Category Archives: Technology

‘Generation Jobless’

Business, Economy, Education, Intelligence, Labor, Outsourcing, Race, Racism, Science, Technology

I wonder about those who claim our math and science students are first rank, and blame the high-tech sector and its greed for the “importation” of South and East Asian talent. Sure, there is an abundance of greed (not necessarily harmful in one of the freer sectors of the economy). There is also a requirement to display diversity, even if imported, so as to comport with the diabolic diversity policies peddled by all companies as zealously as do the state and CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. But neither are there any shortages of unskilled Americans in the sciences. Have the reductionists, who refuse to recognize this dumbing down, ever spoken to senior and serious high-tech talent; people who are employed and always overworked, because there are so few of them?

“Although the number of college graduates increased about 29% between 2001 and 2009,” reports the WSJ, “the number graduating with engineering degrees only increased 19%, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Dept. of Education. The number with computer and information-sciences degrees decreased 14%. Since students typically set their majors during their sophomore year, the first class that chose their major in the midst of the recession graduated this year.

Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract. Some students, like Ms. Zhou, say their high schools didn’t prepare them for the level of rigor in the introductory courses. [She’s more honest than the professors. “My ability level was just not there,” says Ms. Zhou of her decision” to drop out from electrical and computer engineering.]

Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.”

Science classes may also require more time—something U.S. college students may not be willing to commit. In a recent study, sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that the average U.S. student in their sample spent only about 12 to 13 hours a week studying, about half the time spent by students in 1960. They found that math and science—though not engineering—students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.

Springtime in Israel

Economy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Technology, Terrorism

The crazies are threatening it on the north (Lebanon & Syria), the south (the lovely Egyptian revolutionaries), and the east (the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and beyond), but, as the US and most of Europe decline, Israel’s economy flourishes. Here are Israel’s fiscal fundamentals, courtesy of Bloomberg.com:

• GDP growth of 4.8 percent this year
• A raised credit rating of A+
• Very low unemployment
• “60 companies traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the most of any nation outside North America after China.”
• “The largest number of startup companies per capita in the world.”
• A ranking of “third in terms of projected growth this year among MSCI’s list of 24 developed economies, after 6 percent for Hong Kong and 5.3 percent for Singapore, according to the IMF.”
• “Israel’s exports are high-added value exports like informatics and technology”: This means the stuff the Israelis make adds real value and jobs, unlike Obama’s state-manufactured jobs, which are a result of moving money around.

SADLY, that thing we in the US celebrate and anticipate—the Arab spring—threatens commence, innovation and economic prosperity in the region’s most productive oasis. Some “spring” …

UPDATED: Steve Jobs Was With Liberty

Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Celebrity, Economy, Intelligence, Technology, The State

As is to be expected with so private and guarded a person, the curtain on Steve Jobs’ inner life is being pulled back slowly, but surely. In the process, Jobs’ natural affinity for freedom is being revealed. The man who gave us Apple Inc. was obviously too smart to misunderstand the essence of liberty and how at odds BHO is with it. Jobs was on to the idiot Obama (and to racist and statist Bill Gates). Reports the HuffPo:

“Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama ‘was really psyched to meet with you,’ Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

‘You’re headed for a one-term presidency,’ he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where ‘regulations and unnecessary costs’ make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was ‘crippled by union work rules,’ noted Isaacson. ‘Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.’ Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.”

Jobs’ spot-on assessment of Bill Gates has to be my favorite revelation:

“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

So true.

UPDATE (1/3/2016): Alex Gibney, at CNN, trashes Steve Jobs, posthumously, in a one-sided, banal, “Why Can’t He Be More Like Bill Gates” bit of yellow journalism.

Steven Jobs – Capitalist Hero

BAB's A List, Business, Capitalism, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Economy, Ethics, Fascism, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Technology

By MYRON PAULI

MYRON PAULI explains what separates Steven Jobs, the quintessential “Homo Aynrandis,” from Homo Corporatist, that atavistic throwback that manages the typical corporation nowadays.

ONCE UPON A TIME, great men like the late Steven Jobs (Homo Aynrandis) roamed about in our early republics (note the plural – each state has a republican form of government) – men like Morse, Fulton, Edison, Whitney. These were creators and innovators who helped mankind by helping themselves – not because some bureaucrat put a gun to their heads. They made money through their inventiveness and vision, not by “manipulating the system.”

Nearly all of these early Howard Roarks (the hero in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead) were self-educated. They made their fame and fortune in spite of “the system.” College dropout Jobs was one of these great men and let us hope not the last.

Nowadays, we have a different species of capitalist, Homo Corporatist, “managing” most companies – usually for personal gain and short-term profit – into oblivion. They are often spoiled rich kids who smoke dope through college and then get educational “credentials” in “management” and economics from neo-Marxist pedagogues teaching Keynes, Krugman, Samuelson etc. These corporate-technocratic-idiot-savants work their way into companies, sucking up to the vampires who mismanage these companies, and then get hired as CEOs.

Jobs made that mistake in hiring John Sculley from Pepsi and the soda salesman soon manipulated Jobs out of Apple. Later Apple sued Jobs, whose quote, “It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans,” says all one needs to know about those characters and the modern era.

But Jobs was down but not out. He made Next and Pixar and out-Appled Apple until they took him back and resumed growing. The alternative for Apple would have been to hire the type of corporate flacks who have mismanaged General Motors for the last 70 years.

As for Homo Corporatist – they are excellent in claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses while their companies slide into oblivion. Thomas Edison founded General Electric whose products were found in nearly every American home – now the company is “managed” by Harvard M.B.A. Jeffrey Immelt. Instead of watching GE televisions, Americans now watch GE’s Rachel Maddow spouting inane nonsense on Korean televisions. GE has become a bubble-manipulating finance company which lobbies for tax breaks and “green energy mandates” from its political buddies.

Homo Corporatist, sadly, is ubiquitous. In China and Russia, they are the children of the old party apparatchiks who now play “businessman” in a fascist economy. In the Arab world, they are the relatives and friends of the King/Sheik/Dictator now operating various “enterprises.” In America, it is Archer Daniels Midland with their agribusiness “ethanol mandates.” It is people like my Senator, Mark Warner, who made money off the FCC monopolistic licenses. It is people like Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal, an egomaniac who had security guards holding an entire elevator bank open for him and ran off with well over $100 million, while sinking “bullish” Merrill with subprime mortgages before moving on to Alcoa whose stock has also tanked.

Most of these managers know less about the products that the companies make than their janitors. They make short term profits by firing research staff, selling ideas and marketing opportunities overseas, and finding quick-fix gimmicks, as they pocket the bonuses, and lobby against competitors – and like good vampires, move on to the next target. Some might be better than others – but can Herman Cain (Federal Reserve Bank leader) cook a pizza??

At my first company after graduate school, the big shots were shorting their own stock to the Employee’s Stock Plan (!); they paid 20 percent to borrow money in 1982 to buy up a company at over 50 times price-to-earnings, and then sacked most of the company, bribed government officials and covered it up, then pleaded “no contest” to the bribes with some leaving the companies with golden-parachute bonuses while the “lower animals” at the company got furloughs and had to take ethics training to not do what the big shots had done – all while the company stock plummeted from 45 to 3! While my years in the employ of the government reinforce my libertarianism, I could see how people in companies like this could wind up as Marxists!

Steven Jobs, Homo Aynrandis, will be missed. He was what capitalism should be about.

**
MYRON PAULI, Ph.D., grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism.