My wife and I are going to see Deadpool tonight, I think (this may be one time the theater is overcrowded here in Morris). I’m concerned. This is one movie I’ve heard a lot of gushing hype about, and I have high expectations.
That usually means I’m going to be grievously disappointed.
Stay tuned, I’m going in to the 7:00 showing.
I’m back!
This ignorant fundamentalist boxer, Manny Pacquiao, made a comment about gays being worse than animals and deserving of those biblical punishments (he’s lost big endorsements over it, too). But I do rather like Dave Bautista’s taciturn reaction.
Drax is very literal-minded, but empathic at the same time.
You know, I’m a professor at four-year liberal arts college, and I think Mike Rowe is on to something here. The kind of education we deliver is not for every one.
Now, eight years later, unemployment is down, interest rates are under control, and inflation is in check. But the overall labor participation rate is very low, and the skills gap is wider than ever. In fact, the latest numbers are out, and they are astonishing. According to the Department of Labor, America now has 5.6 million job openings.
Forget your politics for a moment, and consider the enormity of what’s happening here. Millions of people who have stopped looking for work, are ignoring 5.6 million genuine opportunities. That’s not a polemic, or a judgment, or an opinion. It’s a fact. And so is this: most of those 5.6 million opportunities don’t require a diploma – they require require a skill.
Unfortunately, the skilled trades are no longer aspirational in these United States. In a society that’s convinced a four-year degree is the best path for the most people, a whole category of good jobs have been relegated to some sort of “vocational consolation prize.” Is it any wonder we have 1.3 trillion dollars in outstanding student loans? Is it really a surprise that vocational education has pretty much evaporated from high schools? Obviously, the number of available jobs and the number of unemployed people are not nearly as correlated as most people assume.
I’m no economist, but the skills gap doesn’t seem all that mysterious – it seems like a reflection of what we value. Five and half million unfilled jobs is clearly a terrible drag on the economy and a sad commentary of what many people consider to be a “good job,” but it also represents a tremendous opportunity for anyone willing to learn a trade and apply themselves.
This is an interesting comparison from David Hillis.
I still see a lot of Ego in the Eco diagram, since humans are the only species (out of 1.8 million species that have been described on Earth) that are represented twice, and over half of the species shown in that diagram are vertebrates like us (even though only about 5% of all described species are vertebrates). I made this version to emphasize that there is a lot of biodiversity on Earth, and all species are connected through our evolutionary history to single common ancestor. The tree shown under “EVO” represents species approximately in proportion to their described diversity, and the circular shape emphasizes that we are all equally distant from our common ancestor.
The EGO diagram is a somewhat accurate illustration of one common perspective that places humans, and especially male humans, at the top of a hierarchy…although I don’t think most people would place whales so high. Cats and dogs would be somewhere just below Noble Man, but distant animals that are rarely seen in day-to-day life wouldn’t rank so highly.
The ECO diagram is a step in the right direction, but as Hillis points out, it’s still grossly vertebrate-centric. But then, the ecologists I know wouldn’t favor that diagram, either — they’d stock it with trees and grasses and insects and bacteria and fungi.
The EVO diagram is the best of them all, but has the problem that it’s also the least easily understood and the most complicated. But then if you reduced it to a smaller number of branches to make it more graphically appealing, you’d have to choose where to prune, and unfortunately for us humans, we wouldn’t be represented at all on a fair and simplified illustration of biodiversity.
Justin Keller wrote an open letter to the mayor and police chief, demanding that something must be done. There are homeless riff-raff cluttering up his streets! They are howling and lying down and collapsing in despair everywhere; why, one even leaned up against his car! The horror…
I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day. I want my parents when they come visit to have a great experience, and enjoy this special place.
Yes, something must be done. Only I don’t think the solution involves hiding the “pain, struggle, and despair” out of sight of smug dudes with lots of money. It’s got to involve deeper changes that give poor people a living wage and an opportunity to better themselves that might also require fewer luxury cars for the wealthy.
No restraint or decorum, they just go at it out there in public. It’s good to be the squid.
Ken Perrott of New Zealand SciBlogs waded into the controversial Dawkins disinvitation, and wrote a load of typical bullshit. That is, he tries to logic all critics of Dawkins into some kind of fallacy, because they must be mistaken, and we cannot examine the flaws in Dawkins worldview without first dismissing everyone who disagrees with him as irrational. Therefore, suggesting that Dawkins has said some terrible things…
…is so mistaken I think only people who are already hostile or desperately searching for something to confirm their anti-Dawkins or anti-male bias would actually fall for it – or promote it. But that is the sort of thing we get on social media – especially Twitter.
This is the fallacy of faulty generalisation – or more precisely, faulty induction. Very often resorted to by people with a large axe to grind.
I was awakened this morning by the heavy patter of raindrops on my house. This cannot be. This is against the natural order. January and February are our coldest months, we simply do not get liquid water falling out of the sky in midwinter. I looked, and it’s +1°C out there! Unthinkable! Inconceivable!
Now I’m wondering, if we melt all the icecaps and glaciers, will we get enough sea water rise to refill the great inland sea of North America? If so, I could pretend I’ve moved back to Seattle.
The Bundy case is shaping up to be loads of fun. The pretrial detention memorandum for ol’ Cliven has been released, and in addition to making the case that he was a lawless, violent criminal, it explains that he was a terrible “rancher”.
While Bundy claims he is a cattle rancher, his ranching operation – to the extent it can be called that – is unconventional if not bizarre. Rather than manage and control his cattle, he lets them run wild on the public lands with little, if any, human interaction until such time when he traps them and hauls them off to be sold or slaughtered for his own consumption. He does not vaccinate or treat his cattle for disease; does not employ cowboys to control and herd them; does not manage or control breeding; has no knowledge of where all the cattle are located at any given time; rarely brands them before he captures them; and has to bait them into traps in order to gather them.
Nor does he bring his cattle off the public lands in the off-season to feed them when the already sparse food supply in the desert is even scarcer. Raised in the wild, Bundy’s cattle are left to fend for themselves year-round, fighting off predators and scrounging for the meager amounts of food and water available in the difficult and arid terrain that comprises the public lands in that area of the country. Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery. At the time of the events giving rise to the charges, Bundy’s cattle numbered over 1,000 head, straying as far as 50 miles from his ranch and into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (“LMNRA”), getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway (causing accidents on occasion) – foraging aimlessly and wildly, roaming in small groups over hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands that exist for the use of the general public for many other types of commercial and recreational uses such as camping, hunting, and hiking.
I used to spend some time every summer at my uncle’s horse and cattle ranch in eastern Washington, and what I remember was all the work: up early in the morning, walking the irrigation ditches and watering the fields, taking hay out to the cows, and there was this tiring ritual of walking the fields and picking up rocks. None of that for the Bundys! Neglect the animals, do nothing to care for the land, just let everything run loose until you feel like going out and killing a few cows.
I’m unimpressed.
Doesn’t the Bible say something about good stewardship? Maybe they should take a look at that holy book they pay lip service to — it doesn’t look good for the Bundys.
The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Isaiah 24:5
And the Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful. Luke 12:42-46
They should count their blessings, though. Being cut into pieces isn’t a permissible punishment under federal law.
Lakes around here freeze over solid on the surface. Lakes in more temperate places just stay liquid. It’s the ones trying to be in-between that get weird.
Be sure to have the sound on. Lakes aren’t supposed to sound like that!
