Ranting to /dev/null

300,000,000 is a big number

The site definitely has an axe to grind, but it's interesting nonetheless. The link contains images of very large numbers of things, like, for example, the number of aluminum cans used in this country every five seconds (106,000), the number of shipping containers processed through US ports every day (75,000), and the number of Vicodin pills equal to the amount of annual emergency room visits related to prescription abuse (240,000).

All of which goes towards the realization that yes, there are a lot of people in the US. If you named one person a second it'd take you nine and a half years to get through them all. It'd take almost 35 years to do the same for the number of people in China.

I hereby advance the thesis that the vast majority of identifiable social ills that are blamed on such various things as industrialization, technology, etc. can be traced to a single factor: population growth. From the dawn of history until about AD1700 the world never really had more than half a billion people on it for any length of time. Now within 300 years we've got 12 times that many. So 6000-odd years of cultural and civilizational adaptation to social patterns predicated on the scarcity of people have basically been thrown out the window.

No wonder we're a mess.

The de facto flat tax

Lots of noise is made about the pros and cons of a flat tax. Conservatives tend to like it because it has a sheen of simplicity and equitability. Progressives don't like it because they - wrongheadedly, I suggest - believe it will unfairly burden the poor. But both parties seem pretty committed to the idea of a graduated tax structure.

Which turns out to be garbage. Why? Because we already have a flat tax. True, income taxes are graduated, and that rather severely. But total taxes, state, local, and federal, when combined, are almost the same for everyone. The median is 41.8% with a standard deviation of 5.3%. The table included in the article is quite telling. The median overall tax rate for a 25 year old person making $20,000 a year is 42.5%. The median overall tax rate for a 60 year old person making $500,000 is 45%. That's as close to flat as makes no difference.

I always knew Sid Meier was a genius

A few professors at NYU have published a paper describing the linkage between current GDP and population with historical adoption of technology dating back to 1500BC. To no one's surprise, those areas that adopted technology earliest tend to be better off today. The tendency is most pronounced for AD1500, but still obtains at the earliest data point, 1000BC.

Anyone who has played any of the Civilization games (I'm currently stuck on Civ IV) could have told you that.

Noam Chomsky in space

Apropos of my last post, the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica, Dirty Hands, has Gaius Baltar penning a Chomsky-esque diatribe about the stratification of society into class orders. Labor disputes have never made for such good television, let alone science fiction.

Let's see now. In the past season we've covered racism, marriage and fidelity, biological weapons, collaborators, war criminals, military tribunals, and suicide bombing. Now class warfare and the underclasses. This is some damn good TV.

Where has all the value gone?

So there's this email debate up on Slate between Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and Jason Furman, an economist and self-identified progressive, on the subject "Is Wal-Mart Good for the Working Class?". It's at least an interesting read, Ehrenreich's strident insistence on the economically content-free proposition of the "living wage" notwithstanding. Furman points out that the deflationary pressure Wal-Mart has exerted on prices is the functional equivalent of a 6.5% boost in annual income, whereas Ehrenreich gripes that the people who work at Wal-Mart can't afford to shop there (a dubious proposition at best).

But I think they both miss a fundamental question that is hinted at by some of the evidence and studies presented by Furman: where has all the value gone?

Employees are paid in proportion to the value they produce. This isn't a goal or ideal, it just is the case. The market is very good at correcting employers who don't pay their employees enough or pay them too much. By "enough", all I mean is a high enough wage to incentivize working for the employer as opposed to working for someone else or not working at all. If you pay people too much, you go out of business, because the value created by your employees is less than the value you pay them. If you don't pay them enough, someone else will, and you'll still go out of business.

The fact that retail employees tend to get paid in the single-digits/hour is directly related to the fact that they don't actually create all that much value. But I don't think it was always this way. There are many areas of employee-created value that have been shifted elsewhere. Take inventory management. This was, I think, an area in which retail employees used to serve a useful function that has been shifted elsewhere, namely to suppliers. Take product information. This has been shifted to consumers, who are expected to do their own research for the kinds of things you can buy at Wal-Mart. At high-end electronics stores, this is not the case, and as employees at such stores create value by being knowledgeable about their products, they are paid commensurately more. Take hard-sell closing tactics. This is definitely a way in which employees can create value. Car dealerships can function almost entirely on commission as a result. But Wal-Mart makes its money on volume, not margin, so this is not going to work, and consumers really don't want to be hassled about whether or not to buy that thing for $1.93. Furthermore, Wal-Mart generally doesn't use upsell tactics which can pad sales by encouraging add-on, extra purchases. So that's another aspect in which employees no longer create value.

Furman points out that a significant chunk of the productivity increase we've seen in the American economy over the last fifteen-odd years has come from the retail sector. But this doesn't have anything to do with getting more out of employees; it has everything to do with asking them to do a lot less and shifting value-creating activities to where they are accomplished most efficiently: automated processes that function on a macro-scale.

What is left? Pretty much just stocking shelves, as even the checkout process is starting to be eliminated. And stocking shelves takes approximately zero skills. Literally anyone of reasonable health can do this. All you have to do is be warm and ambulatory, and you can stock shelves. Why should Wal-Mart pay anyone $30,000/year for a job for which there is a functionally unlimited supply of labor?

I grew up in Hershey, PA, a town which was founded on the paternalism of its resident tycoon, Milton S. Hershey. In the height of the Depression, he built a 3-4 star hotel on the hill overlooking the town. One day he was at the construction site and saw that the foreman had brought in a new steamshovel to help with excavation. He asked what it was, as such things were just being introduced. The foreman told him that it was the latest in construction equipment and could do the work of 40 men. Hershey immediately had the machine sent away and told the foreman to hire 40 men.

I think the above illustrates exactly the kind of thing that Wal-Mart critics need to happen for their criticisms to be valid. But I stipulate that this involves something that most Wal-Mart critics are loath to countenance: a condescending, paternalistic attitude towards the poor. Class war my ass: the only way for there to be any real amelioration of the plight of the poor is for the rich, out of the goodness of their hearts, to condescend to be inefficient with the way they spend their money. Care for the poor is not something any economic formula can produce. So stop trying to tell me that Wal-Mart is hurting the economy by cutting prices and depressing wages. It's doing the opposite in that it is maximizing the efficiency of the economy by not paying people for things they aren't doing. If we really have any kind of concern for the poor, we must recognize as a first-order assumption that true care for the poor is not an economic concern, it is a theological concern. From here, we can have a discussion as to what our various theologies require of us with respect to the poor. But that is an entirely different kind of discussion and one for another time.

James Cameron needs to stick to sci-fi

His latest... project?... is disproving the resurrection of Christ.

Yep. You read that right.

He claims to have found a 1st century tomb containing the bodies of Jesus and his family, including his wife (Mary Magdelene of course!) and children.

He is holding a press conference on Monday, at which time he will supposedly produce the coffins in question.

Seriously now, James, couldn't ya have stuck to Aliens and Terminator? Those were good movies.

You only kind of own your house

I was surprised by this when I read it this afternoon, but even today, private ownership of land is really only tenancy with use rights. As in feudal England, the sovereign is the ultimate owner of land. The United States has replaced the king as sovereign with the people's government (state government, not federal government) but the underlying framework still obtains. If you die without heirs or a will (are "intestate") the land goes back to the state.

I would guess that this goes a long way towards explaining eminent domain.

I agree, but...

...why is Steve Jobs railing against teachers' unions? I mean, yeah, they're bad, and significantly responsible for the destruction of the American public school system, but... Steve Jobs?

Just missed it: Iron and Wine, 2/10

Sam Beam, aka the guy from Iron and Wine, played a show at Messiah College last week. Messiah College is about 45 minutes from where I grew up and lived last year. This is really annoying, as it's one of the only shows he's going to play in the US this spring. Fortunately, my brother was at the show and made me aware that someone recorded the show and has thrown it up on YouTube.

I absolutely love the song Trapeze Swinger.

Other tracks:
Upward Over the Mountain
Resurrection Fern
Boy With a Coin
Muddy Hymnal
Peace Beneath the City
Naked As We Came
House By the Sea
Free Until They Cut Me Down
The Love Song of the Buzzard
Pagan Angel in a Borrowed Car
Sodom South Georgia
He Lays in the Reigns
Not Afraid to Die

They're all uploaded by the same guy, and his video page also has the clips he uploaded of David Bazan playing the same show.

I love the Internet.

WCF II § 1

There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his won glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him; and withal most just and terrible in his judgments; hating all sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty.

I've been nominated for the deaconate at the church of which I'm now a member, and I'm currently going through officer training. It's on Sunday evenings after the service, and the first section is on the Westminster Standards. Tonight was the first meeting.

We read the above section in tonight's session, and it always makes me want to cry.

I'll eminent your domain

One of the few advantages of state ownership of most property is that heck, if that major stadium is in the way of the new stadium, well, you can just make it go away and no one's gonna say anything.

UNICEF hates kids

Yeah, that's provocative. But they just released a report that purports to be a measure of the overall "child well-being" of top industrial/post-industrial nations. To no one's surprise, the US comes in dead last (21st), with the UK in 2nd to last. Ireland comes in at a measly 9th. The top countries are, in order, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Spain.

So why do I say that UNICEF hates kids? Because the US is the only country on the list whose birth-rate is sufficient for population replacement. Women in the Netherlands have, on average, 1.66 children a piece ([1]), Sweden has the same ([2]), Demark has 1.74 ([3]), Finland comes in with 1.73 ([4]), and Spain has only 1.28 ([5]. The so-called "replacement rate" is 2.1 children per women, one for each of the parents plus a little extra to account for gender ratios etc. Many of these countries, most of them European, are currently in a state of population decline, and the ones that aren't are growing solely by virtue of net immigration. Which isn't good for parked cars.

So basically, UNICEF is telling us that the way to have happy children is not to have them. Frankly, this makes a lot of sense, considering the UN's general positions on vital issues (in every sense of the word "vital"). The UN consistently advocates a death-affirming, post-Christian, Euro-phillic culture that is not consistent with a healthy, growing, vibrant civilization. It is utterly contradictory for an international organization purportedly dedicated to the global well-being of children to encourage people to have fewer children. I mean, sure, there will be fewer unhappy children if there are fewer children, but that's kind of like saying that the solution to prison-overcrowding is to let everyone go.

A plague on them, I say. Only that probably isn't needed. All we have to do is wait, and the lefty types will simply disappear for want of offspring. The meek may inherit the earth, but only if they have enough kids.

"Consumer electronics are a joke"

So says former and now current Gizmodo columnist Joel Johnson. Why? Because they're overpriced, don't work as advertised, and serve pretty much every master but you, the sap who bought it.

I bought a 3rd-gen iPod in Spring of 2004. I'll admit it. I owned it for a bit more than a year, and then it decided it didn't want to play nice with Firewire or Windows. I've no idea why. So I sold it and switched to Archos. Never looked back. The thing does more and costs less. It isn't as cool. It doesn't work with iTMS. But it does everything I want it to do, and nothing that I don't want it to do. And I don't have to use iTunes, which while reasonably cool, is really slow and kind of feature-poor for my purposes. And iPods make you jump through hoops to use the hard drive like... a hard drive.

I bought a laptop last summer to bring with me to law school. One of the best purchases I've made. I didn't buy a VAIO. I didn't buy all that much, actually, just a low-end Dell. And the first thing I did, before even booting up for the first time, was to pop in my OS disk and wipe the drive. Don't want any of those OEM pre-installed craplets. And I've had no problems since I got the thing. It does everything I want it to and nothing that I don't.

I'm not going to get an iPhone, for two reasons. One, it's massively overpriced. No way am I spending $600 on a phone. Second, it's defectivebydesign. My data is my data, and I'm not gonna let anyone else mess with it.

My phone has a built-in camera. I almost never use it. Why? Because Verizon wants to make me pay to get data out of it. This is brain dead.

Say no to broken, crappy consumer electronics. Buy beer instead. I mean, sure, it doesn't last as long, but you get exactly what you're paying for.

Dang, that's fast

I just learned about OpenDNS. I just switched to their DNS servers. I didn't think that it'd be possible to surf any faster than I had been, given that Notre Dame has a T3, but damn, this is fast.

Switch. Now.

Cooler heads

Certainly cooler than mine anyway, have weighed in on the SoulFarce issue. I still refuse to take the project seriously, but the author makes some very good points.

Potential consequences?

So now a Yahoo chief is sounding in favor of Steve Jobs' anti-DRM essay that came out last month. I'm not entirely sure Jobs wasn't being cynical about the address, but as the popularity of the iPod seems to be significantly greater than the popularity of iTMS, he wouldn't stand to lose all that much. It's also debatable how much revenue Apple would actually lose, as rumor has it that iTMS is breaking even at best if not an actual loss-leader.

If the record labels drop DRM, something they are under increasing pressure to do, it occurs to me that we might have a very happy unintended consequence: the movie studios, realizing that consumers don't like DRM and AACS us useless anyway, might do so as well. Which would be good in and of itself. But even that might have another consequence: Microsoft might take all of the patent idiocy out of Vista, leaving us with an actual update to Windows instead of a manifest step backwards.

RIP DRM

It's a really bad day for the entertainment robber-barons. First, there's a Vanity Fair piece on The Pirate Bay, one of the leading torrent sites in the world. They ran into some legal trouble last summer, with a bunch of their servers being confiscated by the Swedish police in what turns out to have been a US-motivated sting operation. Needless to say the Swedes were not happy. Also needless to say, the site was back up, initially in the Netherlands but now mirrored around the world, within 3 days. It was up so fast the prosecutor was giving self-congratulatory interviews and had to be informed by a journalist that, hey, it didn't work.

Second, Ars Technica has a piece about a recent statistical analysis of filesharing data against physical media sales. Turns out there isn't a statistically significant correlation between the two, and the reduction in sales has far more to do with retailers ordering no more stock than they're convinced they're going to actually sell than with piracy. They study also suggests that the reduction in music sales can be linked to the increase in DVD sales. Which makes sense: there's a finite amount of money consumers have to spend on media, and if they're spending more on DVDs they're spending less on music.

Finally, AACS, the DRM methodology used to protect HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs has now been officially broken. Doom9, perhaps the world's premiere cracking forum, has the info. BoingBoing has commentary. Previously, they had reported that the same forum had discovered how to extract the media once you knew the relevant key. Now you can extract the key itself, meaning that any and every next-gen medium is officially pirateable. I expect to see a fully automated process by this summer.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of entertainment executives all cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something wonderful has happened. DRM is dead.

Good news

Let met start by saying that I'll believe it when I see it, but North Korea has just agreed to dismantle its nuclear reactors and turn over its nuclear fuel.

Amazing.

Woohoo!

I have been accepted - subject to the requisite procedural background checks - as a summer intern at the United States Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Pennsylvania. I'll be at the Harrisburg office.

Yes!

Yeah, that's about right

Quiz results from something I got from Scott. Again, I'd quibble with their presentation of the tradition, but I think it's largely accurate as far as mapping influences go. The second place item on my score probably indicates growing up in a broadly evangelical church for 18 years, combined with a reaction to the overly narrow theological statements on the quiz.

You scored as Reformed Evangelical. You are a Reformed Evangelical. You take the Bible very seriously because it is God's Word. You most likely hold to TULIP and are sceptical about the possibilities of universal atonement or resistible grace. The most important thing the Church can do is make sure people hear how they can go to heaven when they die. Reformed Evangelical 82% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 71% Neo orthodox 64% Fundamentalist 54% Roman Catholic 54% Emergent/Postmodern 50% Classical Liberal 46% Charismatic/Pentecostal 14% Modern Liberal 4% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

Incentives

Playing the lottery:
Odds of winning any prize at all in the lottery: 1:68.96.
Odds of winning the jackpot: 1:146,107,962.00.
Cost of a lottery ticket: $1.
Potential payout: $1 - $150,000,000.
Immediate "value" of that lottery ticket: negligible through $1. (Odds of winning times potential payout.)
Value of purchase if you don't win: $0.

Downloading a
Very rough, back-of-the-napkin calculation of odds of getting sued for downloading/distributing any particular copyrighted file: 1:600,000,000.
Cost of downloading: $0 (assuming you're already online).
Potential "payout": most cases settle for $5,000, so -$5,000.
Immediate "value" of downloading: somewhere between a $4 movie rental and a $19 album purchase. (Money saved by not buying a physical copy; iTunes is not a viable option, as it's defective by design.)
Value of "purchase" if you don't get sued: $4-$19.

Now which one does it make more sense to play? Playing the lottery costs money, so you've an overwhelming chance of losing a buck and a fraction of a chance of winning a lot of money. Downloading costs nothing, provides immediate enjoyment, and has an even lower chance of legal troubles leading to a modest payout. No one, copyright holders included, expects any individual consumer to be able to pay the $1,500,000,000 it would take to pay the statutory fines on a reasonably large mp3 collection.

Conclusion: it makes more economic sense to download music than play the lottery. Which explains why more people do the former than the latter.

Responses

Lots of people, both here and elsewhere are criticizing my response to the whole "Equality Ride" issue. Some of these critiques are fair, and I hope I've made it adequately clear that I recognize this. As a practical matter, having the group arrested is probably a bad move.

The more serious accusations have to do with me not being a Christian because I don't demonstrate what some consider to be the canonical expression of Christian love, which I can only interpret as a complaint that I'm not being nice. That much is certainly true. And it is also true that Jesus always responded in love. No debate there. But why is it that those who criticize others for lack of compassion always seem to think that compassion is always the same? And why does this conception of compassion always seem to involve passivity bordering on the spineless? Sometimes Christ responded by healing the ear of a high priest's servant. Sometimes he made a whip out of cords. The duty of love doesn't always look nice.

Calls to compassion are always necessary, but I can tell an empty rhetorical flourish when I see one, and simply saying that Christ always acts with kindness is nothing more than that. I'm not saying (anymore) that confrontation is necessary or wise in this case. It's probably better off being avoided. But I'm not going to give credit for making a serious theological argument when none is made.

My question is this: exactly how is it compassionate to provide the comfort and care of the church to people who openly defy its ministry and seek to subvert its principles? Lest we forget here, we are talking about a group that advocates a position on sexual ethics that no good-faith reading of Scripture can produce, and that has been roundly condemned by every serious branch of the Christian church for 2000 years, not to mention our predecessors in Israel. We are talking about the advocation of a moral evil. Why does welcoming these people with open arms not constitute aiding and abetting that evil? What's compassionate about that? Wouldn't it be far more compassionate to make it unambiguously clear that what these people represent is a critical danger to their souls by refusing them the fellowship that is a benefit of inclusion in the body of Christ lest we coddle their souls into hell? This does seem to be what Paul requires in Corinthians.

At this point I am no longer advocating any particular course of conduct with respect to the "Equality Ride". I think the tour as such is juvenile and have little doubt that the noise they make about dialog and discussion is made completely in bad-faith. If they were acting in good-faith, they would not assert their intent to trespass and would be willing to engage the administration in seeking to create some kind of dialog. People who are truly not interested in violence do not do violence by violating property rights in a bald-faced dare to get the authorities involved. They are basically banking on the fact that it would cost the college more to defend its rights than it would to take the hit. This, to me, is the purest example of bad-faith that it is possible to conceive.

But I am really mystified at the idea that so many members of the Covenant College community, current students, alumni, and various other hangers-on, think that the position being advocated by this group is one that should be taken seriously. I say again, from a moral perspective what they're asking for is essentially the legitimization of extra-marital sex, something which any even cursory reading of the Bible must lead one to conclude is proscribed. Practical and tactical considerations aside, why should we listen to these people at all?

Totally unrelated

So the residents of the "B" apartments in the graduate housing get a mass email asking us to keep our kitchen faucets running. See, the water line runs up the outside wall, and as it's colder than Satan's butt around here, the water needs to keep running to prevent the pipes from bursting. So we've had the water running.

What do you think happens this afternoon? My roommate and I get an email saying that the apartment below has reported a water leak. But we've had the water running! What happened? The drain pipe froze and burst because of the water we were running through it.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Analogies

The reaction to this whole "Equality Ride" thing is really mystifying to me. I mean, we're talking about a group that wants to change the church's opinions on sexual ethics by targeting Christian colleges with a juvenile PR stunt.

Let's say a group supporting the wonders of pre-marital sex wanted to do the same thing, and framed their discussion in terms of "discussion," "dialog," and "compassion." And they said they'd be on campus whether Covenant permitted them to or not. What about a group calling for church recognition of the validity of divorce? I mean, heck, these are both commonly recognized familial decisions in today's culture, why shouldn't we give them a "fair hearing" as well? What if the group was an abortion rights group? Do we let them trespass with impunity?

Hell, what if they were a group of traveling salesmen wanting to sell male hygiene products? Do they get a free pass? How about Scientologists? I mean, seriously, they just want to have an open, honest discussion with the student body. Why not?

Thing is, if we don't take a stand on this trespassing group, there is no logical reason not to let any of these other groups on campus too. Don't be fooled by their rhetoric.

Trespass

In a bald-faced and shameless attempt at channeling the civil rights activists of the 1960s, a gay-rights activism group that describes itself as "Soulforce" (Soul-farce anyone?) is putting on another "Equality Ride". Yes, this is a deliberate homage to the "Freedom Ride" voter-registration drive in Alabama in 1961. No, the two don't have anything to do with each other. Yes, the group is deliberately targeting conservative Christian colleges in an attempt to make them look bad. Yes, this amounts to little more than a publicity stunt.

And, yes, Covenant would be entirely within its rights to have any member of this stunt who shows their face on campus in any official capacity arrested. Though First Amendment issues frequently permit all kinds of offensive behavior, property rights are still pretty absolute. Trespass is a serious tort, Covenant is a private institution not open to the public, and prosecution of this trespass is clearly doable. I, for one, really hope they do get arrested. It'd put a huge kink in the rest of their "tour" if they had to get bailed out. This would probably make members of the group quite happy, as they, like most counter-cultural types, seem to make no distinction between dissent and deviance, and would probably consider getting arrested as proof of their righteous cause. True, Covenant would probably take a substantial PR hit in the secular media, but it would probably earn a lot of points with people who might actually consider going to Covenant.

Dr. Neilson, this is a personal request: if the bus shows up in front of Carter, call the cops.

I don't actually give a damn what they choose to do with their sexuality. But I refuse to countenance two things: 1) juvenile publicity stunts intended to vilify the church or its agencies; 2) insistence that the church radically alter its theological positions for political reasons.

I won't link to their site, cause they don't deserve the traffic.

Actually, the bus will be showing up at Notre Dame at month before they do at Covenant. This actually doesn't bother me much, because it means that I won't have to go out of my way to spit on them. I shall begin treating them with respect as soon as they start acting in ways worthy of it.

Disadvantages

See, I got my gmail account relatively early. Early enough that I was able to get my actual name as a username without any numbers or random characters or anything. Which is great, because the resulting address is simple, and professional enough to use for things for which professionalism is a plus.

The downside is that I tend to get random, misdirected email for other "Ryan Davidsons". Like tonight I got one from a realtor who congratulated me on my wife's pregnancy and commented on how happy my mom must be to finally have a grandchild on the way.

This, of course, is all news to me. So to the Ryan Davidson married to "Andrea", your realtor says hello.

Huh boy.

How 'bout them Colts?

I just want to say that the Colts winning tonight brought just enough warmth to my frozen extremities to make this ungodly cold bearable.

Unacceptable, I say. Unacceptable.

They just canceled the blizzard for tonight, but somehow this provides little encouragement, as it is now 4° outside. The high tomorrow is expected to be 4°. The high on Monday is expected to be 3°. Wind chill temperatures are expected to reach -20° tonight and -30° tomorrow.

This is no good.

More on food

Slate has a response to the NYT Mag article I linked a few days ago. He disagrees with many of the basic premises, and asserts that modern science is entirely capable of dealing with nutrition as it is currently doing.

I'm not so optimistic, and largely because of the sciences he lists as counterexamples: climatology and psychology. Both are largely still magic, as far as I'm concerned, especially the latter. I'm not convinced that we're capable of much climate studies beyond the "Yep. It's getting warmer." kind of pronouncement. As far as the latter... it's crap. Psychology is not science the same way that physics is. I've discussed this elsewhere, and don't feel like defending the thesis here, but the level of scientific rigor is simply not there.

Though I do concede that the article in question probably does overstate its position, I still think the basic idea is sound and the Slate criticism is ill-founded.