Elsewhere (229)

Microbillionaire wrote:
And it’s not just tabloids and Leftboros, it’s people like Laurence Tribe, Harvard Professor and Generally High Muckety-Muck, pinning this:
As more emerges re @realDonaldTrump’s theft of the presidency it gets clearer that we mustn’t keep calling him POTUS. He’s a usurper.
Tribe is co-conspiritor with one BHO in the production this post-modern classic:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/07/barack_hussein_einstein_at_har.html
— Bad News

Comedians have told how anti-Brexit jokes are killing their careers as audiences outside of London walk out in offence.
Heh.

Yep. And frankly, the careers of the two examples they give in the Telegraph could do with a bit of killing. But no doubt they’ll get plenty of mileage in London (and Glasgow), not to mention on the BBC, from laughing at the dumb provincial hicks to make up for it.
Mind you, you have to wonder what someone who pays to see Brigstocke or Stewart Lee expects. It’s a bit like walking out of the ballet because they’ve forgotten the words.

I’m just going to leave this little gem here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-teenager-ziad-ahmed-blacklivesmatter-stanford-application-100-times-repeat-university-a7665591.html

Squires,
I saw that abomination earlier today. Someone at Stanford’s admissions needs a whack on the head with a club.
(Of course, the real reason the smarmy little shit got admitted is because he’s connected.)

On another note somewhat in line with this post and/or its criticisms of our universities and such, I was recently contacted by my alma mater the University of Florida (Go Gators) looking to meet with me regarding giving. As my time is rather limited, I declined. Not to overshare but this is my email reply, some parts redacted 😉 Feel free to use as a template should anyone here be contacted. Given my somewhat limited language skills by all means enhance/improve where necessary.

Dear Mr. Xxxx,
I received your letter of XXXX along with a phone call from one of your colleagues on about the same day. While I will not likely have time to meet with you I thought I would take this opportunity to explain why my, admittedly somewhat meager, giving has dropped off to essentially zero. While I do value the time I spent at the University of Florida, my feeling is that the value of a college education has dropped significantly in the last dozen or so years. I think you can guess to the kinds of things I refer without me having to spell them out in detail. We are both educated people, after all. When I look back at my time at UF with a little more perspective and 30 years of practical work experience under my belt, I see where the roots of my most recent dissatisfaction were visible even then. In general, UF (and so some extent the rest of the state university system) has done a fairly good job of keeping things somewhat rational. On the other hand I see virtually zero concern from administrators and faculty at UF regarding the comically absurd happenings that have been occurring at other even more prominent schools.
Up until a few years ago I was concerned that there was a little too much emphasis on athletics at our major colleges and universities. However given the events of the last few years it seems to me that athletes, benefiting from an objective standard/goal inherent in sports, ironically may now be getting a better education even by staying out of class than they are likely to get in some of the softer majors that some such athletes gravitate toward.
But my most significant concern, one that I am more intimately familiar with on a regular basis, is that the greater state university system is failing its students and society in general. I am familiar with a couple of professors at other state schools, one specifically who teaches critical thinking, ethics, and philosophy, whose thinking skills, sense of responsibility, and ethics are lower than that of some 16 year olds I have known. As I understand it, many of these soft classes are essentially no-shows. The professors themselves complain that students don’t show up. I ask how can they be passing the classes? Based on the answers I get, it is quite clear that the professors in these soft subjects feel pressure to pass the students and thus maintain a reputation as “easy” such that they can continue to be “in demand” and thus collect a pay check.
I am greatly interested in STEM programs and supporting such but I do not see a way that I can be assured that even in the context of STEM, that my money could quite easily get sidetracked to support people/issues with whom I very much disagree. But I am mighty tired of seeing my tax dollars go to extended childhoods and avoidance of genuine responsibility.

Much of what went to India and such has come back due to poor quality.

What tends to get missed in the bean counting is that India and Mexico (the place a former employer outsourced its IT to) do not have the IT culture that North America does – the 40-some-odd years of best practices and familiarity with the technology cycles, or in some cases just the understanding that the manuals lie. The MCSE/CCNA/certified techs in India and Mexico are fine as long as everything goes by the book and are useless once anything deviates from what they were taught in their cram schools. Which is why that work is slowly being brought back in-house.

A common trick is to write the job description with someone already in mind, so as to get who you want for the job.

A friend of mine alerted me to this trick US companies once used to hire foreign workers: you have to show you’ve advertised for the position in at least four national circulation newspapers before you can look outside the US.
The Weekly World News, The Enquirer, The Globe and the Star are national circulation newspapers. And ones not generally read by out of work software engineers.

I get the impression that HR departments (using resume keyword scanners) are more involved in hiring decisions than they used to be.

HR’s job is to keep resumes away from the actual hiring managers. They filter on a variety of criteria which may or may not be meaningful to the job, since HR rarely understands what the job is, let alone what skills are required. Only a fool tries to get a job by submitting a resume; you need to figure out how to bypass HR and talk to the hiring manager directly.

I keep thinking the far left has to fold in on itself. It’s logically incoherent, hypocritical, factually challenged, unworkable in practice, unforgiving even to its own adherents, and lately, violent. The word “cult” is difficult to avoid.
But it keeps rattling on, perhaps even gaining momentum, whilst leaving a debris trail of destroyed lives — often the same people they claim to be helping — in its wake.

Flashback 2015.

The U.S. Labor Department will not investigate allegations that Southern California Edison Co. abused a popular visa program for skilled foreign workers, according to senators who requested the probe.

Disney 2015

From the perspective of five laid-off Disney IT workers, all of whom agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, Disney cut well-paid and longtime staff members, some who had been previously singled out for excellence, as it shifted work to contractors. These contractors used foreign labor, mostly from India. The laid-off workers believe the primary motivation behind Disney’s action was cost-cutting.
“Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing,” said one of the IT workers who lost his job. He trained his replacement and is angry over the fact he had to train someone from India “on site, in our country.”

This:

Via dicentra.

Note how these attention-seeking clowns – who grin at their own lies and then demand applause – are indulged, effetely and at length, by university staff, as if the venue were a toddlers’ day-care centre.
Even day care centres have rules.

Minority Report is already twice past what an AI nightmare is future distant.
You might want to take something for that fever. Where are these PreCogs now?

I’m going to leave the immigration tangent to others and back up a bit to expound further on the worry Tom raised.

There is, per Mike Rowe, a need for trained manual laborers but certainly not enough to absorb all those who wouldn’t be attending university when the money dries up. What do we do with all of them?
Add the increasing automation of certain functions, truck driving perhaps(?), and you only increase the number of people who need work but aren’t really able for high-end, mental labor.
I apologize for throwing out a lot of seemingly rhetorical questions but there’s a world of hurt potentially headed our way and I’m more than a little concerned that very few people are thinking about it.

Strictly speaking, automation by itself will not put people out of a job.
However, what automation can do by itself is drastically drive down wages for jobs. This automatic carrot harvester (16 second video) is a visually striking example. Advances in that sort of machine working at the speed of dozens of men drive the competitive wages of men in that field down to a few percent of the fuel cost of the machine. (I have simplified somewhat. Insert relevant caveats about also having to account for depreciation of machinery, for example. But this is not the thousand-footnotes post for convincing nitpickers.)
In theory, the former carrot pickers can retrain as something else, perhaps truck drivers, telephone salesmen, or software engineers. In practice, that “something else” is going to be sharply limited by a) various truck-driver-like jobs also getting automated, b) various software-engineer-like jobs being unattainable for many people who went into carrot picking in the first place because they have a poor grasp of software abstractions. Jobs are not fully fungible.
Secondly, there are a lot of jobs where machines can’t replace humans, but they can “duplicate” one human to do what many humans were previously doing. In the Bad Old Days when travel was hard, literacy was rare, and paper was expensive, every hundred-person village might have its own storyteller. These days The Hobbit or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sell a hundred million copies. It’s not literally winner-takes-all, but it certainly is winner-takes-lots.
It should be noted that this is all to the great benefit of consumers. My carrots are cheaper, and my books are better when I can sample the best books of the world instead of the best books of my city. But it sucks for the person who was a local one-in-a-million star and finds that globally, this leaves them out of the Top 5000 sweeping most of the business.
Thirdly, I return to the case of the horse. A century ago America had about 25 million horses. This dropped to about 5 million over the next half-century, before eventually rebounding to 10 million today. I’m not a horse historian, so I don’t know the exact details behind the figures, but I think I can safely say that the drop was in large part due to the spread of cars and tractors, and those horse-jobs went away and aren’t coming back. Some new horse-jobs were invented, but a lot of the horses just died for lack of prospects. We have no promise this can’t happen to humans. Technology advances. As Mr Ream noted upthread, we have flying cars, they’re called helicopters.
Again, this is good for consumers, arguably good to humanity at large, on net. Jobs, in principle, are a cost, not a benefit. Wealth in all its forms is the benefit, and ideally it’d fall from the sky or spray from a cornucopia machine and nobody would have to work. But until you’ve turned welfare into a program like Universal Basic Income which does practically fall from the sky, good fucking luck trying to explain to umpteen million unemployed adults that their distressing lack of income is actually a good thing.
At this juncture I wish to address a previous exchange between Daniel Ream-

But given that the Luddite movement was coincident with the Napoleonic Wars, I’m going to point out again that every time someone says “humanity has weathered previous technological disruptions just fine!” there’s a little echoing whisper of “…as long as there’s a handy war or epidemic or famine around to kill off the excess population and raise the value of all labour”.

-and WTP:

The makings of a good communist have started with less. Much focus on labor. “What can I get” as opposed to “what can I create” or “how can I help”.

Position statement: Communism is bad. Very bad. Literally worse than Hitler.
Position statement: People are valuable as imagines Dei regardless of their labor.
Nonetheless the value of labor, or something like it, quickly becomes a relevant quantity for consideration when “what can I create?” or “how can I help?” are answered with things that don’t put food on the table. A man teaching his son to paint or whittle or bike is doing a good thing, but the paints, the knife or the bicycle must come from somewhere, as must food and drink, and the usual somewhere is “bought with money”, and the usual source of money in its turn is “obtained by selling labor”. Indeed, a proposal that people should be entitled to get these things without labor might itself be denounced for ‘the makings of a good communist’.
Cheaper products will make charity easier, alleviating some of the problem, but you can’t much cheapen e.g. land. They’re not making it any more, after all. 😉
I don’t have any good solutions. It looks like one of those things that might not so much have a solution as merely an outcome.

I’m a bit more optimistic than micro billionaire.
We’ll lose lots of jobs to automation. Good. If they can be automated then what’s being automated is largely repetitive. But the economy is capable of creating vastly more jobs in areas where we can’t even visualise today. In 1921 the UK population was 43m. There was a 2m surplus of females over males. Sine then, the UK population has increased to 65m. The UK has lost millions of jobs in steel making, shipbuilding, coal mining. But employment levels are much higher now than then. I don’t know what people will do or what and where the new jobs will be. But I bet that, on balance, they’ll be better and better paid than they are now.

What tolkein said. And to the point of..
the value of labor, or something like it, quickly becomes a relevant quantity for consideration when “what can I create?” or “how can I help?” are answered with things that don’t put food on the table. A man teaching his son to paint or whittle or bike is doing a good thing, but the paints, the knife or the bicycle must come from somewhere, as must food and drink, and the usual somewhere is “bought with money”, and the usual source of money in its turn is “obtained by selling labor”. Indeed, a proposal that people should be entitled to get these things without labor might itself be denounced for ‘the makings of a good communist’.

Understand your position statements and agree on the Worse Than Hitler part. A matter of scope of the socialism. But to what I quoted, I think you are missing the point about communism. Helping people, even taking it beyond a father/son to general charity work with strangers, the homeless and such, I believe is a human obligation. Where I vociferously disagree with communism and make-work and such is it is predicated on taking the necessary resources by force. Those things that don’t put food on the table do enable others to do so further down the road. Teachers do similar. We pay them. This being one of the limited situations where I firmly believe in borrowing money. But not for snowflake subjects. STEM, shop, etc. The Mike Rowe jobs. Shop, and also home economics, should be required classes not things we discourage young people from taking. The penetration of cultural Marxism into our society began before most people posting here were born, thus we are all steeped in it. It’s what I’ve begun to refer to as The Matrix (and god, I hated that movie). People need to get their heads out of what the media, entertainment, and academics are presenting as reality and think independently.
And more to the general points about technology being a bane rather than a boom to the human experience, it’s a similar argument in line with gun control and no-nukes, etc. Blaming inanimate objects for the behaviors, the morals, of those using them. I know those with other perspectives, probably the majority, would disagree with this but I believe that banning the machine gun or mustard gas would not have made much of a difference in the carnage of WWI. It simple would have been manifested differently. The way I see it, the attitudes of the leaders of the day, their morals or what have you, were such that they were willing to sacrifice those millions of lives to meet their objectives. That there were so many available to expend was a function of the advancements in technology that provided the population booms. I’m sure this is an unpopular view and my thing presentation of such will invite much more hole punching but I don’t have time to get into the details and address every possible detail, but from my study of human history, technology, war, economics, etc. that’s my perspective.
Id’ like to discuss this further and should probably proof read this more but I need to get to work…

“What proportion of the jobs “then” was government pseudo-jobs, as opposed to now?”
I hear there’s a lot of government(s) money flowing into the “Everything’s Fine!” PR business and the “How-To-Find-A-Job” consultant industry.

Which is why that work is slowly being brought back in-house.
Not to mention the fact that India doesn’t have intellectual property laws, so your coders can legally walk off with your code. That’s why we closed our India office even though we had a really good crew — the lack of IP was too much a liability.
We’ve got an H1-B on my team but the rest are local yokels, and when we hire, we hire locals. It’s hard to find people with the advanced skills we need for our product, but we’re not boxing out locals in favor of H1-Bs. QA has a division in Kuala Lampur, but as with most overseas teams, it’s a mixed bag as far as employee quality.
As for China, if you sell your software to DoD (and most companies do), you can’t have ANY of your code developed in China. So IT is safe from that labor market for now.

Shop, and also home economics, should be required classes not things we discourage young people from taking. The penetration of cultural Marxism into our society began before most people posting here were born, thus we are all steeped in it.
Evidently cultural Marxism penetrated to the point that ‘capitalists’ can require people to be subject to programs they deem beneficial too. (No more wondering how the term rightist became warranted.)
And more to the general points about technology being a bane rather than a boom to the human experience, it’s a similar argument in line with gun control and no-nukes, etc. Blaming inanimate objects for the behaviors, the morals, of those using them.
Nobody’s blaming technology and there’s no ethical equivalency between a technology developed to obsolete humanity and others specifically designed to enforce law and order and in extreme cases, enforce the longevity of human civilization.
The way I see it, the attitudes of the leaders of the day, their morals or what have you, were such that they were willing to sacrifice those millions of lives to meet their objectives.
You don’t see how that applies almost to the word to an elite technological cabal willing to distance itself from messy humanity if and when it can replace it with what it thinks is a better alternative? You’ll recall way back a year ago when flooding the borders with cheap labor was all the rage. Sure, they made handy dependent voters but they also did all that stuff Americans Won’t Do for industry.
I’m sure this is an unpopular view and my thing presentation of such will invite much more hole punching but I don’t have time to get into the details and address every possible detail, but from my study of human history, technology, war, economics, etc. that’s my perspective.
As important as it is. Look, collectivism expects to take back production by any means. Elite ‘capitalism’ simply eliminates that option by formal order. Neither established order, as a precept or tenet, has any aim to prevent human misery, as fanciful as the rightist view of infinitely elastic market forces may be. One is happy to entrench misery forever and the other to allow it to happen forever.
Generally, corrective negative feedback can be overwhelmed and any human system ruined. It could have been, as far as they knew at the time, lighting the atmosphere on fire during the first atomic tests. Now it can be obsoleting humanity with sufficient technology possessed by a sufficient few. There’s nothing in ‘conservative’ conventional wisdom to address these eventualities except faith in an infinitely self-restoring system.
How does rendering a third, then half, then all of humanity redundant self-correct?
For a race where nothing is infallible markets will not be infallible either.

Evidently cultural Marxism penetrated to the point that ‘capitalists’ can require people to be subject to programs they deem beneficial too.
Oh FFS…shop and home ec addressed getting through life. You might as well whine about why we bother to require people to get any education. In the f’n context shop and home ec are as important as history, math, science, etc. I would argue more so in fact. But I think I get where you’re coming from. I can juvenile this point to death probably a hell of a lot better than you can. Simply not worth the time.

your coders can legally walk off with your code.

We had the same problem with the factories in China, although the lower manufacturing cost made it an acceptable loss. I’m fairly sure that IP leaks were factored in to the ROI.

a lot of the horses just died
WWI saw off eight million horses, plus uncounted numbers of donkeys and mules. In the UK, half a million horses were appropriated from their owners during the first year of that war. Similarly, in the United States, 1,000 horses a day were loaded on to ships bound for Europe. The knock-on effect was that very many farmers were deprived of the motive power for their equipment. There were motorised tractors being built at the time, but they were expensive to buy and to run and thus not widely used. In 1917, Henry Ford introduced the Fordson, an affordable, reliable, mass-produced tractor (built in Ireland, England and Russia as well as the US). The rest, as they say, is history.
As for the problem of too many unemployed people and too few ‘real’ jobs, there are various options. There’s the doomsday scenario: another global war or a pandemic. (Not my choice!) Or we need a visionary like Henry Ford, who seized the opportunity of the moment. (Facebook/Google do not qualify.) Or we can just subside into hand-wringing impotence (which doesn’t solve anything!)

This has been quite enlightening for me. While I well understood the degree that Marxist, Malthusian, and such education has obfuscated the understanding of economic fundamentals on a broader scale, I appear to have grossly underestimated its impact into the educated conservative domain. Long term unemployment is not a function of too many people and not enough jobs. It’s a function of many other factors, most of which occur between the ears. A lack of hope, possibly due to theft of productivity via government, mafia, etc. A poverty of self-worth. Etc.
This idea that we need wars to kill off the surplus population is conspiracy theory BS. Throughout the advancements of civilization people have been given more and more tools, knowledge, etc. from previous generations than those generations had themselves. Again…i gotta get back to work. Can I get a witness? Sherman? Jabrwok? Bueller?

While I well understood the degree that Marxist, Malthusian, and such education has obfuscated the understanding of economic fundamentals on a broader scale, I appear to have grossly underestimated its impact into the educated conservative domain.
Economics ain’t the thing. Tip: Add Keynes to your list but add Keynes to your list in a peripheral way, a way even he would reject outright as things are today. Actually, add Krugman to your list. And Greenspan.
So no, this ain’t economics. This is what economics only portends to straddle and given its contortions, straddle badly.
Without that context restored, the remark about conservatives either wants a definition or a real target or both.

This idea that we need wars to kill off the surplus population is conspiracy theory BS.
Do I get to pick who dies? I’ve got a little (very long) list…
Throughout the advancements of civilization people have been given more and more tools, knowledge, etc. from previous generations than those generations had themselves.
The knowledge and tools exist, but I’m not confident they’re being transmitted to the next generation well enough to keep the torch alive. Ever-expanding welfare policies and the eternal import of more uneducated and unassimilated aliens does not portend well for Western Civilization (which is the only one about which I particularly care). Cut off the flow of illegals and non-advantageous legal immigrants, balance trade somehow (prohibit export of money and require all proceeds from imports to country A from country B to be spent by country B in country A on goods for export back to country B maybe), eliminate or vastly reduce the Welfare State, and de-Socialize the education industry so students who might actually learn something aren’t held back by the students who see education as an insult, and THEN the economy might start cranking out enough jobs for all levels of cognitive ability to keep the West going.
I generally lean towards free trade, but if that amounts to letting China game the system and produce all the strategic goods that we in the West need to protect ourselves, then I’ve got a problem with that. Rare Earths being one example last I checked.

.

Says she. While protesting against diversity of opinion.
The hum of mental feedback.