Friedrich von Hayek: His Life and Thought

Found this while I was digging around for a project (Operation Siuma) I am working on. It's long but worth watching.

Sinnerman

15 years ago I never would have listened to this song but now I really like it

A Tornado Hit Billings, MT (my hometown) Today

You Tube Video

Review – unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation

I found this book at Half Price Books a couple days ago and the description on the cover sounded interesting;

unSpun reveals the secrets of separating facts from disinformation, such as:

• The warning signs of spin, hype, and bogus news
• common tricks used to deceive us
• how to find trustworthy and objective sources of information

and in general it does a decent job.  It lays out the basic ways that marketers, PR men, and politicians attempt to spin facts and gives examples of each.  It also illustrates each major point with an amusing story.  In addition the authors explain why people are so dogged in sticking to their beliefs in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  I was already aware of a lot of them, such as confirmation bias, and I do my best to avoid them when I am writing here by doing things like always trying to seek out the primary source document and purposefully going to websites with opposing views; even so I was able to identify places where I have slipped up, and I have definitely been able to spot areas where blogs I visit egregiously engage in the behaviors.  Of course I knew they were biased going in so I try and take that into consideration when evaluating what they have written.

I know I make it sound like I am a paragon of intellectual honesty, but that isn’t quite it.  It’s more that I am interested in what will really work rather than partisan solutions.  Personally my life experiences and reading / evaluation of issues leads me to believe that in most cases the conservative / small government solution is the best one.  That isn’t always the case and when it isn’t I want to know.

My one complaint is that the authors engage in a little spin themselves.  Despite being officially non-partisan, the authors’ political biases show through, in the way they present examples of political disinformation.  In almost every case the Republicans are presented first and the Democrats afterwards.  This leaves the impression that the Republicans are the primary offenders.  Not true.  Actually, I should have been prepared for this given that all the reviewers on the cover are liberals.  Despite this the information is useful and well presented.

Overall, I recommend reading this book.

A Blast From the Past: Economics and Freedom Discussed in Cartoons

Someone posted the comic book version of "The Road to Serfdom" again and that reminded me of these:







Quite a few others here.

Wal-Mart catches up with Kuru Lounge

Today:  Wal-Mart to Offer Its Workers a College Program

The purveyor of inexpensive jeans and lawnmowers is dipping its toe into the online-education waters, working with a Web-based university to offer its employees in the United States affordable college degrees.

The partnership with American Public University, a for-profit school with about 70,000 online students, will allow some Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club employees to earn credits in areas like retail management and logistics for performing their regular jobs.

…

“It came out of an awareness that the jobs in our stores are really good jobs,” Tom Mars, executive vice president and chief administrative officer of Wal-Mart U.S. said in an interview, “but if we want to make them great jobs, we really have to do something different to distinguish those jobs and our company from everyone else in retail.”

…

He added: “We hope in this way to expand the education and employer communities’ knowledge of what works most effectively, so that policy makers, other companies and other stakeholders can continuously improve such offerings.”

Jul 2007:  The Open University

Second the ultimate customer for the project, will have to be heavily involved in the process. For example Boeing needs Aeronautical Engineers. To really get the type of engineer that they want they would need to lay out a set of skills that they feel are important. From there it would be necessary to backtrack to the courses which develop those skills, and a curriculum would need to be developed. From there textbooks would need to be written and labs developed. On and on continuing up the chain until a comprehensive program had been developed.

Wal-Mart, as is their want, has simplified the process a bit by finding a program that fits their needs rather than starting from the ground up but the underlying premise is the same.  It would be better if the cost was reduced a bit more, but that could be coming:  Wal-Mart has a tradition of driving costs down.

I anxiously await the various unions denouncement of the naked exploitation of the worker.

h/t: Memeorandum

Back at work for the Census Bureau

Picked up a couple hours today and probably next week, just following up on some open issues from the house to house count. 

I’m having a little trouble believing the Big Government census fraud expose

Over that past two days Big Government, the site that brought us the ACORN killing videos last year has taken aim at the US Census Bureau with allegations of rampant fraud and implied allegations of misconduct in hiring and screening practices.  That hasn’t been my experience.

I have mentioned before that I am working as an enumerator this census season.  It was a temporary job that could fit around a school schedule so I took it, and while it isn’t my dream job, myself and the people on my crew that I have contact with have tried to conduct ourselves professionally.

Most of the issues that Big Government seems to be trying to expose deal with training and pay during training.  The training that O’Keefe, and Adeleye received is at odds with that I received.

1.  We only received pay for the time we worked plus the travel time to and from training. 

2.  Our training days went the full 8 hours.

3.  As near as I can tell our time sheets are audited.  I have had two returned because of questions. 

4.  All of us were screened before beginning field work.  Our first day of training was on a Tuesday, we were fingerprinted, sworn in, and went through all the regular employment rigamarole in the morning and did our first 4 hours of actual training in the afternoon.  We were then sent home until the following Monday, at the time we were told it was to allow time to process our fingerprints.

5.  The office I work out of is apparently very budget conscious.  Half the enumerators in my crew were laid off after about 3 weeks because we were ahead of schedule.  They were going to lay us all off but at the last minute decided to keep some of us on in case follow-up interviews were required.

6.  This hasn’t come out in videos yet but I’m sure that they are looking for someway to prove that we are careless with personal information.  The number one issue in training was protection of, in government speak, PII.  Most of a day was devoted to it.  We had to sign statements acknowledging that we could be fined our imprisoned if we reveal personal information to unauthorized individuals, and we are required to give a sheet to very respondent that informs them of this. 

In short my experiences have been diametrically opposed to those of the Big Government crew.  While the census has problems, it’s computer system being one, and is somewhat inefficient it runs much better than I would expect a system utilizing 650,000 temporary part-time employees to run.  That is especially true when you consider the complexities of some of the situations.  I can’t go into detail but an example would be non-English speakers, there is a system to insure that we can identify and get an appropriate interpreter if we can’t find one in the household.  As near as I can tell it works pretty well.  The entire system is like that, a little elaborate at time but it works.