In 1950, the hundreds of men on the Ford assembly line were far smarter than all the thousands of brilliant people who had gone before in that industry. The assembly line men were smarter than all the Fords, Edisons and all the thousands who had made small and large improvements to auto design.
If you are not college trained, you won’t understand this. You see, the assembly line produced a 1950 car, whereas none of those thousands of smart people and originators and geniuses could not make a car that was that fast or well-designed.
This was the logic every college student learned. It was called socialism. College professors taught them that the way for third world countries to develop was to bypass all the old-fashioned market stuff and have professors from the London School of Economics and Harvard plan out how they could go from a 1500 AD economy to a 1950 economy without all that waste of time, money and energy growing in a market framework.
The geniuses Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, they were told, could put together a truly efficient and planned production-distribution network as could their successor intellectuals.
We also learned that Orientals are smarter than Westerners. The Japanese jumped from Asian poverty to first-world status in a single generation, just as the assembly line workers could produce a modern car. Professors, Orientals, and assembly line workers were clearly superior creatures.
When Japan reached a Western level, a level already reached by the West, their miraculous brilliance stopped. When 1950 assembly line workers produced a 1950 car, their genius reached its final stage. Socialist economies didn’t even get there.
Orientals were able to reach the white living standard before hitting a brick wall. Black cannot get there, copy as they might. Socialism kept white Eastern Europe to a third world level. So Orientals are better than blacks. Socialism can’t even COPY, so any form of market economy is superior to that, just as Orientals are superior to blacks.
But the IQ obsession teaches that Orientals can copy, and are therefore equal. An assembly line, says the IQ obsession, is smarter than the inventors.
If you have a college degree, you truly cannot imagine that anything is wrong with that logic.
#1 by Dave on 11/05/2007 - 1:36 am
Microsoft made the default file format XML for the Microsoft Office Suite in its new Windows Vista operating system. Few have any clue as to what this means.
But if Microsoft is anything, it is very pragmatically oriented educational institution, aimed encouraging very smart and creative software developers to put their energies into things that make sense.
And if anything makes sense, it makes sense to encourage software developers to learn and enhance the XML application-programming interface. Making XML the default file format for the Microsoft Office Suite encourages this.
XML is revolutionary for it is a platform for expelling all the legal, accounting and auditing and financial clearing pilot fish from our economic system.
The Visa Master Card monopoly will ultimately not survive XML. Neither will the contract lawyers’ bar, the accounting and auditing profession, and a big piece of the finance profession also.
XML will enable business alliances to spontaneously form based upon handshake deals for the sharing of revenues, expenses, and activities concluded and memorialized in the very software code that enacts the clearing and netting of alliance financial obligations. This will be accomplished in a manner that is completely transparent and sound from a fraud prevention and financial accounting perspective while cutting out the rakeoffs from today’s accounting and auditing, financial clearing, and law firm pilot fish.
Visa MasterCard, FedWire, SWIFT, the ACH system, and the Depository Trust Corporation (among others) are going to get some serious competition. A lot of regulators are going to be left with nothing to do.
A whole big swath of administrative, financial, legal, and accounting overhead of enacting business will disappear downward into the technology stack and become completely automated because of XML technology.
The entire nature of business will change because the regulators and today’s financial clearing organizations will be shut out like it or not. The competitive landscape will change from reliance on hard to source technical, accounting, and legal talent to interpretive abilities for the detection of opportunities for adaptive specialization and alliance formation.
The Chinese, Indians, and Japanese cannot even conceive of this emerging landscape. They are still locked into electricity utilities, skyscrapers, freeways, shopping malls, and phone systems with C-level people prancing around with big entourages.
They are perennially behind. They are perennially playing catch-up. They are perennially pretending they are smart while they are actually under-performing.
The darkies, (Mexicans and Blacks), well, they are just lost. Completely lost. The world of today is not accessible to them, let alone the emerging world of tomorrow.
It is just beyond their comprehension. That is all that can be said. Their role can only be kitchen staff, janitors, maids, groundskeepers, and security guards.
#2 by Hardric on 11/05/2007 - 11:54 am
I understand that some people place importance on IQ, but really, do we go around measuring the heights of Zulus and Pygmies because we are not sure they are different?
Do we use a light meter to measure which is brighter, day or night?
Rulers and light meters are far more dependable than IQ as measuring tools. But if you told me that you had conducted extensive studies to determine that Zulus were taller that pygmies and day is brighter than night, I would either smile or shake my head in amazement or both.
Some things, like racial differences, are really quite obvious. They are so simple that even a Harvard Social Scientist is capable of understanding them. That might be a slight exaggeration.
#3 by AFKAN on 11/05/2007 - 4:21 pm
in reply to Dave:
I was talking to two of my bank’s smart tech heads about XML for financial databases, and they said, in so many words, that we haven’t seen anything yet. It is just barely beginning to be used, and, once Upper Management gets with it, a LOT of programmers and systems heads will be encouraged to seek new employment.
We saw the first wave of software commodification with Y2k/the First Internet, an a common means of symbol manipulation changed the world – and took a lot of middle manager jobs with it.
This is one of the sclerotic systemic weaknesses The Goddamn Self-Proclaimed “Greatest Generation” has bestowed upon us – a system of “management” that actually worked against our inherent Creativity, by being modeled on the Armed Forces that was supposedly responsible for supposedly winning World War II.
Most “managers” in such systems are really merely people who store information, carry information, and transform the information (with a few basic operations on the information and some summaries, for example). XML takes all of this and moves it into high speed, where it becomes all too obvious that most “management” are little more than time serving empire builders. Incidentally, real drill-down software is finally available (Hyperion?), and the banks IT guys said Top Management were openly discussing how many people they could get rid of – EXPENSIVE, “middle managers,” such as the Armed Forces are renowned for turning out.
The implications – fewer, smarter people will be able to effectively understand much more, and exhibit greater
control“effectiveness” than ever before.It does mean that the Smart Fraction Theory of National Greatness will be proven, in microcosm, at much smaller organizing levels of society.
On the other hand, many corporations are bigger than many nations; as well, Singapore proves the Smart Fraction Theory, with the proper Cultural Framework, works very well, indeed.
Malaysis is proof.
Lots of auto assembly line workers in Malaysia, while Singapore goes where Malaysia can not imagine…
Anyone think Singapore isn’t based on a Positive Theory of Racism?
Thought not!
#4 by mderpelding on 11/05/2007 - 9:07 pm
Still the best analogy, I think has to do with literacy and the “whole language” approach.
The way I heard it, some bright educationists studied highly literate people and found that these people didn’t need to “sound out” words but recognized them not as collections of individual sounded letters but as a whole word. (well, duh, if you read enough, this should be obvious). So these experts decided to throw out phonetics, as the time honored practice of learning individual letter sounds was called, and adopted the so-called “whole language” approach. Much to the detriment of school children.
You see, in our world, all effects happen through physical causes. Something must be applied to something else.
Our enemies believe that effects can be created by words alone. This is the essence of “wordism”.
So an assembly line can spring into action with an edict.
Grain will grow anywhere and at anytime if it is Soviet grain.
A Mugabe can become a Goethe, you just need enough special educators “talking” at him.
Reality can be changed with words alone.
We invented words to describe the world around us.
Not the reverse.
#5 by Alan B on 11/05/2007 - 9:38 pm
The 1950’s assembly line was was briming with high paid and arrogant UAW workers. Imagine these folks looking down the line and seeing hundreds of their fellow workers brimming with pride, now imagine an engineer doing the same. What the engineer sees is this, hundreds of mechanical robots slaving away, no wages and benefits to pay and no strikes.