April 12, 2006
Logical Fallacies
I came across the Logical Fallacies Cheat Sheet. I’m of the mind that something like this should be distributed and taught in all public schools, and given to prospective voters every time a politician opens his mouth. There are plenty of people out there looking to fleece you, and understanding these logical fallacies makes it a heck of a lot harder for them to get away with it.
Hat Tip: Robert, who’s leaving us in Atlanta and moving to Jersey…
April 11, 2006
Carnival Time!
I took my post Outsourcing at Both Sides, and submitted it to both the Carnival of Liberty XL and the Carnival of the Capitalists 33.
And my post over at The Liberty Papers, entitled Where Markets Beat Government — and Vice Versa, was also submitted to the Carnival of Liberty XL.
Sorry for the lack of posting over the last few days… My old roommate came down to visit last Saturday night. He, my wife, and I went out to a local bar to play trivia, and took third place, so that went well. The next day, I did yardwork all day while he sat around and drank my beer, so that wasn’t quite as well, but still not too bad. I got some good work done, and then came inside and drank beer. Now that the week has started, I’m overloaded. My company has a new engineer that I’m training in the early part of the week, and on the homefront, we’re getting ready for 20 family members to show up for Easter.
This week isn’t going to get much better, but I’ll try to get some content out. I just read V for Vendetta, and enjoyed it immensely. Perhaps I’ll post a review. In local news, a fight is brewing between John Konop and Tom Price for the Republican nomination in the 6th District of Georgia, and I definitely have some thoughts to share on that race. But there’s a lot going on, and my brain isn’t quite up for blogging…
April 8, 2006
I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore!
Wow, last night one of the most violent thunderstorms I’ve ever seen passed overhead. I usually sleep through everything (especially if I’ve had a couple beers, which I had), but at 4:00 AM I was awoken by flashes of light outside my blinds that were so frequent that the sky didn’t have time to get dark in between. The dogs were barking at the thunder (as usual), and when I looked out through the blinds, the rain was coming down so hard I could barely see the street.
Normally, when my wife (the worrier of the two of us) gets freaked out by something, I just laugh it off. But when she suggested heading down to the basement, I decided it might be prudent!
Oddly enough, it all passed in about 15 minutes, and then it was calm the rest of the night. If only I could say the same for the dogs!
April 7, 2006
It’s Okay, She’s Got Credentials!
Someone Brought a Knife to a Gunfight…
Fist flattens would-be carjacker
John and his wife were leaving the All City Credit Union on Tuesday when the suspect approached them and asked if they had a vehicle, police said.
John pointed to his van. He thought the man may have backed into it in the parking lot.
“He told me to give him the keys or he was going to kill me,” John said.
John moved his wife back.
“Give it a shot,” he told the would-be robber.
The man, 39, swung at John and missed.
John didn’t. He hit the man. More than once. He said he wanted to make sure the stranger didn’t get up and make good on his threat to hurt him or his wife, who is recovering from a recent heart attack.
“I don’t advise anyone to do what I did. It could have turned real nasty real quick,” John said. “If he would have had a weapon, I would have handed over my keys.”
Bystanders urged the men to quit fighting. John stopped. He was floored when the man reached out to shake his hand.
“He said he hadn’t had his (expletive) kicked that good in a while,” John said.
What kind of stupid criminal tries to carjack someone barehanded?!
April 6, 2006
iGod!
Tired of having to go visit your priest for confession? Need a quick
heavenly pick-me-up while at work?
All the fun of prayer, with the convenience of instant messaging!
Hat Tip: Libertopia
Uncounted Victims of the “War on Drugs”
I often argue that the “War on Drugs” causes more problems than it solves. The negative implications of giving police such wide-ranging power to stop and investigate these victimless crimes, protecting people only from themselves, are an affront to anyone who believes in civil liberties.
But that’s just me. I’m pretty rare in that sense. A lot of folks trust the government “looking out for us.”
But do you trust them when they’re killing dogs?
April 5, 2006
Outsourcing at Both Sides
In the outsourcing debate, there are always emotions that carry a lot of baggage. After all, everyone knows someone who’s been laid off, and almost everyone has a friend whose job moved overseas. Whether it’s manufacturing, IT, or any number of other industries, jobs are liquid things, and when someone loses one due to cost-cutting, outsourcing is an easy scapegoat. After all, when someone “over there” is doing the job you once did, it doesn’t do a lot for your feeling of self-worth. And when you start seeing people in your own industry getting the axe for cheaper labor elsewhere, you start to worry about your own job security.
Despite all that, I’m a firm believer in the idea that free markets must be allowed to work. Of course, people look at an engineer and say, “Just you wait: One of these days, they’re going to start outsourcing your job. Then you’ll feel differently.”
Those people are wrong. I’ve spent a mere 5 1/2 years in the job market, and I’ve seen outsourcing from both sides. When I first began working, I was up in Silicon Valley at the peak of the technology boom. Which is to say, when I started, I had no experience, no seniority, and the job market was falling apart all around me. My job was an “Applications Engineer”. Basically at the time, it was an advanced technical support role. Without going into who my employer was, my job consisted of working with engineers who were using our products, and helping them to work through the design issues they faced. 8-12 hours a week, this consisted of answering phones on a hotline, and the rest of the week was spent supporting more in-depth inquiries and our field engineers.
And I was outsourced. Not overseas, mind you. But still outsourced. After surviving a hiring freeze 2 months after I started, and surviving the first round of layoffs, our department at the time was about 50 people. Only those of us with little experience with the company were still on the hotline. To be fair, the hotline portion of our job didn’t really require the services of someone with a 4-year Electrical Engineering degree. And the company understood that. They axed 17 people that day (about 12 of the low-experience folks like me, and 5 others). Part of what they were doing was streamlining simply to cut costs, but they entirely closed the hotline at that location. Instead, they hired people with 2-year associates degrees down in San Diego to staff the hotline full-time. Those folks were available for about half the cost of a full-time engineer in San Jose, so they could hire enough to keep the hotline fully staffed, even counting transition and training costs, and still improve the bottom line. While it wasn’t seeing my job go to China or India, it hurt me just as much.
That began the rough time in my life, when I had to find another job. I spent a few more months in San Jose, then moved southward with my wife (who had at the time just become my fiancee, with the help of my 401k funds!). She was having trouble, having survived a few layoffs, an office move, and the general insanity of Silicon Valley at that time was causing her to have anxiety attacks. Eventually I found a job, so did she, we got married, and it’s been looking up ever since. (FYI, if you’re ever unemployed, having a motorcycle definitely makes it a little more pleasant!)
But here’s where it gets ironic. The job I found was with a company based in Asia. No longer was my job outsourced, my whole industry was outsourced and I became an Applications Engineer here for a company there, and now I’m in the business of helping replace American-designed products with those designed and built in Taiwan and China. In my industry, that’s just the way things go. The computer motherboard market is mature enough that it’s so much cheaper to have the work done there, there’s no point to doing it here. The only domestic competition we face are in custom products, where having local design engineers is enough of a boon to American-based competitors where we only win a majority of designs, instead of a crushing majority. The shoe is on the other hand now!
We’re in a global market, folks. But let’s be honest. We’re not all fighting for a slice of a small pie. The pie keeps getting bigger and bigger. Taiwanese engineers aren’t replacing American engineers. In this world, more engineers (unlike lawyers!) are a good thing. The more scientists and engineers we have in this world, the faster the rate of technological progress will occur. And that’s what makes the great pie get bigger. When engineers get laid off, they don’t go start flipping burgers. John Kerry might talk about how jobs are being replaced by worse jobs, but people don’t simply give up. They become consultants. Or they find a new job.
Or, they create a whole new company. During the bad days when I was unemployed, I read a story about engineers in San Francisco who had all gotten laid off, and had actually been living in a shelter. In that shelter they created an idea for a brand new startup! I never saw a follow up, and I don’t know whether the company succeeded, but the negative effects of outsourcing are purely temporary. It’s tough to tell that to someone who has been laid off, but it’s no less true.
America should take one lesson away from this, however. It is a good thing to slow down outsourcing at the margins. Reforming our tax system and regulatory bureaucracy (and fixing our public schooling system) will go a long way to slowing down outsourcing, and to enticing companies in other high-standard-of-living countries to set up shop here. But we need to understand that some outsourcing will never be stopped, and that it shouldn’t be stopped. What makes America great is people, and freeing up people from jobs who can be done more efficiently elsewhere gives them freedom to focus on other things. Computers are now becoming mature technology. It wouldn’t be smart for the US to have remained an agrarian society after the industrial revolution, and we won’t survive as a manufacturing power after the information revolution. Yet nanotechnology, medical research, advances in bioengineering and genetics are all occurring here on our shores, because America is still the leader of the industrial world. We have stability, we have wonderful universities, and compared to most of Europe, we have a favorable business climate. As long as we keep those things, America will always be a formidable world competitor.
The Unrepentant Individual linked with Carnival Time!
Business Opportunities Weblog | Carnival of the Capitalists linked with Business Opportunities Weblog | Carnival of the Capitalists
Business Opportunities Weblog linked with Carnival of the Capitalists
Exodus Rate will Increase
My good friend (and former contributor) Wilson is a Boston resident, although he’s getting closer and closer to being fed up with the insanity. He told me recently that Massachusetts is the only state who is actually losing population year-to-year. States like California are losing a lot of people, but there is a net increase due to immigration. Not so with Massachusetts, it’s a net decrease. This morning, I spoke with Wilson, and he sent me this story… It’s about time for the exodus to get worse:
Massachusetts Sets Health Plan for Nearly All
Massachusetts is poised to become the first state to provide nearly universal health care coverage with a bill passed overwhelmingly by the legislature Tuesday that Gov. Mitt Romney says he will sign.
The bill does what health experts say no other state has been able to do: provide a mechanism for all of its citizens to obtain health insurance. It accomplishes that in a way that experts say combines methods and proposals from across the political spectrum, apportioning the cost among businesses, individuals and the government.
“This is probably about as close as you can get to universal,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. “It’s definitely going to be inspiring to other states about how there was this compromise. They found a way to get to a major expansion of coverage that people could agree on. For a conservative Republican, this is individual responsibility. For a Democrat, this is government helping those that need help.”
The bill, the product of months of wrangling between legislators and the governor, requires all Massachusetts residents to obtain health coverage by July 1, 2007.
I don’t have time today to truly study this. But I can say, without a doubt, that it will have unintended consequences and will end up hurting the state of Massachusetts. Wilson is furious, because he knows exactly who will be paying for this: him.
UPDATE: Perry, the Eidelblogger, gives us his take on this. Good stuff, as usual.
The Liberty Papers»Blog Archive linked with Where Markets Beat Government — and Vice Versa
Following in Rather’s Footsteps
Well, it seems that left-wing morning chatter Katie Couric is leaving the Today Show, and heading to anchor the CBS Evening News:
On her 15th anniversary on “Today,” Katie Couric told viewers Wednesday she’s leaving NBC to join CBS and become the first woman to solo anchor a network evening newscast.
For those people hoping to restore the credibility of the CBS News organization, I would have to call this a failure. So now, the Today Show is looking for a replacement:
Meredith Vieira of the daytime chat show “The View” has emerged as the leading candidate to team with Lauer. Vieira, a former CBS News reporter who won a Daytime Emmy as host of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” had previously turned down offers to return to news since joining “The View.”
An NBC spokeswoman would not comment Wednesday on succession plans.
I think there’s more going on behind the scenes. The Today Show has long been critiqued by those on the right for being extremely friendly to all sorts of left-wing authors and causes, while ignoring even highly-prominent conservatives. You can sense the bile inside Couric or Lauer when a conservative author creates a book so popular that they earn an interview with the Today Show.
I’m guessing the succession plans will be looking to blunt that criticism. I suspect they’re looking for someone who can bring back the viewers of red state America. And who better than to choose someone who has criticized them in the past??
You heard it here first. The next anchor for The Today Show will be Ann Coulter.
April 4, 2006
Just heard this one…
A Chinese guy and a Jewish guy are sitting at a bar, having a conversation over a couple of beers. Out of nowhere, the Jewish guy punches the Chinese guy right in the mouth. The Chinese guy asks, “What the hell was that for?”
The Jewish guy responds, “That was for Pearl Harbor!” The Chinese guy, confused, retorts; “But that was the Japanese, not the Chinese!”. The Jewish guy (who’s had at least one too many) responds, “Chinese, Japanese, they’re all the same…”
Realizing that the Jewish guy was a little in the bag, the Chinese guy agrees to let bygones be bygones, and goes back to his drink. They sit around a few more hours, and when they’re about to settle up, the Chinese guy punches the Jewish guy right in the mouth!
The Jewish guy is stunned, and slurs, “What was THAT for?!” The Chinese guy, also now inebriated, explains, “That’s for the Titanic!” The Jewish guy responds, “But that was an iceberg!”
The Chinese guy: “Iceberg. Goldberg. They’re all the same…”
0012 (oz) — Licensed to Brew
When I was at the tradeshow last week, I was speaking with one of our product managers visiting from Taiwan. Taiwan tends to be a fairly conservative place, so when word gets around back at HQ there about my penchant for drinking, poker, and motorcycles, I just might get a reputation!
But we had been talking about homebrewing. The product manager was asking if I needed any sort of license to homebrew. “Of course not!” I replied. “A license to homebrew? Not in America. I think I’d need one, but only if I were to start selling it.”
But the question piqued my interest. Today, in one of the beeradvocate forums, it was mentioned that homebrewing was legalized in 1978. Legalized? That would mean that buying malted barley, hops, and yeast, putting them together, fermenting the product, all for personal consumption, was illegal at one point?!
Looking back at it, it’s not that surprising. Back during Prohibition, all alcohol production was made illegal (like most victimless crimes, that did very little to stop it, of course!). In 1933, when alcohol was again legalized, home winemaking was legalized with it, but in an oversight, homebrewing beer remained illegal. Since 1978, though, it has been an uphill battle to bring states in line with the federal legislation. Even then, while federal law allows up to 200 gallons/year without running afoul of the BATF, here in Georgia, we’re only allowed 50 gal/year.
So I’ve already managed to use up 30% of my brewing allotment for the year, and since I will soon be moving from 5 gallon batches to 10 gallon batches (with the help of a neighbor), I might have to keep an eye on things. After all, within a week or two, I’ll have hit 50%! I’d better watch it, because I wouldn’t want to find myself running afoul of the law, now would I? 
What are the Roman Numerals for 39?
Ahh, yes, one of these days, Roman Numerals will come back to bite me. But for now, head over to the Carnival of Liberty XXXIX! It’s hosted by Doug, a nice way to break in his new home.
Check it out. I’m back from NYC, and I’m working on getting some errands done, and cutting the lawn for the first time this season. This whole yardwork thing just never lets up, does it?
April 2, 2006
I’m enjoying NYC
Not much time for posting… Anniversary trips will do that to you… But I have to say New York is a heck of a place to visit. The portion I’m in reminds me quite a bit of Chicago, but when we headed up to the top of Rockefeller Center, I realized that Manhattan is quite a bit more expansive than Chicago. I hope to be back to posting sometime on Tuesday, but in the interim, you can find a lot of good things to read on my sidebar. As always, The Liberty Papers is a great place to visit. And if you have a chance, head over to Doug’s new digs.
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Since I took that critical thinking class I have noticed that logical fallacies are all too prevalent in our public discourse from all sides. The fallacies I’ve noticed the most are slippery slope, special pleading, circular reasoning (used often in religion), red herring, ad-hominem, and strawman. I agree, every person should know how to identify these and other fallacies. This would not only make it easier to know when someone is using fallacies but would also help people construct their own arguments better.
Comment by Stephen Littau — April 17, 2006 @ 3:14 pm