dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Help stop the spread of social anxiety. A fact sheet.  FOMO (fear of missing out) and status anxiety are highly contagious social anxieties. 😨 What are they? The fear of being excluded from knowledge, experiences, and interactions (FOMO), and consequentially being considered unsuccessful by society (status anxiety). What Are the Symptoms?

Emotional Intelligence: yet another thing we can beat ourselves up for not having. Why? The jobs and therefore income of the future will belong to those with a high 'EQ - emotional quotient'. IQ-heavy roles are about to go the way of manual labour. White collar is the new blue collar. Software and robots will replace nerds and jocks respectively. Only the popular kids - those who can creatively connect clients and contacts - will be spared. The future consists of fluffing enthusiastically to keep your five star rating.

Money printers go 'brrr ... ains'. 🧟 And that's okay. Monetary expansion and lowering interest rates is often criticised for keeping alive zombie firms.

Rural regions may want revitalisation without repopulation. "Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." -- Paul Weyrich , Conservative political activist.   

Yes, stocks can go down and stay down, but in relation to what? Japan's stock bubble gets rolled out time and time again as a cautionary tale against assuming stocks will rise in the long term. In reality, it's as much a story of currency. You'll read something blood-curdling like this: "the Nikkei 225 [22,977.13 on 2 Nov 2020] is still 70% below its peak [38915.87 on 29 Dec 1989] after 30 years!" 🙄 [Eye Roll]

Similarity, not difference, breeds conflict. When we came to Australia in the 1980s my parents remarked upon how cheap certain cuts of meat were at the butchers'. 'White' Aussies didn't eat the fatty belly pork prized by south-east Asians, so we gorged on it at bargain prices. 🐷 They also didn't eat squid, to the delight of Greek and Italian immigrants who scooped up prime calamari at the cost of bait. 🦑

Don't sweat the big stuff. Like a lot of people right about now, I got drawn into some tribal debates. COVID-19, Racial Justice, Climate Change. Fun stuff. Lots of heat and noise. Maybe it's one of my mental patterns, but they leave me feeling like I'm the only one out there holding up a cocktail umbrella to a tsunami of reasoning. I don't intend to denigrate my opponents. A lot of what they say is logical, if often cherry-picked, one-sided, and beside the point. There's just ... a lot. I like to think that I do research not just to confirm my views but to expand them. To aid this I don't just do broad topic searches, but try to think laterally from the topic, then type specific theories into the search box. One thought I came up with was: "Who cares?"

Lifetime earnings is another way to investigate the commercial advantage that tertiary education can bring. I prefer this measure to wage gaps because career-income paths are not smooth for everyone. From the Social Security Administration in 2015: After controlling for key socio-demographic variables that influence earnings and the probability of college completion, the differences in lifetime earnings by educational attainment are reduced, but still substantial. Regression estimates show that men with bachelor's degrees would earn $655,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates. Women with a bachelor's degrees would earn $450,000 more in median lifetime earnings than high school graduates.

Use a USB gamepad as a Raspberry Pi mouse. Raspbian supports mice out of the box, but what if you want to use a USB gamepad to move the pointer around (and click buttons) instead?

Racism appended to COVID-19 discussions, and how to respond.

... Soldier, Sailor. Various brain-farts from a chat about retail space. Bricks and mortar retail dead? Rents in Australia squeeze out tenants and profits in shopping centers . Poor conditions flow to landlords. The ASX's largest retail REITs Scentre (ASX:SGC) and Vicinity (ASX:VCX) have indeed been losing value for years.

An alienated man ' driven too far ' murders his wife for perceived wrongs. I'm not referring to Muzzammil Hassan , but to Rowan Baxter who also killed his three children and himself. While there is reason to differentiate between honour killings and domestic violence, is it useful to frame domestic violence as an honour killing?

What if you bought at the top of the market in 1929 ... ... and then did nothing?

The soothing notion that chaos can flow from order. First, watch this: