Interesting it comes from the UK

I found some emails in my outbox that I guess didn’t generate any responses, but I still think they are interesting so will post them here…

How the US government secretly reads your email
Secret orders forcing Google and Sonic to release a WikiLeaks volunteer’s email reveal the scale of US government snooping
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/11/us-government-secretly-reads-your-email

It is not that any of this is terribly shocking, what is interesting is this is a UK paper pointing out the hypocrisy of the US government, not a US paper doing so.  As if we needed any more proof that the US media is fully in the pocket of the government.

The Great Firewall Of America

PROTECT IP Renamed E-PARASITES Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111026/12130616523/protect-ip-renamed-e-parasites-act-would-create-great-firewall-america.shtml

Thanks to Erik for this link!

This would appear to be more of the insidious efforts of the wealthy to make law that only applies to others, never to themselves.  As the article describes, the law is clearly designed to sound like it is doing one thing while doing the exact opposite in reality (relying on the sheeple to never actually read the text of the law).  To me it is less about a firewall blocking unwanted content on unreachable severs and more about creating ways to criminally pursue people who the powerful don’t like.  By making it criminal, then they can rely on the tax payers to shell out to prosecute, they no longer need to bother employing their own lawyers.  More socialized risk with privatized rewards, but this time we are screwed both ways, since we are now paying to prosecute ourselves for laws we never wanted in the first place.

From here on, read in reverse order…

I started this blog today and went through my email to pull out things I wanted to post (I looked at my inbox on my gmail account, so only those emails that someone responded to got posted here).  I didn’t have the forethought to post them in the same order that I created them, so if you want to read them in chronological order (not likely to be terribly important), start with the oldest post and read toward this post.  Going forward the newest posts will be the most current.

Another thoughtful article

Some good stuff today…

Why we should protect those accused of rape
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/07/27/dsk_kobe_assange_flatley/index.html

Initially the article sounds outlandish, but it makes a very good point.  Very analogous to the loosy-goosy way people wind up on sexual predator lists (I read one where a 17 year old teenager accused of statutory rape (but no one every claimed was non-consensual) was permanently put on a list of pedophiles because the girl was one year younger than he and thus a minor).  As I complain in my American Injustice writeups:

http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/bok/AmericanInjusticeSystem1.html
http://sol-system.com/koxenrider/bok/AmericanInjusticeSystem2.html

the rights of the victim and accused-who-are-guilty are well cared for, but the rights of the accused-innocent are completely ignored.

Just like free speech: if you are not prepared to defend to the death the right of someone to spout words so ugly they make your blood boil, you are nothing but a poseur (paraphrased from a great line in the movie “The American President”).

Not just grade inflation, now credential inflation

The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

It seems clear to me that we are having an education bubble exactly the same as the housing bubble.  When I started my MBA more than 15 years ago it was purported to be the only graduate degree that had an economic payback (meaning the lifetime incremental increase in income outweighed the lost wages and direct cost of the education).  Even as an undergrad I recall quite clearly the many professors lamenting how unprepared we were for class and this was 20 years ago.  If students were not considered college ready 20 years ago, how much worse could the situation be today?  Now, due to government interference exactly like the housing situation, people are basically being forced/coerced into getting a bachelors degree (of course, with the Fannie/Freddie analogous financing by Sallie we have more parallels) which are driving up costs (how is it possible that the price of education outstrips inflation for decades?  EXACTLY like the housing bubble!) and reducing long-term benefits.  Now we see that to get a job that used to only require a bachelors, now a masters is required.  This is a telling point to me:

“Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960.”

Just like the high school diploma has been cheapened to uselessness by the governments absolute insistence that everyone get one (regardless of qualifications), now the bachelors degree has become nearly useless.  Soon, as the article mentions, a PhD will be required to be qualified and without a doubt getting one will be at least as easy as it used to be to get a high school diploma.

In the Philippines it is quite routine to see college graduates working at McDonald’s.  They even specify a degree when the advertise the job.  And why not?  If you can get them, at least you can feel reasonably sure they will show up for work!

Doomed to repeat

If students fail history, does it matter?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/26/education.history.soboroff/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

I took the quiz they had and while I got 100%, I was left to guess on 3 or 4 of the questions and only the context allowed me to narrow down the choices.  To me history can be fascinating, but the way it is generally taught (e.g., memorization of disconnected facts) fails to interest the vast majority of students.

Not sure how to improve the situation (much like our idiotic government being populated by pathological liars), but things can’t get better until somehow education becomes meaningful.

Something we get to start thinking about soon…

The hard truth about getting old
Sixty isn’t the new 40, and 80 isn’t the new 60. I know it. You know it. So why do we buy into it?
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/08/03/lillian_rubin_on_ageism/index.html

I have read several articles about the idea of people having at a minimum 2-3 careers over their lifespan.  It used to be that the retirement age (65) was greater than the average lifespan (62 if I recall correctly), but now people are expected to live into their 80s and instead of a negative average spent in retirement now you can expect to spend a full 20 year career in retirement.  While I am sure that there are people who would like nothing better than doing nothing, I expect the majority want to have something to occupy their days so they are not just counting down the days until they finally die.  One general upside to being ‘retired’ is you are expected to have some level of income, ideally enough to pay all your basic bills. Therefore, it should be trivial to take on any job that is interesting, but pays poorly, so I would expect an infrastructure to build up that would cater to the interests of us old people to engage in some sort of economic activity.  What form it will take is hard for me to imagine, particularly with the blatant age discrimination that goes on, but if we can make it socially acceptable for ‘people of age’ to take entry level jobs at entry level wages (though that does confound the problems with unemployment with young people, but according to demographics we are going to start running out of young people (compared to old people) shortly), perhaps we can see a way to dramatically reduce the ‘burden’ of old people on society while simultaneously giving them something to do besides cross off the days until death.