Category Archives: jobs

Indeed There Is

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River Page, writing for The Free Press last Sunday, objected to any proliferation of “Tiger Moms.” However, she’s wholly misinterpreted the concept of and the goals of tiger moms.

There are more important things in life than making a six-figure salary and going to Yale goes her subheadline. She concluded her piece with this:

There’s no point in living in a prosperous country if you can’t enjoy it[.]

The one is not the aim of tiger moms, and the other isn’t possible without achieving their goal. Vivek Ramaswamy, of DOGE, has laid out the situation, using the H-1B visa debate as the backdrop.

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

He added, as paraphrased by Page, that tech companies prefer to hire foreigners—and their offspring—because the children of native-born Americans don’t work hard enough.

That’s what tiger moms are working against, and we need more of them, not the coddled snowflakes of too many of our current offspring and their children.

That more important thing, toward which tiger moms try to raise their children, is a work ethic that prides work and that produces the overriding satisfaction of a job well done. The self respect that comes from that is what powers full enjoyment of leisure time and the full enjoyment of the plethora of leisures available in a prosperous country.

Indeed, there isn’t a prosperous country without the work required to produce, maintain, and defend it. Six-figure salaries fall out of all of that; they aren’t the goal of any of that. Neither is going to Yale instead of any other school. Students get out of their higher education institution—whichever it is, and it need not be a so-called elite school—what they put into it, and what they put into it is what they learn to put into it during their pre-school and K-12 years. That’s where tiger moms earn their stripes and the respect of us otherwise average Americans, their peers.

Blame Someone Else

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Safeway is closing one of its San Francisco stores due to concerns about high crime rates and employee and customer safety in that store’s neighborhood. Oh, the hue and cry.

The Reverand Erris Edgerly, for instance, is crying foul.

It’s obvious the community has been struggling, but to just up and leave without calling a meeting, with no alternative for groceries, is upsetting. There was no community outreach at all.

It’s obvious that the crime rate in Edgerly’s community has been out of control for quite some time and the safety of his community members has been in the wind for all that time. From that, it’s just as obvious that community “leaders,” like the good Reverand, have contributed nothing useful to mitigating the situation (in truth, the city has done nothing, also, but that doesn’t excuse the community’s “leaders”).

Outreach would have been just more chit-chat and worse than pointless: advance notice of the store’s closing would have been too likely to trigger an accelerated spate of break-ins and lootings, exposing the store’s employees and customers to even more danger in that end game.

Maybe the Edgerlys of the neighborhood should look in a mirror to find some of the folks with whom to…outreach.

Prop Up That Industry

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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants more government pressure on support for battery cars, their manufacture, and their sale to an uninterested public.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called for the introduction of Europe-wide measures to increase uptake of electric vehicles, in a speech at Ford Motor Corp’s factory in Cologne, just weeks after the US car maker outlined plans to lay off 4,000 of its European workers.
In the speech at Ford’s EV factory on Tuesday, Scholz argued Germany should work to facilitate the “leap forward” towards “electromobility” by providing “support” for the country’s car industry, including by subsidizing energy costs for EV battery makers.

And this bit of contradiction:

Scholz said the support for the car industry should also aim to protect worker’s jobs….

He can’t have it both ways, except through government-mandated featherbedding. It takes fewer workers to build an electric motor and a battery car than it does an ICE motor and an ICE-powered car. It takes fewer suppliers to supply fewer parts, and fewer employees at each supplier, to provide the simpler components of a battery car than the more complex components of an ICE car.

The ripples go on from there: secondarily, all those mom-and-pop stores—diners, grocery stores, bars, entertainment venues, and so on—will get fewer customers from those smaller work forces at the EV factories and supplier plants, resulting in fewer mom-and-pops and fewer employees in surviving mom-and-pops.

No. If the battery car industry still needs overt government fiscal subsidies and mandates aimed at pressuring consumers to spend their own money on even subsidized battery cars, those vehicles and that industry aren’t ready for operation.

The only legitimate support for battery cars is the consumers’ interest in buying them in a free, competitive market shorn of government pressures. That interest isn’t yet there.

Irrelevant

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Or it should be. Biden administration folks, on the way out the door, are jumping to employment at the special interest groups and lobbyists who influenced their decisions while they were in office, and they’re doing it at a higher rate than prior administrations. For instance:

Even though Trump has vowed to roll back the Biden-Harris administration’s climate agenda, these relationships will be maintained and could be strengthened as former federal employees under the current administration go to work for climate groups that will continue to lobby the agencies in support of the activists’ preferred policies.

Not necessarily.

If the incoming Trump administration personnel are true to the terms of their selection for nomination, and if the kitchen cabinet DOGE group, with their goal of reducing the size of the Federal government work force (among other goals), has sufficient influence in Congress, those lobbyists and special interest groups should have little influence, especially with fewer bureaucrats available to be…lobbied…and so easier to keep under control by their government bosses.

In an ideal operation, they should be irrelevant altogether. Especially, they should be ignored if they’re employing ex-Biden administration officials, given those worthies’ utterly failed, damaging even, policies.

A Bureaucrat with an MD…

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…chimes in. Robert Califf, MD, two-term US FDA Commissioner, and long-time government bureaucrat wants the government’s bureaucracy left alone.

As the world’s largest bureaucracy, the US government has ample room for improvement.

Awfully decent of the old boy to acknowledge some minor issues. Then he writes this in his Letter:

…a broad call for support from the workforce would be much more likely to succeed than castigating the workers who have chosen to serve the American public. Instead of suggesting “large-scale firings” and asserting that “if federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy would be well-served to inspire the workforce to work with them to become more efficient.

This is an example of why bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees must have their words taken only skeptically.

No one is castigating the workers; Musk and Ramaswamy instead are insisting that those let go not be stigmatized by that while insisting they be given generous severance packages and plenty of notice to find other work before their government jobs end.

Government isn’t the only place employees need to resume working from workplace offices or cubicles—corporate America also is waking up to the need for in-place, face-to-face interactions and collaborations. It’s entirely appropriate to require government employees work full time in the offices and cubicles alongside their colleagues. Those who resist are those resisting the teaming and collaboration that is so necessary to work and so much more effectively done when done in person, and those persons are reducing the efficiency and limiting the potential of their teams. They should be let go.

On that matter of efficiency, this is best achieved with a smaller workforce operating under narrower scoped of responsibilities, tasks, and goals.

Califf is a senior bureaucrat in a government “medical” bureaucracy looking to preserve bureaucrats’ job. Nothing more.