Friday, January 27, 2012
ONE OF MY LEAST-FAVORITE POLITICIANS
...out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen's attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)---another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama's suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that "Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more."
Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?
There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America's energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America's energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky's bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.
Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various "alternative energy" options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature's cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
9:07 AM
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T TAKE CRITICISM
...should not be placed in leadership positions--...not as captains of ships, not as commanders of infantry platoons, not as managers of stores or factories, not as principals of schools.
Most especially, such people should never be chosen as national leaders.
More here.
5:34 AM
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
INTERESTING DATA
A Flesch-Kinkaid analysis of State of the Union addresses says that Obama's speech last night was at a grade level of 8.4. By comparison, JFK's inaugural was at a level of 12.0, Richard Nixon was 11.5, George H W Bush was 8.6, and George W Bush was 10.4.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
2:31 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
A TALE OF TWO COMPANIES
Two old rivals. One is in Chapter 11, the other is thriving. Why?
Kodak and Fujifilm
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:47 AM
Sunday, January 22, 2012
EXCELLENT NEWS
The wit and wisdom of Cassandra has returned to the Internet.
Temporarily, at least...I see that she still has her notice that "you have reached a blog that has been disconnected or is no longer in service" up on the masthead. Maybe if we all clap our hands, she will stick around. It worked for Tinkerbell, after all.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
9:29 AM
NICELY PUT
The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.
--Joseph Schumpeter, 1942
Quoted here: the high price economy
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:45 AM
Thursday, January 19, 2012
4004 PLUS 40
Missed this by a couple of months....November 15, 2011, was the 40th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the world's first microprocessor. The history of this extremely influential device provides an interesting case study in innovation.
Early computers were constructed out of discrete components, first vacuum tubes and later transistors. Early work on transistors was done at Bell Labs...one of the inventors, William Shockley, became dissatisfied with Bell's management and left to start his own company, which he located in Palo Alto to be near his mother's house. (If Shockley's mom had lived in Roanoke, would the term "Silicon Valley" now refer to the Shenandoah valley!?
Eight of the new company's employees ("the traitorous eight") in turn became unhappy with the way Shockley was running things, and left in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. The integrated circuit, which allowed several transistors to be placed on a single chip, was independently invented at Fairchild and at Texas Instruments. Large numbers of these chips still had to be interconnected to form the central processing unit of a computer.
continued at Chicago Boyz
7:21 AM
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
PROTEST THE INTERNET CENSORSHIP BILLS TODAY
Although public outrage has led to the "Stop Internet Piracy Act" in the House of Representatives being "suspended" until "consensus can be achieved," the Senate version, which is known as the "Protect IP Act," continues making its way through the legislative process. There is no doubt that numerous CongressCreatures, many of them in the service of the powerful media-industry lobby, will continue their efforts to enact something along the lines of this very dangerous legislation.
Several well-known web sites, including Wikipedia, have gone dark for the day in order to help inform the public about the SOPA and PIPA. Others, including Google, are remaining active but putting up an information banner about the threat represented by this legislation.
Links to information and analysis concerning these bills, including a summary of lobbying activities, in my post here.
This would be a good day to contact your CongressCreature and express your opinion about the threat to American free speech and to the American economy which is represented by this proposed legislation
5:06 AM
Saturday, January 14, 2012
"GREEN ENERGY," CRONY CAPITALISM, AND NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
...an interesting piece here.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
5:58 AM
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
THE IDEA THAT BIGNESS AUTOMATICALLY WINS IN BUSINESS
...still seems to have a remarkable number of adherents.
Business Insider has an interview with a 32-year-old Brit who is cofounder of Huddle, a startup aiming to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint. While I didn't read the comment thread, up toward the beginning there are at least 3 comments from people mocking the idea that a startup would be able to succeed against a product which (a)comes from a very large company and (b)is successful and growing.
Well, let's see. Up through the early 1980s, IBM's position in the computer industry looked unassailable...indeed, IBMs dominance was so complete that the computer industry had often been referred to as "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs." Who would have guessed that a couple of startups called Intel and Microsoft were about to start grabbing market share from IBM in a big way?
Up through at least the 1970s, Sears Roebuck & Co was a colossus of the American retail industry. Who would have guessed that Sears--along with many other large retailers--would have found itself losing out to a bunch of guys from Arkansas?
The steel industry was long dominated by the giant integrated steel companies, especially Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel. Both of these companies went bankrupt--but for smaller and more nimble firms such as Nucor, focused on mini-mills and continuous casting, the story was very different.
I haven't looked at Huddle in any depth, and don't have a considered opinion about their future. But I do know that many SharePoint users are less than happy with the product, and I do know that small and focused companies often have considerable advantages over larger and more complex companies. Sometimes these advantages, intelligently applied, will suffice to dramatically overcome the also-very-real advantages of the larger firm.
The belief that the-big-guy-always-wins seems surprisingly resistant to historical experience. J K Galbraith, in his book The New Industrial State, asserted to large firms would simply become larger and more vertically-integrated and would control demand through advertising, making themselves fairly unassailable. This was in 1967--in view of the history of the last 45 years, people today have much less excuse for such beliefs that Galbraith did
Why is the big-guy-wins theory still so widely held?
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:35 AM
Sunday, January 08, 2012
THE DANGERS OF DEMONOLOGY
A writer at The Economist notes that hatred of bankers is one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous prejudices:
Civilisations that have eased the ban on moneylending have grown rich. Those that have retained it have stagnated. Northern Italy boomed in the 15th century when the Medicis and other banking families found ways to bend the rules. Economic leadership passed to Protestant Europe when Luther and Calvin made moneylending acceptable. As Europe pulled ahead, the usury-banning Islamic world remained mired in poverty.
and
In medieval Europe Jews were persecuted not only because they were not Christians but also because killing them was a quick way to expunge debts. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish family, regarded Jews as the embodiments of capitalism who could only be rescued from their ancestral curse through revolution. The forgers of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” wanted people to believe that Jewish financiers were engaged in a fiendish global conspiracy. Louis McFadden, the chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency in the 1930s, claimed that “the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” The same canards have been used against Chinese minorities across Asia.
It can be reasonably argued that the financial industry in the US, and probably also in Europe, is too large as a % of the overall economy and also far too influential in political affairs--see my post about sticky governors. But the unthinking demonization of finance as an activity, and of people involved in that activity, is counterproductive, and, as the Economist author argues, dangerous.
via Stuart Schneiderman
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:22 AM
Thursday, January 05, 2012
THE RAMPANT ARROGANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT CLASSES AND THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN LIBERTY
A 16-year-old girl in Florida parked in the wrong space, had her car keyed, suspected another girl, and posted on her own Facebook page the following:
oh so you keyed my car? well your karmas gonna be a wholeee lot worse that that
The next day, school officials suspended her for three days--and a criminal charge of "stalking" was brought against her by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department
As Scott Greenfield says:
To call the arrest of Allie Scott crazy is to state the obvious. That both a school district and a sheriff's office would nonetheless indulge in such insanity is the piece that would make a good subject for Kafka.
Other incidents of Kafkaesque abuse of authority by public school officials and local police departments are easy to find.
For most of history, in most places in the world, people have lived in fear of The Authorities. For a couple of centuries, that fear was largely lifted (with certain obvious exceptions) in the territory of The United States of America. Now, as a result of the endless expansion of governmental powers and the political and administrative arrogance which have inevitably followed, it is returning. The American populace is being collectively cowed.
See my related posts zero tolerance-zero judgment-zero compassion and Philip Queeg Public High School.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:01 AM
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
TAKE A STROLL THROUGH DUBLIN
...specifically, Harcourt Terrace, a favorite street of the Sibling of Daedalus.
Google Street View really is pretty cool.
1:59 PM
Saturday, December 31, 2011
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Lots of people will be singing Auld Lang Syne tonight. A history of the song is here...note that the Burns version was apparently based in part on a much earlier ballad by James Watson. The lyrics of the Watson version (published in 1701) are here.
Thanks for reading Photon Courier...best wishes to all for 2012.
3:46 PM
Friday, December 30, 2011
VERY DANGEROUS LEGISLATION MOVING FORWARD
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, writes:
This week, a bill that would create America's first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass.
He is referring to the "Stop Online Piracy" act and the related "Protect IP" act. Links to information and analysis concerning these bills, for which heavy lobbying activities are underway, here.
This is dangerous stuff, and, as Tim notes, people need to be contacting their CongressCreatures now.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
5:58 AM
WELL, WHY NOT?
Admit Britain to NAFTA?
The acronym even still works..."NA" could stand for "North Atlantic" as well as "North American."
via Neptunus Lex
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
4:56 AM
Thursday, December 29, 2011
JUST BECAUSE I LIKE IT
Minutes to Memories, John Mellencamp
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:52 AM
Friday, December 23, 2011
CHRISTMAS 2011
A wonderful 3-D representation of the Iglesia San Luis De Los Franceses. Just click on the link--then you can look around inside the cathedral. Use arrow keys or mouse to move left/right, up/down, and shift to zoom in, ctrl to zoom out.
Vienna Boys Choir, from Maggie's Farm
Christmas photos from the 1920s
Lappland in pictures, from Neptunus Lex
Snowflakes and snow crystals, from Cal Tech. Lots of great photos
A Romanian Christmas carol, from The Assistant Village Idiot
In the bleak midwinter, from The Anchoress
French Christmas carols
Rick Darby has some thoughts on the season. More here.
A Christmas reading from Thomas Pynchon.
The first radio broadcast of voice and music took place on Christmas Eve, 1906. Or maybe not.
An air traffic control version of The Night Before Christmas.
Ice sculptures from the St Paul winter carnival
Silent Night in Gaelic
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, sung by Enya
Gerard Manley Hopkins
7:13 PM
Thursday, December 22, 2011
BLACKBIRD AMONG THE STARS
Today marks the 47th anniversary of the first flight of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane. Which reminds me of this well-written article by an SR-71 pilot, especially the following passage.
One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again. To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars Shooting stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound. I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight. In the plane's mirrors, I could see the eerie shine of my gold spacesuit incandescently illuminated in a celestial glow. I stole one last glance out the window. Despite our speed, we seemed still before the heavens, humbled in the radiance of a much greater power. For those few moments, I felt a part of something far more significant than anything we were doing in the plane. The sharp sound of Walt's voice on the radio brought me back to the tasks at hand as I prepared for our descent.
Read the whole thing.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:34 PM
STRANGLING SMALL BUSINESSS
Chicago Boy Lexington Green:
One huge problem we have in America is that the millions of people who are struggling to start or grow businesses, or go solo through self-employment, have no voice. The people who talk and write — the chattering classes — do that for a living. The people who live off the public teat are often talkers and writers, and thus dominate the conversation. The major business guys are in bed with the government or have a lot to lose, so they lie low. The big middle band of actual and potential self-starters and wealth-creators is inarticulate and it needs someone to speak for it, and to learn to speak for itself.
The regulatory state is structured to punish and thwart solo workers, self employment, small businesses, and start ups. The regulatory state has several missions. Expanding its power is one. Moving resources to its clients is another. Insulating its clients from possible threats — incumbent protection — is another. The very thing which will allow us to dig out of this recession is what our government is structured to prevent.
This has to change.
Good discussion thread at the link.
8:19 AM
Monday, December 19, 2011
IATROGENY IN MANAGEMENT REPORTING
In medicine, an iatrogenic disease is one that is brought on by a medical treatment itself. An example would be when a physician treating a minor condition fails to properly wash his hands and as a result gives the patient an infection more serious than the original problem.
It strikes me that iatrogeny also occurs in the management reporting and control systems of businesses and other types of organizations. A particularly awful example was reported in Britain a couple of years ago: hospitals were being measured on time from a patient's entry into the emergency room until the time that patient was seen by a physician. It appears that in quite a few cases, the optimization of that measurement for the hospital was achieved by leaving the patient in the ambulance, in some cases for as much as five hours, so that the clock on the measurement would not start until the criterion was certain to be achieved.
So a measurement intended to improve patient service had the opposite effect. It directly caused unnecessary pain and danger to the individual ER patient who was kept in the ambulance while harming the effective utilization of expensive vehicles and skilled personnel, while at the same time providing upper management with a distorted picture of what was really going on.
Smirk not, fellow capitalists. While this particular example of iatrogeny was perpetrated by a government entity, plenty of examples can also be found in the private sector. Indeed, I saw an interesting example in a Target store just the other day.
continued at Chicago Boyz
5:26 AM
Sunday, December 18, 2011
BATTLE OF THE BULGE + 67
A commenter at this Neptunus Lex post reminds us that Friday was the 67th anniversary of the desperate German assault in the Ardennes that began the Battle of the Bulge.
Here is a remarkable set of photographs of the battle, including some in color, recently released by Life Magazine.
There is also a Battle of the Bulge thread at Ricochet.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
11:48 AM
Saturday, December 17, 2011
WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING
Photographs of Sikkim, a former independent monarchy which is now part of India
The history of maple syrup
How NYC sold public housing in the 1930s
Why people micromanage
The assembly line, the $8 million scale, and the $20 electric fan
The decline of elephants and the rise of human intelligence
The baby seal on the sofa
60 years of network television
5:11 AM
Friday, December 16, 2011
CAN READING FICTION MAKE YOU A BETTER INVESTOR?
In this post from last month, I cited a study which suggests that reading/viewing fiction can help to develop social intelligence and empathy.
Here's someone who makes a similar argument about fiction-reading and investing.
(via Barry Ritholtz)
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:10 AM
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
MORE THAN A LITTLE WORRISOME
Anyone who values American freedom of speech, and anyone who values American economic vitality, should be worried about the so-called "Stop Internet Piracy Act" which is now being considered by Congress. While Internet-based intellectual property theft is indeed a problem, the proposed remedies seem to me, and to many others, to be quite dangerous. If you're not familiar with this issue, please familiarize yourself with it--and if the bill bothers you, contact your Congressman. Apparently, this bill is going into markup tomorrow (Thursday).
Some resources:
--Wikipedia summary of SOPA
--A statement by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
--A statement by Google chairman Eric Schmidt
--A summary of lobbying efforts for and against this bill
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:25 PM
Sunday, December 11, 2011
WIND, WATER, ELECTRICITY, AND BUREAUCRACY
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled against the Bonneville Power Administration, which is itself a creature of the Federal Government. The case provides an interesting microcosm of the difficulties encountered in doing any kind of large-scale productive work in the increasingly rule-driven environment of contemporary America.
BPA's mission is to provide electrical generation and transmission services in the Pacific Northwest. In May-July of this year, the agency suffered from an embarrassment of riches: owing to weather conditions, vast amounts of both water power and wind power were available. Storing large amounts of electricity, though, is not a very practical proposition: in most cases, supply and demand needs to be balanced on an instant-by-instant basis. Hence BPA needed to cut either its hydroelectric generation or its wind generation, the latter of which comes in substantial part from independent businesses which sell their output to the BPA. The only alternative was to engage in "negative pricing"--ie, paying various entities--either customers or other power providers--to take its excess electricity.
The agency did not believe it could legally cut the hydropower generation below a certain level: routing excess water over spillways causes it to pick up nitrogen, which is believed to be harmful to salmon, and hence in BPA's interpretation would be in violation of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. What BPA did instead was to tell the the wind operators that during this time period it didn't need or want all of their output--100,000 megawatt-hours of potential generation was turned away. The wind operators, unsurprisingly, filed a complain, and FERC sided with the operators. So next time there is an oversupply situation in the Pacific Northwest, BPA will be paying to give its power away--ultimately resulting, of course, in higher electricity bills for its customers.
Various technical fixes for problems of this kind are being discussed, such as the remote control of water-heater thermostats in homes and businesses (which would allow excess electricity to be stored in the form of heat) and the interconnection of power grids across wider geographies. But basically, operating a power grid reliably and economically is already a difficult problem. Adding substantial amounts of relatively-unpredictable capacity such as wind makes it harder still, and each additional regulatory constraint makes it even more so.
The continuing proliferation of rules, many of them adopted without any deep consideration of their implications, makes increasingly difficult the running of productive activities of any kind.
Related: Frankly, my dear, I do need a dam
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
12:55 PM
Thursday, December 08, 2011
SOME OPTIMISTIC THOUGHTS ABOUT AMERICA
...from Claire Berlinski, who lives in Turkey and is now visiting NYC.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
7:44 AM
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
PEARL HARBOR + 70
A date which will live in infamy
See Bookworm's post and video from last year and her new post today; also, some alternate history from Shannon Love.
Neptunus Lex has a video of FDR's speech, accompanied by relevant newsreel footage. See also his eloquent post from 2006.
Jonathan worries that the cultural memory of the event is being lost, and notes that once again Google fails to note the anniversary on their search home page, whereas Microsoft Bing has a picture of the USS Arizona memorial.
Shannon Love analyzes how Admiral Yamamoto was able to pull the attack off and concludes that "Pearl Harbor wasn't a surprise of intent, it was a surprise of capability."
UPDATE: Via another excellent Neptunus Lex post, here is a video featuring interviews with both American and Japanese surivors of Pearl Harbor.
7:00 AM
Sunday, December 04, 2011
KNOWLEDGE, STABILITY, AND BLACK SWANS
The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.
--George Eliot in Silas Marner
I was reminded of the above passage by a couple of recent posts:
Claire Berlinski excerpts some thoughts by Hernando De Soto, asking "Is the knowledge system broken?" Some good discussion in the thread at Claire's post; see especially the concept of a "knowledge bubble" in the comment by Late Boomer. Although I'd say that it's more a matter of an assumed-knowledge bubble.
Richard Fernandez suggests that "too big to fail" really means "wait for it," where "it" means a failure on a very large scale. He cites Nassim Taleb:
Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite.
Both of the above are very worthwhile reading. See also my related post penny in the fusebox.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
10:57 AM
Friday, December 02, 2011
JUST UNBELIEVABLE
Barack Obama, a couple of days ago:
I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.
Barack Obama, quoted in a 2008 article:
I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director.
Tries not to pat himself on the back too much? The man is in serious danger of breaking his arm from patting himself on the back so much.
The second comment is absolutely bizarre, even taken by itself--anyone who thinks that way is seriously dangerous in any management or leadership position, and should probably not even be allowed to operate power machinery. Put the two comments together and you have an individual whose mind functions in very strange ways indeed.
The assertion about Obama's support of the security of Israel is of course so at variance to reality that it's hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously except members of the hard core of Obamian true believers. Of whom there are unfortunately still quite a few.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:17 AM
Sunday, November 27, 2011
INTERESTING ASSERTION
...it may be said that at any time when finance is under attack through the political authority, it is an infallible sign that the political authority is already exercising too much authority over the economic life of the nation through manipulation of finance, whether by exorbitant taxation, uncontrolled expenditure, unlimited borrowing, or currency depreciation.
--Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:48 AM
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
THANKSGIVING AND TEMPORAL BIGOTRY
(Basically a run of an earlier post)
Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)
She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?
The example of knowledge that people usually throw out is “computers.” But the truth is, to be a casual user of computers (I’m not talking about programming and systems design), you don’t need much knowledge. You need “keyboarding skills”–once called “typing.” And you need to know some simple conventions as to how the operating system expects you to interact with it. That’s about it. Not much informational or conceptual depth there.
Consider the knowledge possessed by by the Captain of a sailing merchant ship, circa 1840. He had to understand celestial navigation: this meant he had to understand trigonometry and logarithms. He had to possess the knowledge–mostly “tacit knowledge,” rather than book-learning–of how to handle his ship in various winds and weathers. He might well be responsible for making deals concerning cargo in various ports, and hence had to have a reasonable understanding of business and of trade conditions. He had to have some knowledge of maritime law.
Outside of the strictly professional sphere, his knowedge probably depended on his family background. If he came from a family that was reasonably well-off, he probably knew several of Shakespeare’s plays. He probably had a smattering of Latin and even Greek. Of how many high-school (or college) seniors can these statements be made today?
(In his post, Stuart compares knowledge levels using his grandfather–a farmer–as an example.)
Today’s “progressives,” particularly those in the educational field, seem to have a deep desire to put down previous generations, and to assume we have nothing to learn from them. It’s a form of temporal bigotry. Indeed, Thanksgiving is a good time to resist temporal bigotry by reflecting on the contributions of earlier generations and on what we can learn from their experiences.
As C S Lewis said: If you want to destroy an infantry unit, you cut it off from its neighboring units. If you want to destroy a generation, you cut it off from previous generations. (Approximate quote.)
How better to conduct such destruction than to tell people that previous generations were ignorant and that we have nothing to learn from them?
(Last year I cross-posted the above at Chicago Boyz, where it resulted in an interesting discussion thread)
6:51 PM
BRICKBATS AND ROSES
...from Bill Waddell, who is in fine form. The brickbats are for Whirlpool, specifically their approach to manufacturing:
Inventory doesn't turn at Whirlpool because their flow is a non-issue. Instead, their 'assets' meander from China in slow boats and ooze through their factories like so much primordial sludge.
...and the congressional Gang of Six, especially their lack of private-sector experience.. The roses are for the application of Lean methods to a Thanksgiving food drive by a guy from Toyota.
10:46 AM
Sunday, November 20, 2011
DRUCKER ON EDUCATION, 1969
About a week ago Instapundit linked this Wikipedia article about the higher-education bubble, noting especially the point that William Bennett predicted the bubble back in 1987. The post reminded me of some interesting and rather prescient comments that Peter Drucker made about education even earlier, in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity. A few excerpts:
Resources and expectations:
Education has become by far the largest community expenditure in the American economy...Teachers of all kinds, now the largest single occupational group in the American labor force, outnumber by a good margin steelworkers, teamsters and salespeople, indeed even farmers...Education has become the key to opportunity and advancement all over the modern world, replacing birth, wealth, and perhaps even talent. Education has become the first value choice of modern man.
This is success such as no schoolmaster through the ages would have dared dream of...Signs abound that all is not well with education. While expenditures have been skyrocketing--and will keep on going up--the taxpayers are getting visibly restless.
Credentials and social mobility:
The most serious impact of the long years of schooling is, however, the "diploma curtain" between those with degrees and those without. It threatens to cut society in two for the first time in American history...By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve...I expect, within ten years or so, to see a proposal before one of our state legislatures or up for referendum to ban, on applications for employment, all questions related to educational status...I, for one, shall vote for this proposal if I can.
Dangers of "elite" universities:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the "elite institution" which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties "matter." This restricts and impoverishes the whole society...The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim...
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap.
continued at Chicago Boyz
1:58 PM
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
BIG PRESTIGE PROJECTS AND THE OBAMA WAY
Barack Obama:
"It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth --- that used to be us." (Nov 3, 2010)
"America became an economic superpower because we knew how to build things. We built the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Hoover Dam, and the Interstate Highway System. And now, we're settling for China having the best high-speed rail, and Singapore having better airports? When did that happen? "(Oct 25 2011)
George Savage juxtaposes the latter Obama statement with his decision, only two weeks later, to delay approval for the construction of a Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, which was estimated to provide about 20,000 jobs, as well as having an obvious beneficial impact on America's energy security. Indeed, it should be obvious at this point that the main inhibitors to the building of any large project whatsoever are regulatory overreach and complexity and the exploitation of the legal and regulatory environment by precisely the kind of activists that Obama the community organizer has spent much of his life encouraging. Obama's complaints about us not building things resemble the plea of the defendant who killed both of his parents and then asked for mercy because he was an orphan. (More thoughts on large projects then versus now at my post like swimming in glue.)
But in addition to the above point, the kinds of projects about which Obama waxes enthusiastic (to the degree that any enthusiasm is contained in his rather flat emotional range) reveal much about the "progressive" economic worldview.
continued at Chicago Boyz
12:13 PM
Monday, November 14, 2011
WHAT AMERICA DOES BEST
Some thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson
8:36 AM
Sunday, November 13, 2011
FICTION AND EMPATHY
An article by Keith Oatley, in Scientific American/Mind, asserts a connection between exposure to fiction and the development of empathy. It's not a new idea--IIRC, the idea that seeing plays and reading novels has tended to increase empathy throughout entire societies has been asserted by Harold Bloom, among others--but Oatley describes empirical research he's done to test this assertion.
In one experiment, Oatley and colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults, separating fiction from nonfiction. They also tested the subjects on measures of emotion perception (being able to discern a person's emotional state from a photo of only the eyes) and social cognition (being able to draw conclusions about the relationships among people based on video clips.) This study showed a "strong" interconnection between fiction reading and social skills, especially between fiction reading and the emotion-perception factor. This correlation, of course, does not by itself demonstrate the direction of causality.
Another study involved assigning 303 adults to read either a short story or an essay from the New Yorker and following up with tests of analytical and social reasoning. Those who read the story tended to do better on the social reasoning test than those who read the nonfiction essay.
Oatley argues that "Good social skills require having a well-developed theory of mind...the ability to take the perspectives of other people, to make mental models of others, and to understand that someone else might have beliefs and intentions that are different from your own." He says that children start to acquire this ability at about 4 years old, and that "the ability to gauge emotion from pictures of just the eyes correlates with theory-of-mind skills, as does the capacity for empathy."
continued at Chicago Boyz
4:41 AM
Friday, November 11, 2011
VETERANS DAY 2011
Neptunus Lex has some thoughts
Do not fail to follow the link to this music video: the war was in color
Update: Some photographs of WWI battlefields today...link via this post from Sgt Mom.
4:37 AM
Sunday, November 06, 2011
WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING
Moscow in 1963...a collection of photographs taken by John Hinderaker's parents during their trip there
Sunstone...did it make navigation for the Vikings possible on cloudy days?
Should college degrees be required for fire chiefs?
How people ruin their chances of ever achieving power
Cincinnati in 1848....a Daguerreotype panorama
Some worrisome signs for the Chinese economy
Responsibility...some thoughts from Bookworm
The Nordstrom Innovation Lab...an unusual approach to software development. They refer to themselves as "a Lean startup inside a Fortune 500 company."
Fire engines, fighter jets, and nannies
4:29 AM
Friday, November 04, 2011
FREEDOM AND FEAR
A highly-recommended post from Chicago Girl Sgt Mom.
7:52 PM
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