is the possibility that they were simply lied to by people that pretended to know more about the case than they did or knowingly spread false information.
• I’m inclined to believe the latter explanation because the vast majority of the early pushback against the arrest seemed to be rooted in misinformation and not of the debatable kind. A lot of comments about how everybody agrees it was consensual (which is not true). Comments about how she lied about her age (which nobody is alleging). Comments about how the arrest is illegal due to statutes of limitations (which do not apply). That what he did was only illegal because it was in the puritanical US (very untrue). I see a lot fewer of those comments more recently and more comments on the defenses of Polanski that hold more merit (judicial misconduct, that Polanski is no longer a threat to anyone, and that the victim wants this to all just go away).
• The illegality, and indeed immorality, of what Polanski did should be pretty obvious to everyone. Sex with a 13 year old, consensual or not, is illegal in California and the US and almost all of Europe. It not only runs against American law and European law, it runs afoul of Gannon’s worldview. And that’s not even considering the allegations of coersion. I’m a critic of American AOC laws, but I can’t imagine a regime that I would support that would let a 44 year old male have sex with a 13 year old female. And even to the extent that she did consent and even if she had wanted it because she was starstruck or wanted to further her career, there is almost no scenario in which I can see Polanski taking advantage that in any way that isn’t pretty immoral.
• I’ve seen some try to question the timing of the arrest. It’s all pretty straightforward in my mind: The Zurich Film Festival people stupidly (and helpfully for the authorities!) advertised where he was going to be well in advance. And this time the authorities were able to keep hush-hush enough about it to keep from scaring Polanski away. I’m not even sure what that accusation is supposed to mean in terms of nefariousness. The documentary came out a year ago and as far as I know there’s no new big, giant scandal sweeping the LA DA’s office. It reminds me a little bit of the late 90’s when conservatives attempted to attach each and every foreign policy decision that Clinton made to a Wag the Dog trick. It wasn’t hard because there was always some scandal going on any time Clinton sent our boys (and girls) into action.
• Kudos to Kevin Smith for being an early Hollywood voice against giving Polanski a pass.
• Chris Rock: “People are defending Roman Polanski because he made good movies 30 years ago? Are you kidding me? Even Johnny Cochran didn’t have the nerve to go, ‘Well did you see OJ play against New England?’”
• There seems to be some confusion of the ultimate significance of the alleged wrongdoing by the LA District Attorney’s office and the judge in the case. That’s the issue that most of Polanski’s remaining defenders (outside of Hollywood) are hanging their hat on. It seems to me that there are three ways this could go:
  1. The complaint is thrown out, the plea upheld but not the deal, and the new judge gets discretion over what the sentence should be. This is what a lot of Polanski-bashers are hoping for (and seem a little too optimistic about). This would certainly be a worst-case scenario for Polanski.
  2. The new judge determines that the old judge screwed up, but that the plea and the original deal both stand. This would mean that Polanski gets Time Served and does no more time for the statutory rape offense. However, there would still be the fleeing of the jurisdiction and that could lead to some jail time.
  3. The plea and the deal are both thrown out. Polanski is then free to enter a Not Guilty plea. This is a best-case scenario for Polanski. The victim is uncooperative and the mere threat of forcing her to testify could easily be enough to scare prosecutors out of prosecuting entirely and would certainly make them more amenable to a sweet deal that would have Polanski roaming the streets of LA relatively soon as if he hadn’t done a thing.
• In the event that the guilty plea is thrown out, I would oppose bringing the victim back to California to testify. It’s one thing to ignore the victim’s wishes when nothing is required of her (which would likely be the case if the guilty plea stands), but it’s another to ignore the wishes of the victim and force her to fly to LA and relive the experiences that she has so successfully moved beyond. I want to see Polanski face a penalty for what he’s done, but not at that expense of the victim. I would hope that they could still get Polanski for fleeing the jurisdiction.
• If the underlying charges against someone are dismissed, can he still go to jail for fleeing the country? I’m pretty sure he can. This is sort of a can of worms, I guess. In the case of an innocent man fleeing the jurisdiction and having his innocence proven, I would not favor prosecution for fleeing. If the charges are dropped due to insufficient evidence, though, that’s a dicier proposition. Another factor is if there was official misconduct alleged. In other words, if a guy happens to be at the wrong end of the circumstantial evidence stick and flees, I have less sympathy than the guy that is being actively framed by the authorities. Of course, this is further complicated by the fact that there is official misconduct alleged. This isn’t the kind I had in mind, though. But it’s hard to parse these distinctions without doing so on a case-by-case basis.
• Mostly, though, I want the judge to follow the law. I think that so many people discussing this case are so intent on arguing what the law should be in this case that they’re losing sight of the fact that laws exist beyond this case. If the law says that Polanski should be set free, then he should be set free. If the law says that his skipping town significantly reduces the number of his legal options, then his parents’ death in the Holocaust shouldn’t change that. If he is let go, I will not be outraged, though I will want a good explanation. Then, if the explanation is rooted in “Poor old frail guy doesn’t deserve punishment in light of his dark history and his contributions to the arts”, then I’ll be outraged.
• Some of you are probably aware that Poland, when not fighting vigorously for leniency with Polanski, aims to force chemical castration on pedophiles. For those of you that wonder: Yes, Polanski’s crime would apply as the victim was under 15.
• On a positive note, I’ve been very pleased to see jokes about Polanski and prison rape kept to a minimum. Prison rape is unacceptable and not funny regardless of who the victim is.

By most accounts, she seems to be kind of out there. But I can’t really blame her on this one. I realize that the banks and the credit car companies need to make their money, but not every way of doing so – even if legal – is ethically legitimate. Customers that make their payments on time and don’t overdraft should not be penalized because the banks made some bad loans to other people.

The notion that all men are created equal and that results are determined by effort, discipline, and so on is what my former boss Willard referred to as “one of the great noble myths.” The subject came up shortly after two of my coworkers, Edgar Braughton and Charlie Belcher, were let go. While I had, up until that point, always known that raw intelligence varied from one individual to the next, and that there were people we euphemistically called mentally handicapped that biologically lacked the intelligence that most people have, I never fully appreciated the wide spectrum of intelligence out there until I met, worked with, had to checked the work of, and eventually had to team-lead Edgar and Charlie.

Edgar and Charlie were not mentally retarded in the obvious sense. There were some questions about Edgar, but a lot of those were attributable to a speech impediment on his part that gave the false sense of retardation. Willard, too, had a speech impediment, but is among the smartest of the guys that I know. Edgar could easily have been in that category if he were, well, less dim. But he was the dimmest bulb in our shop. Charlie was a little bit smarter, though not much.

Edgar’s and Charlie’s job was really what I would call straight-forward. For much of the teach, it was mundane. Tedious. Perhaps the hardest part of the job was staying interested in the job enough to do it right. It required an attention to detail, though as Freddie demonstrated you could get away with a lot of inattention if you were simply fast. So really, all you needed was some combination of careless speed or slightly more time-consuming accuracy.

Most of the OSI Team did not have a whole lot in the way of external motivation. I was one of only four longish-term OSI Programmers that was married or in a committed relationship though the only one without children. Simon had kids to support but they were his girlfriend’s kids and he was not under any legal obligation to support them. The other two married OSI Programmers were Edgar and Charlie. On top of that, Edgar had a whopping four kids with a wife that didn’t work and Charlie had a chronically ill wife whose medical bills (by his own telling of it) were considerable. Further, they had less in the way of marketable skills than did many of us and therefore needed the job at Falstaff more than the rest of us did. In other words, these were two people that had the most motivation out of any of us.

And yet, despite all of this motivation, they simply could not get the job done. They could not get it done quickly. They could not get it done right. We tried vigorously to teach them how to do it. We patiently worked with them and looked over their shoulder and tried over and over again to teach them. They had the background that suggested that it wasn’t beyond their grasp. Edgar had a couple years of coursework from DeVry and Charlie a degree from the local vocational school. So it wasn’t completely alien to them. Charlie had a bit of an attitude problem, but his problems far surpassed that.

At the end of the day, despite each of their motivations and despite the easy nature of the job, it was simply beyond their grasp to do it right. Though I had always known of variable intelligence, it just never fully occurred to me that something as simple as that job would quite plainly be beyond people that were able to otherwise live independently. We may squish and squeak and slide a bit and say that they didn’t have the right kind of intelligence. There may be some truth to that in that I could see (maybe, possibly) Charlie being successful at fixing cars or something else that melded one’s mind with one’s hands. But the job itself is so easy to achieve basic competence with that it seemed to me and others that even if your real skills lay elsewhere, it’s not something that somebody shouldn’t be able to at least do right. It’s not an easy job to excel at… but to do? There isn’t a reader of Hit Coffee that couldn’t figure it out in a week.

Of course, Hit Coffee has a self-selected audience. It primarily appeals to people of a pretty basic level of intelligence. To people that like to think about things. People with college degrees (which I think all of you that I know about have) or at least the intelligence to get one. And some of my surprise at what should have been bloody obvious is that I have for most of my life been surrounded by such people. I went to an upper-crest high school. Then I went to college and hung out with the Honors College crowd. My career is mind-based. And even those I knew from outside my circles tended to be self-selected. The people I knew that went to more working-class schools tended to be the smarter people there (I met many of them through a computer network). The warehouse workers at my first job that I talked to tended to be team leads and the odd young man or two that were simply working their way through college. In that sense, it’s no surprise that my relatively sheltered existence lead to a sanguine view of the strength of human intelligence.

And so I gradually had to accede the notion that even within functioning individuals that don’t require special care and that didn’t ride the short bus and weren’t ill-educated and that weren’t just lazy, there can be some pretty basic limits as to what they are capable of. These limits include things that I would have been capable of doing in the seventh grade. Maybe earlier.

A lot of people come to this realization. Some wash it away with notions that it was really how people like Edgar and Charlie were raised and educated that are the problem. That’s historically what I’d done. Even though there were always people that couldn’t do things that I considered pretty basic and that in some cases it might take more attention and tutoring, that they could get there. A lot of whether someone accepts it or declines to accept it depends on ideology. To the extent that it dovetails with what they already believe about people (that, say, poor people are poor because they’re less intelligent), they believe it more readily than others where it presents some uncomfortable truths that contradict the way that they see the world.

For some people, it adds a stronger element of libertarianism because it adds more a sense of justice to the segregation of the haves and have-nots. For me it does slightly the opposite. If people that are at the bottom of the economic latter are so because they made less of an effort or made poorer life choices, I have far less sympathy than someone that is stuck manning a convenience store with little hopes of making it into management simply because they were born with fewer neurons firing quite as vigorously as the next guy. In fact, it almost starts to make a socialist out of me in that I believe that people that lack brain-power (assuming that they work somewhere doing something!) are deserving of, if not everything that their sharper peers that contribute more to society, as respectable a standard of living as we can afford. In short, it makes the notion of wealth redistribution bother me less. It makes the wheat-and-chaff of capitalism overall less appealing.

On the other hand, my experiences at Belle Rieve, that occurred at the same time, which come to think of it included a number of people that probably wouldn’t have been able to do OSI programming work, counteracted this somewhat by demonstrating pretty clearly the dangers of subsidizing lifestyles that aren’t going anywhere. It may be too much to expect them to get jobs that pay well, but it’s pretty important that they work. If idle minds are the Devil’s Workshop, idle lives partake in a never-ending buffet of counterproductive habits. Further, on the subject of crime-prevention, if people that live among the poor are not just limited to those that made poor lifestyle choices, trying to keep those zones as free as possible from crime becomes all the more important.

But mostly, it gives me a little more sympathy for those that haven’t made it. Not enough sympathy that I want to move back to Belle Rieve or that I would raise children where we lived in Estacado or where we live now, but enough to feel a sense of sympathy rather than simply frustration when I bump into them on a daily basis.

-{Note: The setting of most of this post is Deseret, where 90% of the population is white (96% including white-Hispanic). The racial aspects of IQ are discussed at length elsewhere and I would prefer them not be discussed here. This post is about IQ. Not about IQ and race. Not IQ and immigration. Or welfare mommas. Or about how people that are not like you or don’t think like you are ruining our country.}-