When I came back from my vacation, my boss had a tremendous amount of work for me to do. The amount of assignments piled over and I had to stay late every night, but still there was no way for me to get them done. I realized that no one had stepped up for me while I was gone, so basically I was doing all the work that I would have done, plus the work for which I was normally responsible.

Then I got my January paycheck. It was only about 75% of what I normally earn in a month. And I realized that my salary is actually 75% salary and 25% built-in bonus, and that they didn’t pay me the bonus for January because I didn’t work enough days. It doesn’t matter that I used vacation days, and even negative vacation days, to “pay” for the vacation. Nor does it matter that I could have just split the vacation into two months, by going at the end of January and beginning of February instead of going all in January.

So I’m now triple-paying for this vacation: in vacation days, of which I won’t have any until I think February or March 2011; in labor, which they’re taking from me not only during the days now but also in the evenings and into the night; and in shekels.

This is how companies in Israel do business. This is the normal – I should be happy I didn’t get back to Israel after my vacation to discover that I’d been replaced. But it also breeds disloyalty. Do they not realize this?

I commented that deflation is a pretty good thing; he replied and I replied back (go read it).

Though this discussion is about deflation, I actually have much stronger views about inflation. I think inflation is absolutely the worst economic policy that can possibly be effected, a million times worse than recession. Recession, see, harms everyone. But inflation is a dagger in the back of the people who hold society upright, the people who work hard for a long time and save their money with prudence and wisdom. I think there is a case to be made that inflation is at the very root of all the ills of modern society.

Why don’t other people see it this way?

Let’s be clear about some terms: deflation is a decrease in the money supply, and it typically leads to decreasing prices (it does not equal decreasing prices). Inflation is an increase in the money supply, and it typically leads to increasing prices (it does not equal increasing prices). Actually, “prices” are just the number of dollars (or whatever currency) it takes to buy any old good or service. So we can express the cost of stuff in terms of dollars or the cost of dollars in terms of stuff: when the supply of one side increases, its value decreases relative to the other side, and when the supply of one decreases, its value increases relative to the other side.

Progressives love inflation because it’s inherently destabilizing. How so? Suppose you’re 25 years old, just starting out in the world after graduating from university and with a lot of debt. If inflation starts eating away at the money supply, your debt can be wiped away soon! So don’t bother paying it off. Instead, spend your money extravagantly on vacations and fancy clothes, and maybe buy a house that you don’t really need (with a huge mortgage, of course). Why not? It’s not like money means anything or has any value. Now suppose you’re 75 years old, worked your entire life, saved money, raised a family, paid off your debts and finally retired to enjoy your old age. If inflation starts eating away at the money supply, your retirement savings can be wiped away soon! But don’t bother complaining, because progressives love the idea that no one will ever be able to retire (except from government careers, with pensions tied to the inflation rate): after all, it was progressives who came up with the idea that one who doesn’t work should not be able to eat. Inflation is how the young generation steals from their elders.

Suppose you’re 25 years old, just starting out in the world after graduating from university and with a lot of debt. And suppose you can’t count on inflation to take care of your debt for you. What do you do? You move in with your parents. You get a job. You become a productive person. You live frugally, saving money and making careful, wise decisions. Progressives hate the thought that this could happen. People who get jobs, become productive, live frugally, save money and make careful, wise decisions are the enemies of progressivism everywhere, because they are independent and they don’t need progressives or government to organize their lives. Now suppose you’re 75 years old, worked your entire life, saved money, raised a family, paid off your debts and finally retired to enjoy your old age. Due to mild deflation, you’re able to stretch your savings out for a long time, which means you won’t need to depend on charity or welfare. Progressives hate the thought that this could happen. People who stretch their savings and don’t depend on charity or welfare are independent and they don’t need progressives or government to organize their lives.

You don’t have to read between the lines to see how deflation is fear in this article about Japanese beef bowl restaurants. Take this sentence:

Japan’s big three beef bowl restaurant chains, the country’s answer to hamburger giants like McDonald’s, are in a price war.

If I were Japanese and I liked beef bowls, I’d be thrilled. But progressives, who are joyless and whose ultimate goal is to suck the joy out of life like marrow from a bone, write things like:

It is a sign, many people say, of the dire state of Japan’s economy that even dirt-cheap beef bowl restaurants must slash their already low prices to keep customers.

The article goes on to criticize restaurants that provide food to people inexpensively. Sure, those businesses are competing to make their supply match consumers’ demand – but it’s, you know, destructive to be too efficient. Instead, they should make agreements with other companies so they can all keep their prices artificially high – because that would really benefit everyone.

Anyway, some prices do fall and no one complains about them: prices for technology. Why is it a problem to progressives when the price of a beef bowl declines but not when the price of a computer declines? Is it because one is due to deflation and one is not? No one ever seems to present any evidence to show that deflation leads to less expensive beef bowls but that less expensive computers are caused by something else. Perhaps that’s because progressives habitually conflate declining prices with deflation.

In fact, prices can fall for any number of reasons. One is improvements in technology: my parents bought my brother and me a Nintendo (NES) for $100 back in 1987. Now they have a Nintendo (Wii) and NES consoles cost about $15 (not adjusted for inflation). Another reason for prices to fall is increases in worker productivity or efficiency. These are much harder to observe in real life, but even a slightly attentive reader will realize that these are the factors driving the falling prices in Japanese beef bowls (in fact, the article even says that the original beef bowl chain became dominant by being extremely efficient). Actually, increasing worker productivity is both a cause and an effect of decreasing prices, which I find pretty cool!

Finally, the increase in value of dollars compared to other goods and services is what makes us value dollars as currency. If the decline in value of dollars continues and gets out of control, no one will want dollars any more. I don’t mean this to scare anyone – I don’t have any particular affinity for dollars over any other currency, except that my main debts and savings/investments are in dollars – but we should keep in mind that our civilization is built from the ground up on value stored in money. If that money loses its value, civilization as we know it will be over.

In a New York Times op/ed, Ruth Bettelheim says that there isn’t a difference:

Studies conducted in the past 20 years have shown that on all meaningful measures of success — social, economic, intellectual and psychological — most adult children from divorced families are no worse off than their peers whose parents remained married.

What goes unreported is the effect of divorce that extends beyond the family splitting up.

Researchers have found two explanations for this. Children who have to cope with their parents’ separation and post-divorce lives often grow resilient, self-reliant, adaptable and independent. And children benefit from escaping the high-conflict environment of a rocky marriage. After their parents’ separation, as conflicts fade, children recover.

And I propose a third explanation: divorce has become so normal, so ordinary and expected, through television and movies, young adult literature and the constant drooling promotion of single motherhood, that practically all children today “experience the kinds of problems that are usually attributed to divorce: low self-esteem, depression, high anxiety, difficulty forming relationships, delinquency and withdrawal from the world.” It’s because the effects are pervasive – not because they’re well-handled – that they’re so difficult to identify.

No, seriously. Why would I want your brochure? A brochure is just a printed version of a website on dead trees, but with less content and way out of date.

• First, and I think this was touched upon briefly in the article, beta males are the big losers of the new sexual order. Suppose six groups of people: alpha men (less than 15% of the male population), defined by their sexual access to as many women as they want; beta men (more than 70% of the male population), who can only have sex by “getting lucky” and then marrying, giving their wives control of how much access they have to sex; and omega men (also less than 15% of the male population), who have no opportunities to have sex at all; 8-9-10 women (few), ranging from very pretty to international supermodel hot; 4-5-6-7 women (many), ranging from plain to fair to good-looking; and 1-2-3 (few) women, ranging from utterly nauseating to just bad-looking. Now suppose that, in the past – say, in my grandparents’ generation – omega men and 1-2-3 women were all left permanently unsatisfied; alpha men and 8-9-10 women were all left permanently satisfied (at least, for the women, as long as they remained attractive); and beta men and 4-5-6-7 women were more or less generally content, with lots of ups and downs in that contentment. What’s happened since my parents’ generation is that alpha men and alpha women remain permanently satisfied, since they’re still able to attract members of the opposite sex easily, with almost no effort or none at all; omega men and 1-2-3 women remain permanently unsatisfied, because they’re still as awful as they ever were; but because of the breakdown in marriage, 4-5-6-7 women have a vastly increased chance at reaching alpha men. These middle women are doing better for themselves, and actually alpha men are doing better for themselves because they have even more options than before, but beta men suffer because their only options are evaporating: it’s very difficult to “get lucky” if the girls don’t mind being used and abused (or pumped and dumped, however you want to call it) by an alpha and don’t see the value in a beta provider, and long term relationships are disintegrating in this environment also. I know I’m not the first or even the hundredth person to write this, but these are the simple facts that drive what’s happening in the article, and I really can’t see why this wasn’t its focus.
• Second, how ethical is it, or is it not ethical at all, for a man to use game strategies and tactics to attract women? Since I first heard of game several years ago, but only heard about it in the past year in a way that got my attention, I know that I was reluctant even to consider something like it for all that time because I didn’t think anything was wrong with my personality or that I should ever consider changing parts of my personality to appeal better to girls, or to appeal to better girls. But in my reintroduction to game in 2009, I saw that it’s a fact that men and women are attracted to different things about each other: men to women who are pretty and young, and women to men who are of high status and pyscho-socially dominant. And I saw that women constantly modify and even lie outright about the things that men want in them. Girls don’t go outside without makeup. You don’t ask a girl about her age. Girls spend tremendous resources in time and money to buy clothes that make them look better. At the extreme, they even invest in plastic surgery – and it is an investment – to misrepresent their value. When I realized these things and just to what extent they’re disturbing, I became quite convinced that it’s not even remotely unethical to use negging, kino, DHV, etc, to attract them. For a while I resisted using pre-fab lines that I read on game websites and blogs, but eventually I gave up on that and now I use them regularly. It’s hard to see anything wrong with it, especially with girls who’ve obviously gone through a lot of trouble to make themselves look good.
• Third, game is out there. It must work to some extent for some guys, because some guys seem to be using it consistently and it seems to be working for them. They have effectively raised the stakes: previously a guy had to be extremely good looking (top 1%), rich, powerful or famous to sleep with multiple hot women. Now plenty of men are getting access to the best women just by knowing what to say and how to act. In any given location, there are the hottest several girls and then there are all the rest. A guy who can’t compete for the best girls because he’s not a rich CEO can hardly be blamed. But a guy who doesn’t want to compete for them and consequently didn’t take the time to read a few Game websites and employ a few tactics is responsible for his own loneliness and misery. In a sense, the popularization of Game is like nuclear proliferation: when one man has it, it’s no worry; when two men have it, it’s still no worry. But if it starts getting out there, you’d better make sure you have it or else you’ll regret it.

Why I love sleeping with older girls: they’re kinky! A girl in her mid 30s has had two decades of positive experiences with other guys who all did and said some wonderful things to her. Every time I do or say something innocently, I’m likely to trigger some memory of someone else and have her get really horny. If some girl gets aroused over something I didn’t even notice, it’s mostly great for her since she’s the one experiencing her happy memories and fulfillment, but it’s also terrific for me, since I’m the guy who’s there and she’ll be happy to do things with me that no 20 year old would do.

Genius: [about to go to lunch] Oh, hey. That one? Well, if you need it fast, I guess I can drop everything else and get it done in about half an hour [optimistically].

Boss: Great! Excellent! Hey, come over here. I want to show you something.

[Boss spends the next 30 minutes reviewing with Genius his projects and tasks instead of letting Genius work on the specific one that needs to be ready immediately.]

[Genius steps outside to refill his glass of water, exasperated that he's been prevented from eating lunch and tricked into promising to finish something ahead of schedule.]

Boss: So, Genius. Are you about done with that document?

I’ve very rarely bothered to ask a girl with how many other guys she’s had sex, and I’ve never asked one before first answering how many other girls I’ve fucked, and that’s because I’ve known intuitively that I could hardly trust any girl’s answer. I’ve seen some advice that the best way to get a girl’s number is simply to double the one she gives you, but I have modified that technique for Israeli girls. Here, then, is how to find out how many guys an Israeli girl has fucked (in five easy steps):

1. Start with zero.
2. Add five for every square inch of her body that’s tattooed.
3. Add one for every time she’s left the country.
4. Add another one for every month she’s spent in the Indian subcontinent or South or Central America.
5. Consider her military service. If she was exempt for religious reasons and she’s actually religious: add zero. If she was exempt for religious reasons and she’s not religious: add 10. If she served in a combat unit or in close proximity to men in combat units: add two per year. If she served in a desk job that required brains: add one per year. If she served as a “mattress,” making coffee for officers or at a desk job that required no brains: add three per year.

It is impossible to say something in America like, “Barack Obama looks white,” even though he obviously does:

Everyone knows that Obama is about 50% genetically African and about 50% genetically European, but everyone is also supposed to pretend that he’s black. In fact, blackness is about more than just skin color. I’d say that to be a black American is to have three things:

1. black skin and typically west African facial features and kinky hair
2. a heritage of ancestors being sold into slavery and being freed sometime before or after the Civil War
3. the experience of being treated differently and of identifying as a member of the black community, as well as accepting as one’s own black culture

By these standards, Barack Obama is only sort of black. Though his skin is relatively dark, he has sharp facial features like an east African and like most Europeans – not a surprise, since his parents were a Kenyan and white American. His hair is typical of someone with one African parent and one European parent. Obama’s ancestors were never slaves in America – his only American ancestors were white and probably owned slaves. To some extent, I’m sure he has encountered anti-black racism. It was his reaction to other people’s reactions to him that made him “black.” But he is only black insofar as the people around him let him define himself that way. If his friends and family had stepped in and told him 15 or 20 years ago that he’s white, not black, or at least that he’s mixed, not black, he would not be the “first black president” today.

Today Barack Obama is America’s “first black president” because white progressives decided several years ago that he was just black enough to be considered black, but just white enough that he wouldn’t come off as too black. Does anyone seriously dispute this? It seems so obvious to me, and in no way does it detract from the very real possibility that his intelligence is extremely high and that he’s an immensely capable man (nb: there’s also a possibility that he’s not all that bright after all or particularly capable except with a lot of help). Harry Reid realized it, and now has to suffer for having once vocalized it. This is, of course, poetic justice, though it doesn’t mean I don’t feel sorry for him.

The amazing thing about this is that Reid gets a pass from luminaries like the Reverend Sharpton and President Obama himself because he’s known to be a progressive. Progressives can, when they intellectualize things, accept and realize that other progressives are racists, but emotionally, in the spirit of “no friends to the right and no enemies to the left,” a progressive will never admit that someone who’s not to his right is a racist, because that would make himself a racist by definition.