Commenter Archive

Don't know if it was based on any of that research, but Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty involves an enormous cube-shaped building with easy access to the roof (parks and such), which makes it desirable for jumpers. The edge is protected, of course, but structured in such a way to lead jumpers to a gap in the fencing, which ends at... a diving board. In a largely throw-away piece of dialog, the building managers note that most jumpers who start out the board, which does the usual diving board bouncing, panic and abandon the effort.

These days, if I were just looking for some cheap CPU cycles to put to work running something, I'd be inclined to pop the $35 for a Raspberry Pi 2. 900 Mhz quad core ARM processor, a gig of RAM, a real GPU, four USB ports. Runs Linux, the standard SD image includes GCC, Perl, and Python. For @veronica-d , it appears GHC is available, but not GHCi, with the proviso that a gig isn't all that much memory.

Way back, in The Psychology of Computer Programming, when people still believed that there was a personality type that made people good programmers, the author describes an exchange between the outside contractor administering personality tests and one of the programmers.

Programmer: Which personality should we use when we take this test?
Contractor: We want you to answer the questions honestly.
Programmer: What kind of a fool do you think I am?

I understand about rescuing. In my last full-time technical gig, people would bring me old PCs, often with the question, "Can you find something useful for this to do?" If I said no, they looked at me like I'd just told them their puppy was going to die.

Re the robot: you'll need software. I can shuffle my little projects around and create some free time to help you with that. Please? Pretty please with sugar on top?

Not for many of the Arabs. France and Belgium have both made a practice of bottling many of their Arab immigrants up in particular neighborhoods and failing to find them any sort of meaningful work (unemployment typically in excess of 50%). I know it's old fashioned, but I believe that one of the necessary things a society needs to do is "tame" its males in their late teens and early twenties. Having them hang out in groups all day, every day, is a recipe for producing a violent minority.

I've occasionally wondered if the whole "mad engineer" meme that has been popular in fiction for the last 150 years is a recognition of that. And I say mad engineer instead of mad scientist because what made them dangerous was the engineering they did. Not, "I've discovered a new power source," but rather, "I've used my new power source to build an army of giant robots to conquer the world."

Which is to say, an “engineering dude” can be one of the most stubbornly idiotic specimen you might encounter in an average week... while at the same time being totally brilliant. It’s kinda weird, right?

Perhaps my sister summed it up well when, speaking about me, she told one of her friends, "Yes, he probably has a mental illness. But it's a socially useful mental illness, so we're not trying to fix him." Exaggerating for effect, but still...

With variations on how you use "the West". That title has been bestowed on, at one time or another, everything from Kentucky/Ohio to the Pacific Coast. From the Great Plains west, the land transfers to the railroads were much more important historically than the Homestead Act transfers. Some of the peculiar patterns of those grants (as shown on this map of public versus private lands in a portion of Oregon) continue to cause problems in today's West.

The Mountain West was much more about resource extraction than agriculture. As a result, the area west of the Great Plains is, and always has been, much less rural than the American mythos portrays. IIRC, the Census Bureau's Northeast and Western regions are within a point or two of having the same percentage of non-rural population. Both are much less rural -- measured in terms of where the population lives -- than the rest of the country.

P4: When you follow the second link back to the original data source, it might be relevant that the measure is "science and engineering indicators" (emphasis mine). Given that we know the Tea Party is older and whiter than the population overall, it would not be surprising to find that they are "engineerier" than the population average as well. Perhaps related, any number of sources (here's a short one) have pointed out the prevalence of engineers and engineering students in terrorist organizations.

Part of me is jealous that someone has either the time, or the minions graduate students assistants to collect all of these datasets.

Or child welfare hearings, most of which are outside of the court system, at least in my state. I don't know how the case workers do their job -- I certainly couldn't.

Perhaps I misunderstood your analogy. I thought you were implying that current practice is to simply dip into the pool at random, rather than picking and choosing.

But in the case of refugees, we do perform basic tests. That's one of the reasons that the number of Syrians accepted can't be ramped up quickly. They have to file with the UNHCR in the country to which they have fled. The UNHCR has to decide that they are at risk even in that country, and should be transferred to a third country (the vast majority are disqualified at this point). If referred to the US, the application has to be processed by an RSC that conducts interviews and such. Then the USCIS has to review the case and make a decision. From beginning to end, the process typically takes 18-24 months. The process is specified in international treaties and US statute -- it would take action by Congress to change it.

This is why the US has accepted only three million refugees over the last 40 years. The vast majority of refugees get stuck in the country to which they initially flee. Few of the Syrians can afford to "flee" directly to the US. Syrians are getting to France and Germany because the EU recently passed a "refugee sharing" law: legally, they have fled directly to France or wherever. Without that, they were almost all going to be stuck in Greece.

Based on the Republican campaign thus far, we would seem to be in the range of 20-25% who are against refugees because they're against all immigration. The "not in my state" thing is a red herring -- they've got to know that once a refugee is in the US legally, there's no real checks on where they can go. Colorado has a growing Somali refugee population. That's not because the government has decided to settle them here initially, but because we have meat packing plants willing to hire them. This is a growing trend nationally. I wonder how many of these governors have considered that there's a fair chance the meat they're eating at supper tonight passed through a Muslim refugee's hands?

I admit to a bias based on where I live. Draw a line down the center of the Great Plains and consider the region to the west. In round numbers, 40% of the area of the contiguous states, population about 70M. The vast majority of the population, certainly >60M, live in urban/suburban areas totaling far less area than Montana. Arguably, you can add in the non-marginal (when irrigated) agricultural land and it's still smaller than Montana. In one sense it is Germany, it's just divided up into chunks scattered here and there across a vast landscape. That doesn't mean that the empty spaces between those chunks is usable, though.

The carrying capacity in the West is largely determined by water during multi-year droughts, and by how much diversion and storage can smooth out the supply. There are any number of experts who will explain in great detail why Southern California and the rest of the area that draws on the lower Colorado River has already overshot that capacity. The Bureau of Reclamation will probably be able to juggle the water levels in Lakes Mead and Powell for another couple of years before serious emergency cuts get made, but they're clearly coming. None of the West is immune: Vancouver, BC implemented stage 3 emergency water restrictions this past summer.

Of course, from a general population perspective the West has been absorbing an enormous number of immigrants annually for decades; it's just that most of them came from elsewhere in the US :^)

At exactly this moment in time, yes, the correct policy position is that the US should accept lots of Syrian refugees. Thank you for saying it, Jason. That out of the way, I disagree on the open borderish parts of the post (ie, the "all immigration has turned out well, so that will always be true" stuff).

1) It is one thing to be a temporary refuge. It is another to be the permanent residence for millions of people displaced by a much smaller number of bad guys. At some point, it would seem the answer has to be "Ten million of you have to say 'no' to one million of the bad guys, not run away."

2) In the long term, the answer can't always be "The US will absorb some millions of refugees." The US chunk of North America has a carrying capacity for an American-ish lifestyle, with single-family homes and generous allocations of electricity and broad streets and personal transportation and cutting-edge medical tech and... I happen to think that we're close to it. I don't apply this just to Syria. The US can't forever be the safety valve for Mexican or Central American societies by absorbing another few million immigrants. It is one thing to say "Previous immigration waves have not crossed that carrying capacity." It is quite another to say that we won't ever exceed the carrying capacity, that increasing population will never result in a decline in living standard. Bring numbers that suggest it can be done without baking the planet.

3) I spent the afternoon thinking about what could be done with a few thousand 30-minute road flares, each with a small circuit board (square inch or two) and battery attached to it. I came away convinced that the world is lucky the bad guys seem to lack imagination. If unemployed US engineers ever decide that terrorism is in their interest, we are screwed. (Small note, tongue mostly in cheek, but not entirely, to the folks who think there is no difference between STEM programs and liberal arts programs: liberal arts programs don't generally teach you skills for rendering cities uninhabitable.)

"Cocktail" may give people the wrong idea. The drugs are not mixed pre-injection; three drugs are administered in a particular sequence. The first renders the recipient deeply unconscious. The second paralyzes most muscles. The third stops the heart. IIRC, the real problem is with the first drug. It's no longer manufactured in the US, the EU bans export, and the Indian suppliers have not been approved for human use in the US. As an anesthesia, it's been largely replaced in the developed world by safer more-expensive drugs that do not put the patient as far under.

There's a lot of economic and political discussion points here.

Strange tax incentives. For part of my tech career I was a depreciable asset.

Rubio might even mean engineers when he says that. It still leaves him with the problem that American businesses don't want to fully employ the population of engineers we currently have. If STEM is the answer, then the question isn't "How do we get more students to study STEM?" The question is "How do we get American businesses to hire more STEM graduates?" I use "graduates" broadly here -- an unemployed 45-year-old hard-real-time programmer who can't get an interview is not being put to good use.

I hear people bemoan the fact that China is graduating more engineers than the US each year. I tell them that the thing to be afraid of is that China is finding engineering jobs for all those graduates.

I found the comments in this subthread to be quite interesting. Probably says a lot about where/when I grew up, but the large majority of homeowners would have been able to do things like interior painting, replacing the toilet guts, replacing a worn lamp switch, re-gluing chair or table joints that had dried out. A sizable fraction would be able to replace a faucet, replace wall switches and outlets, do much more extensive (hidden) furniture repairs. Unless you were rich, you were expected to do those things -- you called in a pro for the big things, did the routine maintenance yourself.

I'm looking forward to #1; the rest of the items on the list look like it's probably reasonable. Jumping well out ahead, is "failure to clear" covered in one of #2-8?

I suspect you're wrong about the language. I'd be surprised if the scholarship didn't say clearly that it was contingent on your continuing to participate in all of the team's activities, less a handful of spelled-out exceptions. There are a small number of schools that do multi-year scholarships, or that allow you to keep the scholarship when you stop taking part, but that's not the standard NCAA arrangement.

At least for the very top players, it's not the loss of the scholarship that's the big risk -- it's the loss of the opportunity to audition for the NFL general managers.

I argue with it. It's the stock supply-side argument -- if we produce more vocational-training graduates, jobs that make use of that training will magically appear. It's not clear that we're employing our current population of vocational and STEM folks well. There are very few places where you can point and say, "Look! Salaries and hourly rates in this STEM or vocational field are increasing rapidly because there's a shortage!"

Yes. Today's professional welder is expected to know more techniques, to be applied across more kinds of metal, using more complex equipment, than used to be the case.

Not good enough. You claim that Obama should have pulled off a miracle. Which one?

The Bush administration couldn't negotiate a SOFA in Iraq that extended past 2011. Obama should have given the Iraqis the things that Bush wouldn't (eg, US military personnel being tried in Iraqi civilian courts)? Obama should have just "wanted" a favorable SOFA more than Bush did and the Iraqis would have given in? Obama should have declared the US an occupying power? Obama should have declared the right to deploy its military without a SOFA? Obama should have supported a separate Kurdistan if they would let US troops stay?

Pick something that was on the list of not just wishful thinking.