One Setback from Being a Bond Villain

You may recall that roughly a month ago, Tesla was kicked off the NTSB investigation of its fatal "autopilot" crash for issuing self serving pres releases, which the NTSB frowns upon.

Well, it can now be revealed that when the NTSB called Elon Musk, he hung up on them.

I am a firm believer that a leader needs to be receptive to criticism and differences of opinion.

William Durant, founder of General Motors, famously would defer major decisions if there was no opposition, on the theory that the lack of dissent meant that there had not been enough consideration of the downside.

Elon Musk clearly has some problems:

On April 11, Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, called Tesla CEO Elon Musk to tell him that the federal agency was taking the unusual step of removing the company from its investigation into a fatal March 2018 Tesla X crash in California.

Now, as Bloomberg reports, Sumwalt says that Musk abruptly ended the call, according to remarks that the safety official gave before the Society of Air Safety Investigators' Mid-Atlantic Regional Chapter dinner on Thursday.

"Best I remember, he hung up on us," Sumwalt said.

In a short email sent to Ars, Christopher T. O'Neil, the NTSB's chief of media relations, confirmed Bloomberg's description of the call.

"The account of the Chairman's remarks is accurate," O'Neil wrote.

………

On April 12, the NTSB formally removed Tesla as a party to the investigation into the crash.

"The NTSB took this action because Tesla violated the party agreement by releasing investigative information before it was vetted and confirmed by the NTSB," the agency wrote. "Such releases of incomplete information often lead to speculation and incorrect assumptions about the probable cause of a crash, which does a disservice to the investigative process and the traveling public."

For its part, Tesla said, in fact, that it withdrew before being booted out of the investigation.

A spokesperson even said that the NTSB was "more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety."

No Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die

I am not explicitly stating that Elon Musk has a screw loose, but I am saying that we should be very concerned if he buys a white Persian cat.

Adventures in the Annals of Quackery

In the annals of quack medicine, there is patent medicine, there is quackery, and then there is treating someone with the saliva of a rabid dog:

“Hair of the dog” remedies may do the trick for some hangover sufferers. But health experts say that a Canadian homeopath took the idea too far—way, way too far.

Homeopath and naturopath Anke Zimmermann used diluted saliva from a rabid dog to “treat” a four-year-old boy, according to a blog post she published earlier this year. Zimmermann claims that the potentially infectious and deadly concoction successfully resolved the boy’s aggressive behavior, which she described as a “slightly rabid-dog state.”

The tale fits with the scientifically implausible principles of homeopathy. These roughly state that substances that produce similar symptoms of a particular ailment can cure said ailment (“like cures like”) and that diluting a substance increases its potency (“law of infinitesimals”).

Health experts say Zimmermann’s claims aren’t just farfetched, but, rather, they’re barking mad.

………

Zimmermann quickly sniffed out the source of the problem: when Jonah was younger, a dog bit him. That is, Jonah’s mother said that one time a dog accidentally “broke the skin slightly” on Jonah’s hand while it was reaching to get food Jonah was holding.

Zimmermann pounced on the tidbit, claiming:

A bite from an animal, with or without rabies vaccination, has the potential to imprint an altered state in the person who was bitten, in some ways similar to a rabies infection. This can include over-excitability, difficulties sleeping, aggression, and various fears, especially of dogs or wolves. This child presented a perfect picture of this type of rabies state. Most homeopaths would have easily recognized the remedy required in this case.

The “remedy” to this “state” was clearly the saliva of a rabid dog, Zimmermann concluded. Months later, the mother reported that Jonah’s issues had improved—although they had not resolved entirely.

You can read the whole article for innumerable dog puns, but this is truly horrifying, and Zimmerman needs to be locked up to protect the rest of society.

Best Science Headline Ever

How Many Times to They Pass the Ball?

Cosmic Gorilla Effect Could Blind Detection of Aliens

It's also a good discussion of inattentional blindness, with a focus on how this might be interfering with the search for extraterrestrial life. (SETI).

Good read.

Quote of the Day

It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

—Adam Curtis on the fact that journalism on intelligence has been getting it wrong for decades.

This is undoubtedly true.

Whether Allen Dulles or Lavrentiy Beria, what has characterized the the minds of spies is their perverse view of the world.

Snark of the Day Conundrum

Surprised the @washingtonpost didn't illo this with the word JUDENREIN shaved into pubic hair. https://t.co/pK4pK4siAR

— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) April 2, 2018

It being a slow news day, the Washington Post posted an article from Carey Purcell, who is miffed that the two Jewish men she dated refused to recognize her in all her WASPy glory.

In the last line, she refers to  creating a cocktail called, "A Jewish Man’s Rebellion, which has a bourbon base and a bacon garnish.

Well, there were two responses that were noteworthy, one a tweet from Spencer Ackerman that is the might be even more epic than his comment at an editorial meeting of the New Republic, where he offered to, "Skullf%$# the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides."

It is a work of beauty and elegance under Twitter's 140 280 character limit.

On the other hand, the Forward goes for the long form, "How Come Jewish Men Keep Breaking Up With Me?, which (obviously) goes into more detail (4347 characters), and makes what I assume to be devastating allusions to the TV show Sex and the City.

I assume that Twitter is rather a rather unaccommodating climate for Ms. Purcell right now, but please remember to take the time to heap opprobrium on the editor who selected this for publication as well.

Remember the tools for such things are irony, sarcasm, and mockery, not obscene epithets or threats of violence.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel, don't f%$# it up and make them martyrs.

Oh, You Delicate Snowflakes....

This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked. Monstrous! pic.twitter.com/MeYLTy1pqb

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 17, 2018

It appears that comedian Jim Carrey has taken up political cartoons as a hobby, and his latest, which is clearly of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has resulted in Talibaptist Republicans and Fox News completely losing their sh%$.

Seriously Republicans, if you can't stand up to Ace Ventura, Pet Dick, how can you stand up to ISIS?

I'm not a fan of Carrey's artistic stylings, but this butt hurt is really just pathetic.

Today, I Wrote the Quote of the Day

At the Stellar Parthenon BBS, we are having a discussion about 2020, and there was a difference of opinion.

Basically, it came down to a bunch of us saying that the Democratic Party is f%$#ed up, and before the Presidential campaign begins in earnest, we need to correct the fundamentally dysfunctional structure and culture of the party before going there.

On the other side was one guy, who was shouting for all the "Bernie Bros" to shut up.

It went around and around, and finally said that his position was about:

Who would be the best general for the Polish cavalry, when they are still charging Panzers on horse back, is like the bite of a dog into a stone; it is a stupidity.

That whole dog/bone thing was actually from Friedrich Nietzsche, but the analogy was mine.

I know, it ain't deathless prose, but it's as close as I'll ever get.

North Korea is Desperate

No, I don't mean that the sanctions are causing real problems. Nor do I mean that military posturing by the US has them terrified. What I mean is that Donald Trump is simply too weird for them to understand, so they are trying to hire Republican political consultants to explain what the f%$# is going on.

“Their number-one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out,” said one person with direct knowledge of North Korea’s approach of experts on Asia with Republican connections.

You and me both can't figure Trump out.

 I think that the DPRK should consider hiring Paul Manafort, seeing as how he's a Republican political consultant, and he's not got a lot of clients right now.

9/11 Thoughts

It's the 16^th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

My only deep thought involves citing a work of science fiction.

I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read Eric Frank Russell's magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an overreaction by the authorities:

"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.

"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face."

"It nearly happened to me once."

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap."

………

"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."

The country has changed, and none of these changes to our benefit, and none of them were really required, but rather the product of mindless over-reaction.

We are those drivers in that doomed car.

In terms of my personal recollections:

• My first thought when someone said that a plane had hit the WTC, was, "What took so long?", because I had always seen private planes and helos flying low around the area, and I assumed that it was a private plane accident.
• When I realized that it was something big, I wondered if this was done by Chileans, since 9/11 is the anniversary of Pinochet's CIA sponsored coup against Allende.
• I wondered whether it was another Reichstag fire.

Interestingly enough the memory that sticks with me is the most trivial:  When I was driving home that afternoon, the roads were empty.

When I passed the I-695/I-83 interchange I marveled how little traffic there was and how easy my commute was.

Normally, I would have at least a 5 minute slowdown, but there was NO ONE on the road that day.

Memory is weird.

Damn! I was Hoping for a Trial in Open Court

The lawsuit agaisnt the CIA's torture psychologists has been settled, so the rest of us won't find out what they did:

A settlement in a lawsuit against two psychologists who were paid tens of millions of dollars to design torture techniques used by the CIA in black-site prisons was announced on Thursday. The terms of the settlement were undisclosed.

Two of the plaintiffs in the case, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ben Soud, were held and brutalized in 2003 in a secret CIA facility in Afghanistan that prisoners called “The Darkness”. Salim, who is Tanzanian, and Ben Soud, who is Libyan, were eventually released and are now living in their home countries with their families.

A third plaintiff is a young Afghan computer engineer whose uncle, Gul Rahman, was tortured to death in November 2002 in the same facility.

The three filed the lawsuit in October 2015 against James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, contract psychologists who devised a menu of abusive interrogation methods and billed the CIA between $75m and $81m. The plaintiffs sought damages from the men for allegedly aiding and abetting torture, non-consensual human experimentation and war crimes.

You may recall that these were the guys whose lawyers inaccurately claimed that the maker of Zyklon-B weren't held liable for their aiding genocide.

I'm not happy.  Their misdeed should have been revealed to the world.

Honestly, they should be spending the rest of their lives in jail.

One of the Rules of Whacked Out Conspiracy Theorists

No matter where they start, all end up blaming the Jews, case in point, Russia conspiracy nutjob Louise Mensch:

You can say a lot of things about Louise Mensch, everyone’s favorite conspiracy theorist and unhinged internet troll, but you can’t accuse her of not knowing how to spin a good yarn. The author of novels like Venus Envy and A Kept Woman—the titles give you a pretty good idea of what’s inside—is a natural storyteller, a gift she’s been using lately on Twitter to convince her hundreds of thousands of followers that she is, as my friend Jamie Kirchick wrote, “perpetually on the cusp of exposing a massive conspiracy on the part of Russia, dating back decades, to make Donald Trump president of the United States.” Yesterday, Mensch introduced an unexpected plot twist to her Twitter potboiler: America wasn’t hacked by the Russians alone; the Jews helped.

One Jew in particular: Bibi Netanyahu, dark lord and, apparently, apprentice to puppet-master Putin.

Because the pleasure of indulging in lunacy lies in the minute details, here goes. The saga began last night, when Mike Cernovich, himself a fan of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, tweeted to protest the firing of Derek Harvey, a National Security Council official sacked by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, suggesting that Harvey was let go because of his allegiance to Israel. Another Twitter user responded and accused Cernovich of being an agent of a Russian-sponsored coup d’etat. It was precisely the kind of language that summoned Mensch into the fray.

“Love you sir” she tweeted back, with all the subtlety of an oversexed British boarding school adolescent. And then, having warmed up to her subject, she continued: Obama, she tweeted, was right to despise Netanyahu. Oh, and Netanyahu was colluding with Russia to help Trump take an ax to the beating heart of American democracy.

………

What is Netanyahu, then? And where’s the proof of his subterfuge? What’s up with the RISSAD, which used to be called the Mossad but which Mensch has renamed Russian Israeli Trolls Loyal to Moscow Over Jerusalem, suggesting Israeli intelligence, too, is in Putin’s pocket? And why rehash, as Mensch did this morning, the ridiculous canard that Chabad is secretly a vessel for connecting the Kremlin and the Knesset?

Anyone who had two brain cells to rub together knew that Mensch was an addled conspiracy theorist, but because it fit a narrative, she got an OP/ED in the New York Times.

Even if Russia did everything that they have been accused of in exactly the manner accused, and the evidence is at best sparse, it is neither unusual nor unprecedented behavior.

US interventions in foreign elections, including Yeltsin's 1996 reelection in Russia was far more extensive, including tacit support of vote fraud, as was Winston Churchill's intervention by his intelligence agencies in the 1940 US Presidential election.

As I've said before, Donald Trump's election was a perfect storm of many factors, but the entire, "A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin," crap serves only to gloss over the very real institutional failures of the Democratic Party, and as such continues to set it up for electoral debacles.

Worst Defense Attorney Lawyers Ever

Today in complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy, counsel for the psychologists designed the CIA torture program are attempting to defend themselves against a civil suit by comparing themselves to the manufacturer of Zyklon-B, whose product was used in Nazi death camps:

As the recently departed White House press secretary demonstrated earlier this year, making comparisons to the Nazi regime’s murderous use of poison gas is rarely a good idea. That’s one reason it was so surprising that ahead of a crucial court hearing this week, defense lawyers for the two psychologists behind the CIA’s torture program compared their clients to the contractors who supplied the Nazis with Zyklon B, the poison gas used at Auschwitz and other concentration camps to murder millions of Jews and other prisoners in the Holocaust.

Psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen were the architects of the CIA’s torture program. Now, in a groundbreaking lawsuit, three survivors and victims of the torture program are seeking to hold Mitchell and Jessen accountable.

This Friday in federal court in Spokane, Washington, Mitchell and Jessen’s lawyers will argue that they can’t be held responsible for their actions. In an extraordinary legal filing, Mitchell and Jessen claim they aren’t legally responsible to the people hurt by their methods because they “simply did business with the CIA pursuant to their contracts.”

A key part of Mitchell and Jessen’s argument hinges on the claim that poison gas manufacturers weren’t held responsible by a British military tribunal for providing the Nazis with the gas because the Nazi government, not contractors, had final say on whether to use it. They argue that they are like a corporate gassing technician who was charged with and acquitted of assisting the Nazis because “even if [Mitchell and Jessen] played an integral part of the supply and use of” torture methods, they had no “influence” over the CIA’s decision to use them and can’t be accountable.

In fact, the Nuremberg tribunals that judged the Nazis and their enablers after World War II established the opposite rule: Private contractors are accountable when they choose to provide unlawful means for and profit from war crimes. In the same case that Mitchell and Jessen cite, the military tribunal found the owner of a chemical company that sold Zyklon B to the Nazis guilty — even though only the Nazis had final say on which prisoners would be gassed.

The military tribunal made clear that “knowingly to supply a commodity to a branch of the State which was using that commodity for the mass extermination of Allied civilian nationals was a war crime, and that the people who did it were war criminals for putting the means to commit the crime into the hands of those who actually carried it out.”

There is a saying among lawyers, "When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the law is on your side, pound the law. When neither is on you side, pound the table."

These sadistic psychologists are pounding the table here.

Everyone Hates Ted Cruz

Including the normally passively and hopelessly divided Federal Election Commission, which just cited Cruz for campaign finance violations:

This has not been a good week for Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. First he is the butt of a cutting joke by Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota (who told “USA Today” that “I like Ted Cruz probably more than my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz”), and now the Federal Election Commission has ruled against him — unanimously, no less.

The three Republican FEC members joined the two Democrats to find that Cruz failed to properly account for loans he had received from two banks, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, during the 2012 election, according to a report by Bloomberg. Cruz borrowed $1.1 million worth of loans from the banks during his Senate campaign in Texas, with the FEC determining that Cruz had loaned his campaign $800,000 from Goldman Sachs (where his wife Heidi works) and $264,000 from Citigroup.

The reason that this happened is that literally EVERYONE hates Cruz with a whit hot burning passion, so the FEC saw a chance to throw some shade his way, and took it.

As Al Franken noted in an interview with NPR, "You have to understand that I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz." 

Make it Stop!!!

Hillary Clinton will be launching a political organization shortly.

Can you say 2020?

Once again I feel compelled to murder the genius of Dr. Seuss for political commentary.  (After the break)

"Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
The time has come.
The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go.
Go.
Go!
I don't care how.
You can go by foot.
You can go by cow.
Hillary Rodham Clinton will you please go now!
You can go on skates.
You can go on skis.
You can go in a hat.
But
Please go.
Please!
I don't care.
You can go
By bike.
You can go
On a Zike-Bike
If you like.
If you like
You can go
In an old blue shoe.
Just go, go, GO!
Please do, do, do, DO!
Hillary Rodham Clinton
I don't care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
You can go on stilts.
You can go by fish.
You can go in a Crunk-Car
If you wish.
If you wish
You may go
By lion's tale.
Or stamp yourself
And go by mail.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Don't you know
The time has come
To go, go, GO!
Get on your way!
Please Hillary C.!
You might like going in a Zumble-Zay.
You can go by balloon . . .
Or broomstick.
Or
You can go by camel
In a bureau drawer.
You can go by bumble-boat
. . . or jet.
I don't care how you go.
Just get!
Hillary Rodham Clinton!
I don't care how.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Will you please
GO NOW!
I said
GO
And
GO
I meant . . .
The time had come
So . . .
Hillary WENT."

I F%$#ing Hate Tom Brady

I did not watch the Super Bowl, I was in bed, dealing with a nasty cold, and I really did not care who won the game.

I don't have a problem with his looks, or his wealth, or his celebrity.

I hate him because he can make Sharon,^* a Patriots fan since before the Drew Bledsoe era, scream loudly in ecstasy.

That is MY job, dammit!

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Getting it Wrong

Sir Martin Sorrell suggests that the problem with business today is that companies are too timid about taking the long view, so they spend most of their profits on things like stock buybacks, as opposed to investing in capital improvements or R&D.

While this is a nice theory, and the modern publicly held corporation does have an unrealistically short time horizon, this is not about timidity.

This is about managers looting the companies futures for their own personal benefit.

You see, much of the modern manager's remuneration these days is in stock options, and if the stock price goes up, they make 7, 8, and 9 figure paydays, while if the stock does not appreciate, they get nothing, so they, as basic capitalism predicts, manage the firm for their own private benefit by mortgaging the future.

This is not timidity, this is honest services fraud, or at least it was until the Supreme Court found 18 U.S.C.§1346 to be unconstitutional except in the case of a bribe or a kickback. (I actually agree with the decision, the law was too vague and prone to abuse.)

I'd like to go back to the pre-Reagan regulations, which defined most stock buybacks as illegal stock manipulation.

Understanding Ammosexual Deviancy

A new study has shown that ½ of all guns in America are owned by just 3% of the population.

Let's run the math: (rounding a bit) There are about 320 million people in America. There are something north of 300 million guns in America.

3% of 320 million people is 9.6 million people.

½ of 300 million guns is 150 million guns.

That means that each of the serious gun fondlers has an average of 15⅝ guns per member of the ammosexual community.

Actually, I rounded.  The article is a bit more dire:

More specifically, the survey showed that the 3 percent owned 133 million guns. Each of these 7.7 million “super-owners” possess between 8 and 140 firearms for an average of 17 guns per person. For some context, most of America’s estimated 55 million gun owners own, on average, three guns and nearly half have one or two, according to the survey.

17 guns per person isn't just someone who has a lot of guns, this is a deranged nut with a firearms fetish.

Admittedly, Just One Report, But If True, Nice Was Not Terrorism

There is a report that  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the alleged perpetrator of an attack in Nice that has killed over 80 people,  may have been depressed because his wife left him.

If this is true, it means that this guy was not ISIS or al Qaeda, but a spree killer driven over the edge by family problems,

That would make him culturally American:

A terrorist who used a hired lorry to kill at least 84 people in a rampage during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice has been named as a convicted criminal well known to the police for armed attacks.

Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel - described as a "weird loner" who "became depressed" when his wife left him - was a French passport holder who lived in the Riviera city and was regularly in trouble with the law.

The 31-year-old delivery driver's wife is this afternoon in police custody as officers question her about his alleged Islamist links. Bouhlel was reportedly not on a terrorist watch list and investigators are seeking to establish his motives - and are also looking for possible accomplices.

………

Neighbours described him as a "very weird loner" and father of three who had recently become estranged from his wife and had become depressed following the breakdown of his marriage.

Seriously, if these reports are accurate, he sounds a lot like the majority of the white mass shooters in the United States.

This is the Least Surprising News in ……… Ever

One of the theories in modern economics is that people will engage in behavior that will provide them with a perceived benefit.

This is literally Economics 101. (Really. It's in the text books.)

It's called Rational Choice Theory, and it is a bedrock of Neoliberal (free market mousketeer) economics.

One of the blind spots amongst the followers of Rational Choice Theory is that whenever excessive executive compensation or control fraud is brought up, they suggest that managers operate in the best interests of the shareholders, and further argue that their bloated remuneration is what leads them to take this course.

Of course this has never happened in the history of ……… ever:

It won't surprise any market-watcher to learn that in the run-up to earnings season, companies tend to lower the bar for top and bottom line performance, thereby giving themselves better odds of exceeding analysts' expectations.

However, a new working paper suggests that the sins of omission that occur during the corporate "cheating" season, as it was dubbed by Societe Generale Global Head of Quantitative Strategy Andrew Lapthorne, are far more insidious.

Authors Kenneth Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik, and Ronnie Sadka conclude that managers mislead analysts and shareholders during earnings reports, and that their penchant for massaging expectations downwards may be employed in order to open up a window to buy their stock on the cheap in the near future.

It's not just about buying stocks, its about manipulating the price of stock options.

The researchers developed two hypotheses: either managers make disclosures in a timely matter (and their forward-looking information is quickly reflected in stock prices) or members of the C-Suite actively "lean against the wind" to understate good or bad news — or even offer the completely wrong impression of what's transpired since the last quarter ended.

Their findings suggest that guidance (or "bundled forecasts") provided by managers as well as the general tone of the conference call (analyzed using a "bag of words" approach) "point toward rejection of Timely Disclosure in favor of the Leaning Against the Wind alternative."

"Leaning against the wind," huh?

I would call it lying, and some would call it fraud, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!<sup>*

*</sup>I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

The Poor Do Have Self Control

One of the myths about the poor is that they cannot defer gratification for greater future benefits.

Well, scientists have found a way to objectively test for the ability to handle stress, it involves "Vagal Tone", activity of the Vagus nerve, which is an indicator of how well people handle stress.

What they discovered is that poor children who are best able to think things through the take the immediate reward, while rich kids will delay gratification.

It turns out that poor children use a different calculus:  Having never experienced the stability of their more fortunate cohorts, they go for the the immediate payoff, because experience has shown them that the any plans for the future will make their plans moot:

In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, invited several hundred children to participate in a game in which they were given a choice: They could eat one sweet right away, or wait and have two a little later. Initially, the goal was simple: to see how and why people (kids in this case) delayed gratification. But after the end of the experiment, Mischel began to check in with as many of the participants' families as he could, and over the following decade he learned that his little experiment probably had much larger implications than he had anticipated.

Many of the children had trouble resisting the single, immediate treat (a marshmallow), which was to be expected. The magnetic force that exists between kids and candies is no secret. What was surprising, however, was that that tendency — the inability to forego something good right now in exchange for something better in a bit — was associated with all sorts of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of academic achievement and higher rates of obesity.

………

The realization has sparked concerns that poverty begets a certain level of impulsiveness, and that that tendency to act in the moment, on a whim, without fully considering the consequences, makes it all the more difficult for poor children to succeed. But there's an important thing this discussion seems to miss. Poor kids may simply not want to delay gratification. Put another way, their decisions may not reflect the sort of impulsive nature we tend to attribute them to.

"When resources are low and scarce, the rational decision is to take the immediate benefit and to discount the future gain," said Melissa Sturge-Apple, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies child development. "When children are faced with economic uncertainty, impoverished conditions, not knowing when the next meal is, etc. — they may be better off if they take what is in front of them."

A recent two-part study conducted by Sturge-Apple shows how the tendency of poorer children to pounce on immediate rewards might not be the result of impulsiveness but rather of careful consideration.

In the first experiment, she monitored the heart rate of 200 low-income 2-year-olds. The monitoring allowed her to approximate each child's vagal tone — a measure of the activity of the vagus nerve, which has been shown to indicate how well a given individual performs under stress (i.e., reads social cues, reacts to environmental contexts, and adjusts behaviors). High vagal tone is good: it suggests a heightened ability to act relatively calmly under stress. Low vagal tone is bad: it suggests just the opposite.

Two years later, at the age of 4, the same children were presented with a choice. Each was sat a table where two plates and a bell were placed. One plate held two M&Ms, while the other held five. The children were told that they could either ring the bell and have the two M&Ms immediately or enjoy the plate of five as soon as the experimenter returned.

Interestingly, each child's vagal tone appeared to have a significant effect on their decision. But — and this is an important but — it didn't have the sort of effect many would have imagined. The higher the child's vagal tone — the greater, in other words, a child's ability to act calmly under pressure — the more likely the child was to ring the bell. The calmer the children were to think it through, the more likely they were to choose the immediate reward.

………

The children born to college-educated mothers of high socioeconomic status acted exactly as one would expect. The higher their vagal tone, or calmness under stress, the more likely they were to hold out for the five extra M&Ms. For children born to non-college-educated mothers of low socioeconomic status, on the other hand, the outcome was exactly the opposite. The higher their vagal tone, the less likely they were to wait.

The chart below, plucked from the study, shows just how stark the divergence is.

This is rational behavior, not evidence of lack of moral fiber.

If you don't know where your next meal is coming from, you eat whenever you can.

QED.