Daily Archives: 4 August 2023

It’s Safer This Way

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Recall that, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) slur regarding Florida’s updated education curriculum, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) invited her to Florida to discuss with him that curriculum.

Harris doesn’t want to. She made it to Florida, though, to talk to the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention. That’s where she made her excuses and backed away.

They attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates with a proposal that most recently came in of a politically motivated roundtable[.]
Well, I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.

The core of her excuse-making is that strawman of hers, a dolly she’ll have to play with by herself. No one is suggesting, including in the curriculum, that there are, or were, any redeeming qualities of slavery. Nor was that the subject of the discussion DeSantis offered; he offered to discuss the curriculum and how it proposed to teach, in the proximate matter, black history, including slavery, in the United States and in Florida.

It’s easy to sit in the safety of the sidelines and carp. It’s cowardly, too, but it’s entirely consistent for the border tsar who’s never been to our southern border.

Who Interviewed These Folks?

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I have to ask because:

Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.
“How do I do that?” asked the young man.
So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101[.]

How was this newly minted mechanical engineer even hired when he didn’t know the basics of mechanical engineering (how was he able to graduate with a degree when he didn’t know such a basic thing, but that’s for a separate article.) Why wasn’t he given a quick test of the basics? Newly hired secretaries administrative assistants get tested on basics like typing and telephone etiquette and etc. Why wouldn’t any new hire be tested on the basics of the job for which he’s being hired?

Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

It isn’t just mechanical engineering, either, it’s

  • structural engineers unable to answer questions about the use of trusses in the construction of bridges and roadways
  • nursing students struggling to pass a certification exam
  • new call center workers have problems with soft skills
  • Zoo seasonal workers not looking to be productive; if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing

The list goes on. And on. And on….

In the alternative, instead of taking whatever noob wanders in from the sidewalk, or dropping too many dimes on ad hoc spot training, where are the employers’ more formal, organized remedial training programs? What are these employers doing to work with the schools to help them better train their students/recover more quickly from the effects of the Wuhan Virus Situation and the associated remote learning, which aside from failing generally, didn’t get the newly minted mechanical engineer the hands-on design training he should have had?