There is something about a nuclear plant surrounded by flood waters that is more disturbing that a coal fired plant or any other kind of energy producing facility. What makes it more disturbing is that knowledge in the back of our skull that if things go wrong, the investors aren’t just out an investment, we all will pay a price for such a calamity.
May we live in a world where reason and knowledge are used to make energy decisions.
James Pilant
via Jewish Nerd
Battle. That’s a very strange word to use in the context of media in conflict but I don’t doubt its importance or relevance.
I believe the battle for the print, broadcast and cable media has been lost. The kind of news that was in the paper and on the television 35 years ago is gone. We now live in an age of “distraction” news, content free news and outright deception. It is a great pity.
A free people cannot defend itself without information, facts and leadership, we have none of that. We have celebrity scandals, fake facts that our sniveling media decline to describe as a lies and a jello spined leadership so beholden to financial interests they contest among themselves for who is the most slavish in their devotion. They throw their offering on the altars of these demigods like the food offerings thrown before the wooden carvings of Odin in Pre Medieval Scandinavia.
Read on and discover nations and cultures where the media is still up for grabs.
James Pilant
via Only Ed
Facts are facts. Whether about evolution or climate change, the data is going to just keep accumulating in ever larger stacks of hard to ignore facts.
It’s getting hotter. Now, tornadoes are not very get indicators of climatic change – too many variable. Hurricanes are a little better but not much. The best indicators are average temperatures over time and weather volatility.
However, with the rise of “intelligent design,” more and more science is a matter of opinion. Thus, the United States is gradually losing that key part of the democratic process, critical thinking. If we don’t like what science or history or sociology says, we just get together with a few other disgruntled individuals and rewrite history or science. It’s easy. Pretend there is a controversy, and that you are God’s seekers after truth.
Will we be burning witches soon? Or giving faith healing status to collect insurance for services rendered? I don’t know. Let’s watch. The 14th century awaits.
James Pilant
via madaboutthenews
How many times do we have to read this same story? Telling someone that they have to stop paying to access a federal program, encouraging them to believe that they are going to get a loan modification, when your bank has already decided that no one is going to get this kind of deal, and then foreclosing on them when they fall for the bait – is this they way banks are supposed to make money?
James Pilant
The adjunct professor here tells us what happens when he flunks a majority of his students. –
What actually happens is that nothing happens. I feel no pressure from the colleges in either direction. My department chairpersons, on those rare occasions when I see them, are friendly, even warm. They don’t mention all those students who have failed my courses, and I don’t bring them up. There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more-widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.
I share some of these concerns. My persistent gripes about the “necessity” of policemen and firemen having to master college algebra is probably well known locally. A college education is appropriate in many fields but surely we can find a variety of mechanisms(of which a college education is a major choice but not the only choice) by which policemen and other municipal employees can be promoted.
James Pilant
via uberlearner
Jayaraman Rajah Iyer walks his own path and has his own thoughts. Here’s what he things about the afore mentioned post –
Dear JP
US has created a bubble of its own, not just a furious-attack as Krugman says [from WP on the bubble..the response of the right was a furious attack; basically, it was politically incorrect to raise any question about the glorious Bush boom.] but a piranha syndrome on any one who talks against cap… before the ism is even completed, by US – .com, .gov, .edu, .org, in one voice by the dots that stand disconnected otherwise. US.ppl stands completely alienated. An idea when turned over, through a maze of analysts before considered by the CEO led team of experts at a Camp Goliath or some such resorts the incremental cost of the idea is so prohibitive in comparison to the corresponding benefits, that it is thrown in the dust bin. US has expended itself out. No country in the world can afford US Model.
Andrew often comments on my posts and always has something interesting to say. –
In a lot of cases, the jobs that are going overseas are NOT in job fields that have a shortage of workers. You mentioned manufacturing. Thats the big one.
This is speculation, but I think that outsourcing jobs has actually created a lot of the worker shortages in particular job markets.
My generation, while growing up, was constantly bombarded with this idea that if you did not go to college, then you wont be successful. I think this mentality was partly due to our parents generation seeing those high school level jobs (manufacturing, customer service, technical support, etc) being sent overseas and they wanted to steer their children away from having to look for those types of jobs. An unfortunate biproduct of that panic is that, with everyone going to college, the value of the college degree has fallen. Another consequence is that people, generally, arent interested in going into a skilled labor field (carpenter, welder, electrician, etc.) because they’ve been told over and over again that you need college to be successful. This is CREATING that shortage that proponents of offshoring cite to justify their actions.
That this actually controversial is astonishing. Nevertheless, you there are countless web sites that argue that offshoring was good for everybody.
Then, on Feb. 9, the White House released its annual Economic Report of the President. Buried deep on Page 229 of the report was a paragraph noting the growth of offshore outsourcing by U.S. businesses and suggesting this was basically no different from other kinds of international trade:
“The basic economic forces behind the transactions are the same… . When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically.”
I teach college, specifically business law. When my class began to fill up with former manufacturing workers desperate for some kind of work or work related opportunity, I couldn’t help but notice those were the kinds of jobs that made this community, the jobs that made America. It was those jobs that were leaving.
I’ll let the article make the rest of the argument.
James Pilant
Art and mood. A story in a picture.
(There is a lot of amazing pictures on this site!)
JP
The view from on the ground in Fukushima.
I will admit I don’t care much for the “fear mongering label.” Japan is likely hour to hour to experience a nuclear crisis more severe than what they have now. This is fact. An unfortunate fact but still a fact.
James Pilant
via Bolsoversion
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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