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| date | 2001-04-23:12:54 |
| Software |
Ok, so we'll see how Opera does. Opera is a free/advertising-paid web browser available for everything. I'm running it on linux/Slackware, where it has a few problems with fonts (big ones look ugly) but is otherwise pretty nice. After many years of Netscape use I'm still getting used to Operas side-bar style of bookmark presentation, but I think I could get used to it in time. The real question is: will it crash? |
| Humans |
The ad that Opera is currently flashing at me (and which I fooled for the duration of the time I'm editing this by moving the top of the browser off this particular virtual desktop--I love fvwm!) is for "Personalized Astrological Reports." I am so unbelievably tempted right now to just give people what they want. The demand for unreason has always been demonstrably huge. The thought of funding the life to which I'd like to become acustomed by taking money from idiots for nonsense is really, seriously tempting. It's obscene that astrologers and thier ilk make any money at all, much less the amount they do. The whole psychic industry is involved in transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Most individual psychics and astrologers are not well-paid, thankfully, and the psychic hotline business has seen some serious ups and downs in recent years, but the financial advice industry still rolls merrily along, shamelessly bilking the public. And it's so easy. People give themselves to these frauds, they ask to be ripped off. Rand wrote somewhere that the fraud comes to fear other people, particularly thier minds, because anyone with a brain could expose the fraud. But financial advisors have been telling people what stocks they should buy for decades, and everyone knows that there is no value in their advice. The individual investor cannot get higher returns over the long term than the average returns of the market. Yet people still pay lots of money in the hope that somehow they will beat the law of averages. Do I sound frustrated? Angry? That's probably because I am. I work in an industry where it pays to be right, and I spend an enormous amount of effort to ensure that the work I do is correct. It irritates me to see a lot of people getting paid without even trying to be right. And they are just as capable of doing harm when they'r wrong as I am: if they tell someone to invest heavily in a dog, that person has been hurt. But the advisor never has to pay. There's something wrong with this. |