Open Mic for the week of 12/23/2024
On this day in 1972, Terry Bradshaw threw what is known as “The Immaculate Reception“.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Biden gives life in prison to 37 of 40 federal death row inmates before Trump can resume executions
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2024/12/23/biden-gives-life-in-prison-to-37-of-40-federal-death-row-inmates-so-trump-cant-have-them-executed/
Damn.Report
There’s a post on the main page.Report
Sebastian Zapeta set a woman on fire on the subway yesterday. Governor Kathy Hochul held a press conference on Wednesday touting statistics that said subway crime was down 42 percent since January 2021.
Much like after the CEO got shot, we should ask “What does this say about the entire system that setting the woman on fire made sense to this guy?”
Thank heaven for small mercies, Sebastian was not strangled before doing this. The fellow travelers on the subway made sure to get video instead of acting like vigilantes.Report
Thank heaven for small mercies, Sebastian was not strangled before doing this. The fellow travelers on the subway made sure to get video instead of acting like vigilantes.
And that is why the jury refused to convict Penny.Report
What does it mean? Probably not much. If it “made sense” to this guy to set a stranger on fire he is, to use the clinical term, nuts. Maybe there were some red flags that could or should have been picked up, and we’ll probably hear about it if he slipped through the cracks in the system, but that kind of nitty gritty detail won’t lend itself to deep-sounding pronouncements.Report
If there were enough red flags and he slipped through the cracks in the system enough, then that’s a deep-sounding pronouncement itself.
For example the guy who Penny killed had a history of attacking random people and had been arrested 42 times before that time.
At some point we get to say it’s a serious flaw in the system itself.Report
The Gaetz report was released and the findings are what one expects:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/23/us/matt-gaetz-report-trump-newsReport
Trump is apparently going on again about reclaiming the Panama Canal and Greenland for the United States. This is how CNN decided to “cover” it: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eba4a05a631486aa030e5905a4964f79e63a24d794350612f1fff67f92c54f34.jpg
“The president-elect has suggested a territorial extension into Panama, Greenland and Canada. If he’s serious, it would rival the Louisiana Purchase”
Our media is not made of serious people.Report
This is interesting:
https://jabberwocking.com/americans-have-not-lost-trust-in-the-media-republicans-have/
Democrats’ trust in the media immediately shot up 25 points after the election of Donald Trump, when the media abandoned all pretense of objectivity and explicitly dedicated themselves to shilling for Democrats as hard as possible, and then fell back down about a year or two ago, when they acknowledged that maybe they’d gone overboard and started self-correcting.Report
For some reason he failed to include “independents”.
Is there a chart that includes “independents”?
If you click through the link that he posted, the Gallop chart *INCLUDES* “independents”.
Like, he actively had to get the chart that he, himself, posted from a different source that he linked to because he deliberately wanted “independents” to not appear on his chart.
Which, in a nutshell, illustrates the problem.Report
Wall Street Journal has an article about the whole intelligence gathering related to the lab leak theory and, specifically, how the “it probably came from a lab” reports were squashed in favor of the wet market theory.
I wonder at what point we’re going to sheepishly admit that, yeah, it’s more likely to have been a lab leak than a wet market… BUT A WET MARKET IS STILL POSSIBLY THE ORIGIN!!! I think that that’s the next phase after “we’ll never know so stop talking about it”.Report
The problem is that some people say “lab leak” and mean loss of containment of a weaponized virus from a biosafety level 4 facility, and some people mean some poor post-doc got a snoot full of all sorts of stuff while doing routine intake of cave samples.Report
Sure, but if someone thinks that some poor post-doc wiped his nose after touching a sample and says “it was a lab leak”, the guy who thinks that the only thing that qualifies as a lab leak is loss of containment of a weaponized virus should come up with a term that covers the post-doc being sloppy.
“It was a flapperdoodle!”, maybe.
Hey, I’m not arguing that it was a lab leak.
I’m just saying that it looks like it was a flapperdoodle.Report
You have a monomania about this conspiracy boy.Report
“Why do you care that you were lied to and the people who told the truth were squashed by the government? Pretty low-status!”Report
I agree Jaybird. Huge story that our government pushed to cover this up.
Main stream media labelled anyone that said this a tin foil hat wearer.
It looks to be true and now very few seem to care. Pretty sad.Report
“it probably came from a lab”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-sudden-rise-of-the-coronavirus-lab-leak-theory
“On February 16, 2020, the Republican senator Tom Cotton appeared on Fox News to discuss the possibility that the virus had originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. “Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says,” Cotton, of Arkansas, said.”
JAQing off.Report
Golly, when was this written?
Oh. May 27th, 2021.
So it’s an example of the stuff that the WSJ article talked about.Report
Maybe if people like Cotton had some actual evidence, people might have taken that theory a little more seriously.Report
There seems to be a fight over H1-B visas on the Right:
https://newrepublic.com/post/189683/elon-musk-critics-x-immigration-paid-price-verificationReport
Vivek seems to have lectured white people like white people lecturer black people and they did not like it. His examples were very old outdated cliches thoughReport
White people lecturing black people? In 2024? I need some of what you’re smoking.
Not that Vivek is totally wrong about American values. He’s just also off about H-1Bs. They aren’t about talent they’re about cost/(alleged) inability to find Americans with a required skillset. As best as I can tell from anecdotal experience it operates as a combination of indentured servitude and backdoor way for people to move their entire village and extended family to the US, often using highly suspect credentials, maybe at the expense of quality and competence. So an odd arrangement
divorced from original intent where corporate America and would-be immigrants exploit each other in a race to the bottom.Report
At least on the Right, there is still plenty of old school white lecturing of black people even if it can be more muted. The H1-B program is a form of indentured servitude but at the same time I do think the point about American STEM skills and education being lacking are correct. Americans tend to think of math as a talent rather than a learned skill even in very good schools it is just accepted that many kids are going to be bad at math and leave it at that. Few kids seem to want to go into computer programming but become the CEOs and management.Report
Heh I think whatever old school lecturing there is has become so inconsequential and overshadowed by patronizing identity leftism that it’s driving black men to vote the other way. It isn’t a real issue anymore, and the over correction has gone so far that even innocuous life skills stuff has a good chance of being treated as racism in a number of important contexts including education and employment.
I do think there’s a point in there about American culture failing to incubate hard work and excellence as important values. I’m just not sure the H-1B system or the values that come with people via that channel is a great example of the corrective. The immigrants that do really impressive things in STEM fields tend to be the types that want to escape the conformity of their home cultures, not the ones that excelled in the pressure cooker model of education that prevails in east Asia. Silicon Valley was built more by free thinking hippie types and rule breakers than people who spent their childhoods studying 20 hours per day for a state administered exam.
H-1Bs are in my experience neither of these things. You do get some very talented people coming through, and we should absolutely want them to stay and become Americans. Along with them though you also often get their useless in laws with a bordering on fake degree. Before you know it half the department is comprised of that person’s friends and relatives, but modern HR conventions prevent anyone from talking about what’s going on in more than the most euphemistic ways. Meanwhile the C suite is celebrating improvements to the bottom line but no one knows why DevOps (or wherever) is suddenly a black hole and QC doesn’t seem to function anymore.Report
Part of the problem is that American education so decentralized that we have schools that range from the very best to some of the worst. When I was a kid, I’d thought that many of the things I’ve seen on sitcoms like the football coach teaching social studies were jokes because if my high school did that the school administrators would be looking down the barrel of a shotgun held by irate parents and being asked to name names. Turns out there are places in the United States, and these aren’t poor places, where this does happen. It’s why the S.A.T. is not an American abitur, there would be states where everybody fails.
Americans also have weird cultural beliefs around certain subjects like math and regard them as talents rather than learned skills. From what I can gather in Asian countries, any reasonably studious student is seen as capable as learning calculus if taught by a reasonably competent teacher. Even in my high school, regarded as being in the top twenty public high schools since it started, the administrators assumed that many students would just be average at math at best even though everybody would basically go on to college.
Then you have the fact that American teaching is a lot more prone to culture war issues than teaching in less politically divided countries. You usually see this on the liberal-left side with teachers fired up with social justice beliefs but it exists on the right side in many parts of the country as well.
So basically, America has some issues.Report
All good points.
There is a part of me that wonders if these high level conversations aren’t more reflective of what people remember about whatever teen/coming of age movie than the complicated reality of US education. On the one hand there are places that seem to under invest and where the operation is subject to a lot of politicized misdirection and pure incompetence (to say nothing of the places where there is a larger social and economic collapse).
At the same time, as I understand it, our best and brightest are as competitive as those from anywhere, and our median ain’t awful either, but our mean is dragged down considerably by the existence of crazy outlier poor performers.Report
I am sure that high school media people consumed are heavily influencing these conversations at least indirectly. Sort of like how Singles and other such media gave me some very misleading ideas about what my twenties would be like. My actual twenties involved way more studying and work than escapades with friends and paramours.
I don’t know if this is relevant but my brother is married to a woman from Singapore and hangs out with people who went to high school in East Asian countries when we did. He finds their high school tales to be impossibly sweet. Like when Americans talk about telling their parents that they were going to study with their girlfriend or friends in the library, you always expect the tale to go on to some minor naughtiness or wasting time at the mall instead. From people who spent their teen years in East Asia, the story line doesn’t continue. They actually did go to the library and study.Report
I’m sure it’s interesting! The question I suppose is what they’re like now. I get the sense that people who do that end up being decent engineers but would likely struggle to do anything that requires some risk taking. A healthy society probably needs a dose of both types.
My saving grace was going to a strict-ish Catholic school through 8th grade. Public high school was so easy for me I barely had to try, and thank God for that, because I spent quite a bit of time out in woods and fields smoking pot, chasing the smart and artsy yet troubled girls, plus drinking whatever alcohol we could get our hands on.Report
White folks talking about what black folks are experiencing and telling them it isn’t happening or is inconsequential can be tiresome.Report
No more tiresome than white people pretending they speak for black people, or anyone other than themselves for that matter.Report
I can actually speak with some authority on such things. Admittedly second-hand, but close at hand. If you want to join my family holiday table, doubling the white representation, you can get first-hand information.Report
As far as I can tell, he’s wrong here. It’s not that the US doesn’t produce lots of highly-skilled tech workers, but rather that a) there’s a lot of demand for tech skills that are rare because the vast majority of people are incapable of or uninterested in developing them, and b) the US, while it produces more than its share of those workers, is far from having a monopoly on them.
We have lots of highly skilled tech workers, but it would be better to have even more, because a) it leads to more top tech companies being formed in the US instead of elsewhere, with the associated high-wage job creation, and b) it means more high-income taxpayers to help shoulder the burden of the freeloading enabled by the welfare state.
Would it suppress my wages as an American software engineer? Eh…maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to say a priori how it would shake out—increased demand from agglomeration effects vs. increased supply—but really, it doesn’t matter that much. Software engineers are paid really well, and we’d still be paid really well with a moderate pay cut. We don’t need the government to protect us from competition. And it’s not like we’re not already competing with foreign software companies.
A lot of the complaints about H-1Bs are contradicting each other. I’m hearing that they’re terrible engineers, and also that they’re going to take our jobs. That they’re undercutting us, and that they’re paid too much. People say H-1B visas are bad because they give employers too much leverage over workers (for the record, you actually can change employers on H-1B; there’s paperwork, but no lottery or quota), but they don’t want to increase visas for skilled workers that aren’t employer-specific. I’m starting to think that they just don’t want more skilled immigration.
I swear, there’s a subset of right-wingers who are so stupid that they’ve basically turned into left-wingers.Report
The problem is that everybody wants an Engineer-3, nobody wants to promote an Engineer-2.
Hell, nobody wants to *HIRE* an Engineer-2. (“Train one? What’s training?”)
And nobody wants to promote an Engineer-1 to Engineer-2 in the first place.
Better to just sneak an Engineer-1 over from India, tell him to pretend he’s an Engineer-3, and threaten to send him home if he screws up beyond a particular point.
Then use his taxes to forgive the college debts of the comp sci major who can’t find a job.Report
Like a lot of things culture war ends up imposed on an up for debate economic policy. Keeps anyone from asking basic questions about whether the policy actually does what it’s supposed to do.Report
The motte is “We want to hire the best of the best of the best! Like Operation Paperclip!”
The bailey is “we don’t want to pay too much for a Character Surfacing Artist“.Report
Technically for H-1B the motte is ‘I cannot find an American to do this job, in spite of a good faith attempt to do so.’
I’m not going to try to argue that’s never true but I’d like to think we all approach claims from tech entrepreneurs with skepticism, given how self interested they are in the subject.Report
“Despite a good-faith effort to find a pickleball coach, I just wasn’t able to find one here in the US.”Report
Heh, exactly.Report
This comment makes me feel so old. When I went to work at Bell Labs, the philosophy was “We want to hire the best technical talent we can find. We’ll teach them the specifics of the business after they arrive.”
One of the technical jokes in academia at the time was that Bell Labs hired 25% of the new physics PhDs each year. And occasionally some of them got to do physics. A shiny new PhD in theoretical physics is usually a darned good applied mathematician. A shiny new PhD in experimental physics is usually an excellent electrical/electronics engineer with a bunch of hands-on experience.Report
We’re not even eating our seed corn.
It’s asinine.Report
Being able to change jobs is nothing. That requires you having already located a job and already been hired by them.
The leverage is from the threat of getting let go. You stop having a job, you have 60 days to find another. Which is, of course, harder for people on a H-1B visas than other people, processing itself can take a month or longer, and they have to find a company that not only will do the paperwork but pay the application fee.
60-days is actually pretty damn short to find a job regardless.Report
Yeah, I’ve known people with H1-Bs who were able to line up jobs before quitting one, and were fine, but I’ve known others who were laid off and had to find a new job in a panic, or who were stuck in shite jobs because they couldn’t easily find a new one. At least some employers clearly recognize their leverage, as well.Report
On the 21st of the month, SpaceX aborted a commercial launch for Astranis, a company that builds multi-purpose satellites for geosynchronous orbit. The abort happened at the last possible second, due to some (not yet revealed) problem during engine ignition. SpaceX swapped out the problem booster with a replacement and launched the payload early this morning, eight days later. Orbital launch service is a different sort of business for a “hardware rich” company than for everyone else.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/12/29/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-4-astranis-satellites-on-falcon-9-rocket-from-cape-canaveral/Report
Jimmy Carter is dead at age 100.
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/jimmy-carter-dies/37305624Report