Obama dogged by protesters on bay visit — SFGate
Dogged by protesters?! If he ever comes to Orange County, he’ll be PROTESTED BY DOGS!
My owner pays so many taxes that there’s hardly any money left for pug treats! 
— Lightning 
William of Occam
Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They’re Better — PBS NewsHour
An academic says that Silicon Valley is “not a meritocracy.”
He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce.
The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X.
In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do.
Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to have a family? Do you want to see them sometimes?
The fact that more men than women are founding startups is not evidence that women are being discriminated against. The simplest explanation is that women just don’t want to do it as much as men do.
“Do you know how to get there?”
“No. Did you bring the map?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you say before we left that you’d printed a map?”
“I said I printed it but I didn’t say I was going to bring it along.”
“Oh . . . well, we can call when we get out there. I know how to get to Thousand Oaks, I just don’t remember how to get to their house.”
“Do you know the offramp from the freeway?”
“Yes.”
“So it can’t be too complicated then. I saw on the map it was just lefts and rights.”
“Uh, isn’t any route to anywhere just lefts and rights?”
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
That headline should not read “DESPITE new health law,” it should read “BECAUSE OF new health law.”
But we were going to get things for free! We were promised better things at a lower cost!
In my day, most of the citizens were farmers or merchants or tradesmen. They lived by their hands and their wits. They had horse sense and they knew when they were being sold a bill of goods.
Of course, that was before television.
Americans today are unfortunately rather stupid. Most of them don’t know anything about economics, science, history, government . . . as George Carlin says, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” George is here in heaven now. He breaks me up, he really does.
Your president and Congress have decreed that every American will have health insurance whether they want it or not. They have further decreed that a lot of Americans will not have to pay for their own health insurance, which means that the cost of their health insurance has to be paid by the rest of you. That’s one reason why your health insurance premium is going up.
Another reason your premium is going up is the “guaranteed issue” provision. “Guaranteed issue” means that no one can be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.
Funny story: My friend Paul Epps, his wife has an insurance agency in Southern California. It’s an area that’s susceptible to wildfires in the summer months. When a fire breaks out, people who live near the fire actually call this woman wanting to buy a homeowners policy.
Of course, she doesn’t sell it to them. Insurance companies are a little bit smarter than that.
Buying a homeowners policy when your house is already on fire is analogous to “guaranteed issue” health insurance: Hello, I’d like to buy some health insurance. Oh by the way, I have cancer, but the doctors think that with lengthy and expensive treatment, I have a chance to pull through.
This is not even insurance anymore. Insurance is something you pay for now to protect against the risk of having to pay a lot more later. In these cases, there IS no risk. The bad news has already happened. It’s a dead loss for the insurance company and they have to spread the cost of that loss to other policyholders. That’s another reason your premium is going up.
This isn’t even economics, folks, it’s just common sense.
(Photo credit: ironypoisoning)
Final election counts are in for Berkeley, CA, the most liberal city in America. Let’s start with the presidential election, where Mitt Romney was able to edge out Jill Stein for second place:
California ballot proposition results included:
I found this table from Ballotpedia rather interesting. It shows how much money has been donated to each side of the California ballot propositions.
| Proposition | Donations in favor | Donations against |
|---|---|---|
| Proposition 30 | $67,100,000 | $53,400,000 |
| Proposition 31 | $4,400,000 | $573,700 |
| Proposition 32 | $60,500,000 | $73,300,000 |
| Proposition 33 | $17,100,000 | $275,700 |
| Proposition 34 | $7,400,000 | $391,900 |
| Proposition 35 | $3,700,000 | $0 |
| Proposition 36 | $2,700,000 | $119,900 |
| Proposition 37 | $8,700,000 | $45,600,000 |
| Proposition 38 | $47,800,000 | $42,300 |
| Proposition 39 | $31,400,000 | $45,000 |
| Proposition 40 | $601,100 | $2,300,000 |
From the Offical Voter Information Guide:
Requires labeling of food sold to consumers made from plants or animals with genetic material changed in specified ways. Prohibits marketing such food, or other processed food, as “natural.” Provides exemptions. Fiscal Impact: Increased annual state costs from a few hundred thousand dollars to over $1 million to regulate the labeling of genetically engineered foods. Additional, but likely not significant, governmental costs to address violations under the measure.
Notice this phrase: “Provides exemptions.” In other words, the statute requires certain things and prohibits certain other things — except when it doesn’t.
Not that it matters because $1 million a year isn’t going to buy you a lot of enforcement anyway. Who wrote this proposition, Dr. Evil?
Prop 37 is supported by people who hate freedom and having to think for themselves.
I’ve been reading a lot of poetry as part of the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry class on Coursera.
One of the things I like about the class is that the video lessons are done a little differently than other Coursera classes I’ve taken. Rather than recorded lectures, the videos consist of the instructor, Al Filreis, leading a small group of Penn students in close readings of selected poems.
Anyway, here are a few of my favorites so far:
These next two, both by Richard Wilbur, I want to single out as being particularly exquisite and heartbreaking:
We stopped for gas in Lodi a couple of days ago on the way back from Berkeley and I can’t get the damn song out of my head . . .
If I only had a dollar for every song I’ve sung
For every tiiiime I had to plaaaay while people sat there drunk . . .
I recently concluded a 3-month job search. As part of my networking, I met a number of unemployed people in other fields who were having trouble not only getting jobs, but even getting interviews.
I talked to a lot of people and averaged about an interview a day, including phone interviews, mostly for development manager jobs. For every development manager job, there are multiple development jobs, so if you’re a developer, your situation is even better than mine was.
I live in Southern California, but the demand is not just local. I had multiple contacts from companies outside the SoCal area that can’t find qualified candidates.
I’ve been working again for over two months, I no longer have an active résumé on job boards, and I still get emails and calls every day from recruiters all over the country.
The situation with Agile and Scrum right now seems to be that a lot of people are putting it on their résumé but most of them are bluffing.
One hiring manager told me that he’d talked to three dozen candidates who claimed to know Scrum and only one (me) who actually knew it.
Another hiring manager asked me to describe the Scrum process, beginning with a product owner with an idea through the end of the first sprint. It’s a basic question, and when I finished, he thanked me for my answer. “You’d be surprised how many people I ask that question and the answer is a yard sale.”
Actually, you’d be surprised how little I’d be surprised by that.
One recruiter contacted me about a 3-month Scrum Master contract in Toledo, Ohio. A glance at my résumé will tell you that I’ve never worked outside Southern California, so on a list of people likely to take a 3-month contract in Toledo, Ohio, my name would be far, far from the top, but the difficulty of finding a qualified candidate to fill that job is such that the recruiter contacted me anyway.
If you really know Agile and/or Scrum right now, it’s a seller’s market.
I’m spending a couple of weeks in Bangalore at the end of the month. Travel is the most depressing thing in the world, beating out listening to other people talk about their travels.
Bangalore has been called the Silicon Valley of Asia. It’s like the Silicon Valley here in California, but with monkeys and malaria.
My boss has cautioned me to drink only the bottled water from the hotel, never the bottled water at the office.
“They refill the bottles at the office with their own water,” he said. “The hotel will give you two bottles a day, but I tipped the staff a dollar a day and they left extra bottles in my room. That’s a lot of money over there.”
I’m seriously thinking about tipping two dollars a day just to see what the heck happens . . .
My boy saw Derrick Williams out and about the other night . . . Williams is from La Mirada (like me!), so it wouldn’t be unusual to spot him in the SoCal area.
“You’re Derrick Williams, right?” the boy said.
“No, that’s not me,” Williams replied.
Williams was cleverly disguised in an Arizona basketball hoodie and Minnesota Timberwolves sweatpants. Oh, and he’s 6-foot-8.
Via Curbed LA on the occasion of what would have been DFW’s 50th birthday today.
What a depressing abode! I’m ready to drive out there right now and hang myself . . .
The University of California is prohibited by law from considering race in the admissions process, but they are allowed to identify certain ethnic groups as “underrepresented minorities.”
Here are some freshman enrollment numbers at UC Berkeley for Fall 2011. The first four groups on the list are considered underrepresented; the others aren’t.
| Ethnicity | 2011 Fall |
|---|---|
| African American/Black | 130 |
| Mexican American/Chicano | 325 |
| Other Hispanic/Latino | 150 |
| Native American/Alaskan Native | 33 |
| Pacific Islander | 11 |
| Chinese | 936 |
| Filipino | 108 |
| Japanese | 68 |
| Korean | 250 |
| Other Asian | 45 |
| South Asian | 324 |
| Vietnamese | 142 |
Asian kids are putting a different race on their college applications to boost their chances of getting into the top schools.
Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.
That’s a rather modest strategy. Identifying yourself as white does give you a little bit of a boost but to really improve the odds, I’d advise everyone to go ahead and check the Black or Hispanic box. Or Eskimo. Eskimos are kind of Asian-looking.
Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it’s 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.
Here in California, state colleges and universities are prohibited by Proposition 209 from considering race in the admissions process. As a result, the student body at UC Berkeley is more than 40 percent Asian, up from about 20 percent before Prop 209 was passed in 1996. (The California population is 13 percent Asian.)
Other top schools that don’t consider race in admissions also have a high percentage of Asian students. Cal Tech is about one-third Asian. (As a private school, Cal Tech is not subject to Prop 209, but chooses not to consider race.)
Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania declined to make admissions officers available for interviews for this story.
Draw your own conclusions. We are being overrun by the yellow horde!
Someone asks one of the Hearst Castle tour guides, “What’s the difference between the evening tour and the regular tour?”
“Oh, it’s night and day,” he replies.
As we’re touring the gardens at Hearst Castle, my wife points out a plant that’s just like one we have at home.
“Yeah, this place a has a lot of similarities to our house,” I say. “We have a plant, we have a pool . . .”
“We don’t have a pool,” the boy says.
“Well, we have access to a pool.”
“Here’s your wristband for the tour.”
“What do I do with it?”
Image via Wikipedia
The dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering expressed support today for a recommendation from a student group that the college create a recruitment and retention plan for women and underrepresented minority students.
It sounds like the dean might be up for lowering the engineering standards to meet diversity metrics. Bad idea. Engineering is serious business.
Also: Preferential treatment by a public institution based on race, sex or ethnicity is prohibited by California law.
I’ve got a better and more legal idea: How about if the women and “underrepresented” minority students suck it up and meet the same academic standards as everyone else?
Or apply to a different school? If they can’t meet the standards at Berkeley, they might do fine at a less demanding institution like Stanford or UCLA.
I’ve attended engineering school myself. We had diversity admits. After one semester, maybe two, they weren’t there anymore. Who was helped?
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a controversial, affirmative action-like bill Saturday that would have allowed public colleges and universities in California to consider demographic factors in admissions processes.
Like!
I hate to sound selfish but whatever “demographic factors” they were planning to consider, I’m 110 percent sure they’d serve to penalize my kid, nieces, nephews, grandkids — everyone in my family now and forever — and for what? Racial inequities of the past that they had nothing to do with?
Not interested in taking the hit for that, sorry.
We’re good people. We stopped inviting the slaveholders to the family reunions because they’ve all been dead for about 100 years . . .
