Only an economist could believe something so stupid (proven by “evidence”) that H-1B visas are good for American workers. First, over what time scale, and second, in what circumstances?

Oh, companies bring in more H-1Bs and hire more American workers at the same time? And pray tell, when does this happen? When the economy is expanding. Some insight, there. I am getting accustomed to seeing through the typical economist tricks and salary-motivated mistakes so it just doesn’t take me as long as it used to.

This is also common methodological error in economics papers: presume the existence of the item you are claiming benefits the economy and/or workers, and then fail to examine worlds without the existence of said “beneficial” program as they cannot be tested. Fail to mention this or to account for it in any way. Thus, your paper’s postulation is merely a tautology, though gussied up in a lot of impenetrable mathematical formalism. As Taleb has pointed out, most economics papers have this problem.

That so many Americans are so fond of donuts proves definitively that they deserve the garbage food that corporate propagandists are pushing on them.

Donuts all taste the same no matter what is on them, and are only capable of being enjoyed by someone with the food mentality of a toddler.

You learn this lesson week 1 on helpdesk lol. “The network is down!” typically means “My USB Printer is disconnected!”

— Zeusce (@Zeussce) June 7, 2019

Yes. Working in retail or help desk are the two main causes of one to hold a much, much lower assessment of humanity in general.

To an average user, “the network is down” can mean these things:

1) They kicked the power cord out of the wall.

2) They didn’t plug in their computer.

3) They didn’t turn on their monitor(s).

4) They kicked the ethernet cable out of the wall.

5) They forgot how to find the Start menu.

6) They forgot how to open some application. (Of course, when you ask which application, they usually say something inane like “Microsoft.” Yes, just “Microsoft.”)

7) The power in the building is out.

8) The change that they’ve been getting emails about for three months has occurred.

9) They forgot to turn on their wifi, or forgot their wifi password.

10) They can’t open some document.

11) They didn’t connect to VPN.

12) They forgot how to navigate to a mounted drive.

13) They are in a meeting room and didn’t plug their ethernet cable in or connect to wifi.

14) They spilled coffee and/or tea all over their computer.

15) They decided to move their computer somewhere else and plugged in everything in an absurd way that would never work.

16) They plugged in a USB drive and aren’t able to see it because it’s unformatted or broken.

17) They installed malware that’s causing browser issues.

18) A site block list is blocking some gambling site they are attempting to navigate to.

19) They can’t make a phone call because they dialed incorrectly.

20) A light on their laptop that they don’t understand is flashing (usually battery light).

Occasionally, very, very rarely, it does actually mean the network is down. However, then, the user will usually instead say something like, “I can’t get to my files!” This is a much better sign of the network being down than any user anywhere actually saying “the network is down.” In this case, the network is almost never down.

All of those above are the actual problems users have had when they’ve told me or my staff in the past that “the network is down,” by the way. Alas for all of us, not a single one of those is made up.

What if eating meat is not only wrong – but obsolete?

Meat is dead. Carnivores are going the way of cigarette smokers and, by 2050, there’s a good chance that it will be socially unacceptable to eat meat. In the same way that we’re now horrified people used to smoke in offices and airplanes, we’ll find it almost unthinkable that people used to consume animals so casually and frequently.

Fine with me, as long as I can still get meat. I have no problem at all with being absolutely positively downright socially unacceptable. Then, I will be as a demi-god, lording over the malnourished eating their garbage food. OK, I have no interest in lording over anyone, really, but I won’t eat the offal and heart-destroying dreck that food companies are peddling as meat replacements no matter how much it tastes like real meat. I care what it does to my body and if it allows me to gain 10 pounds of muscle in six months. (Hint: It does not, but it will play hell with your circulatory system and other important bits.)

The propaganda is really hitting hard now. It might really be time to buy that large freezer so I can keep meat handy when these doofuses attempt to get it banned. Just because they choose to be poorly-nourished skinnyfats doesn’t mean I have to be.

Naomi Wolf’s Career of Blunders Continues in ‘Outrages.’

That a woman just as incompetent and as clueless as Thomas Friedman can succeed is proof of sorts that equality is closer than ever. In some cases, you no longer have to be twice as good to make it half as far (at least if you are an attractive white woman).

The heightened interest in space is going to benefit the military industrial complex more than ordinary people.

Funding will be poured into the war machine in an attempt to maintain the existing world order.

Those resources should go toward a #GreenNewDeal

— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) June 5, 2019

I don’t understand how and why so many leftists think so poorly and non-systemically and ahistorically. I mean, they try, but they are utter shit at it. Just worse than toddlers. I need to ponder this more because I have difficulty with understanding how this can be the case.

I like this person, but false dichotomy here, among other issues. Not only is base assumption utterly incorrect, but DARPA was a result of space funding, and from DARPA and other related space-race-caused funding we got:

*ARPANET (direct predecessor of the internet)

*Video conferencing, the mouse, the GUI, hypertext (look up Douglas Engelbart if you don’t believe, and yes, we was receiving directly and indirectly government funding at the time)

*Siri and other personal digital assistants

*Unix (and therefore Linux), and many, many other computing innovations

*GPS

I could go on, but is that not enough?

Not that all of these were funded directly for/by space research, but funding for anything societally useful tends to move in a cluster. See here for more info.

As Fishman points out, while the U.S. government was funding moon rockets, it was also thinking big in social policy: the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, Medicare and Medicaid. When it withdrew from space, it pulled back from such initiatives, too. Public investments of all sorts tend to sink or swim together.

I agree with her that it’d be better that it were not done under the oversight of the military-industrial complex. But in the US, that’s about all there is. Who else will do these things?

As I said, I like her, but when an argument is incoherent and obviously fatally flawed in some base assumptions or concerning very-recent history, no reason to agree with it. I just don’t value comity or being liked that much.

While the new Mac Pro is not something I’ll ever buy, people who say it’s already a failure don’t understand the market they’re aiming at.

This is not for home users and not for casual video editors. While I too wish Apple had released an expandable computer for the home market, that market is shrinking and cynically speaking, people were generally too dumb for home computers.

The Mac Pro is aimed, in other words, at TV and movie production studios that are required to provide output in 4K or above. This “expensive” device (including monitor) is replacing hardware that costs 10-40x as much, often. In this market, it’s a bargain for the capabilities that you get. It’ll be far faster in less space than what 99% of studios now use. It’ll pay its cost back almost immediately — even the monitor.

Yes, the stand is ridiculous, I agree with that. But too many people don’t understand what they are commenting on when they snark about this topic because they’ve never needed to edit a dozen 6K* video inputs and handle audio syncing with that, etc.

*Many professional movie cameras capture in 6K and this is down-converted to 4K. Looks better and preserves more fidelity that way.

Something I learned managing people over the years is that only about one out of fifty people don’t need pretty explicit directions to complete nearly any given task. The other forty-nine will need it step by step or they simply can’t do it. This isn’t ideal for a lot of the business world (particularly IT) because of how often you are doing things that have not been done exactly that way before.

If you’re the 1/50 who can just get things done without detailed and constant instruction, you’re immensely valuable. Working with people like that is so much easier and the organization is so much better off. The intern I worked with a while ago was like that, which was probably one of the reasons we got along so well.

Perhaps this is trainable. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all, though. Quite the opposite. I’d love to be proved wrong, however.