Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Birthright Citizenship

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I’m hearing that The Donald is proposing putting an end to it. That’s too bad, because I think it’s a good idea that will now be tainted by the source. Here’s what I wrote about it almost exactly five years ago:

if it were my choice, I’d much rather grant citizenship to someone who was willing to brave a desert and river crossing to get to this nation, learn the language and the civics, and work for a living, than someone born here who takes the nation for granted and refused to accept those responsibilities. Who is more deserving of the vote — the immigrant who has worked for it, or the native who spurns its requirements and demands public largesse? Or worse yet, a native who gangs with others to prey on his own neighbors? Why should someone, regardless of their behavior and level of social responsibility, be a citizen of this great nation through the sheer luck of having been born here, when many other true Americans who weren’t born here but “got here as fast as they can” are not?

Note that this isn’t about civil rights, at least not the traditional negative rights as stated in the Bill of Rights. Both citizens and civilians would have rights to free speech, rights to fair trials, even rights to bear arms if they’re not felonious, but voting is not and should not be a right — it should be a privilege, because, as noted above, it’s one that many will otherwise abuse to the detriment of their fellow residents, should they not be responsible and willing to pull their own weight, choosing instead to rob them at the ballot box.

Immigrants in fact tend to be harder working and more grateful to be here, though the Latin-American influx may be different because they aren’t necessarily coming to stay.

[Update a while later]

This isn’t exactly the same, but it would have much the same effect: Tom Tancredo is once again proposing that voters pass the same test that one must to become a citizen.

Works for me. And I have become long-inured to falsely being called a racist.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Perfect Feminist Storm

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I’ve joked for years that I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, but someone should seriously do this to make their heads explode:

In the Perfect Storm scenario, the ex-boyfriend, when called before the tribunal, refuses to bow down. He does not beg for a lawyer. He does not offer pathetic, chauvinistic attacks against his victimized accuser. He does not beg for mercy.

Instead, the accused ex-boyfriend claims that the charge against him cannot possibly be true. The reality, he says, is that during the time he was dating his accuser, his gender identity was feminine. Not only was his gender identity feminine, it was also lesbian — and to the extent his appearance on campus was externally masculine, he behaved that way because he had discovered that he had much greater sexual success as a lesbian (with sexual success defined as encounters with other women) when those same women believed he was a man. He knew, however, at all relevant times, that he was a lesbian having sex with the woman now hiding behind a screen and accusing him of the heteronormative crime of rape.

Not only does the accused ex-lesbian boyfriend deny the charges against him, he counterattacks.

It would deliciously highlight the contradictions of the fascist SJWs.

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

First Restaurants Raise Wages

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Then what?

Americans spend a phenomenal amount of money consuming food outside their homes, and a major reason is that with restaurant labor so cheap, the convenience and price are attractive to people who don’t feel like cooking. If the wages go up, that calculus shifts. And unfortunately those “rich bosses” can’t just take it out of their profits, because margins in the industry are under 5 percent, and the difference between making that profit and closing up shop can be surprisingly thin. Empty seats don’t just cost you rent; they make it hard to get good servers, because empty seats mean lost tip income. You can end up in a vicious spiral where your service gets worse, so your restaurant loses more customers, so the service gets even worse . . . and it’s time to call the bank and tell them you won’t be paying off that loan.

The economic ignorami don’t seem to understand that restaurants have competition in addition to other restaurants — cooking your own meals at home. In fact, the high cost of dining out is one of the reasons (though not the only one, also I can feed myself more healthily, and I really don’t enjoy sitting around being served by people) that I rarely eat out unless I’m traveling. With 25% unemployment of black youth, raising the minimum wage (or in fact having one at all) is a moral atrocity.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

“The Ferrari Of Rocket Engines”

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This is what happens when a reporter has no idea what is going on, and is simply an uncritical stenographer for NASA PAO and officials:

“It is the most complicated rocket engine out there on the market, but that’s because it’s the Ferrari of rocket engines,” said Kathryn Crowe, RS-25 propulsion engineer.

“When you’re looking at designing a rocket engine, there are several different ways you can optimise it. You can optimise it through increasing its thrust, increasing the weight to thrust ratio, or increasing its overall efficiency and how it consumes your propellant. With this engine, they maximised all three.”

The resulting engine, according to Martin Burkey of the SLS strategic communications team, blows everything we currently have out of the water.

“They ‘maximized’ all three.”

Know what they didn’t optimize? They didn’t optimize on cost. Nowhere in that article does it mention that those are actually reusable rocket engines, from the Space Shuttle. But they’re going to throw them all away the next time they use them. Ferraris are expensive, too, but at least they don’t throw the car away each time they take it for a drive.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Sheltered Students

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…go to college to avoid education:

Why is this happening now? How did colleges manage to guide generations of students through offense and outrage, only to founder at the dawn of the 21st century? Haidt and Lukianoff offer some plausible candidates: the increasingly sheltered lives that middle-class children now live, and expect colleges to sustain.”In a variety of ways,” they write, “children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.” Too, partisanship is higher, and angrier, than it was when I was in college. And today’s students, who live in a world where social media make it easy to launch crusades, may have stronger tendencies in this direction than my generation. (Once upon a time, an offense had to be outrageous enough for people to go to the trouble of exchanging phone numbers, attending meetings and printing fliers.)

There’s also a regulatory component: Under Obama, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has broadened the definition for what constitutes offensive speech. Colleges tremble in fear of lawsuits or visits from regulators, and they send legions of administrators forth to head off any threat by appeasing angry students and making new rules.

But here’s a candidate Haidt and Lukianoff don’t mention: the steady shift toward viewing college as a consumer experience, rather than an institution that is there to shape you toward its own ideal. I don’t want to claim that colleges used to be idylls in which the deans never worried about collecting tuition checks; colleges have always worried about attracting enough students. But cultural and economic shifts have pushed students toward behaving more like consumers in a straight commercial transaction, and less like people who were being inducted into a non-market institution.

Yes. The student-loan program has become a huge disaster.

The Lukianoff-Haidt piece she refers to is here:

There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

I think we’re seeing a lot of that.

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