The Disappointed Idealist

It just so happens that yesterday I was talking to someone about this and then today I found this article: How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks . I will let you read the details, but the conclusion is what needs to remain: "Being a cheapskate can be expensive indeed." The article is written from an economic point of view, so I will adopt the same tone from then on, but let's not forget the damage done to actual children and human beings, a damage which cannot be measured in money. But, by all means, let's be as cynical as the people making these decisions and let's just talk in terms of how much money these decisions will cost them (because, yes, money makes the world go round and health is a minor issue). We've just come out of a period of crisis. During this time lots of companies laid off a lot of people for reasons of cost-saving. I can totally understand the decision, hard as it may be for me as an employee, what I am...

Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell My rating: 4 of 5 stars Thomas Sowell goes against the general trend of ideas promoted by today's society in this book and I appreciate that quite a lot. There is, indeed, a general fear (that he actually consistently criticizes) of attacking certain ideas that means that most of the intellectuals of today (as he very well points out) are actually, with different words, promoting the same trends and ideas. It takes guts to go against the trend and I like it. Generally speaking, the themes of this book revolve around the fact that intellectuals are people who speak without practical experience which means that in most cases, no matter how smart they are, they do not really know what they are talking about. But because they sound like they know what they are saying, they are influential in creating policies that in the end hurt the very people they are claiming to defend. I tend to agree with this idea. I also agree that in many cases the...

Because happy holidays and because I am being literally bombarded with all sorts of ads like "make your family happy, buy them this and that." As already pointed out in pretty much all my previous posts, companies don't care about you. They don't care about your holidays. They don't care about your family's happiness. Everything they care about is money. They want your money, they want you to buy their products, so they sell you something they think you might like. Oh, but wait. It's not even like that. They sell you something they convince you to like. Either by hiring a cool person for a shitload of money to tell you that what they're selling is cool. Or by making studies that say that you will respond positively to one stimulus or another (say... a naked chick in the rain. And then suddenly, behind her, a nice bottle of wine that suddenly you want to buy.) It doesn't even matter whether or not the product is good. Every company...