Facing the reality of HiTech

Here is the reality:

"In 2014, tech companies Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Apple, and others, released corporate transparency reports that offered detailed employee breakdowns. In May, Google said 17% of its tech employees worldwide were women, and, in the U.S., 1% of its tech workers were black and 2% were Hispanic. June 2014 brought reports from Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! said that 15% of its tech jobs were held by women, 2% of its tech employees were black and 4% Hispanic. Facebook reported that 15% of its tech workforce was female, and 3% was Hispanic and 1% was black. In August, Apple reported that 80% of its global tech staff was male and that, in the U.S., 54% of its tech jobs were staffed by Caucasians and 23% by Asians. Soon after, USA Today published an article about Silicon Valley's lack of tech-industry diversity, pointing out that it is largely white or Asian, and male. "Blacks and Hispanics are largely absent," it reported, "and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley — from giant companies to start-ups to venture capital firms".

It's an unbudgeable gap. The companies concerned are very politically correct and have made great efforts to alter the pattern of their employment -- but with negligible success.  The industry concerned runs on IQ and the level of IQ required is just not generally available outside white and Asian males.

The only way to get more women and minority employees in the sector would be to drop recruitment standards.  And doing that would rapidly hand the entire industry over to China.  China already has an IQ advantage over America so will probably take charge eventually anyway but the innovativeness of American firms is so far keeping America in the lead.  Doing anything to degrade the performance of the sector would be fatal.  My software developer son has been to China three times recently in order to teach computer people there some skills they did not currently have and he has only one word for the Chinese:  "Unbeatable".

What I think outsiders don't get is how complex computer programming is.  It requires the utmost attention to detail and constant creativity to find a way ahead through the task.  For some of us that comes easily but for most people it just cannot be done.  Many years ago, I tried to teach FORTRAN to sociology students at a major university but in the end none of them really "got" it. They were smart but not that smart. And the composition of silicon valley firms is a loud announcement of where the required level of talent is mostly to be found. The Leftist preoccupation with equality is just madness in that sphere.  It could very easily become destructive madness. Reality is unco-operative with Leftist dreams -- JR

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It is a caricature of what happened in Charlottesville to call Trump and his supporters racists

Since Trump’s ascendancy, there have been repeated outbreaks of violence, mostly perpetrated by Antifa against ordinary Republicans and other conservatives, either at pro-Trump rallies or on other public platforms. These people have been either stopped from speaking or physically attacked by Antifa and other left-wing demonstrators.

Such attacks on mainstream conservatives have been ignored, downplayed or even endorsed by Democrats and their media acolytes.

In June the House Republican whip, Steve Scalise, was shot and almost killed by a Bernie Sanders-supporting Democrat who opened fire on a group of Republicans at a baseball practice. A New Jersey Democratic party activist, James Devine, posted on his Facebook page that he had “little sympathy” for Scalise because he opposed gun restriction policies. Another Democratic party official in Nebraska was fired after saying he was “glad” that Scalise had been shot.

The real target is mainstream American values and culture
The Democratic establishment dismisses such people as mavericks with no significance for the left-wing causes they support. Yet a double standard operates against President Trump, who is held to be personally defined by the unacceptable nature of a tiny minority of his supporters.

The fact that the former Ku Klux Klan “grand wizard” David Duke, who was at Charlottesville, claims to support Trump’s agenda (that is, when he’s not in the next breath condemning him) is being used to smear Trump himself as a white supremacist.

It is grotesque to equate Trump’s pledge to “make America great again”, which was endorsed by the 63 million Americans who voted for him, with the bigotry of white supremacism. The former is driven by people wanting to uphold core American values they deeply cherish and share with each other. The latter is driven by loathing of racial and ethnic groups deemed to be inferior.

In last year’s presidential campaign Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Will Quigg, “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter. He claimed she had a “hidden agenda” and that if elected she would come out for gun ownership and sealing America’s borders. Quigg’s support of Clinton was rightly dismissed as either mischief-making or barking mad. Yet when such people support Trump, this is held to define him.

The left’s real target is not the far right but mainstream conservatives who want to uphold American values and culture: the people who brought Trump to power. Defending national identity, however, is denounced by western progressives as white racism.

The result is an unholy alliance between the left and the far right. A white supremacist called Richard Spencer invented the blanket term “alt-right” to associate his ilk with conservatives seeking merely to defend American identity and core values. Through this tactic, Spencer intended to boost the far right and simultaneously smear and thus destroy regular conservatives.

The left has seized upon this smear with unbridled joy, routinely using the “alt-right” term to try to destroy the national identity agenda by bracketing it with white supremacism. The result is a powerful boost for the far right. From deserved obscurity, they suddenly find the left are transmitting their every utterance to the world. The phrase “useful idiots” comes inescapably to mind.

Charlottesville was but the latest front in what has become America’s cultural civil war. It won’t, alas, be the last.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Is Dumping Millions of Middle Class to Insure More Poor

While Democrats and Republicans fret over millions "losing" coverage to reform, the actual law is taking its toll.

Barack Obama and the Democrats’ “Affordable” Care Act was never really about making the cost of health care more affordable. It was never about giving Americans greater access to health care. ObamaCare was always a scheme designed to give the government greater power to control and redistribute Americans’ wealth, essentially taking from the middle class to give it the poor — and to insurance companies.

While Democrats like to point to the increasing numbers of individuals receiving ObamaCare’s subsidized insurance coverage, they are ignoring a dirty little secret. The number of Americans with unsubsidized individual coverage has decreased precipitously. From March 2016 to March 2017, some 2.6 million fewer people had unsubsidized policies, an overall decrease of 15% in one year alone.

But the unsubsidized coverage bleed is not limited to the individual market. Since 2013, the year before ObamaCare began subsidizing plans, the number of individuals with employment-based coverage has decreased by almost three million.

Doug Badger of National Review describes the issue:

The narrative nevertheless endures. Believing it requires indifference to millions of people who can no longer afford individual policies and to millions more who may forfeit their policies with the next round of rate hikes. For many of them, Obamacare has been a serial nightmare, producing policy cancellations, skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, and a narrowing choice of doctors before finally leaving them uninsured.

Obamacare is insuring more poor people and uninsuring millions of middle-income people. That suits the Democratic party and many congressional Republicans just fine. They measure social progress in the number of people receiving government assistance. Those struggling to pay their own way evoke little sympathy. Lawmakers of both parties, whose consciences were lacerated by CBO’s theory that millions would “lose” coverage under the GOP’s “repeal and replace” legislation (most of those “losses” the result of people voluntarily dropping insurance once the individual mandate was repealed) are unmoved that millions actually have lost coverage under the law they fought to preserve.

Obama was a leftist who was bound and determined to foist his socialism onto the American people. Health care was his means to that end, and so far too many Americans and their representatives in Congress are content to sell their freedom for the mirage of greater security and health.

SOURCE

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Problems with AG Jeff Sessions

The two big issues I have with Sessions are his intention to escalate the so-called war on drugs, and his support for civil asset forfeiture.

The war on drugs is misnamed. It is not a war on inanimate objects, it is a war on American citizens who make choices some people in government don’t like. As for civil asset forfeiture–government’s ability to take people’s property without even accusing them of a crime–I honestly don’t see any defense for it that is compatible with basic principles of due process and liberty.

Sessions seems to have gained a bit of support from Trump for his attack on sanctuary cities, I’m sorry to see. My sorrow here has nothing to do with sanctuary cities and everything to do with the war on drugs and civil asset forfeiture. I don’t feel I’m being extreme in expressing dissatisfaction with an attorney general who has so little respect for individual rights.

SOURCE

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CA: More Costs Flowing from Dam Negligence

National Water Quality Month is turning out rather dry in California, but trouble will soon be washing up in court. Farmers and business owners have filed more than 90 claims against the state government for causing a total of $1.7 billion in losses from the spillway failure at Oroville Dam back in February. Might they have a case?

As we noted, the failure of the spillway prompted the evacuation of 200,000 people, hardly a frivolous move, because if the spillway collapsed it could have caused complete failure of the dam, built in 1968.

As it turned out, government engineers knew for decades that the dirt spillway was unreliable but failed to reinforce it with concrete. As Representative John Garamendi (D–Walnut Grove) famously put it, the dirt spillway “worked fine until it had to be used, in which case it didn’t work so well.” State water bosses also failed to add gates above the spillway, which would have allowed the reservoir to rise another ten feet. Governor Jerry Brown claimed to be unaware of these problems and proclaimed, “stuff happens and we respond.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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