Behold:

• devmgmt.msc
• services.msc
• lusrmgr.msc
• net stop
• taskkill /im
• rd /s
• regedit
• net use *
• taskmgr
• mstsc

You may now outsource my job.

Colinvaux’s 25 year old book, Fates of Nations has an eerily persistent theme: A people achieve wealth through colonization, technological advancement and/or conquest. This wealth gives people hope that they and their children will have a larger slice of life. So people have more babies to grab up those slices until the wealth has spread around (often thinner than before). The new generations have the same hope and expectations as the last. With little or no spare resources left, their expectations can only be met through further colonization, technological advancement or conquest.

The United States of America grew up with an excess of resources unlike any other. There was an abundance of free land taken from the previous Americans. Added to this was rapid technological progress and the unparalleled availability of cheap, non-renewable energy afforded through oil and coal. Millions and millions of people poured into our countries for centuries, yet we had the resources to feed, clothe and house them all–in a far more luxurious manner than their old countries could.

This abundance exists no more. The best land filled and the price of homes skyrocketed. A nation with far more arable land than any other in the world, we now import our fruit from South America, seafood from Southeast Asia. Our energy needs grew far faster than supply; we now import oil and gas from around the world. We are too poor to manufacture our own products or even support them over the phone once sold.

Yet few Americans have seen the glass ceiling erected above our heads. We look up and talk of ever greater wealth for ever greater numbers of people. Americans still expect the upward mobility our fore-fathers enjoyed, but we no longer have the means of giving it away. Henceforth, we must earn it.

How have we chosen to do this?

Certainly not through a big technological push. Our public-education system lies in distress, often under-funded but always mismanaged. We talk half-heartedly of addressing the problem, but our real push lies elsewhere.

We now have a military budget that dwarfs every single other country in the world. In fact our military budget nearly exceeds the rest of the world’s military spending combined. Our previous military experiments have been successful: the French, Spanish, English, Japanese and Germans can attest to this. But few remain to attest to our greatest military success of all: the eradication of the indigenous people of our continent through sustained aggression and conquest. With our coffers empty and heads full of dreams, why would we not try what has worked so well before? Where would we attack? And how?

I find it very amusing that the left-wing radicals are now victims of the same strategy they took the conservative establishment down with. Make no mistake, the horrors of the PC-era have left a permanent stain on the United States of America.

Groups like the ACLU are too short-sighted to see that ideas like “politically-correct” have no inherent meaning. Their definition will shift over time until one day they are on the wrong side of what is PC. They are then silenced for their insubordination. That is the future America the liberals created when they replaced Liberalism with Socialism and Communism.

Thanks to these groups, America has now established precedent that it is okay to legislate people into thinking a certain way. I have little pity for these current victims of the PC-police.

I am listening to Digitally Imported here at work (at 10:18pm). Now ignoring the fact that I decidedly should not be at work at 10:18pm, it has all been worth it because I heard about the greatest compilation of Mozart inspired techno – UltraMax Music. How great! They even let you download the whole thing in MP3 format! No DRM for you baby! It truly is Digital Bliss!

Perhaps we are all beginning to realize that Google is nothing more than just an enourmous advertising outfit. Google just bought a radio ad firm. How boring.

Back in the 80s, Tokyo and Kyushu had 100km traffic Jams! But Asahi thinks we shouldn’t complain:

According to studies done by a Tokyo Metropolitan University team headed by associate professor Takashi Oguchi, the Roman Empire was so plagued by the congestion of horse-drawn carriages that Julius Caesar once banned all incoming daytime traffic into city centers. But this only resulted in heavy traffic at night, leading Cicero, the philosopher, to bemoan the noise.

yup

This is our second post of 2006 here at Erick’s blog. While we will still be covering the politics of Japan to some extent, the shift of this blog will become more Psychology oriented. The reason is because we find the subject fascinating; the human mind is so wonderfully complex. Decoding its mysteries could hardly be anything but one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Slashdot is promoting an article discussing our quick judgements of websites. This is undoubtedly a result of the same meme that produced Blink. The Canadian study concluded that people make lasting judgements of a web-site’s visual appeal within the first 50ms. These judgements generate a bias effecting all future decisions of the sites worth.

An important aspect either the Nature article or the study failed to address was the effects of visual short-term memory on the results. The image on the screen was flashed for a mere 50ms. However, unless another image was flashed to, in effect, “wipe” the memory of the website, it is likely the person simply stored a visual representation in his memory of the website to which he could refer when marking his multi-second judgement of the sites attractiveness.