Tag Archives: culture

How Bad is a Vocational Education?

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Especially compared with a formal college education?  Oren Cass, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had some thoughts on that in a recent Wall Street Journal piece.

Elevating vocational education, and prioritizing its students, must begin with a substantial reshaping of American high schools. Vocational education will not succeed so long as culture and public policy consign it to second-class status—a dumping ground for students who interfere with what school districts consider their real mission, college prep.

It’s absolutely true that we shouldn’t be deprecating the status of those with or who prefer, for any reason, vocational educations.  These folks—the VoTech graduates, the OO graduates—the trades and secretaries are critical to our economy. What road gets built, what office buildings or houses get built, what communications networks get laid out without the trades?  What office is operable without the secretaries and office managers who do the actual nitty-gritty of running things?

What will a designer or an engineer or an architect do without the trades and secretaries to turn ideas into action?

Cass is spot on.

They Shouldn’t Let…

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…the door hit them in the fanny on the way out.

About a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the tech giant’s involvement in Project Maven, a controversial military program that uses artificial intelligence, Gizmodo reports.

Maven is a DoD project for developing an AI capability to quickly process vast amounts of drone-generated data for human decision-makers.  Such a capability, if successfully developed, would enhance our war-fighting—and especially our war-winning—capability.

These ex-employees should consider their view of citizenship in light of their view that the US should not be allowed to take steps to defend itself.

And then they should have the moral courage to publish the results of their analysis.

Offensive

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Three dentists in North Carolina dressed up in traditional clothing of an American Indian, a Japanese, and a Scot in order to run an advertisement under the catchphrase “Everyone smiles in the same language!”

Oh, the hoo-raw.  SJWs crawled out through their baseboard holes on this one, proclaiming the ad to be “ignorant and offensive” and racist.

No.  What’s ignorant and offensive is the naked racism of manufacturing a beef where there is none for the sole purpose of supporting the professional victim industry.

Felons and Voting

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In general, felons have no voting rights—it’s part of their punishment for having committed their crimes.  There also are growing movements to restore voting rights to felons—they are, after all, US citizens.  (I’m eliding here felons who aren’t citizens; they have no voting rights to restore.)

It’s a debate worth having, but a couple of misunderstandings need to be cleared up first.  These misunderstandings are illustrated in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

As the midterm elections draw closer, Dameon Stackhouse is eager to cast a ballot, but he can’t under New Jersey law because he remains on parole after more than a decade behind bars for second-degree robbery.

If he’s on parole, he’s still serving his punishment for his crime; he’s only entered a new stage of that punishment.  With his punishment still in progress, he shouldn’t get his right to vote back.  On successful completion of his parole—successful completion of the punishment society has said is required for his crime—then it’s worth seriously considering reenfranchising him and others in similar situations.

And this, from Stackhouse:

We have no say [without a right to vote].  This is one of the worst things you can do to a citizen.

No, Stackhouse did this to himself with his decision to commit his crime; no one else did this to him as a citizen.  His apparent inability to accept responsibility for the outcomes he created with his misbehavior in addition to the misbehavior itself does not suggest that his rehabilitation is being entirely successful.

I am spring-loaded to restore the franchise to those who’ve successfully completed their punishment—for the vast majority of crimes, there should be an endpoint to the punishment short of death, whether by execution or old age.  But the punishment must be completed before reenfranchisement.

It’s Not Your Company

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Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.