Maggie's Farm

Who works "9-5" anymore in America?

Most folks (if lucky enough to have work to do) work far more than that these days.

I work 7:30 to noon, then a little more than an hour in the gym or just walking around outdoors (then an apple, cigar, and a coffee for lunch while preparing a Maggie's post), then around 1:30 - 6 or 6:30 (on a typical work day). I have a roughly 35-45 minute commute, too. Not sure whether you'd call that a 10 or 11-hour day, but it suits me just fine. When I have deadlines, I work weekends but I try to avoid that as much as I can during the summertime. And I am linked into the office at home.

"Man May Work from Sun to Sun; But Woman's Work is Never Done." Is that still true? I find that my work is never "done" either. "Done" is when you're dead.

What are your usual work hours?

A perfect example of it: Climate Confusion: Global Warming Halted by Pollution.

The alarmists are playing whack-a-mole with any data which does not fit their hypotheses and predictions. This is the stuff of politicians, children, and litigators, not scientists.

One definition: An error in reasoning in which one assumes that the observed relationship between current events and some historical events represents a causal relationship.

Such reasoning is not consistent with the scientific method. When data don't fit your hypothesis, you can't makes excuses for your data while leaving your hypothesis unchanged.

If you play that game, you also violate the rules of Falsifiability by making a non-falsifiable hypothesis. My bold:

(Karl Popper) A conjecture or hypothesis must be accepted as true until such time as it is proven to be false. Popper maintains that scientists approach the truth through what he calls "conjecture and refutation." In actuality, scientists approach the truth not through conjecture and refutation, but through conjecture and CONFIRMATION, i.e. demonstration, by means of careful experiment, that a hypothesis corresponds to the facts of reality. Until the phenomenon is proven TRUE there is no obligation to base my attitude toward it on the assumption that it MIGHT be true. If there were such an obligation, then I would be obliged to give serious consideration to every crackpot notion that has ever been put forward.

If an hypothesis cannot be refuted by data, it's not science: it's a belief system. The evidence that there has been no warming for over a decade is difficult data indeed in light of their hysterical predictions, so now they have invented covert warming. This is pathetic and embarassing. Tweaking computer models to fit unexpected data is not science. It's overt fudging.

As a commenter at Watts pointed out, with some math adjusting you can prove Ptolemy's solar system to be an accurate model.

(Thanks to Hogeye Bill's Dictionary of Logical Fallacies)

Related: Breaking: A peer reviewed admission that “global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008″ – Dr David Whitehouse on the PNAS paper Kaufmann et al. (2011). The comments there are great. One example:

What... emerges from this is a convenient flexible device to explain any climate change and blame it on humans. Is there warming? Its caused by CO2. Cooling? It can only be smokestack particles.

Fascinating. Without beer, we'd have no pretty pyramids to look at. 

Hey, honey, don't forget the limes.

VDH: An Exceptional Fourth of July:

... there has never been any nation even remotely similar to America. Here's why. Most revolutions seek to destroy the existing class order and use all-powerful government to mandate an equality of result rather than of opportunity -- in the manner of the French Revolution's slogan of "liberty, equality and fraternity" or the Russian Revolution's "peace, land and bread."

In contrast, our revolutionaries shouted "Don't tread on me!" and "Give me liberty or give me death!" The Founders were convinced that constitutionally protected freedom would allow the individual to create wealth apart from government. Such enlightened self-interest would then enrich society at large far more effectively that could an all-powerful state.

Such constitutionally protected private property, free enterprise and market capitalism explain why the United States -- with only about 4.5 percent of the world's population -- even today, in an intensely competitive global economy, still produces a quarter of the world's goods and services.

All true, but I resist the notion that wealth and productivity are the goals of freedom. I believe that they just happen to be a side effect of what happens when people are (relatively) free from the control and the infantilization of the state, and are free or forced by reality to pursue whatever the heck in this brief life they decide to pursue, whatever is important to them.

That is our American "special sauce." Long may it live.

I believe in work.

I believe that no honest work should be beneath any American. I also believe that all kids should work, and earn their own money. Kids learn more about how to, and how not to, negotiate the world from work than they do from school. Make your mistakes when young, and learn from them, as everybody needs to. Any paid work will do, but the more "menial" the better.

Except for the most spoiled brats who want to hang out during the summer or to be indulged in "enriching experiences," most kids want to work. It's a step towards adulthood and independence, and moping around the house or driving to the beach in the Beemer is a spiritual death for teens - or a sign of spiritual death.

Summer "vacation" is for the teachers. What do kids need a vacation for? They've been in school, for heaven's sake. School isn't "work work," as Whoopi Goldberg did not say. School is a piece of cake, compared to work. It's a delight, a joy, and a privilege - and it sure beats working an industrial loom in New Bedford at age 11. And, heck, teaching is real difficult too, compared to running a business. Right?

This is sad: The Jobless Summer - Why only one in four teens is employed.

That one-in-four is the one with initiative and drive. Watch that one, because if you can make something happen in your teens with all of the forces creating headwinds today, Bravo. Or Brava, as they say in NYC.

Here. When you train and enable adults to be children, they will act like it. Just like in Wisconsin. Many will revert to childhood if they can get away with it. Those made of sterner stuff will not.

They are marching and berserking for "socialism." They don't realize they already have it, along with the typical Socialist terminal case of the Gimmes.

Euroland people need to grow up and accept the reality that life is difficult and challenging, and that no adult is entitled to anything. You are supposed to man up, in life. Or woman up, as the case may be. Reagan would have fired them all for shirking their duties to the public who hired them and who pays their wages from their own toil, and rightly so.

If you want to be a serf, expect to be treated like one.

Everybody makes fun of poor Paul Krugman, who is widely known as having become a real flake, a partisan hack, and a mind-numbed robot for the Left. Has he written a single thing in the past ten years that has not been predictably straight Left-wing Dem party line apologetics?

Foster in FP attempts a sympathetic understanding.

A reader sent us a pic of his first wheels. Nice:

He also sent us this car, but I forget why:

Anyway, what was your first car? (year, make and model please, if you can recall the details)

You know about the warning, but do you know who Miranda was?  Or how he died? Or what became of his killer?

Black racism against Asians and whites (h/t Doug Ross). Never reported because it doesn't fit the narrative.

Fraud Up and Down Our Educational System. A quote from London:

     Once these high-school graduates hold a diploma in their hands, however questionable their skill level, they are deemed college-ready. Since America has a college for everyone and the society is committed to mass education, students who can read at only a marginal level or who cannot solve quadratic equations are seated in institutions of higher learning.
    Surely something has to give. Invariably remediation must take place, but that is insufficient to deal with widespread incompetence. Obviously course content and requirements are modified. A physics instructor at the City University in New York told me recently it is impossible to teach real physics when your students are incapable of engaging eight-grade math.

That's the title of a fascinating essay by Aaron at FP. (link fixed). A quote:

... a moral resurrection was essential. This meant not merely an overhaul of the Soviet political and economic systems, not merely an upending of social norms, but a revolution on the individual level: a change in the personal character of the Russian subject. As Mikhail Antonov declared in a seminal 1987 essay, "So What Is Happening to Us?" in the magazine Oktyabr, the people had to be "saved" -- not from external dangers but "most of all from themselves, from the consequences of those demoralizing processes that kill the noblest human qualities." Saved how? By making the nascent liberalization fateful, irreversible -- not Khrushchev's short-lived "thaw," but a climate change. And what would guarantee this irreversibility? Above all, the appearance of a free man who would be "immune to the recurrences of spiritual slavery." The weekly magazine Ogoniok, a key publication of glasnost, wrote in February 1989 that only "man incapable of being a police informer, of betraying, and of lies, no matter in whose or what name, can save us from the re-emergence of a totalitarian state."

A rescue from the "spiritual slavery" of Socialism.

From William Young's The Reverse Metamorphosis of Sustainability: Governance:

The founders recognized that the political power of groups or factions would become largely the basis for rewards from the state. Thus, they deliberately sought to circumscribe spoils and rewards from government. The difficulty they anticipated in controlling factions was exacerbated by twentieth-century progressivism. In The Rise and Decline of Nations(1982), Mancur Olson shows that factions seek to redistribute rather than create wealth and, over time, impose social and economic rigidities and costs which cause nations to lose vitality and reduce their rate of economic growth. This is America’s early-twenty-first-century affliction, and government-controlled sustainable development would further amplify the role of politics and factions in redistributing scarcity rather than creating wealth. Olson further warned that factions drive political life away from considerations of widespread common interests and spur divisiveness that can even make societies ungovernable.

Our colleges and universities, and the teachers they have educated, have undermined the understanding of, and attitudes towards, Western and American systems of economics and governance, guiding students from public schooling onward to become true believers in the reverse metamorphosis of sustainability. The concept of sustainable development would repeat the historical errors and failures of socialism and communism in the name of protecting nature.

Can I say that Rush was right about all this, back in the 1980s? He saw the Left's need for a new meme, a new narrative. That's around the time when many of us Maggie's folks took the Conservationist path of stewardship instead of the Greenie path of hidden power agendas.

A Trojan Horse in “Higher” Education. He begins:

In 1932 Yale accepted seventy-two per cent of its applicants. In 1940 Harvard accepted eighty-five per cent. Of the four hundred and five boys from Groton who applied to Harvard between the years 1906 and 1932 only three were turned down.

He concludes:

When my kids get “literature” in the mail from a college claiming that it will help them enter into the fullness of their humanity and teach them to insure in perpetuity the life and health of the world, I will stop using the word “racket” to describe “higher” education. But until that time I’m afraid I will be an accomplice to something I cannot wholly admire—if also, I hope, an enemy within it, a kind of Trojan horse.

Only the prosperous could afford fancy private higher education before WW 2. It is getting so that few can afford it now. At $50,000+ per year, they are back to looking for the rich kids again whose parents can pay full freight.

It's summertime, and I like to post a few light-hearted summertime items on occasion.

This one will be the First Adult (ie first post-formal education) job held by prominent or semi-prominent high-achieving people.

For examples:

Ronald Reagan - sportscaster

Ben Franklin - Apprentice printer

Robert Frost (dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard) - cobbler, farmer, and schoolteacher

Saint Paul - Tentmaker

Harry Truman - Timekeeper for the Sante Fe Railroad

Mark Twain - Apprentice printer

Add interesting examples in the comments - including your own if you wish...

Some interesting comments to Cafe Hayek's Muscle Inequality, including this:

“Would you pump weights for hours each day knowing that a large chunk of what you build will be stripped away and given to someone else?”

Seemed to me, today, that our economy is stuck in a great molasses spill, but this time the molasses is from the government.

Pic from The Great Molasses Disaster (Boston, 1919).

Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, which includes the famous line, “We hold these truths to be revealed after careful study by Ivy League-educated people, that all men are in need of constant care and supervision, that they are endowed by the highly-educated intellectual class with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are free Health Care, strict and expansive Regulations on all activities, and the pursuit of Big Government.”

From Fleming's The Real Story of America’s Founding - "Give me a large government telling me what I can and can't do while spending most of my money, or give me death!"

We Hated Reagan - A memoir of ignorance.

Bobby Jindal: Hating President Obama Is Foolish

Our Attorney General: Civilian Courts Are America’s ‘Most Effective Terror-fighting Weapon’?

The author comments:

If you saw a dozen al-Qaeda terrorists approaching your location, who would you rather have by your side? A squad of lawyers like me (even with my sidearm and M4 that I carried downrange) or one of Fox Troop (2/3 ACR)’s Bradley Fighting Vehicles, chain gun at the ready?

At Chronicle.

I believe that, if you haven't gotten what you need to become an effective and self-motivated learner in high school, you never will. School is spoon-feeding, but real education is picking up the spoon yourself.

The test of whether someone has deserved a higher education is afterwards: Do they continue with scholarly or self-educational pursuits, or do they rest on their paper laurels? Most people could learn to do their jobs through apprenticeships if a job is what they are after, and save the college cost. Most jobs are not rocket science, but most jobs expect ongoing learning of some sort, on one's own.

I also believe that all education is self-education, and that a degree is an expensive piece of paper. See "I got my education at the New York Public Library," (which wonderful library, a source of learning for immigrants and scholars alike, had its 100th Aniversary last month).

We easily forget that almost none of the remarkable achievers and contributors in human history ever had higher education, or more than elementary formal education, and that that continues to be true up through the present.

America's "education system" is SNAFU, and "college education" is a racket designed to support Big Beer.

George Will: In Ted Cruz, a candidate as good as it gets. Impressive resume - and a Madisonian. It would be fun to see him in the Senate.

At City Journal, The Great Little Madison. One quote re Madison and the Bill of Rights amendments:

He had at first strongly opposed such amendments, arguing that the Constitution, by its precise enumeration of the federal government’s strictly limited powers, makes clear that any power not on that short list remains off-limits. A bill of rights would reverse the emphasis, he feared, opening the way to an enlargement of federal prerogative and a shrinking of the powers reserved to the states and the people. “If an enumeration be made of our rights,” he argued in the June 1788 Virginia ratifying convention, “will it not be implied, that every thing omitted, is given to the general government?”

I think he was right, but he ended up flip-flopping due to political pressure.

Four Myths about the Crusades. A quote:

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

From Malanga's The 'Anti-Christie' Agenda Driving Connecticut:

Connecticut finished 47th among states in net jobs created by existing businesses over a 15 year period, according to the National Establishment Times Series database, which tracks job dynamics from 1993 through 2008. On jobs generated by new businesses over the same time, the state ranked 46th, according to NETS. In fact, it's misleading even to use the term ‘job dynamics' in discussing Connecticut. The state has fewer private sector jobs today than it had in 1990.

Malloy and his fellow Democrats now in charge seem to believe that the state's only problem was that it just wasn't doing enough taxing and spending and borrowing.

Lovely state, insane politics. Economically, it could be another Texas if it wanted to be. From an income standpoint, it's the richest state in the US (but that mostly comes from the comfortable NYC suburb of Fairfield County). Instead, it keeps trying to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs to buy votes in its forlorn dying cities from which industry has fled.

That's a long-term death spiral, just like the one New Jersey was in.

The Joy of Mathematics is on sale at The Teaching Company. It's "designed for you."

Math is fun, endlessly challenging, relentlessly logical, brain-exercising, and intriguing. Two years of Calc and Stats should be required for a Thinking Permit.

Honest discussions or debates have one purpose: to illuminate a subject with facts and theories which relate facts to eachother, and perhaps to persuade. Dishonest debates or arguments are really just fights with words, and of interest only to litigators and politicians.

Fallacious arguments  of the false assumption type are used in both: in the former by accident or out of ignorance, and in the latter as a tactical trick (eg "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit.").

When questions are posed in that manner, they are known as loaded questions.  They are "loaded" with an effort to seek your acquiescence to an unspoken assumption. (The classic is "When did you stop beating your wife?") The correct response to questions with hidden assumptions is to point that out, and to challenge the hidden assumption. Otherwise, you will fall into a trap.

When engaging on an issue, always examine the other guy's assumptions first, because a topic can go nowhere with fallacious assumptions, and there can be no constructive discussion if you do not accept the other guy's premise. In that case, you must address the premise first, backing up before you can move forward.

Here are some simple examples of fallacious assumptions. Usually, in arguments, the assumptions are unstated, "assumed." It's better to state them first just as one lists one's "givens" in geometry proofs. Sometimes, just addressing the assumptions clears everything up.

 John at Powerline: You Can Prove Anything If You Make the Right Assumptions. Certainly true, if one is engaging in dishonest or tendentious debate.

(I am aware that I am not discussing the huge and important topic of unconscious assumptions, but that is more about psychology than logical debate.)