Category Archives: Media Criticism

Bachelor Of Arts Degree

The new high-school diploma:

Obviously, if Beaudry et al right, this is ferociously depressing news. It suggests that we’re pushing more and more people into (more and more expensive) college programs, even as the number of jobs in which they can use those skills has declined. A growing number of students may be in a credentialling arms race to gain access to routine service jobs. Or maybe the productivity of our nation’s wait staff is spiking as more skilled workers flood into these jobs.

And as evidence, McDonald’s is now requiring a college degree to be a cashier. And it’s positively destroying the low-skilled workers. This isn’t going to end well.

[Update on Friday]

OK, so it turns out that the McDonald’s help-wanted ad was erroneous. But the fact that it was believable should concern, and it may in fact be a sign of things to come.

Obama’s Competency Deficit

Some thoughts:

This administration has grand ambitions to grow government but little interest in running it. The result, according to polling, is the highest mistrust in government in years. And rightfully so. We’ve willy-nilly added bureaucracy, deepened the debt, perpetuated cronyism, slowed economic entrepreneurialism and gotten few, if any, of the promised benefits.

It’s not exactly a new problem, but more people are starting to notice it. Too bad they didn’t do so a year ago.

Losing The Gun Debate

It’s pretty simple really. One side actually wants to make schools safer, and the other side wants to take away our guns, despite all their lies about their intentions, and push measures that by their own admission wouldn’t have prevented the event that precipitated the push for the legislation. So it’s pretty hilarious when they deliberately mischaracterize their position as “reasonable,” and “common sense,” particularly when they don’t even understand how guns work.

Colorado Representative Diana DeGette

…is a gun-grabbing moron:

“What’s the efficacy of banning these magazine clips? I will tell you, these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them” says Rep DeGette. According to her, “the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will be shot and there won’t be any more available.”

These people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, let alone be elected to office.

Obama Incompetence

It’s not a new theme, but it is a new source: Joe Klein:

Yes, the President has faced a terrible economic crisis—and he has done well to limit the damage. He has also succeeded in avoiding disasters overseas. But, as a Democrat—as someone who believes in activist government—he has a vested interest in seeing that federal programs actually work efficiently. I don’t see much evidence that this is anywhere near the top of his priorities.

He only just figured that out? A little slow on the uptake, I guess.

SLS Delenda Est

Kill it to save human spaceflight:

Simply put, the SLS program should be canceled now to free up approximately $10 billion programmed for this decade. This money could then be redirected to continue the planned flight tests of the Orion spacecraft with the much lower-cost Falcon Heavy booster while making a robust investment in a first-generation space station in the vicinity of the Moon. An investment in such a cislunar station would provide—by the early 2020s—a multifunctional platform to act as a fuel depot, a workstation for robotic operations on the Moon and a habitat to protect against the more intense radiation environment outside of the Earth’s magnetic field. This station could even be used as a habitat during longer-duration human missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

Expect to see a lot more editorials like this as time goes on, new systems appear, and budgets get tighter.