# Last edited on 2014-03-11 22:38:02 by stolfilocal

This message is meant for those who are seemingly obsessed about my [i]person[/i]. (Should I perhaps start a separate "Jorgeology" thread?)  It is probably boring to everybody else.

I thought I should provide some details about myself that are probably not found in the internet:

* I am not "a man of wealth" (although I imagine that the phrase was meant ironically).  My Ph.D. at Stanford was paid with a grant from the Brazilian government. Today, my wife and I own one smallish house  and one ordinary car.  My salary, as an end-of-career tenured full professor, is not bad by Brazilian standards, and quite adequate for our needs; but is only a bit more than what I was making in ~1990 when I was a research engineer at DEC, freshly out of grad school.  

As for being "a man of taste", you should find sufficient evidence in the net to evaluate that.  ;)

* I do not earn money writing books.  My first book, derived from my Ph.D. thesis, earned me perhaps 15,000 US$ in royalties; but since it took the equivalent of ~2 years of full-time work to write, it would be depressing to call that "income". Later I wrote a couple of small books, and edited a Proceedings; none of which paid me a dime -- they were all part of the implicit duties of my job. (Ditto for the journal articles, by the way: authors earn nothing, and sometimes they have to pay the publisher for color figures and such.) 

* Promoting or fighting the bitcoin project, or any other kind of public advocacy, will neither help nor harm my career or my income.  And no, I do not hope to win the Economy Nobel.

* For more than 10 years I have been collaborating with a small group of people here who tries to warn the Brazilian public and legislators of the dangers of DRE (totally digital) voting machines and internet voting.  (Please, don't tell me that the blockchain this or that: it is not merely a technological problem.)  All I got was a lot of frustration, and a lesson that was obvious in restrospect: no matter how much you explain something to someone, he will not understand it if his income depends on him not understanding it.

DRE machines are just as bad for US voters as they are for Brazilian voters.  But it would be silly for me to try to warn US voters about the risk: they have plenty of important people advising them (including Ron Rivest, for example).  In Brazil, on the other hand, there are so few critical voices that I feel it is my obbligation, as professor of a public universty, to do that.  Each must worry first about the mess in his own backyard.

* My father originally had a small car paint and upholstery shop, in a rented building. When I was in college, a friend of his convinced him to close his shop and set up a company to paint buildings, claiming that he had connections in the military (who were ruling the country at the time) and could get some lucrative contracts from them.  Turns out the guy was a con man, and he stole what he could from the society, profiting from my father's aversion to and incomptence at accounting.  After limping for a few very stressful years, the company went bankrupt; we had to sell our house to pay the debts, and several other bad things happened.  

I am telling you these last two things so that you know that:

* Aversion to risk in some people is deep-rooted and cannot be overcome with a mere a sales pitch.  That "personalty defect" has served me well in life, and I do not wish to be "cured" from it.  Please do not waste your time trying.

* I have absolutely no sympathy for swindlers, including (especially) those who think it is OK to fool others a little for the good of some Great Cause.  And my threshold for separating honest salesmen and advertisers from swindlers is strongly biased towards the pessimistic side.