Blog Jones

The Times of India reports that some jerks have taken it upon themselves to harrass call center workers in India with racist comments because of the “outsourcing” of American jobs.

Way to go! Very mature! Harrass people in a country with a per capita GDP of $2,900. The average Indian worker receives something like 7% of what an average American makes per year. I think that you can find something that will pay more than that. They can’t.

It’s nice to see that we’ve matured from the No Irish Need Apply days. And from the anti-semitism, anti-hispanic, and anti-black days. I guess we can move on to having racist attitudes about Indians and Pakistanis.

Come on already, people! Must we go through this with every single ethnic group on the planet?

(Via InstaPundit)

VariFrank has an “unprofessional” post today. I’m late to the party on this one; InstaPundit and at least 44 other sites have linked to this article, but this is good stuff. It’s in reference to the Asian tsunami disaster.

Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:

” See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, theres a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier…”

After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.

and then they looked at me. I wasn’t laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.

I’m afraid I was “unprofessional”, I let it loose -

“Hmmm, let’s see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster, now what kind of ship would we want?

Something with its own inexhuastible power supply?

Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?

Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?

Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?

Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?

Well “Franz”, us peasants in America call that kind of ship an “Aircraft Carrier”. We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that’s right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we dont like.

Read the whole thing.

Why is Michael Savage still on the air?

As if his “You should only get AIDS and die” comment that got him fired from MSNBC wasn’t bad enough, and as if his ridiculous claims about John Kerry weren’t bad enough, now we get the following comments about the tsunami, as reported by Le Sabot Post-Moderne:

“I wouldn’t call it a tragedy. … We shouldn’t be spending a nickel on this.”

Some other quotes: “This is more a UNICEF deal, it’s a U.N. deal, it’s a Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, George Soros, Bill Clinton bleeding-heart-liberal deal. I don’t want to send them any money. . . Many of the countries and the areas in these countries that were hit . . .were hotbeds of radical Islam. Why should we be helping them destroy us? . . . I truthfully don’t believe in foreign aid.”

InstaPundit also links to Classical Values which makes the argument that Savage is an agent provocateur, a “deliberately inflammatory poseur masquerading as conservative.” I certainly wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m about to email WORD, my local radio conservative radio station to request his removal. I recommend that you do the same in your areas.

It goes without saying that the education of our young people is one of our country’s top priorities. Taxpayers dole out huge sums of money–on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year–to ensure that the children of America receive the highest quality education possible. Therefore, it stands to reason that we want to spend our education money in the most effective way possible.

Duh.

Kevin Drum has a post today that looks at the idea of merit pay for teachers. His take: Good idea, but who’s going to evaluate the teachers? The principal is the only real manager, and there’s no way that he can accurately evaluate each teacher. He seem to recommend that public schools should hire additional management to observe, evaluate, and manage the teachers. His final paragraph:

So there’s the paradox: I don’t think teachers are somehow immune from needing supervision, any more than any other white collar worker. But there’s precious little of it available, and it would cost a fortune to provide it. Private sector firms seem to think that reasonable levels of management make them better companies, but public schools don’t. Why?

It’s an excellent question. On the other hand, oftentimes I hear that the money that’s supposed to be going to education is often eaten up in “administrative costs,” which is why teachers have such low salaries compared to the rest of the marketplace despite the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year. Unfortunately I don’t know where to find the statistics, and even then there’s the question of what exactly adminstrative expenses entail.

In any case, while hiring enough managers to properly run a school is a good idea, it’s going to be hard to sell that idea to legislators and voters–so I think additional funding to hire managers is out. And I imagine the teachers’ unions would be firmly against hiring additional management at the cost of funds that could be used to pay teachers higher salaries and at the cost of some of the teachers’ freedom in the classroom.

I think that the way to fund the idea is to find out what the “administrative expenses” are and to reduce them. Indeed, depending on what they are, better, closer management might actually *reduce* those costs, and the management will pay for itself.

In any case, adding a thin layer of management to schools might be worth a try. It certainly can’t hurt anything, after all.

(Of course, this all assumes that the government should be providing education in the first place. I think that the private sector could do a better job; indeed, the small Christian school that I went to costs significantly less per pupil than the public schools do, and turns out significantly better students on average than the local public schools.)

You’ve no doubt heard cynical comments complaining that all of our manufacturing jobs are being exported to China and the other far-eastern countries. But remember: No trend lasts forever.

One of China’s main advantages from an economic standpoint is that it offers labor very inexpensively. This will only continue until the Chinese rediscover the concept of unions, and I believe they’re heading that way. A report from China Digital News quotes the Asia Times as follows: “Recent protests have been sparked by the near-fatal beating of a migrant worker, an illegal hike in taxi fees and low wages in an electronics plant - to name a few. These are but the tip of the iceberg in the nation of 1.3 billion people where the wealth gap is widening, corruption is widespread and the rule of law is far from entrenched. For those who know their Chinese history, this raises the specter of devastating peasant and other revolts over the ages, sometimes cataclysms that have toppled regimes.” (My emphasis)

According to Marginal Revolution, “58,000 major incidents of social unrest took place in China in 2003 — an average of roughly 160 a day and 15 percent more than the year before.”

I believe that the Chinese labor bubble will collapse as either A) the Chinese unionize or B) the Chinese revolt against the system holding down their wages.

As the Chinese proverb goes, interesting times.

According to Reuters, the Bush administration is considering holding suspected terrorists, without trial, for the rest of their lives.

The Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

Citing intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials, the newspaper said the Pentagon and the CIA had asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for those it would not set free or turn over to courts at home or abroad.

I’m thinking it’s about time for the Supreme Court to step in here. I don’t want the government to have the power to hold people indefinitely without sufficient evidence to charge in court. I refer you to Article I Section 9 of the Constitution.

One can hope, however, that the article is in error, or, as newspapers tend to be, extremely skewed.