Facebook initially got it right. They created a place where people could feel free to express themselves in a particular context. The feeling of security and privacy led to a flourish of content uploaded to the site. By opening up, now, if you are on Facebook, you have the risk that your mom or your employer is going to see the photos your friends posted of your antics at the party last night.

A transparent society is a totalitarian society and thats not fun for anyone.

But what is left for the United States to do if both manufacturing and information jobs are moved overseas? The answer is marketing. Marketing is the craft of linking producers of goods and services with customers. And the customers exist in the United States because we are the world’s richest nation.

Only Americans know what other Americans want to buy. Only Americans know how to create the perception of value where none actually exists. Two days ago I wrote about an $88 t-shirt. The Chinese can manufacture a t-shirt for $1, but they will never be able to figure out how to get Americans to pay 88 times what it costs to manufacture.

1 Don’t even think about smoking and, preferably, don”t hang glide.

2 Eliminate sugar to lower blood insulin levels. Use stevia as a sweetener. It is a South American plant that is both very sweet and good for you.

3 Don’t eat any animal fats. Government guidelies tend to say cut these down, but they probably only say this because they think it’s the best
people can manage. No saturated fat at all is probably best.

4 Eat lots of vegetables that grow above ground. Those below ground are heavy in carbohydrates that turn into sugar and raise insulin levels.

5 Don’t overdo the fruit. Contrary to popular wisdom it’s not unconditionally good as it contains sugar. Non-drinking Arabs and Indians who
sit around sipping orange juice all day end up with diabetes.

6 Eat nuts. For incompletely understood reasons, people who eat nuts live longer. Not salted peanuts, however (see 7).

7 Don’t salt things. Salt raises blood pressure and will kill you through a stroke or heart attack. For this reason, don’t touch processed food.

8 Don’t have heart bypass surgery or have a stent installed to hold a blocked artery open. Latest figures suggest neither works. People who live
longer after them probably do so because the shock made them eat better and exercise more.

9 Have a massive medical assessment, preferably at Kronos in Phoenix, Arizona, to establish what you are doing wrong and, if possible, what genetic
weaknesses you have. Continue these assessments throughout your life and adjust supplements accordingly. Read all the latest medical journals to keep
up.

10 Exercise vigorously and daily but dont run. Running is bad for your skeleton.

11 Take a childs aspirin once a day to thin your blood and a much larger dose before you get on a plane. Ideally, don’t get on a plane.

12 Eat very little. Rats on restricted diets live longer but it is not known if this would damage humans particularly their brains. So if you forget
what 2+2 equals, eat more.

13 Ignore all of the above. They may be wrong and, if a piano falls on you, pointless.

Fish is largely missing the point. Summers is making a factual claim that may or may not be justified using scientific evidence. See this fabulous debate to betwee Steve Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke to see how such a discussion can proceed. In contrast, Churchill is making a value judgement about America and terrorism that is not per se provable or disprovable. Discussion and evaluation of factual claims are the substance of science and acadamia and it is indeed scandalous that Harvard’s faculty appears unable to engage in it. In contrast, Churchill is infusing facts with value judgements that at odds with those of the people and institutions that employ him. The left has indeed been entirely ok with the politicization of academia. The right has largely stood for the idea that academia should be the province of intellect.

Churchill’s abuse was to shift from intellectual discourse to political discourse and to represent his political discourse as intellectually valid. Summers was making a factual hypothesis ammenable to proof or disproof. The fact that Fish can’t see the difference is indeed part of the problem with academia today, a problem that Ward Churchill so vividly makes apparent.

All of these changes have made me gigantically less distracted and hopefully more productive. Yay!
Update: A sideeffect of a consistent inbox is that I now have things configured so that all from addresses of mail accepted in my INBOX are whitelisted. Note if you use CRM114, you should only whitelist AFTER training.

1. – Begin mandatory Retirement Savings Accounts (RSAs) and phase out Social Security
2. – Begin mandatory Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and achieve universal health care coverage, phase out Medicare and Medicaid
3. – Implement a loophole-free Effective Flat Tax (EFT) that has a completely flat perceived rate

Read the whole thing to understand why this is actually very progressive and very much saner than our current system.

Philosophically I prefer taxing estates to taxing income, but that is a subject of another post. If we are going to stick with income, this is a good way to do it.

• View email recent first
• BCC all outgoing mail into my inbox
• leave all email in my inbox
• note a set of processed email by sending myself a STOP POINT message

If this works, I will no longer be dependent on IMAP. I’ll be able to do useful searching and sorting with whatever mail client I want. And I will spend even less time “managing my email”.

Also, I set my email polling interval to check for new email every hour rather than every minute. That leads to a much higher level of sanity. I may start switching all my subscription email to a different folder and then increase the polling frequency. We’ll see.