Chillin'

Good news: I am officially done at the bakery.

More good news: We are officially landless peasants. Some time this morning, a large sum of cash was deposited electronically into our Michigan checking account. Woohoo! Cha-ching!

Still more good news: All the cafe employees had a meeting with the cafe manager yesterday. There will be a three-day delay in getting the place open, so I have today, tomorrow and Friday to sit on my butt and do nuttin'. So far, it's everything I imagined doing nothing could be.

Even more good news: I finally found out my pay rate at the cafe job; I'll be getting an instant 20% raise. Count in the increase in hours, and my take-home pay should go up almost 70%. Woohoo! Cha-ching!

So today I'm sittin' and chillin' doin' a whole heap 'o nuttin'.

OK; enough of the redneck blogging. On to more serious stuff.

The markets today are just holding their breath so far just wobbling around what they closed at yesterday. European and Asian markets did the same thing. Everyone awaits our messiahs' return to Washington DC to craft the most brilliant legislation that man has ever seen and save us all.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, Kip has some thoughts on the fallacy of intrinsic value and whether or not markets can be "wrong" (short answer: no, they cannot).

With about a month to go before the entire nation (well, 60% of the nation anyway) casts the ballot that will change history, there are a couple studies that you may want to read about. The first one shows that when people are given evidence that their "facts" are wrong, they don't take it in. In fact, there is some evidence that being shown real facts that contradict beliefs actually reinforces the counter-factual beliefs. The second shows that the more stupid you are, the smarter you think you are. The title of the study is "Unskilled and Unaware of It." The assumptions of the study are precious:

• Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
  
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
  
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

Pretty much says it all. Scott Adams had links to these. He said that you can make both of these articles hysterically funny by saying "Doomed!" at the end of each paragraph. It works. At least it cracked me up. YMMV.