Dispatches from District 48
Archive for July 2014
It should not be necessary to say this, but apparently it is:
Supposedly, there is this huge trend in Millennials graduating college, failing to find a satisfactory job, and ending up living at home. Almost every media outlet known to man has written about it. They have anecdotes and pictures of individuals to prove it. But there does not seem to be an actual trend:
It turns out that the share of young people 18-24 not in college but living at home has actually fallen. Any surge in young adults living at home is all from college kids, due to this odd definition the Census uses
It is important to note that the Current Population Survey counts students living in dormitories as living in their parents' home.
Campus housing, for some reason, counts in the census as living at home with your parents. And since college attendance is growing, thus you get this trend that is not a trend.
"Trend that is not a trend" is an occasional feature on this blog. I could probably write three stories a day on this topic if I wished. The media is filled with stories of supposed trends based on single data points or anecdotes rather than, you know, actual trend data. More stories of this type are here. It is not unusual to find that the trend data often support a trend in the opposite direction as claimed by media articles.
I have yet to meet a skeptic who reports getting any money from mysterious climate skeptics. A few years ago Greenpeace had a press release that was picked up everywhere about how Exxon was spending big money on climate denialism, with numbers that turned out to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a year.
The big money has always been in climate alarmism. Climate skeptics are outspent a thousand to one. Here is just one example
It sounds like the makings of a political-action thriller. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded Arizona State University a five-year, $20 million agreement to research the effects of climate change and its propensity to cause civil and political unrest.
The agreement is known as the Foresight Initiative. The goal is to understand how climate-caused disruptions and the depletion of natural resources including water, land and energy will impact political instability.
The plan is to create visually appealing computer models and simulations using large quantities of real-time data to guide policymakers in their decisions.
To understand the impacts of climate change, ASU is using the latest advances in cloud computing and storage technologies, natural user interfaces and machine learning to create real-time computer models and simulations, said Nadya Bliss, principal investigator for the Foresight Initiative and assistant vice president with ASU's Office of Knowledge and Development.
I can tell you the answer to this study already. How do I know? If they say the security risks are minimal, there will be zero follow-up funding. If they say the security risks are huge, it will almost demand more and larger follow-up studies. What is your guess of the results, especially since the results will all be based on opaque computer models whose results will be extremely sensitive to small changes in certain inputs?
Postscript: I can just imagine a practical joke where the researchers give university officials a preview of results. They say that the dangers are minimal. It would be hilarious to see the disappointment in the eyes of all the University administrators. Never in history would such a positive result be received with so much depression. And then the researchers would say "Just kidding, of course it will be a catastrophe, it will be much worse than predicted, the badness will be accelerating, etc."
I don't think anyone would say:
Yet half the country seems to be saying
I cannot find a single opposition statement to the Hobby Lobby decision that does not contain some variant of this:
Today, the Supreme Court ruled against women’s basic access to contraceptive healthcare. This decision opens up the door for for-profit companies to impose their personal beliefs on their employees and deny them basic contraceptive care.
Basic healthcare decisions shouldn't be subject to the whims of bosses and employers. ...
I will continue to fight for the right of every woman to make her own private medical decisions. #notmybossbusiness
It seems that a huge number of Americans, even nominally intelligent ones, cannot parse the difference between banning an activity and some third party simply refusing to pay for you to engage in that activity. This really does not seem to be a complicated distinction, but yesterday I watched something like 40% of America fail to make it. How is it possible to make any progress on liberty and individual rights if peoples' thinking is so sloppy?
By the way, the passage above is from the Facebook page of Hanna-Beth Jackson, a California state senator. The reason I find her faux libertarianism initeresting is that Ms. Jackson is co-sponsor of the bill requiring explicit verbal or written consent for each sex act (and each step of the sex act) in California colleges. A woman's body may not be her boss's business but it appears it is the California government's business, at least according to Ms. Jackson. This is typical of the abortion and birth control issues, where supporters use libertarian-ish arguments narrowly to defend abortion and contraception rights, but then go all-in for authoritarianism everywhere else. Jackson's bedroom regulation bill is co-sponsored by Kevin De Leon, who said yesterday "No boss should have the power to interfere with a worker’s personal health decisions." Because that's his job, I guess.
