One thing our military-industrial complex does very well is to put movie-worthy names on new weapons systems. Turns out we’re sending a bunch of Phoenix Ghost suicide drones to Ukraine. Hell, even if the weapon doesn’t do much, the name alone should scare the shit out of Ivan. I sure wouldn’t want something like that hovering over my position.

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Found an interesting article in Time about the quiet death of overtime pay. It really struck a chord with me – I remember time and a half, it was a big deal to my Dad back in the day. And the article is right, it has just quietly been legislated out of existence. More evidence that working class families haven’t kept up with financial progress of the top 20% of earners.

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I made the mistake last night of reading a really interesting article about the Dunning-Kruger Effect at about 2am. Because it was interesting, I couldn’t get it out of my head to get back to sleep. I rolled around thinking of different ways to plot the data and illustrate different aspects of their study.

There’s a LOT published about the DK Effect on the Internet, but it boils down to this (from the essay):

From here the way is short to the conclusions made by the authors: unskilled people overestimate their performance, experts underestimate it, and the less skilled people are, the worse they are at estimating their performance.

Since being published, this effect has been called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and it has received a lot of attention, both academic and from the media. Most of the follow-up research supported the initial results, and generalized them to other cases.

Illustration of the DK Effect below:

One of my late-night thoughts is the hypothesis that the DK Effect is somehow related to evolution. All people are not created with the same intellectual capacity, and those with low capacity, if they are self-aware and realize it, will not be happy. They may not mate, they may not live long, they may be depressed and self-destructive. But those with low capacity AND a low self-awareness can go on happily living their lives in the belief that they’re just as capable as anyone else. So they multiply. And now we have a population selected (evolved) to exhibit the DK Effect. Weird, but it explains a lot.

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Final thought for the morning, this is very real. I’m finding that the cost of commuting to and from the office, buying and wearing clothes other than T-shirts and jeans, and eating lunch out fairly often is *expensive*. The commute alone is costing me $150/week and about 8 hours/week that I used to have for leisure. Thankfully, I only have to do this for a couple of months, but if I were 30 years old and looking at another 25-30 years of this, I’d be horrified. This is one more big reason that labor costs are going up, and employee retention rates going down.