Here’s a report from the Daily Mail: “Oxford University extends time for maths and computer science exams in bid to help women get better grades.” Oxford University has extended time for maths and computer science exams in a bid to help women get better grades. Undergraduates were given 105 minutes to complete their papers, rather 90. There was no change in difficulty or the length of questions and female students were said to do better as a result. . .... Read more
A. Nothing. Yes, maybe in the meantime, we’ll get a full-on reform of the system. But if we don’t, this is what will happen: Congress will just, in what will be called the “Social Security fix” in the same way as we had the “doc fix,” pass legislation that provides that, “temporarily,” any FICA shortfalls will be funded by general revenue. And this will be extended from year to year to year. Folks, the pension plans of the S &... Read more
“Robots will take away all of the unskilled jobs. In order to support a family, you’ll need an advanced education.” “Robots will take away all of the unskilled jobs, but we as a country will be wealthy enough to provide a Basic Income to everyone.” “We’ll need lots of unskilled workers because of the growing need to have caregivers for the elderly, and to provide cheap labor to reduce the cost of daycare and allow families to outsource household tasks.”... Read more
Every so often I feel like I need to type this up: what I’d like to see with respect to illegal immigration. My desired end state is, simply, an end to illegal immigration by preventing those who are in the country without authorization from working, either in the formal economy (that is, with forged IDs) or under the table. With respect to the former, it’s a matter of instituting an E-Verify mandate — and, no, having to prove that you... Read more
I’ll start by saying that I’ve always considered SROs, single-room occupancy hotels, that is, to be a key ingredient in the solution to the problem of affordable housing. It’s a subset to the general solution of density: if land is at a premium, fit more people on a given patch of land — most obviously by building multifamily, multistory buildings instead of single-family homes (yes, even for families — Europeans and some city-dwellers accept that it’s perfectly reasonable for a... Read more
By which I mean this: Three Republican and three Democratic Senators have been working on a proposal that claims to be a “breakthrough bipartisan compromise” on the question of whether or how to provide legal status to individuals brought to the U.S. illegally as minors. Senators Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) are spearheading the effort (that is, the bill is being called the Graham-Durbin proposal), along with Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Cory Gardner (R-CO), and Bob... Read more
So the other day I wrote about the “brain drain” and vaguer “ambition drain” issue that may be impacting places like El Salvador and Haiti, and I wanted to spend some more time thinking about this issue. Of course, to prevent “brains” from leaving a given country, Berlin Wall-style (because that is what they built the Berlin Wall for, not merely to imprison the population — it’s my understanding that the elderly were allowed to move to the West, once... Read more
and, if so, what did you learn? I got the results back from my own DNA test, through Ancestry.com, yesterday, and I was, well, underwhelmed. The German part is fine — multiple ancestors on both Mom & Dad’s sides. Scandinavia, too, is right – my paternal grandfather’s parents both immigrated from Denmark. But Great Britain? I have one great-great-grandmother whose ancestry is unaccounted for and who possibly could be of British ancestry (from a poor white family in the south... Read more
The conventional wisdom on immigration from a place like El Salvador is clear: the country is dependent on those immigrants because they both relieved the pressure of needing to support these people, at home, and because they provide remittances, to the tune of billions of dollars, from the countries in which they now live and work. And at the same time, we’re told, these people benefit the receiving countries. They’re ambitious and work hard, and are better able to put... Read more
In the news: “Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries,” at the Washington Post. President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers. Trump then... Read more
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