First Blog

Immigration and Education Paradox The President has recently promoted a new immigration law.  English speaking and needed skills take priority.  You may agree or disagree.  But the pundits, always that crowd, have expanded the argument further – to education and immigration. They say we are educating foreign nationals to have highly technical skills.  Then, by law, they are required to return home.  However, the USA is not producing a sufficient number of technical USA citizen grads to satisfy job openings. It need many, many more.  The current push is to let foreign grads stay.  Let them stay - they say. Let’s allow those well trained, educated, and able students to take jobs right here.  Does this sound reasonable? Absolutely!  No brainer, huh?  Not quite .  By the requirement of law, the students to return home, the US has created a truly inexpensive and successful foreign policy program.  Those educated students, back home, and become allies of everything USA.  They be

The extensible spring.  Think of the shock absorber on your car.  You hit a bump, the spring is compressed and then releases its energy slowly to cushion the bump.  Now think of capital markets in the same way.  This time the bump is a constant barrage of regulations.  They kept coming during the Obama administration.  For good or bad, the spring kept compressing.  Under Trump, the regulations have been relaxed, and the spring with all its stored up energy seems to be releasing its energy in an explosion of expansion.  This leads us to believe the markets have expanded (30 new DOW records this year), not back to their reasonable expression, but far beyond.  It leads one to think a rebound is possible, as it returns to where it should be.  And “should be,” on the basis of growth and market, are the key words.  We are led to believe the markets will settle back to reasonable positions, and this may imply a correction is coming.  A bumpy ride may be afoot.  Analogy is a wonde

Whatever happened to pollution?  Ever since climate change came on board , we hear little of pollution.  Smoke stacks emissions, dumping garbage in the ocean, toxic metals in landfills, polluted streams, chemical plant effluence, nuclear waste…  All gone?  All been fixed?  Possibly not. With the exception of smoke stacks (i.e. C02), climate change has co-opted the attention of all those formerly driven by pollution issues.  Such remain as unsolved, unattended, yet seriously important problems. 

Ways we learn. You want to learn?  You want to achieve?  You want to know?  Go to school, say the educators.  But there are other important ways to learn.        First, we learn from reading books or being taught in the classroom. We learn by solving given problems. Practice and repetition, this is the role and scope of all school teaching. Occasionally, inspiration occurs.           Second we learn from examples and experience. Seeing many examples, some working and some not, and knowing why helps. These build our knowledge and intuition of reality.  Knowledge is a pathway to solving problems, while intuition provides a pathway to innovation.  More simply, we learn by doing.  Attending the school of hard knocks is an expression of this.         Third, we learn from mistakes*.  Make no mistake about it; this is a key way we learn.  How many times have you and I learned this or that of what *not* to do, or what doesn’t work.  However, this is the latest in actual academic re

Anti-trust – 21 st century style All of us know when a particular company or cabal of companies begin to and then control a sector of products, it invokes attention.  These companies are sometimes subject to the anti-trust provisions of the law, i.e. Sherman Anti-Trust.  That was yesterday, when companies created an unfair market advantage to increase profits.  Many companies were broken up in this way, notably Standard Oil. Today is different, with monopolies and cabals created to hold information, the commodity of the future.  Implied here is that large corporations such as Amazon and Facebook contain so much information about citizens, it can actually affect what people do and how they buy.  By marketing information, they will soon be moving into altering what citizens think, and even how they vote.  The tip of this is already evident, with many pundits and news anchors discussing that such firms are becoming too big and controlling too much leverage in America. Alas, even

Freedom vs. Security It is said that by the second century of our era that ancient Romans during the reign of Trajan (Roman emperor from 98 to 117 CE) that at least one provision of current social justice was popular even then, that it is better that the guilty remain unpunished than the innocent to be condemned.  This is a thorny issue plaguing us all today. However, and of more subtle distinction was at this time Romans loved security too much to be capable of freedom.  The distinction should not be lost on modern times.  At least one party in most western countries promotes security above everything else.  In their version of politics, they work to attract groups that venerate security, having persuaded them they never had it and that it is the primal goal to achieve.  Security, however, comes at the price of surrender of power, of thought, and of freedom in all forms. It surrenders to the provider (usually government) virtually unlimited power over their well-being. Freedo

The Hyperloop Elon Musk (i.e. Mr. Tesla Car) has received “verbal” approval from the government to build the world’s longest tunnel for an ultra-high-speed train line to connect New York to Washington.*  Called a Hyperloop , this tunnel is a mere 204 miles long, as the crow flies. Basically, this means the creation of a tunnel into the earth of a very slight angle and linear, i.e. perfectly straight, to Washington DC. The length of this underground tunnel will be about 203.98 miles.  Not much savings there from the crow’s flight. The interesting point is this tunnel will, at its lowest point be 1.3 miles or about 6866 feet below the earth’s surface.  This is deeper than most oil wells.   So you take a trip on the new train in this new tunnel, and it gets stuck midway.  Will happen sometime. At this depth, the tunnel temperature has increased by 98 degrees F above the mean surface temperature.  It’s hot down there. All this implies system failure at this depth will be fatal.  P

What has happened to the US Government?  It seems like Congress is doing little, either party, preferring to squabble internally, or not allowing compromise.  Sometimes both.  The consequence is that the President makes regulations and takes other executive actions.  Both parties here.  The courts have become the legislature, assuming the job of interpreting the law in some preferred fashion – and their “legal” arguments are increasingly weak and partisan*.  I believe this era of polarized politics is the root cause of the dysfunction. I believe some persons or some organizations are at the switch, keeping this state of conflict at high tension.  For some of these, the goal is the reshaping of America toward some uncertain model.  For others, there seems to be a harkening to return to the traditional certainty and comfort of a remembered past. The central issue these days is Obamacare.  It seems no one likes it much, at least those paying the full freight of premiums.  But whi

Politics in Washington is a combination of many factors.  Some of these are contrapuntal, with strong sounds of dissonance. Fear, obedience, strategy, tactics, principles, consensus, leadership, and survival are among the many diverse, contradictory, but sometimes sonorous overtones.  The music is certainly played in a minor key, with multiple tonalities. All these are motives as well as operations, all portions of this strange symphonic band. Perhaps this has always been; the best leaders had a sense on how to arrange this strange concoction into a harmonious symphony of achievement.  This was in the past when politicians could be maneuvered into their place in the orchestra of legislation.  Perhaps the current leaders simply don’t understand the fundamentals of political music.  Perhaps the current politicians are so tone-deaf there is little understanding of how this music is made, much less played.  We also have especially too many minor players wanting to be soloists

You hear much about Apple TV, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and all those other services selling alternative programming.  Why is that?  It could be little more than enhanced alternatives with another channel for delivery. It could be more choices.  It could be the traditional television networks offer little more beyond their traditional tripe. It doesn’t work any more. ------------------- I’ve been watching on Netflix an Australian series, Dr. Blake Mysteries .  Not bad.  How lucky they were, five years after total war, these citizens during the years 1946-1959.  It is true: Many were still grimaced by the war. Many were still grieved by their losses. Many were still flagged from their suffering.  However, almost all rejoiced in their affirmation of the excellence of our victorious countries, our system, what they stood for, and their preeminent position in the world.  Aside from the horror, there remained a certainty we were right, the enemy was vanquished, and we were the pathfin

“Why police reform is so hard?”  This is the content of a essay from The Conversation website ( http://theconversation.com ).  It is akin to the old chestnut, “Are you still beating your wife?”  The very statement assumes the conclusion.  In the police case, the statement assumes the police need reforming, and that it is not only difficult but nearly impossible.  Always, we see more training is the prescription to correct these egregious offenses. What has happened is that police now live on the defensive.  Pro-active policing is feared by the probability of racist accusations. Crowd control is diminished by the probability of being charged with brutality.  Domestic disturbance interventions are diminished by the possibility of  excessive force charges.  The perpetrators make their charges with the simple goal of making their case tried in the press – usually against law enforcement.   The result is always that more sensitivity training is needed. Police, from the onset of any

Bill de Blasio . It used to be that college students would imitate adults.  Wearing suits and elegant attire, they would act as mature as they could. Nowadays, it is the reverse.  Adults are imitating college students, supporting all manner of youthful positions, mostly extreme uncompromising views – the typical fair of sophomores.  Case-in-point.  With NY City in grief over the loss of a police officer to assassination, the mayor jets off to Europe to hang with a bunch of protesters with seeming goal simply to protest. The man seems to be singularly immature, usually a recoverable illness, but not in his case. --------------------- Presidents . Clinton was bogged down a lot by personal issues. Bush was bogged down by wars in the Middle East. Obama was bogged down by trying to remake the US and the world into a globally unified enterprise.   The question is: Who’s taking care of our country?  This includes the bridges and roadways, the waterways and schools, the power plan