Slut-gate

Yet another letter from Foster City, along with a (!?!?!) reply:

The GOP has a candidate whose daughter is an underage, unwed -- um, pregnant teenage slut. If you had asked me even a month ago, I would have said the GOP frowns on this kind of behavior. Yet they seem to be embracing it, they're saying they're "super proud" of this person, and perhaps they'll put underage pregnancy into their campaign platform. I don't get it.

Candidates spend SO much time on obscure nuances in an effort to "swing voters." But apparently voters aren't even swayed when their own candidates do a complete 180 on their own ideals and pee in their own punch bowl.

What gives?

Reply:

"We embrace the utter failure of our hypocrisy, and hope all underage
unwed mothers and their soon to be responsible partners will join us
in promoting family values that will carry us into the 21st century
and beyond."

Sounds pretty good when you put it like that.

How To Not Hire An American

The video is a little tedious, but perhaps I am a tad impatient with blather.

You can read all about it on the DAILY KOS.

Notes about the video:

• DOL PERM refers to Department Of Labor process for becoming a Permanent resident.
• The web site mentioned is: http://www.programmersguild.org/

A friend of mine is working a contract job at Intel. There are 20 cubicles on his aisle. There is one other Caucasian and one Chinese man. All the rest are Indians. I am not opposed to hiring foreigners, but I don't like people gaming the system, and that is certainly what it looks like. I am beginning to suspect Intel of being not a very good member of the community.

H/T to Andy.

ROBOTS ARE ALMOST AS LIBERAL AS PENGUINS

This was a comment on a blog about about Wall-E. I thought it was the best of the lot. Robot Wisdom auxilary had a link to a nice story on this same page.

Pod People, Part 2

More stuff I didn't write, but I really like it.

The commonly recited pros of having a healthy, educated, socialized population are: social stability; less desperation, violence and civil disobediance; presumably more development and social benefits by having a wider pool of talent to draw from.

But the drawbacks are: a wider pool of talent to draw from. This means more competition for the current priveleged groups. John McCain, for example, would be much better off if women or blacks hadn't been enfrachised.

These are basic protectionism arguments, applied to talent rather than international boundaries.

Additional point that is demonstrated by emerging economies: increased competition for resources. You can liberate/elevate a bunch of people, thinking they're going to become productive members of society and become an asset for you. But those newly productive people are developing tastes for gasoline and beef, and that's driving up prices for everybody -- not to mention generating environmental impacts. And as anyone who has gone from a driving a broken down Maverick to a new Toyota can attest, once you taste wealth and convenience, you will redouble your efforts to prevent backsliding.

Interesting if the legacy of Reagan and that lot will turn out to be, not the champions of "freedom," but rather, "the dimwits who let the rabble into the country club."

Pod People

From someone I know:

I heard this on the radio this morning, and found this from January. City letting homeless people live in their cars in designated areas. No more living like a hunted animal, hiding from the cops.

This is very generous of the cops, although it's perhaps inevitable -- when that many people are driven into the street, you are pretty much forced to recognize the problem.

But this is still a subsidy. Somehow, someone has to figure out a way to extract wealth from these people. These are people who are so marginal that they can't pay for housing (although housing is pretty expensive). There has to be a medium between extracting $500 a month from someone for a full-fledged apartment, and letting them live for free. How about a big parking lot, with ultra-low maintenance concrete showers and latrines, charge people $3 per day?

Indeed, as market efficiencies expand and people are increasingly forced into pods, this could give rise to "high-end" parking lots, with some trees and decent facilities, where mid-level people can park their living pods.

More thoughts on the inevitable decline:

• In the mid-century and postwar era, one could earn a good living from labor. This was due to sheer abundance of resources and opportunities, ie: a "boom-town" environment;
• Technology, efficiency and free trade have turned labor into a cheap superfluous commodity;
• When people are desperate enough they revolt. But the requirements to keep people passive are relatively few, and can be made cheaply (TV, shiny vehicle, salty fatty food).
• Will commodity prices, technology and efficiency, and profit motivations produce a world where people are living in pods, eating meals of starch and fat out of drive through windows, and staring at celebrity gossip on little glass screens? And not able to afford anything else?
• The current system where voters can "change the government" is good in principle. In reality, the government is entrenched and designed for continuity and expansion, not change and responsiveness. Thus, while voters can still register their discontent about the size of their pod or the starch content of their diet, those votes will only be met with rhetoric, viewed on the TV screens. We can't expect the underlying trends to change.
• Cost of health care will remain prohibitive. Good thing is, when people get sick, they are price-insensitive, and you can extract their last dime out of them. And often they die so they're not around to provoke outrage, people just forget about them.
• Is this really better than having a population of healthy, educated, confident people? I guess the theory is that a small minority of healthy educated confident people is adequate, they can run things and extract profit from the rest of the population, who are basically reduced to slaves. Lets all hope that our kids get a lucky draw.