Octopodial Chrome

Little-known fact: during Prohibition the US government poisoned alcohol. Roughly 10,000 people died as a result.

Chris Dixon has a great post examining the perverse incentives which reward executives for mismanagement. Well worth the read.

Cracked.com states that babies lie, racially discriminate, defy authority, get high off of masochism, steal and even murder in the womb. I think we should require registration of all babies and institute a mandatory one-week waiting period before procreation…

Roger Clegg offers up an illuminating parable. It starts:

Suppose you are a lifeguard, and you are presented with studies showing that boys are more likely to drown than girls, probably because they engage in riskier behavior. Now, how does this affect the job you do as a lifeguard?

Well, I hope that one thing you do not do is shrug if you see a girl drowning. You also should not try to rescue boys who are not drowning.

In fact, if this datum doesn’t help you spot drowning people, and it probably doesn’t, then it won’t affect the way you do your job as lifeguard at all. You look for people flailing and screaming, and knowing that most of them will be boys is really irrelevant to you.

Would it prompt you to support “Safety First” swim programs for boys only? Well, so long as there is some percentage of girls who would benefit from such programs, it’s not clear why you would want to exclude girls from them. Maybe the “Safety First” videos you show in the programs would be more likely to depict boys doing typically boy-things, but that’s about it.

And, of course, if further studies showed that it’s not so much sex that matters, but some other factor, then you would care even less about gender, and would be even less supportive of a program for boys and boys alone. For example, if there were some way instead to target risk-seekers for the program—thereby excluding cautious boys (and girls), and including risk-seeking girls (and boys)—then you would be all for it.

Read the whole thing—it’s good.