5 Years

Five years ago tomorrow I started this blog. I was working at a job I didn't particularly like nor found mentally fulfilling, and the blog was intended to be a creative outlet. Blogging took a little getting used to. Honestly a sizable chunk of my first entries were blatant plagiarism of Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column. But it was something fun to do and I got better at it over the years. A couple or three entries had pictures of DIY projects I'd done, which gained traction on Google Image search and I get a pretty regular stream of 200-300 people a week to those particular posts. The other posts get about 20 readers.

But it was never about traffic for me. Or revenue. It was about writing. I'm sort of a weird engineer because I like writing. I like practicing it. And after 5 years of honing my writing, I'm ready to be done with blogging. My current job is incredibly exhausting, but I love it. My family, since I started this blog, has grown by two children and two dogs. I've bought a house (and everything that goes with it). My wife finished school and got a full-time job. My daughter starts Kindergarten in a few weeks. Life is just really busy.
And I committed myself to writing a book, which is coming along pretty well. And I'm trying to learn Spanish.

But the busy-ness isn't the reason I'm quitting. I'm quitting because I feel done.

I want to direct you to pretty much anything Freddie deBoer is writing. That guy can cut through B.S. like no one else on the internet.

Thanks to all my readers, I hope you found something on here you liked once or twice. I plan to leave this up and not archive/delete any posts, because there are several entries I am hoping my children will find and read one day.

And if you should never hear from me again, because you do not know me personally, cannot find me somewhere else online, or for any other reason, please go from here with the words of William Safire:

Our charge today is to value the goal of discovery that drives questing humans to take great risks.

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If A, Then B

WSJ Headline 1: Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard

 WSJ Headline 2: To Follow the Money, Study Engineering

 The conclusion isn't hard to draw.


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The Influence of Andrew Sullivan

Ross wonders if Andrew Sullivan is the most influential political writer of his generation. I humbly submit that my grandmother, who votes in every election, has never once in her life heard of Andrew Sullivan.

I'm not going to argue that Sullivan hasn't been influential. Douthat and Tyler Cowen rightly point out that Sullivan's crusade for gay rights has been both effective and important. And in general terms he obviously is a popular writer, Obama even reads him.

But outside the beltway...Sullivan's name and influence start to wane. And I have to wonder if all these writers and political journalists and political bloggers, all having their parties together and hanging out in their swank apartments where they all talk with and about each other...they have a skewed notion of what influence is.

I remember in high school there were these two kids that were really popular: Ky and Cameron. In fact they were so popular that even at the other high school in town they were respected. But go any further away than that, and no one had ever heard of Ky or Cameron. Nor did anyone feel it necessary to respect them.

Andrew Sullivan has his moments. Even at its worst, his blog is entertaining. But how can Ross et al. call Sullivan the most influential political writer in his generation if he can't even get enough subscribers to support his site?


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America, June 2013 Edition

Never has the quote "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" been more aptly applied.


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The Long Arcs of Human Existence

Imagine me, 16. I'm a junior in high school, this is October 1998. I'm on the sideline of a football field, in the blue and gold uniform of the Olathe South Falcons. It's a Friday night and we're playing our town rival, the Olathe North Hawks. And we're losing badly.
Of course, I didn't normally dress varsity. I was a junior at a large school, so the odds were stacked against me just due to the sheer amount of talent available to the coach. But also I was pretty small, and not especially good at football. I played defensive back, along with about 15 other guys, so my chances of getting playing time at the Varsity level were pretty slim. Which was fine. I wasn't 100% obsessed with football. There were guys that would go ballistic when our team would score a touchdown, running up and down the sideline screaming their heads off and I would not at all understand this kind of ferocity. And I got knocked on my ass a lot.

But I'd had a particularly good week at practice, and combined with a couple guys getting stomach flu, I'd eased my way into backup backup backup varsity free safety for a night. So I stood on the sidelines as Olathe North absolutely demolished us. By the 4th quarter, we were miserably behind, and our chance of winning was gone. So I sidled up to the coach and asked to be subbed in. I figured this might be my one and only chance to ever take the field at a varsity football game, why not seize it? So I fired myself up and told the coach "sub me in, I want to turn the game around!" and the coach kinda smirked and sure enough he subbed me in.
So there I am, trotting out onto the grassy, lined plain. There's something magical about a Friday night football game. As soon as I got on the field I understood better why people liked playing football under lights. I eased up about twenty yards behind the D-line, watching the Olathe North offense work. Most of their starters had been pulled - they too understood the concept of a foregone conclusion. But their starting runningback, a sophomore phenom, was still in. His name was Darren Sproles.
Their quarterback took the snap and I saw him duck low as he moved to hand it off. Other defensive players began to shout "RUN" to as they recognized the play evolving. I kept my feet moving, quickly pulling in towards the defensive line to intercept their runner if and when he came through. My head was moving left and right as I wildly scanned the field. If the runner got through the line, I was the last defense stopping a touchdown.
And just like that a white and red blur went past me. No human being could move that fast. Some sort of projectile had been launched by the offense. I whipped my head around and watched Darren Sproles absolutely torch me for a touchdown.

That was my one and only play at the varsity level. Coach, after turning a funny shade of cherry red, pulled me off the field and I was promptly sent back to JV the next day. And shortly after that, I quit football. Not because I didn't like it, or because I felt ashamed that I wasn't especially good, but because I treated extra-curriculars in high school like a buffet, sampling as many as I could. Football was replaced with some other sport. I tried tennis, track, theater, Science Olympiad, marching band...the list is long to tell.

Off I went to college. Years passed. I neared graduation, and had applied to several graduate schools. On April 24th, 2005, I was sitting in the living room of the house I was renting. A letter had arrived from a graduate school and I was nervously opening it. It was the school I wanted to attend most. As I read, with a great, glowing satisfaction, their acceptance letter, on the television the Paul Tagliabue was on stage at the NFL Draft and he said "With the 130th pick of the NFL draft, the San Diego Chargers choose Darren Sproles."

Off I went to graduate school, then to a job, then another job, then to my current job. And last night, wife and two kids in tow, I headed over to have sandwiches at Chick-fil-a. There was a strange line outside the restaurant. Apparently people were waiting to meet some celebrity that going to be there signing autographs. My family went inside, we ate, and came back out. And as we were leaving I saw the celebrity had arrived. The people in line were wearing K-State Jerseys, or holding San Diego Chargers memorabilia for him to sign, or New Orleans Saints memorabilia. And as we walked past the little booth they'd set up for him, he looked over at me. Its been 15 years but I recognized Darren Sproles immediately.

15 years of life, and two humans who could not have possibly taken more different paths, who met as kids on a football field for 10 seconds...meet again in the parking lot of a Chick-fil-a for 10 seconds more. I'm not sure what sort of conclusion to draw here, other than that the arcs of our lives are impossible to predict. Where we'll be a year from now...five years from now...fifiteen years from now...is surely a wildly different place than what we think it will be.


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Bill of Rights

First Amendment - Justice Department Secretly Obtained Phone Records of AP Journalists

Second Amendment - Obama Administration Ignores Justice Department Researchers That Show Assault Weapons Ban Won't Decrease Gun Violence

Third Amendment - FBI Uses Drones For Surveillance On U.S. Soil

Fourth Amendment - UN Torture Chief: Treatment of Bradley Manning Was Inhuman, Cruel

Fifth Amendment - Obama Signs NDAA 2013: U.S. May Still Detain U.S. Citizens Indefinitely Without Trial

Sixth Amendment - John Walker Repeatedly Asked For Lawyer, Was Not Given One

Seventh Amendment - U.S. Citizens May Be Assassinated Without Jury Trial According to President Obama

Eight Amendment - Drone Assassinates U.S. Citizen Without Trial or Charges

I could keep going, but I'm too embarrassed to do so right now.


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Electrical Engineer Unemployement Soars

My stance on immigration has always been one of open arms and open mind. That's all been tempered in the last couple years, as it became clear to me that many companies in the tech industry are pushing for the expansion of the H1B visa program solely so they can bring in cheaper workers and undermine the wages of degreed engineers already in the USA. R&D labor is expensive.

So here's an interesting little article from Computerworld (back in April) talking about a recent surge in unemployment among electrical engineers. The article also mentions the very low unemployment among "software developers." And finally, it touches on the IEEE-USA's attempts to inhibit random expansion of the H1B visa program.

A few thoughts:

1) In this modern app/software era, it is very possible that many electrical engineers have simply migrated from hardware to software. Typically an electrical engineer can program too, so its not that uncomfortable of a switch. And apps is where the money is right now. I have a friend who worked for Honeywell as an electrical engineer but he's now doing Indie games for iOS and making a killing.

2) It's interesting the IEEE-USA refers to the cohort as "software developers" and not "computer scientists" or "computer engineers" or "software engineers." My guess is that this group includes all the above and more: people doing software development that don't have a 4 year ABET degree.

3) This H1B visa thing reminds me so much of the old days when bosses would try to break the union worker's strike by bringing in foreign labor. And yet the idea of bringing in more STEM is generally lauded. What a strange paradox where bringing in foreign tech labor boosts the American economy while simultaneously driving down wages in one of the last high-paying wage sectors.

You can read more I've written on the STEM controversy here, here, and here. And I already linked to it above, but this is the most important article I've written on this subject.

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Competing Interests in Environmental Friendliness

Bike lanes encourage cities to be more environmentally friendly. So do driverless cars. But to me they seem competing in interest. A city with bizarre bike lanes set ups will be inherently much more difficult for a driverless car to navigate. Further, a flow of bikers will represent a complex and fluid array of potential hazards the car's computer system will need to avoid.
On the other hand, driverless cars, by their very nature, are way more fuel efficient than manually-controlled cars. And thus a city interested in protecting the environment would want to create a road system that was driverless car-friendly. Which might mean moving bikes as far off the road as possible in order to eliminate hazards to the cars.


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The Hypocritical Failings of Andrew Sullivan

OMG Andrew Sullivan. The worst kind of person is the one that when proven categorically wrong doubles down on his position. This is exactly what Andrew Sullivan openly loathed about right-wing pundits circa 2008-2011. This sociopathic behavior was one of his strongest criticisms of Sarah Palin. And thus, he has become exactly what he most loudly hated. But then, isn't that how it always goes?

Seriously Andrew, can ANYTHING make you disappointed with Barack Obama?



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Privilege

Sully posted a link to this video of Tim Doner, a 17-year-old polyglot who can speak (to varying degrees) nearly 20 languages.

It is barely mentioned in the video, but Tim attends The Dalton School. And to me that was the singularly most important detail about this boy, and we can draw so many conclusions from it.

While its easy to celebrate Mr. Doner's accomplishments and truly I would be a jackass to not acknowledge that the kid is obviously brilliant, what would be equally egregious is if I didn't ask just how many languages he would have learned if he had grown up in Kansas City Public Schools? Or in East St. Louis? Or anywhere other than a posh prep school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that regularly matriculates a vast number of students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?

Ask yourself, as you watch that video, two questions. The first is the one I've spoken above...how would Tim Doner have done without all that privilege?

The second, vastly more important question, is what our society would look like if every teenager had access to the education quality found among ultra-rich Manhattan prep school attendees. What if every school was a Dalton School? What if every American student could be taught Mandarin by a native-speaking Chinese teacher in a class with a student/teacher ratio of 3/1?

I think there's a deep cynicism in America right now, evidenced by Federal and State budget cuts to education. It implies that humans are no longer something the Government thinks of as a good investment. I realize crony capitalism and lobbying and what have you tend to drag government dollars away from things like education, but nevertheless many Congresspersons are parents and therefore have to realize by cutting state education budgets they are crippling the ability of future generations to create a productive and vibrant society and economy.
Or...they are secure in their own privilege and subsequently their children's privilege allows them to attend a local Dalton School analogue, making the state education cuts meaningless to them personally. Nevertheless this indicates cynicism, because it means those Congresspersons believe that state education will not produce anything but bad apples and chaff, so why bother spending state money on it, and the students within it.
Or...they are simply so cynical about the future of American society that they'll throw it away in favor of a hedonistic, cronyism-filled present.

Because unless you are cynical about the future, you'd be throwing everything you can at the kids. They're our salvation. You'd be shoving free biology textbooks into their hands, begging them to find cures. You'd give them unfettered access to high-performance computing facilities and climate data and beg them to solve anthropogenic climate change. You'd install gigabit internet in every school, give every student a laptop, maybe an iPad. You'd demolish old schools and build new ones with big north-facing windows and ask the kids to sit there for an hour a day and dream up a brighter future. You'd pay the best teachers a small fortune to go into the slums and teach kids there. And in places where kids left school everyday and had to go to an unsafe home, you'd open cutting-edge boarding schools where they could learn in an environment of trust and security. And you'd not give two shiny shits what any of this cost because you'd realize the cynicism should be turned back on your generation, and not projected forward onto the children. You broke the world. But the kids can fix it. That is, if you just stopped knee-capping them the day they're born.

Honesty is necessary, too. We can't have a world where 100% of children turn into Tim Doner at age 17. The reality is that a bell curve exists. Someone else might learn as hard as he can and achieve the best he can achieve: Air Conditioner Repairman. But at least he will have come to that profession honestly, as opposed to now, where a privilege pyramid exists and honest, good service professions are looked down upon from above by those who were born into a caste that would never have had to do that work anyway.

There are few things that annoy me more than state budget cuts to education. When you cut education funding, only the rich get educated.


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Parenthood

Is way more fun than blogging.

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American Capitalism

Capitalism is sort of like a game of poker, where people are all competing against one another. Everyone gets five cards, and if you are skillful and know how to bluff when you need to - and you get a lucky hand every now and then - you can win out.

Now, American Capitalism is a little different. In American Capitalism, whoever comes to the table with the most money almost always wins. This happens because you can pay the dealer to give you extra cards. Or you can pay the dealer to withhold cards from your competitors.

In American Capitalism, if you win a hand and it is discovered that you cheated by peeking at your neighbor's cards, you are only fined a small percentage of your winnings.

In American Capitalism, if you complain to the dealer that you only got 4 cards and your competitor six, you are chastised for being lazy, and you are expected to overcome the seemingly unfair odds.

In American Capitalism if you get a bad hand you can just buy new cards. If you cannot afford new cards, you must play the hand you're dealt.

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The Daily Dish - Andrew throws in the towel

Sullivan, this morning: "it remains unlikely that we will reach our target of $900,000 by the end of the year"

He goes on, ironically: "But I didn’t start this blogging thing to be rich. I started it to be free."

That's just the thing, Andrew. The internet wants to be free. When you enacted your paywall, you committed Internet Original Sin: you thought people would pay you for something they could get elsewhere for free.


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TAE's Iron Man 3 Review

Obviously, don't read this if you don't want to be spoiled.

First off, I was entertained. I'm not one of those pretentious people who expects The Best Movie Of All Time every time I walk into a theater. I rarely go to movies, and when I do I intentionally set a low bar so that I don't feel like my precious time and money were wasted. With that in mind, I very much enjoyed Iron Man 3 from start to finish.

(stop reading if you don't want to be spoiled, last warning...)

But....

First, a bit of history. Since Tony Stark/Iron Man was debuted exactly 50 years ago this past March, he's had hundreds of enemies. But the four greatest are (arguably) these: The Hammer family (Justin and his daughter Justine), The Stanes (Obadiah and his son Ezekiel), The Mandarin, an Doctor Doom. At least that is my opinion. So when Iron Man 1 featured, Obadiah Stane, and Iron Man 2 featured Justin Hammer, I was on board. Rumors began flying, before Iron Man 3 filmed, that the primary villain would be Mandarin, so I was pumped. Mandarin had been an on-going nemesis of Iron Man for the last 49 years, so there was plenty of source material!
Another bit of history. The "Extremis" storyline in the Iron Man comics was written by Warren Ellis in 2005-2006 and is consistently ranked amongst the top 3 Iron Man storylines ever (Armor Wars and Demon In A Bottle are the other two). In this storyline, Aldrich Killian, a scientist at A.I.M., commits suicide, leaving a note for his colleague Maya Hansen that he has let Extremis loose on the world. One man, Mallen, is given the Extremis serum, and when Tony Stark tracks him down Mallen beats him to within an inch of his life. In the critical moment, a dying Tony Stark realizes he must take the Extremis serum himself in order to survive and defeat Mallen. Stark takes the serum, recovers, finds himself able to communicate directly with his suit as the Extremis serum has turned him into a cyborg, and he goes and defeats Mallen.

And then we have , Iron Man 3. Look, I get it. There's no rule that says "thou shalt follow the comics dutifully." And with that in mind, I am willing to look past the fact that Iron Man's oldest foe was instead 'Ben Kingsley pretending to be Russell Brand'. I was willing to not care that Tony Stark doesn't get the Extremis serum, Pepper does. I was willing to let it slide that War Machine is rebranded "Iron Patriot" even though "Iron Patriot" is actually a villain (Norman Osborne) in the comics.

But what I can't abide are plot holes. I jokingly told a friend once that what Hollywood needs is a profession where you just read screenplays and point out the flaws. All screenplays should be required to get a pass from this person before the movie can be filmed. In Iron Man 3, the plot holes were not hard to find...

Late in Iron Man 3, the game is clear: Killian and Hansen have kidnapped Pepper and injected the Extremis serum into her so that Tony will be forced to fix Extremis and save Pepper from exploding. If this is true, why then did earlier in the movie Killian have a squadron of attack helicopters shoot missiles into Tony's house while Pepper, Stark, and Hansen are all inside?! At one point during that early helicopter attack, a goon is firing a gatling gun directly at Stark and only the fast acting Mark 42 armor saves him from being shot in the back. At another point, Stark, in the armor, is pulled deep into the ocean, and the helicopters seem to leave, presuming him dead. Please someone explain why Killian was attempting to kill Tony (and Pepper and his co-conspirator Hansen) all at once!

The ENTIRE plot of Iron Man 2 hinges on the idea that the arc reactor is the key technology that makes Iron Man a superhero. Whiplash replicates the tech and suddenly Iron Man is vulnerable. In Iron Man 1, the arc reactor is a key plot point, as Stane needs it to power his Iron Monger suit (and no other Stark Industries engineer can replicate it) so he literally steals it right out of Tony's chest. Please someone explain then why Tony is seen in Iron Man 3 charging his armor with a car battery? Ignoring the fact that car batteries are actually really bad at charging things (they are high current so they can crank your engine, but they drain after an hour of running your headlights), why doesn't he just plug his arc reactor into the armor to charge it...you know, like how the armors were powered in literally every instance on film before this moment?

Going back to Extremis...Hansen and Killian have injected it into Pepper to force Tony to fix the serum so that he can save Pepper. He refuses, and...yet...Pepper doesn't explode...

Tony has an anxiety attack at one point and the 10-year-old, Harley, suggests he fix his anxiety issues by "building something." Tony appears to have a Eureka moment and says "okay" and builds...a Nintendo Power Glove? The source of, nor the solution to, Tony's anxiety is never really explained.

What, exactly, was Pepper doing as a day job? At the end of Iron Man 2, she tells Tony she will absolutely not be CEO anymore. But clearly (and Kevin Feige confirmed it) she is still CEO of Stark Industries. Okay, fine. Then why is she in California? Didn't Stark Industries build a big, tall, shiny, environmentally friendly corporate headquarters in New York City that was a key plot point in The Avengers? If Pepper Potts is CEO of Stark Industries, why is she...in fact why are any Stark employees...in Malibu? Consistency, Marvel! Come on!

When Killian comes to Stark Industries to ask Pepper to invest in his project, she clearly knows him...but from where? She wasn't at the 1999 scene in Bern.

Will someone please explain to me how the Extremis girl immobilizes the Iron Patriot armor (just by touching it) with Rhodes still inside it, yet its internal computer systems still work, Iron Patriot/Rhodes is transported instantaneously to Miami, and then after Killian blasts his Extremis heat onto the Iron Patriot armor's tummy, somehow the goon, Savin, is able to make it fly and shoot and stuff? Who at A.I.M. is technologically capable of fixing the Iron Patriot armor (in under an hour)?

Multiple heavily-armed terrorist helicopters moving up the Pacific Coast Highway, then firing missiles and guns, and there's no military response? Suspension of belief can only go so far...

Killian: "We need to capture Pepper Potts so we can use her as leverage to force Tony Stark to fix our Extremis serum."
Hansen: "Okay, she drives herself places with absolutely no security, let's use some of our helicopters and our limitless supply of goons and just grab her when she's alone in her car."
Killian: "Woah woah woah, this is a summer blockbuster! We need a MUCH more elaborate kidnapping plot than that! And I need to be there personally, and then back in Miami minutes later."

All that being said, in terms of plot holes, this movie was SO much better than Prometheus.


And now for the good things.
Tony's interaction with the boy, Harley, were very good. While I thought the anxiety attack/NYC PTSD character development was weak, I really enjoyed his interaction with the kid, and I thought the dialogue was pretty genuine. Tony's interaction with the news van technician was also great. In fact generally the dialogue throughout the whole movie was really sharp.

Holy Hall of Armors, Batman! So many awesome armors. I felt a little cheated that we only got to see about a dozen of them up close before Tony blew them all up.

In general, I thought the movie's overall plot was really good. The character Tony Stark is at his best when he has to face human problems, and can't just hide inside his armor and blast things. And generally, this entire fracas was created by Tony Stark in 1999 he simultaneously blew off Aldrich Killian and also arrogantly provided evidence on his nametag to Maya Hansen that he could fix Extremis. Put another way, this movie did a great job of showing that Iron Man's greatest foe is always actually Tony Stark.

Who have you trampled in your past? I am a smart guy, I walked out of the theater wondering who I have wronged in the past that might hold a grudge against me. Or what opportunities I might have missed because I was arrogant.
Had Stark helped Killian/Hansen with Extremis, how much better would the world have been? In this movie version, Extremis is a serum capable of regrowing limbs. In Iron Man 1, Stark has a crisis because he's spent his life building weapons...what if he had funded and worked with Killian/Hansen on Extremis? Stark Industries might not have been just a weapons manufacturer by 2008.
This is why I will give this movie good marks. It simultaneously entertained me as well as made me retrospective about my own decisions.

All in all, I recommend this movie to all audiences.

A couple parting thoughts:
Am I the only one that thinks Jon Favreau randomly showed up on set dressed as John Travolta from Pulp Fiction, everyone laughed, and they let him stay in that outfit...and that it was NOT planned? He looked completely ridiculous and it was distracting.

Having seen all three Iron Man movies, Thor, Captain America, all four X-Men movies, Wolverine, both Fantastic Four movies, both Hulk movies, Daredevil, Elektra, all four Spider-Man movies, and The Avengers, I have to say: there is only one Joss Whedon.


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I promise to stop writing about STEM soon. Just not yet.

Imagine you are a tech company that makes widgets. You've gotten a factory in China to make the parts for the widgets for a tiny amount. You've got laborers working for minimum wage assembling the widgets. You've got salespeople making minimum wage selling the widgets.

How can you possibly make the widgets cheaper?

Perhaps the most obvious way is to pay the people doing R&D on the widgets minimum wage. Think about it: the R&D folks are still demanding $50-60k or more for their time. That's really expensive compared to a minimum wage assembler who makes $16k.
But you can't just cut these people's pay by 75%, because they'd leave and go work somewhere else, obviously! There's lots of high paying jobs for widget R&D specialists!

Unless, of course:
1) Foreign nations over-produce huge quantities of just-good-enough R&D laborers to drive down the cost, coupled with a strong domestic immigration policy to get those low-cost R&D laborers to the U.S. to replace their high-priced counterparts.

2) Domestic colleges create a surplus of scientists and engineers to make the R&D labor supply pool crowded, and drive down wages. This is coupled with an aggressive domestic student loan policy to maximize the number of humans economically (but not necessarily otherwise) qualified to go to college.

Look folks, there's no law requiring companies to pay engineers and scientists lots of money. And if demand were really high for these people, then wages would be going up. Instead, engineering salaries have been decreasing since the 1990's (Scroll down to Figure R. Engineering salaries are up 25% since 1998, while over that time inflation is up roughly 43%).

Which indicates to me that the labor pool is moving from demand driven to supply driven. Now, I'd never try to pitch this as a giant global program to drive down wages...because that's never happened before. No one has ever done that. Right?


I've written more on the STEM "shortage" here and here.
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STEM Graduate Surplus, Infighting Amongst Engineers

So I posted the Atlantic article on Reddit in an engineering sub, and the backlash was palpable. One /u/ in particular went after the data, pointing out that the "53.7% of engineering grads that found a job in the first 12 months after graduation" was from 2009, and "of course things were bad in 2009!"

My response was "I'm not sure what would have occurred economically since 2009 to provide a STEM labor market correction? Unemployment nationwide has only ticked down a bit, it seems logical that other economic indicators would also have remained relatively underwhelming."

In response, this graph was pointed out to me, from a Bay Area Economic Council report published in December 2012.

Given a cursory glance, yes, STEM jobs are doing better than "Total Occupations" in that total unemployment since 2000 is up 10% or so (important note: this is since 2000, not year over year percentage changes). And yes, since 2009 there has been an uptick of STEM hiring and it is more pronounced than the Total Occupations category. And so I was about to concede the point until I actually read the report.
And lo and behold, Figure 8:

They conveniently broke down the Stem Occupations category into sub categories. And wouldn't you know it: engineers are in the shitter. Not only are engineers net negative jobs since 2000, we are actually doing worse than the population at large.


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There is no STEM graduate shortage.

High school seniors: consider yourself warned.

- In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year.

- Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels.

- Percentage of Engineering graduates that have a job within 12 months of graduation: 53.7%

More here.
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Rampant Sexism in America IS Still A Thing

You need not go far to find a good example. Here's Business Insider's list of "30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech"

Good luck finding a fat woman, or a pimply-faced woman in there. Which, while being obviously sexist, is DOUBLY so when you remember that this is "in tech".


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Polytheism, Monotheism, Atheism, and Space Aliens

What if, later this afternoon, an Intelligent alien race lands here on Earth and makes contact with us. What if they contact our leaders and after exchanging business cards, they ask "how advanced are you?"
We humans interpret this as we can and respond "currently we can control nuclear fission but not nuclear fusion."
"No, that's not what we mean," replies the Alien. "How advanced are you, as in are you polytheistic, monotheistic, or atheistic?"
We respond "the majority of humans are monotheistic."
"Oh, okay," replies the Alien. "See you in another 200 years."
"Wait, what?!" we ask.
"Well, you see," replies the Alien, "there are more than 2,000 Intelligent species in the Universe that we've cataloged so far, not including you 'humans'. And of them, all 2,000+ followed this exact same socio-developmental pattern: polytheism, monotheism, atheism. And it turns out, interestingly, that when an Intelligent species reaches a plurality of atheists, that milestone means they're usually socially, mentally, and emotionally ready to join the interstellar community."

The question I have is this: given this information, that 2,000 out of 2,000 Intelligent species had all followed our species current religious trend, and it had ended in planetary atheism...how many monotheists would drop religion?
My guess is many would, but not nearly all of them. More likely is that new membership would massively plummet, as the young hoped they'd get to join the interstellar community once they shed the suddenly-archaic-seeming belief systems of their elders. But many Muslims, Jews, and Christians would die believing that they were right, and 2,000+ Intelligent species of Aliens were wrong. Earth Exceptionalism.

The case can be flipped around. What if the Aliens arrived and reported that of these 2,000+ species of Intelligent star-explorers, pretty much all of them (except the cyborg race of Planet 95C2) had a strong monotheistic religion on their planets. The belief in One God wasn't just a plurality on Earth, it was literally Universal. How many atheists would take up a religion, in this case? I bet some would, but most would just argue that obviously Faith isn't just an Earth construct but rather a universal construct of Intelligence...all Intelligences in the Universe share this flaw.

My guess is this: it is much easier to strip monotheists of their beliefs than it is to convince atheists to believe.


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Modern Bomb Making In America

I don't condone blowing up innocent people. I don't recommend anyone build explosive devices. I hope the world is a peaceful one, and that my children grow up in comfort and security and without the fear of terrorism.

That said, I want to correct something going around. Federal authorities and the media are latching on to the idea that the bombs used in Boston were "sophisticated" because they used "a battery pack and a circuitboard." I feel that I should point out that a Furby has a circuitboard and batteries. A solar-powered LED patio umbrella has a circuitboard and batteries. The watch on your wrist, if not hand-wound, has a circuitboard and battery. Circuitboards aren't this holy object that only a tiny cadre of madmen are capable of producing.

The bombs in Boston, unless authorities dramatically change their tune, probably had less than $2 of electronics in them. It's likely the only thing on the circuitboard was a SPST relay (costing less than a dollar) and a timing mechanism ($1 or less depending on type). Once again, I do not want any innocent lives ended with bomb making, but people need to realize that any engineer worth his or her salt could put a 'pressure cooker bomb' together in about a day.

The point I want to make is that all day, almost every day, hundreds of thousands of people all over this country who are perfectly capable of making bombs freely choose not to do so. Rather than be scared that there are so many potential bomb makers in America...can we stop for a second and realize that 99.9999% of those of us capable of easily manufacturing bombs choose not to do so? America is a really, really safe place.


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