11/27/2016

Thoughts On A Sunday

Despite Black Friday. It's actually been somewhat quiet here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. There were a few places around here that saw the shopping frenzy, one of those being one of the local outlet malls, but for the most part it hasn't gotten too crazy.

I think the after-effects of all that Thanksgiving fare are still making themselves known.

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This ought to work well as a business plan:

The CEO of an Albuquerque-based internet marketing firm has issued a letter telling clients who support President-elect Donald Trump to take their business elsewhere.

Hmm, blowing off about half of your customer base because you disagree with their political choices doesn't bode well for any broadbased business. As such, I would think that the shareholders of that company, assuming it is a not owned by the CEO, would do the prudent thing and fire him before he can do any more damage.

In an interview this week with KOB, a local NBC News affiliate, Mr. Blanchfield said he had a “moral obligation” to stand up for what he believes is right.

“It is my firm belief that we elected a fascist as our next president,” he said.

As long as he's prepared to suffer the consequences of his actions, so be it. However his investors might not be so sanguine about his actions.

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Here's yet another company willing to shut itself off from half of its potential customer base as well.

Did any of these folks actually take any business or marketing classes? One has to wonder seeing they're doing their darnedest to cripple themselves and, perhaps, put themselves out of business.

Of course if they do go under I expect them to blame Trump for their poor decisions.

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Irony indeed.

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Even Forbes magazine is hopping on to the EMdrive bandwagon, particularly in light of tests run by NASA at their Eagleworks lab facility showing the new technology works as advertised.

The problem? The EMdrive violates Newton's Third Law of Motion which states “For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”

That third law is known as the conservation of momentum, and is true not only in Newtonian mechanics, but in electromagnetism, General Relativity and all of quantum field theory. It’s the one law that Newton came up with that still holds, with no exceptions, today.

But if the EMdrive is truly reactionless, then Newton is wrong. Also, Einstein is wrong, Maxwell is wrong and all of quantum physics is wrong. There’s a fundamental symmetry that causes momentum conservation: translational symmetry. It means that if my system is over here, at a certain point in space, it should obey the same laws as if it’s over there, at a different point in space. But if momentum conservation isn’t truly fundamental, then translational symmetry cannot be a good symmetry of the Universe. In other words, there must be a preferred location, where the laws of physics are different in one location than others. The laws of physics, all of a sudden, depend on position.

Umm....oops? This could certainly upset the physics apple cart unless someone can explain how it works and does not violate Newton's Third Law.

If nothing else the EMdrive is pushing pure scientific research in an area of science so many of us have found fascinating throughout our lives.

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Make them live up to their own rules. Otherwise they show themselves to be hypocrites, right?

(H/T Instapundit)

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According to some study, across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks.

Reading the comments to the linked post I believe that some of the commenters have confused “high computer-related abilities” with the ability to code and learn new programming languages. But from what I've been able to glom from the original article (linked elsewhere in the original post), it is the ability to use sophisticated applications to their fullest extent that comprise the 5%. Of that 5%, maybe 10 to 15% of those actually code. The third of users that can “complete medium-complexity tasks” I take to mean being able to use things like the various Office suites (Microsoft Office, Open Office, Libre, etc) to do more than some basic word processing, presentation creation, or spreadsheet functions.

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Do you feel like a fraud at work? Don't be surprised as it turns out that around 70% of people have experienced this feeling. It seems like it's a version of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, something I've covered before.

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The New England Patriots played the New York Jets at the Meadowlands today, beating the Jets 22-17. That makes the Pats 9-2 for the season so far.

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Will the cognitive dissonance that is part and parcel of the Left's world view be shattered as Donald Trump fails to live up to their opinion of him? Will they swoon if, as some of us expect, he will end up being pragmatic in regards to the Presidency and actually does a decent job assembling his cabinet, creating and enacting his policies, foreign and domestic?

Or will their cast-in-stone beliefs not allow them to see what is actually happening, much as they could not see that The Won was not the answer to their prayers, but instead a divider that has helped destroy their narrative?

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we've survived another Thanksgiving and the follow on Black Friday, leftovers are on the menu for the next few days, and where all of the parking lots at the various malls and outlets will be jammed until Christmas.