Scott Adams's Blog, page 399

Building a House

My wife and I are doing our part to stimulate the economy by building a house. The construction will take about a year, but the planning, design, and approval process took about three.

Financially, it's the worst timing in the world because buying an existing house is getting cheaper every day. But we wanted some specific things in a house that just weren't available, notably my studio.

Arguably, this process started back when I designed what was known as the Dilbert Ultimate House. That home onl

Invitation Only

The idea of keeping immigrants out of your country is starting to seem outdated. In many cases you need them more than they need you. Obviously you can't let people cross borders all willy-nilly, but the immigration policy in the United States seems a hodgepodge. I say this not because I have studied our immigration policy but because I wanted to use willy-nilly and hodgepodge in the same sentence.

A better immigration policy would be to make the U.S. as inviting as possible so everyone wants in

Chimp Cartoon

Did you hear about the racism controversy over this editorial comic in the NY Post?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/19/chimp.cartoon.react/index.html

The cartoonist fell into a trap I call a "remindsmeof." His comic was clearly about Congress, since President Obama didn't "write" the stimulus package. But the comic reminds the reader of racism and the risk of presidential assassination even though the cartoonist clearly wasn't addressing either topic. That was enough to get him into trouble.

In my ea

Will the Internet Doom the Planet?

Democracy requires a healthy news media to keep it in check. A healthy news media requires money to pay its top reporters to go investigate stories. The Internet is sucking money away from TV news organizations and traditional newspapers and news magazines.

Unfortunately the free news distributed on the Internet doesn't make much revenue for any individual company. The ad-supported model is too weak, and growing weaker as the amount of content grows faster than the number of advertisers. So even

Training Humans

I'm learning to train my dog. According to the experts, it all comes down to food. Nothing works as well as food rewards when it comes to getting an animal to do a trick. I assume that's because food is closely associated with survival, so over time you can create an association in the animal's brain between doing a trick and survival itself.

This made me wonder if humans can be similarly trained with food rewards. And it made me wonder if we do it inadvertently all the time. It seems to me that