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  • Guaranteed National Income and Jobs (updated)

    George Rebane

    We in the IT development industry became aware over thirty years ago that the coming technology revolution would destroy more human jobs than create new ones.  Things would be different, very different.  No one believed us, least of all government types and those in the social sciences.  They all had their eyes in the rear view mirror.

    That awareness became a reality in the late 1980s when when research made large gains in machine intelligence – Bayes nets, neural nets, robotics, fuzzy logic, causality, … – that quickly began to be integrated into various industries ranging from defense, through manufacturing and services, to medicine and finance.  While all this was happening our central planners were still firmly focused looking backward in their attempts to look ahead; no one in the public policy arena was looking through the windshield.

    The early harbinger of the yet to come was and still is systemic unemployment – workforce age people in and out of the job market unwilling and/or unable to economically sustain themselves.  What to do about it eludes our governing elites to this day – half of them don’t recognize the problem, the other half would rather not talk about it.  Ten years ago I ran some numbers and predicted that by 2020 the US would harbor around 70M systemically unemployed – even though no one believed me, I was wrong.  Technology accelerated at rates that even amazed me; five years ago I upped my prediction to 90M as reflected in these pages.  I was wrong again because today we have already reached that 90M figure, and now people (excluding locals and liberals) are beginning to take notice.

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  • Scattershots – 3jun16

    George Rebane

    When the country has a problem, it is prudent to consider government guilty until proven innocent.

    Today we hear of banks being squeezed by regulatory mandates that require them to lend to a broader category of borrowers (e.g. car buyers), and at the same time reduce risk.  Such strictures can only issue from the mindless mavens in DC who don’t understand that risk and quality of borrowers sit on opposite ends of a see-saw – you can’t lower risk and the quality of borrowers at the same time.

    Guaranteed national income – tomorrow the prosperous Swiss (gasp!) will vote on whether to start down this road.  The referendum to pay every Swiss who can fog a mirror an annual $2,500 stipend is not expected to pass, but its appearance on the ballot is definitely an indication that the camel’s nose is under the tent.  In these pages we have discussed it here.  Ultimately, I believe some form of GNI will be implemented in order to delay blood in the gutters.

    Hillary lit into Trump yesterday with an opening volley in their forthcoming foreign policy match.  She delivered a fair to middling message to her minions, but really made no gain with even the mildly read voter who knows her record in the Senate and at State.  Overall, she is playing her trump card against Trump who couldn’t wait for this phase of the campaign to start, and showed it by responding with his best 3rd grade level vocabulary and demeanor.  Nevertheless, he did manage to point out that America knows in its bones that Hillary is a corrupt-to-the-core, lying bitch with a record of incompetence that is free of achievement in literally every area of governance.  That orange is not her new black is only testimony to the wretched level to which our federal justice system has sunk.

    The unions are now also implementing Alinsky’s playbook, claiming that the feds are violating the Constitution’s takings clause when they deny them the right to collect dues from employees in the growing number of states with right-to-work laws.  There their argument is similar to our oft-repeated observations of how liberals equate government prohibition with government’s failure to fund.  In federal lawsuits filed in Idaho and Wisconsin unions maintain that “the alleged ‘taking’ isn’t the union grabbing a chunk of a worker’s paycheck without individual consent. It is that right-to-work laws take dues money that union officials say is theirs. This is the Takings Clause turned upside down.”  More here.

    America’s proto-socialism is again on display in today’s release of employment and other data on the country’s economic doldrums.  Job creation (38,000) last month, and downward revision of previous months, reached lows not seen since 2010.  And the unemployment rate dropping to 4.7% reflected only that ever fewer people are still looking for work.  Our pathetic ‘recovery’ (loudly touted by Chief Community Organizer and lackeys) of around 2% annually is expected to dip below 2% for the current year.  But what continues to amaze me is that economists and the Fed never saw any of this as recently as a month or so ago when they were still planning to raise interest rates later this year.  Today, fuggetaboutit. 

    All of this underlines the proposition (which I and others regularly make) that a national economy is extremely hard to model – i.e. develop reliable input/output relationships – and that to this day no such models exist (the careful reader will recall the same state exists in climate modeling).  People in academe and government claiming otherwise are simply charlatans or extremely ignorant about the modeling of large scale, complex systems which are difficult to observe.  But that makes no never mind to those prone to the siren song of central planning.  These economists and Fed board members regularly make predictions that miss the mark by hundreds of percents, and then go on to make more of them as if this time they really do know what will happen.  Oh well.

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  • Still wrong about liberal arts majors

    George Rebane

    Political science major and entrepreneur David Kalt writes ‘Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors’ in the 1jun16 WSJ.  There he argues from his experience that it’s really the liberal arts majors –  philosophy, history, music, … – who have the best background to become what he knows as “computer programmers”.  Why?  Because those are the majors in which students learn critical thinking skills that they then can readily transfer to their new jobs as programmers when they learn a programming language.

    Kalt intends this proposition to go a long way in satisfying our expanding thirst for STEM workers.  No doubt liberal arts majors can learn programming languages and join the workforce as stock programmers – sometimes known as ‘code monkeys’ in our trade – but they in no way can join the ranks of the technology developers who design and build the new systems that expand what society can do and also encroach into the workspaces formerly dominated by humans.

    To be sure, code monkeys serve much needed functions in fielding and maintaining software systems.  But because of their deficit in math based engineering and science areas, in high-tech companies they are relegated to writing code to specifications provided by others who majored in the strong STEM subjects.  Kalt’s myopia in this is understandable since his experience as an online retailer (Reverb.com) for “musical instruments and gear”, and as co-founder of online brokerage firm optionsXpress required the building of interactive procedural websites that had a UI at one end and talked to an API (applications program interface) of an established database or another online service at the other end.  In short, programming tasks that require very little in the form of a math-based background.

    His assertion that today liberal arts majors learn critical thinking skills is also suspect.  First, he implies that a technical education somehow does not require such thinking, that it is “constrained by memorizing commands or syntax”, or at best comes in somewhere far behind those skills which liberal arts majors command.  That is a gross error which is easily forgiven to a political science major.  And the error is compounded in today’s academe where critical thinking in the liberal arts has long been replaced by the lockstep consumption of politically correct tenets which the student must then parrot back to his overwhelmingly progressive professors.

    The truth is that there simply is no substitute for tech workers who are well-steeped in math and the math-based engineering and sciences.  It is the maths which require true critical thinking skills which are then developed by those who survive the rigors and master their curriculum.  This is not to say that other students possessing such qualifications don’t wind up in the liberal arts in unemployable numbers – it was ever thus.  But it does point to the need for communities like Nevada County to attract and nurture kids into STEM careers as early as possible.  For off beaten path communities like ours to develop economically “we need to build people who can build companies”, as recently observed by a friend, colleague, and well-known local business owner.  And these companies will attract STEM workers into our woods who are satisfied that our schools can properly educate their kids.

     

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  • Sandbox – 1jun16

    [I wonder when the Comey vote is coming in.  gjr]

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  • Berkheimer and Bernie – birds of a feather (updated)

    George Rebane

    Last Saturday’s (28may16) newspapers offered up dollops of leftwing wisdom from the great and the small, both issuing from what to me and mine has always been a Neverland of cogent thought.  From Hiroshima (pronounced Hiroshma, not Hero-shiima) we heard once more the words of our leader pleading for an Earth that never was and never will be (more here), ignoring the fundamental tenets of human character that have driven geo-political history since man made marks on stone – a sentiment also recently immortalized by Mr Rodney King.

    But what really caught my eye was Mr Darrell Berkheimer’s ‘A myth about government socialism’ in the 28may16 Union.  We have visited with Mr Berkheimer before (here), but his most recent offering left me a conundrum.  Is the man abysmally ignorant about the workings of governments, socio-economic systems, private industry, fundamentals of economics, and the basics of human behavior, or is he a sinister cynic writing for an audience with such hoped for deficits?  In his favor, I adduce a case for the former.

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  • Memorial Day – 30 May 2016

    George Rebane

    We again gratefully contemplate the terrible price paid by those who gave their all so that America may remain the land of opportunity and the home of the free.  The words and photo from Memorial Day – 30 May 2011 still apply.

    MemorialDay2011

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  • Alexander Rossi wins Indy 500 (updated 30may16)

    George Rebane

    Alexander Rossi of Nevada City won the Indianapolis classic as a rookie entry starting in the 11th position in the middle of the pack.  It was an unbelievably tactical race that brought Rossi across the finish line first while literally running on vapors that he and his team husbanded in the last few laps of the race.  Home town boy makes good never delivered a better story than our Alexander Rossi standing milk-drenched in the Brick Yard’s Winner’s Circle.  I’m looking forward to cheering him on as he rides down Broad Street to take his well-earned congratulations from all Nevada County residents.

    AlexanderRossi

    I was introduced to Alexander about ten years ago by his grandfather, my friend, and fellow Rotarian Don Fultz.  Early in his career as a budding race car driver Alexander talked to our Rotary Club several times describing the travails that he was going through to become a world class Formula One driver.  During those visits I had a chance to chat with him more than once about his progress and the support our Rotary was contributing.  He was an impressive young man then, and the years have demonstrated what dedication and training will do.  His racing career has now the imprimatur of having his likeness join the 99 previous greats who adorn the giant silver Borg-Warner trophy.  And we in these foothills will always be proud to point to him as being one of us, but not as proud as is Grandpa Don smiling down on his grandson.

    [30may16 update]  Alexander Rossi’s career to date has not been a straight line of acknowledged achievements to his Indy victory.  In fact, he has of late been on the back burner as a “reserve driver” on other racing teams.  To me this aspect of his journey makes his dedication and perseverance an even more significant part of the young man’s character.  He didn’t arrive in the winner’s circle on a bed of roses; here is more from Associated Press. 

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  • Sustainability and Single Payer Revealed

    George Rebane

    Sustainability is the established watchword cum battle cry of 21st century world transforming progressives everywhere.  Its most identifiable provenance was the 1992 UN conference which gave us the globalists’ plan for the future – Agenda 21.  Today sustainability is continually evoked as the raison d’etre for stultifying public policies that constrict our activities and take our properties.  However, any concerted attempt to discover a coherent meaning of sustainability yields definitions that are literally unusable in any serious exchanges between thinking people (e.g. see dictionary.com).  In what follows I intend to set the matter straight so that well-meaning, intelligent RR readers may understand and use the notion of sustainability in reasoned discussions.  In this context and as a Lucky Strike extra I present some newly, albeit belatedly, discovered information on the performance of single-payer healthcare systems that have become the holy grail of America’s ideology driven Left.

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  • The ‘Blessings’ of the Ferguson Effect (updated 27may16)

    George Rebane

    [This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 May 2016.]

    Amid this two-year election season we have ignored the alarming rise in crime rates across the nation.  Violent crime in big cities has begun rocketing upward over the last couple of years since the August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.  The shooting of Brown was then amplified by attention drawn to the deaths of other black men at the hands of police during the following months.  This gave rise to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that focused its ire on the resurrection of ‘proactive policing’ which has been widely connected with the dramatic drop in crime rates over the last twenty years.

    Proactive policing included the traditional tactics of police stopping to question young people gathered on street corners at 2AM in high crime neighborhoods where drug trafficking was rampant.  In cities like New York proactive policing applied the ‘Broken Windows’ theory that markedly improved a community’s self-respect and reduced crime.  It also involved the practice of ‘stop, question, and frisk’ of individuals the cop on the beat considered suspicious.  While these encounters seldom advanced to the ‘frisk’ stage, the anti-police activists shortened the label to ‘stop and frisk’, and accused police of its widespread and gratuitous practice in black neighborhoods.  

    After Ferguson, President Obama launched a direct and politicized attack on America’s police, instructing his Department of Justice to conduct several investigations of law enforcement agencies which were pre-judged guilty until proven innocent.  The message quickly got across to outfits like Black Lives Matter that held numerous demonstrations and urged blacks to confront the police whenever there was an officer involved activity in their community.  Consequently, police departments and individual officers also got the message – ‘if you can let it go, then then let it go.’ – and proactive policing became a thing of the past.

    As a result the Ferguson Effect now correlates perfectly with the jump in crime rates to a degree that FBI Director James Comey has recently come out twice citing the alarming statistics.  For example, “Homicides increased 9% in the largest 63 cities in the first quarter of 2016; nonfatal shootings were up 21%, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association survey. Those increases come on top of last year’s 17% rise in homicides in the 56 biggest U.S. cities, with 10 heavily black cities showing murder spikes above 60%.”, and “homicides in Chicago are up 95%, according to the police department.” (more here)

    Instead of sharing in the concern for the safety of urban Americans and instructing its Justice Department to work with police to halt this resurgence, Obama attacked Director Comey, accusing him of “cherry picking the data” and pursuing a “political agenda”.  Through his press secretary Josh Earnest, the president has made the issue one of race and class warfare as blacks continue to overwhelmingly die at each other’s hands in mounting numbers.

    Why a black president would want to sacrifice other blacks in this election year might be a puzzle if it weren’t so easy to connect many of the dots.  Regardless of the impact on their health, safety, wages, and education, the African-American voters have never been able to sort out the effect of Democrat policies on their welfare, and have instead listened to their politicians’ talk and ignored their walk.  By ostracizing Comey, today Obama is casting the bureau as an anti-black, anti-Democrat political organization and therefore preparing his constituents for the possibly damning Comey Vote on Hillary’s classified emails scandal, while fanning the embers of class-war by telling all African-Americans that they still live under Jim Crow laws from which only the Democrats can free them.  And more blacks shooting other blacks is the perfect argument for castrating the Second Amendment.  So about today’s resurgent crime wave, what’s not to like?

    My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

    [Addendum]  Ms Heather MacDonald, the author of the above referenced WSJ piece, also wrote an edited version on the topic for the April 2016 Imprimis published by Hillsdale College where she gave an extended talk on “the danger of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement”.  In her forthcoming book War on Cops Ms MacDonald documents the continued tragedy of our progressive elites using black-on-black killings to serve as grist for their ongoing socio-political agenda.  I believe that keeping a segment of America’s population purposely ignorant as a compliant voting block while ignoring the gratuitous killings in their communities is evil pure and simple.  And that this has been going for decades in overwhelmingly Democrat controlled cities is literally beyond the generally accepted meaning of comprehension.

    [27may16 upadate]  Additionally corroborating the above report, this week in NYC its “progressive city council, which this week repudiated the ‘broken windows’ policing that has contributed so much to making Gotham safe. … On Wednesday the councilors decriminalized so-called quality-of-life offenses such as littering, drinking or urinating in public and loitering in parks after dark. The package of new laws downgrades such misdemeanor citations to civil summonses so scofflaws will no longer have to appear in court or pay hefty fines.” (more here)  I recall what happened in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica when its city council gave a similar nod to its vagrants, homeless, and just plain bums.  Every bad statistic climbed, including the number of boarded up stores and closed restaurants in one of the most iconic and fabled locales in the world.  Then they reversed themselves and things got back to normal.  Such reports remind us again that, except for CA liberals, in general they are not stupid; it’s just that liberals so often have bad luck when they try to think.

     

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  • Sandbox – 23may16

    [What can I say?  See the last 'Ruminations'.  gjr]

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16 comments on Guaranteed National Income and Jobs (updated)