ROBIN HANSON: Wealth, Not Robots, Makes Us Lazy.
Archive for 2013
September 2, 2013
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS ALL ABOUT POWER. MOSTLY FOR ADMINISTRATORS, USING SELECT STUDENTS AS CATSPAWS. Oberlin racism hoax exploited to advance “even more extreme policies.”
HOW SCHOLARS HACK THE WORLD OF ACADEMIC PUBLISHING.
POST-RACIAL AMERICA: So in this picture, the NAACP’s Ben Jealous looks like George Zimmerman’s paler brother. In fact, if you didn’t know he was black, would you assume so?
THE MORE SUCCESSFUL YOU BECOME, the less relevant your actions.
YOU CAN READ THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE ABOUT OBAMA GOING TO CONGRESS OVER SYRIA without seeing any mention that Bush went to Congress over Iraq and Afghanistan.
LAW STUDENTS KNOW ABOUT SHRINKAGE, RIGHT? Chart: Summer Associate Programs, 2007-2013.
UPDATE: Link was missing; now added.
LABOR DAY SALE: At Amazon, Up to 40% off Select Foosball, Air Hockey, Table Tennis and More.
Also, up to 70% off on select Audio & Video Accessories. From guitar strings to earbuds to TV wall mounts and more.
ANNALS OF SUBSIDIZED INDUSTRIES: North Carolina looks to scale back on their film tax credits; Hollywood doth protest.
I had a piece on state film subsidies a while back. Also, repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!
BOB ZUBRIN: EPA To Regulate Water Vapor Emissions.
LONG-TERM TEST REPORT: The 2013 Lexus GS 450h.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Kurt Schlichter, Fetch My Latte: Sharing Feelings With Stupid People.
WHAT HATH DICK DURBIN WROUGHT: Pawn Shops Boom as Consumer Retail Banking Retreats. “It was also interesting to read how entrepreneurial these shops have become in offering a wider array of financial services to consumers. For those who have become unbanked post-Durbin (because of higher fees and branch closings) this robust competition is an interesting development.”
WELL, THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: Modern parenting may hinder brain development, research shows.
POLITICIZING IS WHAT HE DOES. IT’S ALL HE KNOWS: Obama’s Politicizing National Security.
UPDATE: Related: What The Hell Is Going On? “So far as we know, most everyone in the government was expecting the bombing would start on Saturday afternoon, Washington DC time. Government officials, above all those with expertise in military operations, were told to cancel their Labor Day vacations and show up for overtime work. No golf for them! Then President Obama–in the face of most all the advice from his ‘national security team’ (I even heard a national radio network broadcaster call it ‘the war cabinet’)–changed his mind. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Surprisingly. How? Why? . . . We don’t have an answer, which suggests to me that we’re missing some key element in the story.”
SOONER OR LATER, WE’LL GET A REAL HURRICANE: Brendan Loy: Hypothetical Hurricane “Gabrielle” to eventually threaten Florida or Gulf? Maybe.
IN THE MAIL: From John Ringo, Queen of Wands (Special Circumstances).
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 116.
WAIT: Are we using Google Translate to interpret Syrian communications intercepts? Can this be true? I find the 2003 claim harder to believe — Google Translate was awfully new then — but then again, now that we know how thoroughly in-bed Google has been with the NSA. . . .
UPDATE: An insider emails:
First off, the idea is truly laughable. It doesn’t happen (at least not in my agency).
With respect to the link, it is somewhat ironic that Marinka Peschmann seem to ‘mis-translate’ what David Kay says. In reading his words about Google Translate, it is pretty clear that he is using it as an example that there are no perfect translations. Especially with a language that has dozens of regional/ethnic dialects, and targets that may be using codewords. Very often linguists, even native ones, can disagree on translations.
I can’t find a video, but I would love to see it, as I would bet the house that he is trying to make an example of the pitfalls in interpreting complex foreign languages, not declaring that the U.S. Govt uses Google Translate to translate vital intel (which it doesn’t)…
One hopes not.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Note the update in the linked report: “Google Arabic didn’t launch until 2005.” So this is pretty much an Emily Litella report. Never mind.
THIS PIECE FROM THE IEEE SPECTRUM HAS RELEVANCE TO THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE: The STEM Crisis Is a Myth: Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians.
To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering. . . .
Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM.
The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field, according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University.
The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM?
Plus:
“If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.”
“None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”
Indeed. So why the contrived shortage and demands for more STEM education and visas? “Companies would rather not pay STEM professionals high salaries with lavish benefits, offer them training on the job, or guarantee them decades of stable employment. So having an oversupply of workers, whether domestically educated or imported, is to their benefit.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN LABOR HISTORY: Only Unionized Strip Club Closes. Shockingly the SEIU-organized club had as its central commandment . . . not giving customers what they wanted. “If this seems an insignificant detail, it is anything but. That the terms of interaction were non-negotiable underscored for many dancers a valuable aspect of sexual self-awareness: This is mine. In private or shown for hire, clothed or bare, it’s mine.” Well, okay then. The customers probably felt the same way about their money.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, OUR SECRETARY OF STATE WOULD BE HOUNDED BY ANTI-WAR PROTESTERS: And they were right!
BUZZFEED ON THE INTERNET’S REACTION TO OBAMA’S BOMB-SYRIA PLAN: The memes are running 10-1 against, Mr. President.
They left out this one:
