Shorter Credo

Oct 13

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” H.L. Mencken (via glynnthomas)

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” H.L. Mencken (via glynnthomas)

Aug 29

“Eighty percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas. The way public education works for that eighty percent of people is that any given metro area contains several different school districts. Parents, by choosing where they want to live, exercise choice over which school their kids will attend and which school district bureaucracy they’ll be subjected to. What’s more, since the desirability of the local schools are a determinant of land prices, all landowners in a given jurisdiction have an interest in increasing the desirability of the local schools. Finally, since the supply of houses is constrained in most jurisdictions, things that increase the price of land (like, for example, better schools) tend to increase the price of housing. Consequently, it’s extremely difficult for the poorest families to send their kids to anything other than the worst schools not only because of funding issues or the inherent challenges faced by poor students, but because public education in the United States of America is in many ways allocated by a market mechanism via the market for land. The fact that the service is provided “publicly” tends to obscure the fact that in a world where people can (and do) move the market for land means that there’s a market for schools. If you took the Washington DC metro area and somehow managed to change the current unfair situation where the low-income neighborhoods have the worst schools and instead made it that the lowest-income neighborhoods have the best schools, people wouldn’t just stay in place. Parents of means would start relocating to the places where the schools are best.” Matt Yglesias (via pegobry)

(via pegobry)

The Slow Disappearance of the American Working Man

The economic downturn exacerbated forces that have long been undermining men in the workplace, says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard professor of labor economics. Corporations have cut costs by moving manufacturing jobs, routine computer programming, and even simple legal work out of the country. The production jobs that remain are increasingly mechanized and demand higher skills. Technology and efforts to reduce the number of layers within corporations are leaving fewer middle-management jobs.

The impact has been greatest on moderately skilled men, especially those without a college education, though even men with bachelor’s degrees from less selective schools are beginning to see their position erode. “There’s really been this polarization in the middle,” Katz says, as men at the top of the education and income scale see their earnings rise while those in the middle gravitate downward.

For generations, American workers kept up with technological change by achieving higher levels of education than their parents. High school education became the norm as the country progressed from an agrarian society to an industrial one. After World War II, increasing numbers of Americans went to college as the economy became more complex. But for reasons not fully understood, college graduation rates essentially stopped growing for men in the late 1970s, shortly after the Vietnam War ended, perhaps in part because draft deferments were no longer an inducement. Women, on the other hand, continued to pursue college degrees in greater numbers and have been more responsive to the changing economy in other ways, taking many of the nursing and technician positions in the expanding health-care industry and making greater headway in service jobs.

While unemployment is an ordeal for anyone, it still appears to be more traumatic for men. Men without jobs are more likely to commit crimes and go to prison. They are less likely to wed, more likely to divorce, and more likely to father a child out of wedlock. Ironically, unemployed men tend to do even less housework than men with jobs and often retreat from family life, says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

The long-term fix is simple to spell out and tough to achieve: getting more men to attend college and improving the skills of those who don’t. Reducing financial barriers to higher education would be a start. But there isn’t much political appetite for spending the billions it would take to make that happen. Even once-sacred Pell Grants are on the block as Washington looks for budget cuts. A strapped public education system that leaves many young men unprepared for the workplace, let alone college, doesn’t help. It’s noteworthy but not especially comforting to know that this is not just an American problem. The same gender differences in college attendance and employment are emerging in rich societies around the world.

Grappling with these intractable problems won’t likely be Obama’s top priority. He is under pressure to do something that will be felt now, not a generation from now. The longer people who are currently unemployed remain out of work, the more their skills will atrophy and the greater the risk of a cohort of men—and women—who become permanently detached from the workplace. Anything that raises employment overall would help. Obama is expected to propose tax incentives for employers to hire workers, a reduction in payroll taxes employers pay, and spending on infrastructure. Money for labor-intensive projects, such as retrofitting buildings for energy conservation or refurbishing aging schools, would be especially effective in putting men back to work in construction—though Washington is likely in no mood to pay for that either.

Aug 27

“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse.” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (via azspot)

(via azspot)

“Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.” Cornel West (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Aug 23

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

People have exactly one canonical full name.

People have exactly one full name which they go by.

People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.

People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.

People have exactly N names, for any value of N.

People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.

People’s names do not change.

People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.

People’s names are written in ASCII.

People’s names are written in any single character set.

People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.

People’s names are case sensitive.

People’s names are case insensitive.

People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.

People’s names do not contain numbers.

People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.

People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.

People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.

People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.

People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.

People’s names are globally unique.

People’s names are almost globally unique.

Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.

My system will never have to deal with names from China.

Or Japan.

Or Korea.

Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.

That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?

Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.

There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)

I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.

People’s names are assigned at birth.

OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.

Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.

Five years?

You’re kidding me, right?

Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.

Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.

People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.

People have names.

“There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn’t seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction – even from those who call themselves “progressives” – is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.” David Graeber (via azspot)

(via azspot)

“Here lies the huge irony in this discussion. Persistent pseudonyms aren’t ways to hide who you are. They provide a way to be who you are. You can finally talk about what you really believe; your real politics, your real problems, your real sexuality, your real family, your real self. Much of the support for “real names” comes from people who don’t want to hear about controversy, but controversy is only a small part of the need for pseudonyms. For most of us, it’s simply the desire to be able to talk openly about the things that matter to every one of us who uses the Internet. The desire to be judged—not by our birth, not by our sex, and not by who we work for—but by what we say. Pseudonyms are not new to the computer age. Authors use them all the time. Our founding fathers used them. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech have been part of democratic society since its beginning. What is new is that more and more strangers, whom we have never seen and never spoken to, know our names. What is new is that a name, with just a few minor pieces of information (birthdate, friends names, employer, industry, town…) can in a few seconds provide thousands of personal details about who you are and where you live.” On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google (via azspot)

(via azspot)

“…there is the assumption that people want to trust Google with their true name. “Why ever not?” Ask Google’s senior systems architects. Well, I can only assume that none of them are planning on a second career as a corporate whistleblower. Or have abusive partners who aren’t paying attention to the restraining orders. Or other species of stalkers and vermin. Or are political activists or dissidents in authoritarian countries. Or have a nickname by which they are exclusively known because they hate the name they were born with, to such an extent that even their own family have to think twice to recall their birth name. Or got married but did/didn’t change their family name, or told this financial institution that they’d changed it, but changed their mind afterwards and didn’t tell that one. Or have been members of some other social network, which encouraged pseudonymity, for so long that a lot of their friends know them by the pseudonym, not the real name.” Why I’m not on Google Plus (via azspot)

(via azspot)

Aug 22

“‘America needs heroes,’ it is sometimes said, a phrase that’s often uttered in a wistful tone, almost cooingly, as if we were talking about a lonely child. But do we really ‘need heroes’? We need leaders, who marshal us to the muddle. We need role models, who show us how to deal with it. But what we really need are citizens, who refuse to infantilize themselves with talk of heroes and put their shoulders to the public wheel instead. The political scientist Jonathan Weiler sees the cult of the uniform as a kind of citizenship-by-proxy. Soldiers and cops and firefighters, he argues, embody a notion of public service to which the rest of us are now no more than spectators. What we really need, in other words, is a swift kick in the pants.” William Deresiewicz (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

Aug 21

A Case for Pseudonyms

There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with. They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political or economic retribution. They may wish to prevent discrimination or they may use a name that’s easier to pronounce or spell in a given culture.

Online, the reasons multiply. Internet culture has long encouraged the use of “handles” or “user names,” pseudonyms that may or may not be tied to a person’s offline identity. Longtime online inhabitants may have handles that have spanned over twenty years.

Pseudonymous speech has played a critical role throughout history as well. From the literary efforts of George Eliot and Mark Twain to the explicitly political advocacy of Publius in the Federalist Papers or Junius’ letters to the Public Advertiser in 18th century London, people have contributed strongly to public debate under pseudonyms and continue to do so to this day.

Aug 19

“Reagan’s economic advisor, Milton Friedman, was an anti-religious Objectivist Rand devotee. So is Alan Greenspan. Skeptics Penn and Teller and Michael Shermer are atheistic libertarians. In the Randian hyper-materialistic world those who are on the financial make are the exalted makers, the impoverished that accept tax payer assistance are parasitic takers who need to fend for themselves. A radical modernist ideology in greater antithesis to the traditional scriptural favoring of the poor over the rich can hardly be imagined. Yet the economics of the plutocratic Republican Party that embraces the Christian, anti-Darwinist creationist right are essentially those of the uberatheist, anti-creationist, Darwin-adoring Christianity-loathing Ayn Rand. So we have Christian creationists like Jay Richards writing books titled Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Can a stranger amalgam of opposing opinions be devised? What I do not get from a sociological perspective is why — rather than letting the right avoid being called out for decade after decade — progressives from pious to atheist (most being liberals) as well as the mainstream news media have not been exposing the fascinating incoherence of the right wing’s anti-Darwinian biology, pro-Darwinian economics?” Gregory Paul (via azspot)

(via azspot)

"Last-place Aversion": Evidence and Redistributive Implications

Why do low-income individuals often oppose redistribution? We hypothesize that an aversion to being in “last place” undercuts support for redistribution, with low-income individuals punishing those slightly below themselves to keep someone “beneath” them. In laboratory experiments, we find support for “last-place aversion” in the contexts of risk aversion and redistributive preferences. Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. Similarly, in money- transfer games, those randomly placed in second-to-last place are the least likely to costlessly give money to the player one rank below. Last-place aversion predicts that those earning just above the minimum wage will be most likely to oppose minimum-wage increases as they would no longer have a lower-wage group beneath them, a prediction we confirm using survey data.