What do people mean when they say "this is why we can't have nice things"?

“This is why we can’t have nice things” is an idiom. It connotes a more complex layer of meaning since its origin. Here’s a good definition: A phrase used to blame someone or some group for engaging in the kind of behavior that has led to something valued becoming damaged, ruined, or corrupted.

In a 21st century context, it means this:

… it voices the earnest class aspiration of a dupe who believes that "things" are "nice" (a humorously innocuous word) based on some standard class grid. Then anything that goes wrong points to the larger (comic) frustration of not being able to achieve the standard class-inflected goal. Like Ralph Kramden or Lucy in I Love Lucy. 

The decontextualization of the phrase makes the writer or speaker (not the character) and the audience in cahoots against the position of class dupe.

What's it like to be a member of an Ivy League university's secret society?

If sworn to secrecy, such individuals are unlikely to answer, even as Anon on Quora.

We know that some of these societies exist e.g. Skull & Bones. My father was at Yale in the 1940s and told me that it existed, not that he knew more about it than someone who never went to school there. 

I went to Wharton, 50 years later. University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League school but generally considered a lesser one. There was a rumor, never anything documented that I ever read, of a secret society for the 2nd year MBA's. 

It worked in the usual way: A fixed number of students, maybe 15 or 16, were asked to join each year. They were the "power elite" of Wharton Business School, and passed their spot on to successors upon graduation, but remained affiliated throughout their working lives. Only men were members, in keeping with tradition. I forgot the name of it, don't know if it even existed, or was just something UPenn students made up, so they would have a secret society of their own, like the other Ivy League schools!

Who is Sidney Blumenthal and why was Hillary Clinton contacting him via private email?

Sidney Blumenthal is the father of Max Blumenthal. Max is not a fan of Israel. It is peculiar how Sidney is such a neoliberal Hillary fan yet so defensive of Max. Clinton Adviser Sid Blumenthal's New Cause: His Son's Anti-Israel Book (2013):

A veteran confidant of Hillary Clinton has waded into a bitter argument over the explosive topic of Israel, defending his son’s intensely anti-Israel book from a liberal critic. 

Sidney Blumenthal, a former New Yorker writer turned Clinton adviser from the White House to the 2008 campaign, has been waging an online campaign against Nation columnist Eric Alterman for negatively reviewing his son Max Blumenthal’s book, Goliath. The book was described by Alterman, himself a frequent critic of Israel, as “awful” and something that “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”

Clinton Foundation officials refused to respond to questions of whether the elder Blumenthal is currently on a Clinton payroll.

Sidney contacted Hillary by private e-mail during the her destabilization of Libya because he had various business ideas, for himself, and wanted her feedback and insights. He stopped after the U.S. ambassador was killed at the consulate in Benghazi. Hillary thought Sidney was very insightful, and had been forwarding excerpts from his emails to her staff and friends for years. 

Sidney Blumenthal's Mosaic Mugshot by Kevin Vaughn, on Flickr

Sidney Blumenthal, a senior Hillary Clinton campaign adviser and former White House aide to Bill Clinton, was arrested in January 2008 for drunk driving in New Hampshire, one day before the state's presidential primary. 

Blumenthal, 59, was popped by Nashua cops after his rented Buick was pulled over for speeding. When Blumenthal, pictured in the below Nashua Police Department mug shot, showed signs of intoxication, a cop gave him a field sobriety test, which the Clinton operative failed. Blumenthal, who declined to take a Breathalyzer test, was booked into the Nashua lockup on an aggravated DWI charge.

Are clothes the root of all evil?

How would today be different if humans rejected clothing and nudism prevailed?

Let's start by turning to Biblical scripture for help in answering the question. In Genesis, Adam and Eve ate an apple, i.e. fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, despite it being forbidden. (Blame the serpent.) Upon doing so, they felt shame at their nakedness, and covered themselves. In fact, that is how God immediately knew that Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.

naked = without wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge 




clothed = with wisdom gained from eating of Tree of Knowledge




evil = serpent

Adam and Eve each hold a golden apple.

Elisha of Ascoli's Ketubah: Mantua, Italy on 31 August 1629

Since this was a decoration for the upper right corner of a ketubah (a marriage certificate used mostly by Sephardic Jews from about 1400 to the 1950s), the Hebrew inscription (happily!) doesn't directly correspond with the image. 

This is how it is pleasantly described by the online source, The Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art at the Center for Jewish Art, Image ID 10661

A roundel, located in the top right corner of the outer border, features the naked Adam and Eve each with an outstretched hand, holding a golden apple. The Tree of Knowledge with golden fruits and the serpent coiled around its trunk stands on the left. A Hebrew inscription encircles the scene: יבורכו חתן וכלה כברך ה' אדם וחוה, "May the groom and bride be blessed as the lord blessed Adam and Eve".

Putting it all together, being unclothed is ignorant. Wearing clothing is wise, despite being associated with disobeying the command of God. Forces of evil were the impetus for mankind to go to a clothed state. Clothing was not the root of evil, but merely a manifestation of knowledge, thus clothes are not the root of all evil.

Many happy returns!

This is birthday girl

Deluxe version

Large, somewhat grainy animated GIF with music 

Днем Рождения! Happy Birthday! 

Low bandwidth silent version

Demise of the Navajo Generating Station

Here's the Quora question: How can California go completely to electric cars when we already experience brown-outs and other rolling blackouts due to not having enough electricity?

This answer by Quora user Edw says it all.

California is decommissioning its nuclear plants. Wind and solar won't be able to take up the slack so it will have to buy power from nuclear and coal plants in neighboring states.

That might not be as easy as it once was. More on that in a moment. I upvoted the answer and left a comment of agreement.

Yes, you are correct. California has been sucking all the electricity from Hoover Dam for decades. The Colorado River and Hoover Dam are on the border between Arizona (where I live) and Nevada. Yet my state only gets 10% of the electricity generated by the hydroelectric power from Hoover Dam. Nevada gets about the same. California takes over 50%.

There's more. Californian insanity has spread like a contagion to states north and east of California, and now they are decommissioning their nuclear power and coal plants too!

Let me tell you about another victim, not a nuclear plant, but important nonetheless

The Navajo Generating Station

The Navajo Nation operated a coal power plant on reservation land for DECADES. They were forced to shut it down in 2019. Green liberal Democrats and Republican renewable energy business didn’t care that the Navajo Generating Station had kept the reservation energy-independent. It is a tragedy how 700 Navajo people lost their good jobs, that were right there, on the reservation in northeast Arizona. The generating station produced more energy than needed locally, so the extra was sold through interties to the electric power grid. AND the coal was mined locally!

The Navajo nation protested regulatory demands for plant closure, instigated by California, to no avail. Although it was located on supposedly sovereign native American land, The State shut down their power plant. There is nothing to replace it. 

Google Maps retrospective

I was curious, and had a look at what Google Maps reviews had to say about the Navajo Generating Station, which was run with assistance from a Maricopa County public utility, the Salt River Project. I reproduced some of the reviews here. 

Wind and solar will never replace nuclear and coal, despite what John Kerry and other attendees at COP say. This first review describes solar only advocates as ignorami.

This guy HATED the Navajo Generating Station, as it detracted from his Lake Powell experience, OMG!

Why is working in pairs so rare at work?

I agree that on-the-job working in pairs is rare. There are some exceptions such as pair programming and law enforcement (police work in pairs usually) but not many others!

Why are pairs so rare?

I attribute it to the fact that some supervisors and project managers either:

1. don’t know what is technically involved in enough detail to think of a way to allocate work to teams of two. When they do, it usually isn’t two workers who are peers. Instead, one is experienced and the other is less so or maybe new to the company or project, and mostly “shadows” the experienced person. It is more like one person working, and the other person watching and learning!
2. are concerned that two people who are peers—and should contribute equally—will not. One person will do most or all of the work. Why does this happen, and why doesn’t the one who contributes say something about it to management or the team leader? Lots of reasons, some of which I couldn’t ever figure out! Even when I suspected this was going on, it wasn’t possible to prove without the cooperation of the person who was doing the bulk of the work.

People can work in pairs most effectively when there are not multiple dependencies in the workflow/ timing. For example, one person might write the code to do some analysis, after or maybe simultaneously with the other person who looks for a data source then tests/confirms its adequacy (e.g. quality, frequency, time span, availability/cost, has a data dictionary) for the analysis. Yet even this scenario is more accurately described as two people working on two different parts of a project (or assignment, or experiment) rather than working as a pair.

An eponymous example

The only example that quickly comes to my mind is pairs programming. I did that at work, briefly. It was fascinating and revealing!

What do Nick Szabo and Wei Dai do for a living?

What do secretive cryptography experts like Nick Szabo and Wei Dai do to earn a living? via Quora

Now with 2024 update

The most transparent cryptography experts are those that work in academia. Matthew D. Green is a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. Others work in industry and have prominent public profiles like Bruce Schneier (British Telecom) and Burt Kaliski (Verisign now RSA). Craig Gentry works for IBM; he developed fully homomorphic encryption about 10 years ago.

Some cryptographers have sub rosa personal lives, yet maintain updated websites including disclosure of who and where they have worked in the recent and less-recent past. Their websites aren't just blogs. They have plenty of well-organized content. Good examples are the steganography guys, Neil F. Johnson and Gary Kessler, who work as consultants and sometimes as longer-term contractors.

Nick Szabo is very cryptic!

It isn't easy to discern what Nick did or does for a living, or anything else about him, even with with pro-level google-fu! Nick Szabo has an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Washington in Seattle and a professional degree in the law (Juris Doctor, which is different than a PhD in law) from George Washington University. In the United States, a law degree is a three-year program of study. In one of Nick Szabo's Unenumerated blog posts, he acknowledged being a law school student in 2006. Let's assume he graduated in 2008.

Given his law degree, I would suggest checking to see if Nick is a member of the bar in any state. He may not be, as plenty of people with law degrees don't practice law although they use their knowledge of it in their work, and are often hired because of it. Examples include legal departments of financial services firms (both fintech and traditional), manufacturing companies, and healthcare of all sorts.

If one were to want to develop a digital currency, a high level of competency in computer science as well as a law degree seem ideal, although some knowledge of economics would help too. Many patent attorneys have similar backgrounds, e.g. a physics or electrical engineering undergraduate degree, three years or more of working in the field, then law school.

Nick has an extensive catalog of essays and a blog, but no insights are to be gleaned explicitly regarding his occupation. I can provide merely a single data point. Nick Szabo was retained as a consultant for about a year by Vaurum, a Silicon Valley start-up, from 2014 to 2015. Via The New York Times, Decoding the enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the birth of bitcoin:

In the beginning of 2014, Mr. Szabo joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up based in Palo Alto, California, that was operating in stealth mode and that aimed to build a better Bitcoin exchange. After his arrival, Mr. Szabo helped reorient the company to take advantage of Bitcoin’s capability for so-called smart contracts, which enable self-executing financial transactions.

Wei Dai

As for Wei Dai, I know less. He is a Less Wrong contributor, see Overview for Wei Dai: Less Wrong with a huge karma score of 21,775 points! Apparently, Wei Dai is articulate and persuasive; however, no one earns a living from Less Wrong with the exception of Eliezer Yudkowsky. If I were Peter Thiel, I would have put my money on Wei Dai rather than Eliezer. Wei Dai has a formal education in computer science AND has clearly 'cracked the code' necessary to receive acclaim from the fussy, idiosyncratic yet often intelligent Less Wrong crowd.

Wei Dai has a nice website, Wei Dai's home page. Perhaps one could infer his occupation based on his expressed interests, e.g. his many years of activity in the USENET crypto-optimization forum.

Truly, it would be difficult to go wrong with most of the individuals associated with the 1990s Cypherpunk group, sometimes known as Extropians, to which Wei Dai and Nick Szabo both belonged. Even the most obstreperous members ("toxic" in today's terminology) such as Larry Detweiler, have an impressive record of accomplishment. Detweiler had a weird obsession with Nick Szabo and tentacles! More on that in another post.

Cryptocurrency talk

Be aware, you are not the first person who has wondered, "Nick Szabo, Wei Dai... Who are their employers?!". That links to a BitcoinTalk forum post. Regulars on IRC-style bitcointalk.org were intimidating when I visited. That's putting it mildly.

Mircea Popescu, may he rest in peace, was the domain owner of bitcointalk. He was voluble, clever, and well-informed about many matters in addition to cryptocurrency, although bitcoin was his path to fortune. He was banned after a few months of viciously criticizing Izabella Kaminski of the Financial Times. They got in HUGE arguments on Twitter! 

Mircea Popescu was kind to me during his brief time on Twitter. He patiently explained DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) and other concepts to me. He told me,  "You are a nice girl." That was thoughtful, as I was a childless, 48 year old widow. Mircea was a life interrupted: He was reported to have drowned while swimming in the ocean near his beachfront home in Costa Rica in 2021. 

I found an fortuitously relevant post on Mircea's Trilema blog just now! It mentions both Michael O. Church (whom I will not try to explain...Mircea captures O's essence quite well) AND Quora AND one of my least favorite Wikipedia editors, Flyer22. We frequently argued. She was fawned over, reborn at least once, and in the midst of a huge argument with a transgender woman, Flyer22 died so she couldn't be banned for transphobic remarks. 

Who is Nick Szabo?

Wei Dai remarked, on the record, that he isn't Nick Szabo:

I'm not Szabo but coincidentally we attended the same university and had the same major and graduated within a couple years of each other.

Wei Dai is referring to the University of Washington, where Nick Szabo acknowledges having graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Ah, but Nick has TWO degrees! Perhaps Wei Dai was referring to George Washington University and a Juris Doctor degree? No, I don't think so. Wei Dai seems quite precise with his English usage. "Major" is associated with an undergraduate degree. Juris Doctor is a professional degree, requiring completion of a four-year undergraduate program prior to applying for law school admission. Also, one does not "major" in a field for a graduate degree or professional degree.

Will the conflicts in Syria begin a second Cold War era?

Is Syria the first proxy war of Cold War II?

One of the pre-conditions for the Cold War was the existence of nuclear weapons, and the knowledge of mutually assured destruction if they were used. Another of the pre-conditions for the Cold War was the resolute leadership (and populace) of the opposing post-World War 2 powers, the USSR and the USA.

In other words, the awareness of each other's nuclear capability acted as deterrent to outright hostilities, while each nation's depth of commitment to its political and social ideology meant that withdrawal or capitulation was not an option.

Nuclear weapons remain a potent deterrent, regardless of proliferation magnitude now or prior to 1991. Russia has replaced the USSR as one of the two powers, with greater strength than the USSR in some ways (no longer socialist, religious tolerance), but less in others (authoritarian leadership, loss of Soviet bloc nations in eastern Europe and central Asia). Russia certainly has resolute leadership. A cold war requires two antipodal powers though.

The USA's current presidential leadership under the Obama administration is weaker than that of any president during the Cold War years. Putin is described in many unflattering ways--as a thug and a former KGB agent--but never as effete or lacking initiative. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is intelligent and perceptive. He is a formidable counterpart to our recent secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

The Syrian Civil War and containment of ISIS cannot be a US vs Russia proxy war if US foreign policy is indecisive, slow-moving and undermined by the belief that Russia's need to retain its sphere of influence (even if primarily for purposes of its own domestic security) is "on the wrong side of history" thus should be ignored.

Remember US State Department spokesperson Marie Harf? She said that shaming is half of our two-pronged response to ISIS.

Putin tests the waters. He provided support to the separatists in Crimea in 2014. Next, Russia annexed South Ossetia and Abkhazia in January 2015. Both are regions in Georgia, bordering Russia, see Russia’s Quiet Annexation of South Ossetia.

.
Russia is now flying bombing missions with its own air force over Syria.

Purple region is South Ossetia.

Image source: United Nations.

The fact that Russia is using its own air force is significant! During the Cold War, Warsaw Pact states were guided by Soviet advisors. Direct intervention by Soviet military forces was uncommon and only used in crisis situations such as the 1956 Hungarian revolution. The situation in Syria has already progressed to the point of direct Russian involvement.

We can respond in various ways:

• defuse the situation with explicit support for the legitimate elected leader of Syria, Al-Assad, against ISIS;
• challenge Russia's extraterritorial use of military force through diplomatic channels of communication. Instead, we do nothing.

EDIT as of November 2023

I wrote the above in 2015. I have learned a lot since then! In the comments on my Quora answer, I wrote more, and want to preserve it here.

August 2015

A Populist Coalition: GOP ethnic minority voters support Trump

Why are minorities telling pollsters they support establishment status quo candidates in 2016? This was my answer on Quora.

Minorities are enthusiastic supporters of some very non-establishment candidates.

Donald Trump counts among his supporters more black and Hispanic people than ANY other Republican presidential candidate, see Donald Trump’s Strongest Supporters: A Certain Kind of Democrat via The New York Times and Trump winning over Latino Republicans, poll says via NY Post.

Recent surveys found that Muslim Republicans are supportive of Trump too, more so than all other Republican presidential candidates combined! Not many Muslims support Republicans, but those who do support Trump; CAIR did the study. If you don't like that link from Vox, here's one from Voice of America: Why Some US Muslims Still Plan to Vote for Donald Trump.

Minorities are often silenced in America

The RAND Corporation's 2016 election survey panel is notable for being longitudinal rather than cross-sectional. It shows that one particular non-establishment candidate is more popular among those who feel they have no say in government. This is true for that one candidate, more so than any other,  whether Republican or Democrat. 

See more here, RAND Kicks Off 2016 Presidential Election Panel Survey in the section titled, "Trump's Populist Coalition".

U.S. Presidential Election 2016: "People like me don't have any say..."

If one had a flair for the dramatic, one could say that the RAND Corporation has proven that support for Donald Trump transcends voters' gender, age, race/ethnicity, social status, and attitudes towards the disadvantaged.