Missionary Creep in Egypt by Adam Garfinkle

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The American Interest: Missionary Creep in Egypt by Adam Garfinkle
Simply stunning, a revelatory blog on the why the US struggles to make head or tails of what is going on in Egypt and the Middle East. It’s long and has a couple of longer links but it’s well worth it because it explains our bias so clearly, explains the Muslim middle eastern ‘socio-political-theological’ context and then shows the incompatibility of means and ends that have made such a mess of the last decade or more. If you are interested/frustrated by the unfolding mess read this article it’ll give you new context, though it won’t solve the frustration.

Fences MAY improve neighbors but Walls, however ‘great,’ DO NOT

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The Atlantic: The Great Wall of Texas: How the U.S. Is Repeating One of History’s Great Blunders
Great little piece, good use of references to Rome, China and Great Britain’s Empire. The title is a bit ExcelaCorridor sneering but that’s the editors fault. I am proud to have been born in Britain and be a Naturalized US citizen. I’m also a wonk-geek-nerd-intellectual-libertarian I think the sealing of the border is fantasy/pandering/bunk, a channel for more neo graft cronyism.

We need immigration reform and border security but in a nation the size of the US, physical barriers are a boondoggle. Reform immigration and border security becomes easier since the vast huge immense majority of folks coming will want to come through the check points and follow the rules. The guys out in the desert, at sea or in the booneys looking to cross without being checked will be much easier to spot.

Too complex an issue you say? Not so say I:

3 types of entry visas, you to apply in person, provide a little information, name, age, place of birth, current residence, phone/cell phone/eMail address, one or two people of some repute who will vouch for you ( if you apply for citizenship up front it’s a bit more complicated, see below.)
Visitor: One year, do anything you want, report your location via web when you move, pay taxes, work if you want using your visa # in lieu of SSN. SocialSecurity/WorkersComp ‘fees’ held in accounts with no interest, returned to you as lump sum after you exit and apply for it through US consulate in your country of citizenship. Subject to immediate deportation on conviction of a felony, if you are incarcerated in the US in full you are still subject to deportation. You can convert to a work visa or ask for a citizenship review at any time. If you overstay without upgrading it is an automatic felony and deportation, you are not a citizen though basic constitutional law applies you do not get trial by jury.
Work: unlimited stay, once a year report your location in person at any government office state or federal, use your visa number in lieu of a SSN pay all taxes. SS, MC, etc, fees go in a holding account with no interest, convert to regular SS, MC if you retire in the US or if you become citizen, otherwise returned to you as lump sum after you exit and apply for it through US consulate in your country of citizenship. Subject to immediate deportation on conviction of a felony, if you are incarcerated in the US in full you are not subject to deportation. You are not a citizen though basic constitutional law applies you do not get trial by jury regarding deportation. Time on a work visa does not lead to citizenship, you can ask for a citizenship review at any time.
Citizenship: you can ask for a citizenship review at any time, when applying for a visa in your country of origin or once in the US. Once approved for a citizenship track visa you are still effectively on a working visa but after seven years you can apply for citizenship and after a second review (same process as the first one) you will be approved for naturalization. The process is fee based and administrative, you will pay a fee for a background check to be carried out by US Immigration not a contractor. A US state or federal judge will be chosen at random in your state of residence, to review your case and approve disapprove. You can apply more than once, after a one year wait, you always pay the fee. If you object to a negative ruling you can pay for a court hearing with another Judge and a lawyer from immigration (two hours of J&L, a one hour hearing and a letter response, Yes/No), you can have a lawyer as well at your own expense, only one review a year. Have to be eighteen to ask for citizenship in your own right. A minor less than 12 becomes a citizen if one or both parents become one and ask for it. A minor over 12 cannot become a citizen until he/she is eighteen but if one or both parents have become naturalized citizens in that interim the child can ask for and immediately receive citizenship as long as they pass the administrative hurdle

So what about large number of illegals in the US, what have you done to discourage illegals:

make it illegal to be in the us without a valid visa#
Most folks come to work and want to be treated fairly, as a legal you have most of the protections of a citizen
Those already in the US will be able to apply for a work visa and will have limited immunity since it is currently not illegal to be in the US without a visa. However you will be required to return to your country of origin ( or if you are a refugee apply for asylum ) before you can apply for citizenship track
require employers to use eVerify for SSN, Visa#, for employees or contractors, make the system extremely simple to use. For example: as an employer or employers agent, you enter your number, it flashes your picture on the screen and the employee taps in his/her number and their picture flashes up, you hit confirm, you are done.
failure to eVerify is subject to stiff fines and public shaming

What about quotas, dumping, the hoards who will flood in, all those aliens? You wail…and let’s get this right this what helps give zombie flicks their grist these days….

I would get rid of quotas fo awile and see what happens, but keep the quotas for those coming by boat or plane if you must but simply enforce the visa at the land boarders
no this won’t stop all the tramping across the boarder but will make it much less prevalent and industrialized
most immigrants come to work and plan on going home, it was more than a decade before my parent’s realized they didn’t want to go back, and it was near run a few times
Immigrants (other than a tiny fraction of a sliver) want to make a better life for themselves
if they stay it is to make America their home and a better place for their children
make it easier to come and go and you will find the flow goes both ways
population growth drives economic growth, US natural pop. growth is nearing zero even with lots of youngish immigrant, more would be better for us not worse

I’m not sure why a law implementing the above takes more than five to ten pages, the regulation details will be much longer that’s what bureaucracies are for, but with a simple law comes simple administration. In general a WVisa holder should be treated as a US citizen get rid of layers of special rules make it easy to comply, make it worth complying. But over all – KISS – keep it small and simple…

What Me Worry? The Economist puts the problem with NSA, FISA, etc in a clear light

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The Secret police—the NSA, the CIA, et al—are by their very nature antithetical to those ideals, because openness and transparency about rules are essential to democratic public justification, and therefore to the legitimacy of state power. What must be secret cannot be fully democratic. One may well worry whether we can afford such a demanding standard of legitimate government in such a dangerous world. Perhaps we cannot. Perhaps it is foolish to be too good. But in that case we need to be clear-headed about it, and understand that secret police are a straightforwardly anti-democratic concession we make to a dangerous world. And we ought to accept that any strengthening of the powers of the secret police—especially the secret strengthening of the powers of the secret police—is a further blow to democracy and the legitimacy of our laws. The NSA’s digital dragnet is a silent coup. The filibuster is rain on election day.

Is it zeitgeist? Hadn’t seen this when I ranted a bit on MBA’s

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Read more at : MeganMcardle.com: Is the MBA Going Away? 9July 2013

… it is the graduate schools that the collapse has begun. That doesn’t mean that graduate education will go away (after all, neither tulip bulbs nor stock exchanges went away when those bubbles collapsed); rather, the market will get dramatically smaller, with the shakiest programs going bust, others retrenching, and the top ones continuing to draw more students than they can enroll. If it spreads to college, we should expect to see the same pattern: top tier schools surviving and even thriving, while lesser ranked schools pitched into financial crises by declining enrollment.

Also: Don’t Go to Business School! by Megan McArdle at The Daily Beast Jan 9, 2013 10:36 AM

Unless you can get into a top program, professional school may cause more problems than it solves

ViaMeadia // The Miracles Wrought by Price Transparency

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

A surgery center in Oklahoma has started a bidding war by offering drastically lower prices than other providers and posting them online. The center describes itself as “free-market loving”—an unorthodox but welcome branding for a health care provider. The evidence of its success, however, is eye-popping. Where some hospitals charge more than $16,000 for a breast biopsy, Oklahoma Surgery Center charges $3, 500, according to a local Oklahoma news station. And that’s just one of many impressive examples.

Read more at: IndyStar: Abdul: Why our health-care system needs a single-payer – you

The recent move by the Obama administration to delay implementation of the employer mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act means this is the perfect time to have a grown-up discussion about how we deliver health care in this country. As a free market-conservative, social-libertarian political pundit, I am convinced more than ever that it is time in this country for a single-payer health care system.

Get rid of employer ‘health insurance’ go with health savings plans and catastrophic medical insurance AND PUBLISHED PRICING then we at least know what the real price is and stop paying for so many empty suites…

On a very related note, at least in my mind: There is a great debate about the collapse of the demand for lawyers and the issues with ‘Higher Ed’ payoff vs price in general outside of core STEM. But as a practicing engineer, business development type I have to tell you that one of the most pernicious problems in today’s world is an over supply of pure play MBA’s, business school PhD’s, Operations consultants, etc, etc, et-bloody-cettera. I’m not saying that the tech types know all, do all, but when they are ignored the company ( practice, clinic,….. ) in which they work becomes a zombie…and as we all know zombies can win in the short run, even proliferate, but in the end they either rot out or pull down the society (economy) around them.

Rudimentary Liver from Stem Cell, 3D Printed Ear and 3D Printed micro Battery ? What does the future hold

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Theres a huge amount of research going on in fields that don’t at first appear to have much to do with each other that could in the next few years to few decades lead to a world where the possibility of building new organs either as replacements or upgrades is possible, even common.

Those worried about the future of employment in America—for themselves or for the country as a whole—should look to this data. As of now, many of the jobs of the future are going to be health care jobs, and that will only become more true if Obamacare stands and the pool of insured patients expands dramatically. To understand what the jobs of the future will be (or to land one), go where the money is: services, and especially, according to this data, health services.
For those unlikely to take up health jobs, this graph might seem discouraging. After all, more doctors and health workers points to more health care costs, in a system that’s already vastly too expensive. As the Atlantic points out on its piece on the graph, “There are a couple stories that branch off from this graph. One is the unchecked growth in health care prices over the last few decades, which has made the medical industry the one truly recession-proof job engine of the economy.”
But there’s also a case of optimism here. The Atlantic notes that the two kinds of health care jobs most likely to grow in coming decades are personal health aides and home health workers. This is good news even on its own; achieving a better balance between hospital care and home care is an important task for health care reformers. Moreover, it means there’s a lot of room for entrepreneurial individualse to come up with new and creative ways to cater to a growing demand for personalized health care.

The American Interest // Egypt, we have no idea…

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

The American Interest /July 1, 2013 / Adam Garfinkle / Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—Memorize That Name
Read more at: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/garfinkle/2013/07/01/note-to-clueless-msm-types-abdel-fattah-al-sisi-memorize-that-name/#sthash.aMzX3wZw.dpuf
Lots of deep insight for those who want it, along with a bit of ‘I told yo so.’

This was an interesting passage and a key to why this whole region is so utterly foreign to many of us who wish for better things:

Years ago a clever and truth-telling fellow named David Lamb devised what he called the IBM syndrome to describe political culture in Egypt and the Arab world. The “I” stands for “inshallah“, may God will it: in other words, fatalism. The “B” stands for “bokr“—tomorrow morning, or just tomorrow: suggestive of an extremely elastic, pre-modern perception of time, vaguely akin to some uses of the Spanish word mañana. The “M” stands for “malesh“, which is untranslatable, but which kind of means “whatever”, “never mind” or “fagetaboutit”: not my job, someone else will take care of it, or not, who cares? What difference does it make?

It is also a bit frightening to realize that there are examples of this sort of mindset in ‘the west’ and that it’s a plague…

Wisdom, eloquence and virtue

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Wisdom, eloquence and virtue – these are the aims of a classical education. The patriarchs of western civilization understood that education was more than the acquisition of basic skills and mere competency. The purpose of education was to transform, to elevate, and to refine the mind and the soul. This was the standard, not the exception. At the center of classical education is an emphasis on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Because these universal values serve as the building blocks of classical learning, the classical arts are timeless and proven, and have been known to produce many eloquent confessors and wise leaders. Our communities today are in dire need of just these sorts of men and women. In an endless pursuit of the latest educational dogma, many schools no longer have the capacity to judge what is Good, True and Beautiful, much less teach it. In forsaking the soul for the mind, they have forgotten how to educate both. Classical Education is a holistic approach to education, and a return to excellence in teaching, curriculum and expectations.

Via: http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/22434-The-Rise-of-Classical-Education.html
From: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Rise-of-Classical-Education
More at: http://www.immanuelalexandria.org/school/curriculum/what-is-classical-education
This triggered a flash of fierce agreement from me, we have debased education and muddled it with training. I think that many intellectuals from the middle twentieth century would say that the communists and their Nazi fellow travelers won. The left (which both Nazi and Communists are at core) managed to stain classical education as elitist and useless, whereas in reality it was at its core vastly more leveling and practical than what we have today. A classical education creates a society of citizens with a deep repository of common referents that are rooted outside our ephemeral now, it also trained the mind to think, to organize to pattern recognize across a range of topics in ways that are broadly useful and common without being straight jacketed.

We also straight jacket everyone into a lockstep industrialized system where homogeneity of outcome is vastly more important than quality and to a degree individuality. Why can’t many kids start near full time work at sixteen and spend some years figuring out what they want to do before continuing at part time or your time schooling. Why is it that high schools are not open to anyone wanting to work on their english or get a high school degree? Why is it so hard to get credit for class work and job experience, hobbies etc, the totality of which would make many overlooked folks true masters of their art?

What is and isn’t happening with the NSA phone surveillance

Posted on June 28, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Read more at: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/27/the-science-of-what-is-and-isnt-happening-with-the-nsas-phone-surveillance/
Excellent, readable medium length piece on what the NSA ‘thing’ is all about and why it matters.

So, there’s this NSA thing. Since the stories about the NSA, Edward Snowden, PRISM, and so on have broken, there has been more misinformation, disinformation, bad information, speculation, ignorant commentary and flat out nonsense going around than any topic in recent memory. And to tell you the truth, I’ve been working on this article for two weeks and never finishing because there is always one more howler. Let’s see if we can clear some of this up.

Motley Fool // Is Sony the Next Apple?

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Sci Fi Engineer

Is Sony the Next Apple?
By Leo Sun – June 26, 2013

There is a lot of evidence suggesting that Cook doesn’t know where to go from here – Apple’s stock buyback, dividend, and bond sale all indicate that the company could become a slow-growth tech stock like Microsoft and IBM. The iPad Mini and iOS 7 also suggested to investors that the road ahead would be reactionary, rather than revolutionary.

… Sony has expanded into is the phablets category, … a 6.4-inch screen …seriously pushing the acceptable size limit of a smartphone.

Although the Ultra seems like a goofy attempt to capture some of the phablet market from Samsung, I believe that it could gain some serious ground when used in tandem with the SmartWatch 2 and a Bluetooth headset. Many consumers could stow the Ultra in a bag, while using the SmartWatch to check on basic information and tasks while using a Bluetooth headset to make calls or listen to music. To view movies, make video calls or games, the Ultra could be brought out and used like a normal tablet.

I’m no sure Apple has lost it’s mojo but I agree there is evidence of it.

I think that the latest iteration of blue tooth and general tech advances definitely plays to the padPhone+smartWatch+headSet combo and maybe, maybe Apple missed it.

Apple IMO also has missed the stylus revolution, pads of all sizes need sophisticated hand writing, sketch, art input capability to jump another level of ubiquitous usefulness.

I hope Apple is looking at things like 3D Printing, scanning and model manipulation and creation, in the same way they took on the 2D Printing world, there would be a real break out stroke.