Tech Employment

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age - Vivek Wadhwa

In their book Chips and Change, Professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for the semiconductor industry and found that salaries increased dramatically for engineers during their 30s but that these increases slowed after the age of 40. At greater ages still, salaries started dropping, dependent on the level of education. After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50. Curiously, Brown and Linden also found that salary increases for holders of postgraduate degrees were always lower than increases for those with bachelor’s degrees (in other words, even PhD degrees didn’t provide long-term job protection). It’s not much different in the software/internet industry. If anything, things in these fast-moving industries are much worse for older workers.

Modern Media

The MSM: Closed-Circuit TV for the Ruling Class - Ed Driscoll

Quoting El Rushbo:

When you turn on MSNBC and watch anything on that network, you get the sense that they’re doing that show not for an audience but for fellow journalists and for people in the White House and for elected Democrats in Congress. That’s their audience, that’s who they’re doing their shows for. Same thing for CNN; same thing for the New York Times. There is really a gulf. The media in this country really do look at the people of this country as an enemy. We’re not just a bunch of rubes, folks, we’re not just a bunch of unsophisticated Neanderthals. We are that to them, but we’re now actually the enemy. When they get this poll from Pew that says the number of people that believe Obama is a Christian is shrinking, the number of people that think he’s a Muslim is increasing, they do not look at the media themselves for maybe an explanation. They don’t look at the White House or Obama to try to find an explanation for this. They knee-jerk conclude that we are a bunch of imbeciles, or reactionaries or racists, bigots, or what have you.

I think the divide between media and public is as stark as it has ever been. Stop and think about this. The relationship that the media has with the people of this country is adversarial. It used to be that their relationship that was adversarial was with people in power. It used to be that people in power were those that had to be examined, had to be accountable. But now since they’re leftists, they’re not really media people, they’re leftists first, we know that, we are the enemy. We are a bigger enemy than Iranian nukes. We are a bigger enemy than Middle East peace. The American people, particularly American conservatives, but I think the American people at large.

U.S. Migration Map

The forbes.com U.S. Migration Map is a great resource for quickly assessing the net migration into and out of counties in the U.S.

Compare, for instance, Los Angeles County, CA (Red lines indicate outward migration. Black lines indicate inward migration.)



with Travis County (Austin), TX.

Botox Side-Effects

Botox gap in understanding emotion - Siri Carpenter

In a recent study of women undergoing cosmetic treatment with Botox, researchers found that the treatment, which blocks facial nerve impulses, seemed to slow the ability to comprehend emotional language.

"We know that language moves us emotionally," said the lead author, David Havas, a psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "What this study shows is that that's partly because it moves us physically."

Those findings, which will be published in the journal Psychological Science, complement earlier research showing that mimicking emotional expression triggers a matching emotional response, says Fritz Strack, a psychologist who was not involved in the research and who studies emotion and cognition at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany.

More comments at:
Instapundit

Perhaps this explains Nancy Pelosi’s recent ham-handedness.

Althouse

The Economy - August 2010

Presidents, Precedents - Kevin D. Williamson

News flash: This is not 1982, and Obama is not Reagan.

The important difference is this: There was a good reason for the Volcker-Reagan recession: defeating inflation. American voters may not be terribly economically sophisticated, but they sure as heck did notice when inflation went from 13.5 percent to 3.2 percent — in two years.

Obvious Failure of Stimulus Becomes Obvious Even To Economists - Tim Cavanaugh

At City Journal, Guy Sorman notes how quickly the managed-market winds have shifted. When the credit unwind started, the papers, the TV and the newsweaklies declared capitalism dead in just a little less time than it took for Kent Brockman to declare his loyalty to the Space Ants. Less than two years later, you can't buy good press for the stimulus; the economy is frozen solid in August; the nation is rediscovering -- despite the herniated efforts of local, state and federal government -- the virtues of thrift; and if you search for Keynes on the interwebs, all you turn up are headlines like "How Dr. Keynes killed the patient."

How Dr. Keynes Will Kill The Patient - Michael Pento

And here's where the arrogance in Washington really kicks in. Scores of millions of American consumers have made a decision; they have decided on an individual basis, that what is best for them at the current time is to reduce their debt burden. But a few hundred individuals in government believe they know better than the collective wisdom of the entire free market. They have the power to confiscate our savings by leveraging up the public sector. In essence, they are preventing the healing process of de-leveraging from taking place by increasing government borrowing and spending.

It should be stressed that modern-day Keynesians do not argue for simply slowing down the rate of de-leveraging. They clearly seek to--at least in the short term--significantly increase the amount of debt in an effort to boost the aggregate demand in the economy. Then, once the mythical recovery takes hold from government spending, printing and borrowing, they concede it may be time to bring deficits under control. The only problem with this theory is that there is now a significant risk of suffering through a U.S. dollar and bond market crisis in the very near future.

Runaway College Costs

Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education - Jay P. Greene

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.

Why Does College Cost So Much? - Stephen Spruiell

The authors don’t bother to mention the argument, even for the purpose of dismissing it, that the primary factor driving college-tuition inflation is actually ballooning federal tuition support: Tuition keeps going up because the federal government ensures that students can afford to pay it.

Reagan vs. Libs