joshuago’s Bookmarks

The feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man. The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too.

Even the most knowledgeable, intelligent people around are rarely experts in more than one or maybe two unrelated subject areas. The sum of human knowledge is vast, and while smart people often believe they could become an expert in any of them individually if they only had the time and inclination, the relatively short number of years we have on this planet precludes them from mastering more than a very small portion of them. So smart people have a lot of intelligence, but still only a tiny amount of knowledge, which causes them to overvalue the former at the expense of the latter.

Spending real money on things that don’t exist still sounds “fringe-y and aberrant” to many American consumers. Yet it has been going on for years in elaborate games like World of Warcraft or Everquest, as players buy tools, weapons and the like for digital characters.

Olympia Snowe, Republican Senator from Maine, makes the case for a big-tent Republican Party. Among the mistakes she cites are the devaluation of diversity and the misreading of the 2004 presidential election as a political mandate.

The media loves fear-mongering, as they ultimately sell more of their “stuff” by fueling the recession hype. In the meanwhile though, most of us still get our morning espresso, buy iPods and People Magazine, go out for lunch, and rent a few videos a week. Some are clearly hit harder than others, but it’s not as though all spending has stopped. We all know this, and it’s not the only reason that we need to market our businesses more aggressively.