Paradoxically, the sports garment industry in this country was destroyed and moved to China. Which is where all the real stuff (and its counterfeits) come from now.
So Americans saw their jobs making such garments go bye-bye. And now, some Americans — trying to make a living selling counterfeits from the same place their jobs went, get to have their domains seized, too.
An interesting news piece at Science magazine briefly examines the state of science employment in the US.
If you read the idiot musings of the mainstream press, where stories about science are always written by people without any science background (or worse, weird liberal arts journo-degrees like science & journalism or history of science custom made for a variety of sissies and intellectual weaklings), you have read, many times, that we suffer a science shortage. Or will. Soon. (Sadly, the link is to my old alma mater where they apparently patronize the desire to be ‘into’ science without actually having to do anything that would dangerously expose you to the real thing. Kind of like the George Plimpton Paper Lion approach to pro football — only more pathetic and personally insulting.)
Scientists are like vitamins — that’s the gist of what you read from the good boys. We are always in danger of suffering a deficiency and can’t get enough of them. Except for the Republican Party. The GOP has had enough of scientists. Reality doesn’t adhere to either view.
The author of the brief at Science examines some of the conclusions from two studies — one arguing that there’s, indeed, a shortage of science workers, the other arguing there’s a glut.
The conclusion reached by the writer is that both have some truth to the them but the one arguing that there’s a glut is more true.
And I agree. When DD left Lehigh University there was a surplus of Ph.D scientists in the US. And the people I knew faced it.
The report from FAIR argues that scientists are forced out of STEM fields because there aren’t enough jobs. “There is no evidence that there is, or will exist in the foreseeable future, a shortage of qualified native-born scientists and engineers in the United States,” the authors write. “The glut of science and engineering [S&E] degree holders in the United States has caused many S&E graduates to seek work in other fields.”
[Keep in mind STEM is acronym jargon for “science and engineering majors.” It didn’t exist when I earned a Ph.D. at a science and engineering school. It was invented by education officials and
other nuisances opposed to clear language that can’t be used as a professional advancement.]
While the United States seems to be producing enough STEM workers to fill traditional STEM jobs, the Georgetown authors write, the migration of people with STEM-related competencies into non-STEM occupations leads to STEM-worker shortages. “Even when the numbers indicate that we are producing enough STEM graduates for STEM occupations, we do face STEM scarcity in some occupations because STEM-capable workers divert from STEM into non-STEM occupations.”
“The perceptions about a lack of skilled workers are pervasive,” Cappelli writes. “But the problem is an illusion.” Employers perceive a worker shortage, he writes, because they “want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.” Employers “need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice,” he writes. “Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore.”
A second reason for the perception of a shortage, Cappelli says, boils “down to the fact that employers can’t get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That’s an affordability problem, not a skills shortage. We can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.”
If companies would stop seeking exact skill matches and seek the help they need among the many workers currently available — including, I would argue, the nation’s 100,000 or so science postdocs — they would “vastly expand the supply of talent” available, “making it both cheaper and easier to fill jobs.” This is a case where “company self-interest and societal interest just happen to collide.”
From personal experience, I agree.
Postdoctoral positions paid very poorly in the mid-Eighties. I’m assuming they still do, in spades. The work was hard and, unless you were fortunate, generally sucked. Everyone (and I do mean everyone from technicians to grad students to post docs) eventually left the lab I was in at the Penn State School of Medicine in Hershey because the work was so unrewarding and dead-end.
You could hang around in them until something opened up or you were deemed experienced or connected enough for a position in the private sector. Or you could try for great publishing and grant proposal acquisition and a stab at a university position, much harder to land.
Both tracks revealed gluts of highly trained people, most of whom wouldn’t get the jobs they applied for.
This was made worse by the bottom line practice, adopted nationwide at universities, of using Ph.D’s as cheap no-hope-of-tenure-track labor for the teaching of undergraduate and low-level graduate courses, all in order to free the older tenured professorial class from pedagogy while in the pursuit of more illustrious full-time research.
And in terms of corporate America, it has always been a case of unchangeable but unrealistic desires on the part of the employer: the requirements in personnel departments for “exact skills” matches and people who require no “on-ramp” time.
Yeah, as it turns out, corporate America does hate you. Always has.
Extra points to the story for rubbishing the idea that perhaps many scientists leave the field, not finding jobs because they are socially distasteful. We’re talking about the notion among many run of the mill idiots that science attracts a disproportionate number of physically crippled smelly mentally ill four-eyes types incapable of being near someone without farting, stuttering and acting like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor.
“[Anyone] who has spent time around aspiring scientists will find the suggestion that they’re unemployable ludicrous; socially inept scientists do exist, but most are earnest, personable, and very smart,” writes Jim Austin for Science.
[Stars and Stripes reporterd] “nearly $88 million worth of food stamps were used at commissaries nationwide in 2011, up from $31 million in 2008.”
The Defense Department doesn’t track commissary sales, so it’s unclear which military personnel seek benefits.
Analysts believe, however, that recent vets are the demographic most likely to need help: 860,000 sought unemployment benefits in October.
Statisticians consider some 25 percent of these men and women to be “young veterans.”
Food stamp usage in the military is generally not banner news. You have to look around for it.
In October I posted a summary of food stamp use. It included an item from a southern newspaper citing the use within the military.
Again, it points out that while the US spends lavishly on its defense budget, the soldiers do not do so well. The defense establishment believes in defense contractors and armaments, not people.
You can also view food stamp subsidies as a way in which you can pay soldiers less in a kind of rip off, one in which they’re actually entitled to more but forced to apply for more of the taxpayer’s money through the means test SNAP program applicants go through.
From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.
From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.
You can bet nobody at General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Land Systems ever needs to present their monthly budget and bank account statistics at the local welfare center.
It’s a good demonstration of a systemic immorality and just another hidden national disgrace. It’s the stealing of the riskiest patriotic labor so we can suck out a few dollars more for the gadgets of killing.
Yesterday the Maddow Show devoted a short segment to non-lethal weapons and the OWS protests.
It started with a showing of graphics and citations on the more exotic and menacing versions developed for the US military in the last few years. First up was the microwaving pain ray, aka The Sheriff, written about many times on this blog.
MADDOW: From the files of accurately nicknamed weapons, this is the so-called giant pain ray. It`s technically called the active denial system, but really the nickname pain ray is so much more descriptive. This giant satellite looking thing, it shoots electromagnetic radiation at a target, also known as a human. It’s intended to cause a lot of pain. The top layer of skin is supposed to absorb the radioactive rays and get very hot.
In tests people could endure the pain ray for about three seconds.
Nobody lasted more than five seconds. So it hurts a whole heck of a lot, but in theory at least it does not kill you …
[Maddow goes on to say that non-lethal weaponry is rationalized as “an alternative to deadly force.”]
But it turns out it`s not the way nonlethal weaponry gets used.
Often, instead of substituting for lethal force, nonlethal weapons just
increase the number of occasions, the types of occasions on which force is used at all. Seattle police, for example, probably would have never used guns and live ammunition to shoot this 84-year-old woman who was the defining image [as someone who had been pepper sprayed] of Occupy protests last week.
Another small homeland security industry now of importance is the one devoted to “non-lethal” weaponry in the United States. Small and large businesses, as well as the big arms developers, got involved in peddling various new arms to the government and police forces, all using the argument that technological advances would allow for non-bloody crowd control.
The most public example was The Sheriff, a high-powered microwave gun mounted on a Hummer and developed by Raytheon. The Sheriff took over a decade of taxpayer investment and an incredible public relations effort to push it (one that failed spectacularly) as a revolutionary weapon which could be used to disperse crowds.
Publicly, it was a disaster. The Sheriff was taken to Afghanistan a year or so ago and quietly brought back without firing one microwave shot in anger. It was, and still is, simply viewed as a device for torturing people who can’t fight back.
At which point in time Raytheon began peddling a much smaller mounted version of it for use in the California prison system.
The essential point to be made is a simple one. All the arguments for the development and use of “non-lethal” weapons rely upon the success in getting people to believe there is some magic point of force application in which people are not irrevocably injured or killed.
In real life, this point is imaginary. It does not exist. And there is no scientific method that can be used to find or elucidate it. As any perusal of the literature on use of tasers, rubber bullets and tear gas quickly reveals.
However, the argument remains seductive particularly when governments or law enforcement need rationalizations for using force short of bullets on the unarmed.
What the “non-lethal” weapon does is set the bar downward for the use of force. When one equips a military or law enforcement agency with weapons which the average soldier or policeman believes will not hurt people because they have been told there is a science to them making them safe, the problem becomes obvious.
The point to be underlined is that weaponry sold as stuff that doesn’t kill you only lowers the threshold for its use in the militarized police forces of this country. Restraints are removed.
And you wind up with what we have: Appalling incidents like the one in which the campus police officer blithely empties a canister of pepper spray into students — then goes for more.
On MSNBC Maddow has covered the pain ray before.
One of her producers, Laura Conaway, was also one of my editors at the Village Voice years ago.
In December 2002 I authored a column, “Weapon of the Week,” for the Voice. Conaway was my editor and one of the first pieces we did was on the pain ray.
At the time it was advertised for coming use in the imminent invasion of Iraq.
What is the microwaver’s target? It must be unarmed civilians, because as described, the VMAD wouldn’t seem to offer much against terrorists or regular soldiers ready to fire back with conventional weapons. What is certain is that the Pentagon’s microwave projects lack oversight and common sense.
However, pepper spray, as everyone knows now, is more than bad enough. We’ll probably never get to the pain ray because the old-fashioned stuff — capsaicin, tear gas rounds and rubber bullets — have been more than sufficient at horrification.
Use of non-lethals on unarmed crowds in the United States has led, and will only lead, to more civil unrest. And that’s because the rationalization for their use is totally rotten. Their practical use is in handing out severe punishments for stepping out of line. Everyone knows it, too.
“Boosting [your] schools teaches … skills to represent businesses or organizations after graduation … failure is not an option … Stay optimistic!”
Perhaps no truth to the rumor Homeland Security has a special department employing people writing stories like the above for syndication into Internet news feeds.
Freedom of speech exercised against what in my younger days was called the Establishment??? is tolerated as long as it stays in the backwaters (sort of like this blog). Once persons start actually to notice it, the tear gas, or, these days, the pepper spray and tasers come out.
Putting up the first evah “About” page today involved checking links. One to the old Crypt Newsletter turned up the above, used as art for a T-shirt that I actually had made.
The art was one of the leaflets the US military dropped on Iraq over a decade ago.
Now it’s an obscure absurd anachronism. It indeed looks like something a country that had gone out of its mind would make by the hundreds of thousands.
Hosing unarmed students with pepper spray, as the police did at UC Davis, is a new low.
The video speaks for itself. Use of burning chemical spray to the eyes is totally unjustified. And it tells us that many parts of this country are crippled by moral bankruptcy and bereft of basic human decency. Such actions justify further civil unrest.
Torturing civilians in the US cannot end well for the torturers. In the short term, someone should begin buying police-style helmets with face guards for OWS protests.
UC Davis and the police erred badly. And the video shows this.
Despite the exhibition of brutality and callousness students gained the upper hand, herded there attackers into a defensive position, where brandishing riot control guns, the police were made to look even worse.
“You can go!” shouts the crowd. The police were forced to retreat.
“Join our strike!” the crowd yells as the video ends.
E-mail reaction, a couple days ago, to “In This Brokedown Country:”
nice. fun. but alas, I don’t post anything smacking of this or that side — now, for me, I am not one percent but half the country seems to identify with them — the conservatives
and when some time ago I posted [a] gallery of Occupy Wall St I got heaps of email lambasting me and telling me I was hardly non-partisan. So: though I enjoyed it I won’t post. Simply want to sail on my non-partisan way.
Inconveniently, civil unrest delivers a point of view that offends many people.
Anyone reading this knows I find keeping the peace for the sake of popularity an utterly baffling position. Particularly so for the last, say, five years, at least.
[These] Americans form a diverse group sometimes called near poor??? and sometimes simply overlooked and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.
When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people one in three Americans either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.
After a lost decade of flat wages and the worst downturn since the Great Depression, the findings can be thought of as putting numbers to the bleak national mood quantifying the expressions of unease erupting in protests and political swings. They convey levels of economic stress sharply felt but until now hard to measure …
Perhaps the most surprising finding is that 28 percent work full-time, year round.
Ms. Sheppard, [one person profiled], pays $2,000 in rent and says her employer classifies her as part time to avoid offering her health insurance, even though she works 40 hours a week. Unable to buy it on her own, she crosses her fingers and tries to stay health.
