Ed West leaving Telegraph blogs

But what a goodbye. I've only recently started reading West, through the odd confluence of Steve Sailer and Damian Thompson, but I shall enjoy his snark wherever he goes.

It's my job as a conservative to depress you, so I'm sad to say that, as this will be my last blogpost here, you'll have to find  some other way to get yourself down from now on; maybe stick yourself in a room with some Radiohead CDs and a bottle of gin and put Requiem for a Dream on a loop.

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it’s a fundamental conservative principle that if something repeatedly goes wrong over and over and over again, it’s probably not going to work the next time, or ever.

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Since the time of the Greeks, people have been coming up with schemes to create better societies that are hopelessly unrealistic, and from 1789 the human race has become hugely inventive at thinking of terrible ways to leave us all impoverished or dead, most of them based on the idea that humans are instinctively good.

Joel Kotkin on Zuckerberg et al.

Joel Kotkin at his website NewGeography finds Mark Zuckerberg's immigration enthusiam as self-interested as I do:

Shady 1%This bit is especially good:

Outsource Manufacturing, Import Engineers

Perversely, the small number of jobs—mostly clustered in Silicon Valley—created by tech companies has helped its moguls avoid public scrutiny. Google employs 50,000, Facebook 4,600, and Twitter less than 1,000 domestic workers. In contrast, GM employs 200,000, Ford 164,000, and Exxon over 100,000. Put another way, Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many workers.

This is an equation that defines inequality: more and more wealth concentrated in fewer hands and benefiting fewer workers.

While Facebook and Twitter have little role in the material economy, Apple, which continues to collect the bulk of its profit from physical goods—computers, iPads, iPhones and so on—has outsourced nearly all of its manufacturing to foreign companies like Foxconn that employ workers, often in appalling conditions, in China and elsewhere. About 700,000 people work on Apple’s physical products for subcontractors, according to the New York Times, but almost none of them are in the U.S. “The jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs bluntly told President Obama at a 2011 dinner in Silicon Valley.

It is really interesting to think about all those extra manufacturing jobs in the US. US workers are more efficient than Chinese workers, so it would take fewer people to do the same work, probably 250,000 or less, but that is a big chunk of the labor market. There are lots of reasons why companies off-shored manufacturing, but it really does seem like the benefits of this practice have accrued to a very few, while the costs have been shared broadly.

The argument has been made that the net prosperity gain of the Chinese and other emerging economies outweighs the net loss to American workers, but I do notice this argument is never made by unemployed ironworkers from the Rust Belt. Besides, I thought modern economics isn't zero-sum.

CrossFit 2013-05-15

4 rounds

• 500m row
• 12 situps
• 12 pushups
• 12 kettlebell swings [16 kg]

Time 18:50 minutes

CrossFit 2013-05-13

1/4 mile run 7.7 MPH

21-15-9

• Deadlifts [40 kg]
• Ring dips, band assisted

Time 6:00

Last time 6:40 with 50 kg

Dessert

• Back stretch
• 25 wallballs

Water and speakers

CrossFit 2013-05-06

Inspired by this CrossFit journal article on catching the bar low, and this blog post on squatting low shared by my friend Michael Bann, I decided to try dropping the weight and getting lower.

Snatch-grip squat press

• 5 reps with the 15 kg bar. Much harder than it looked.

Front squat

• 9-9-7-5-3-1-1
• 20-25-30-35-40-45-50kg

Mobility

• Foam roller on thoracic and lumbar spine, inner and outer quads
• Supine dynamic hip internal rotation
• Split-stance kneeling adductor mobs
• Half-kneeling hip stretch

Octopus escape

CrossFit 2013-05-01

1/2 mile run

Time 4:00

Back squats

• 9-9-7-5-1-3-1
• 40-50-60-70-75-70-70kg

25 wallballs

Prisoner's Hope Book Review

by David Feintuch
506 pages; $5.50

This is the first book in the Seafort Saga that I actually started to like Nick Seafort. He's a little older, more experienced, more jaded maybe. He is still the anguished scrupulous perfectionist, but he has finally started to apply the lesson that sometimes what an officer doesn't see is as important as what he sees.

This book follows the same structure as the others in the series, the first three-quarters of each book give Nick ample opportunity to alienate his friends, disrespect his superiors, and make new enemies, while providing the background for the enormity Nick will perpetrate at the end of the book when the fish return.

The backdrop for this story is the restive colony world of Hope Nation, an agrarian world dominated by a few powerful landowners. Since Nick cannot forswear his oath to duel the Admiral who abandoned him to die in the last book, he finds himself recuperating on shore duty, reluctantly appointed as the liaison to the landowners. Surprisingly, this is a duty he discharges well, without undue self-recriminations or creating personal enemies. Which isn't to say it goes well. Nick acquires enemies and his friends suffer, but it isn't personal. Of course, the rebellion of the colonists is complicated by the return of the fish, who care little for the twists of politics, other than perhaps in having a sense of tragic timing.

John Reilly noted this series is indelibly marked as a product of the 1990s.

On the other hand, there are many things about the Seafort Saga that mark it as a work of the 1990s. Some of these are scientific fashions, such as the notion that animal life in general and intelligent life in particular are so improbable that the human race is unique in the universe. (The alien menace, as we will see, leaves something to be desired.) The physics of faster-than-light travel may owe something to the theories of the cult-physicist, David Bohm. Aside from science, the series reflects the period of its composition in such matters as the relentlessly coed military and the fact that socialism is absent from the conceptual universe of the characters. Indeed, the most interesting difference from the science fiction of fifty years earlier is the change in the cultural trajectory of the future history the author imagines. Mid-century science fiction usually assumed that the alternative to secular modernity was barbarism. The world of the Seafort Saga, in contrast, really is postmodern in a way that will remind readers of Oswald Spengler’s forecast of the “Second Religiousness.”

Somehow, the best literary representations of a point in time are the futures imagined in science fiction. The aspect of Prisoner's Hope that struck me most strongly this way is the UN resolution banning so much as the mention of nuclear weapons. Unlike the somewhat nominal capital offense of blasphemy, this ban is enforced with deadly seriousness. Like bomb jokes in an airport, even using the phrase can end in the hangman's noose. When the Cold War was fresher in memory, everyone took this sort of thing more seriously, but after the spectacular failure to find any sort of nuclear program in Iraq after 9/11, public interest is waning.

Nick turns to the forbidden nuclear weapons out of desperation, both personal and professional, fully expecting to pay for his sins, personal and professional, with his life. Of course, it doesn't turn out that way. In a twist, Nick ends up covered in glory by trying to protect his friends from the [perceived] enormity of his crime. If he been more true to his iron code, the ultimate sacrifice he inspires in others could have been given its due. Providence never gives Nick a break.

My other book reviews

Immigration and High-Skill Employment in the US

I had been wanting to look into this subject, and lo, I find that someone else has already done it.

Guestworkers in the High-Skill U.S. Labor Market.

I've long been dubious that we don't have enough native-born STEM graduates in the US. My reasoning is based on my own experience rather than exhaustive data, but I think the things I have noticed are nonetheless potent arguments. First, wages in technical fields are good, but not that good. If we truly had a shortage, in the economic sense, of programmers or engineers or what have you, wages should respond appropriately. If there were a shortage of programmers, I would expect to see companies fighting to pay 18 year old high school graduates $50,000 a year. A real worker shortage looks like thisInstead, you can make that kind of wage, but you need at least a bachelor's degree, if not a master's. Programming is still a field where a true talent can rise to the top regardless of credentials, but in any discussion of larger job trends, such folks are an exception.

Mark Zuckerberg has been in the news lately pushing for more H-1B visas for high-skilled tech workers, but many tech moguls have been pushing for expansion of the H-1B program for many years, along with other different, but related programs. Zuckerberg et al. have been claiming that there aren't enough quality workers available in the US, but I find this less plausible than they simply want to keep their labor costs down by importing cheaper workers.

I can think of one explanation that would support the claim there are not enough skilled STEM workers available in the US. Plausibly, one could claim the existing industry has already skimmed the high-IQ high-motivation graduates, and the remaining workers aren't good enough to do the needed work. However, I don't think the available data supports this either. Let's look and see. Here is what the EPI report notes:

Consider that U.S. students make up one-third of the entire global population of high-performers on tests of science knowledge.

...

For STEM graduates, the supply exceeds the number hired each year by nearly two to one, depending on the field of study. Even in engineering, U.S. colleges have historically produced about 50 percent more graduates than are hired into engineering jobs each year.

ln the computer and information sciences field, which is where nearly half of high-skill guest workers are employed, we see that about two-thirds of college graduates find jobs in their field 1 year after graduation, and of those who don't find a job, nearly half cite low pay and poor working conditions as the reason. For some of these, I would find it plausible that they weren't actually qualfied for the job. There is a skill distribution amongst college graduates, and not everyone is qualfied to do every job in this field. However, it does seem that the higher number of guest-workers in IT compared to engineering may be associated with a higher number of US college graduates being unable to find IT work because the pay is too low.

College grads working in fieldReasons for not finding work in field

This matches the rate of growth we see in guestworkers compared to US citizens and permanent residents graduating with degrees in computer and information sciences.

Guestworker growth

The authors of the study go on to look at the responsiveness of the domestic supply of graduates to wages over time, looking at both IT and petroleum engineering. In both cases, they find that increasing wages lead to increasing numbers of graduates in the field, while decreasing wages lead to a decrease in domestic graduates, with a suitable time lag. So in a sense, Zuckerberg is correct that the domestic supply of graduates in the computer and information sciences field is decreasing. However, the problem is he's not paying well enough, and importing workers only makes the problem worse. Unless, the domestic supply isn't what Zuckerberg is after, in which case he's getting exactly what he wants. Last time I checked, Mark Zuckerberg is really, really smart. Which is more likely?