SF Drowning in Debt

As Margaret Thatcher said, the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money:

San Francisco has a staggering $5.8 billion pension liability, and a series of retroactive benefit increases approved by voters over a dozen years is largely to blame, according to a recently released civil grand jury report.

That generosity is contributing to an eye-popping increase in the public payroll. The grand jury found that the cost of city salaries and benefits, which include pensions, has grown by 33 percent over the past decade — and it’s expected to keep up that pace for at least five more years. That will add another $698 million to the public tab.

And while these estimates come right out of the city’s budget forecasts, said grand jury member Christopher Bacon, “it’s a bigger problem than I think the city has wanted to face.”

According to veteran City Hall watcher and Chamber of Commerce Vice President Jim Lazarus, the mounting retirement expenses “for the foreseeable future (will) require a substantial general fund payment into the pension system.”

That, in turn, could force the city to cut services, and it may “affect the number of employees ... and the wage and benefit packages (the city) can afford,” Lazarus said.

Nonsense.  They can pay for it all with unicorn farts.

When Congresspeople Contribute To A Lack of The Diversity They Supposedly Champion

News from my alma mater:

West Point’s commitment to strengthening the diversity and character of the student body was demonstrated throughout Monday’s Board of Visitor’s session held at the US Military Academy.

Director of Admissions Col. Deborah McDonald pointed out that the academy’s Class of 2021 had the highest percentage and number of female cadets as well as African American/black cadets in history.

“It has been a phenomenal year,” she said of the surge of diversity in the student body.

Still, problems exist with the recruitment process. With high schools across the U.S. producing 81,000 fewer graduates in 2016 than in the previous year, it has been “a close knife fight” for the USMA when it comes to attracting high school students, according to McDonald.

A map presented to the board indicated that Members of Congress are nominating fewer students as candidates for the academy, and the lowest concentration of nominees lies around districts in major U.S. cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D, NY-18), a member of the Board of Visitors, made note of this, and also pointed out that districts led by Hispanic members have almost no nominees. Womack stated that he intends to speak to Representative Jose Serrano (NY-15) about this issue.

Yesterday's Weight

196.4

Tech Help

I've been a reader of Joanne Jacobs' education-related blog for years now, but all of a sudden I get the following error when visiting her site:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I get this error whether using Firefox or Internet Explorer.

I contacted Joanne to ask if there's some problem on her end.  She did some checking and doesn't think so.

I've cleared my browser cache and deleted all cookies in the joannejacobs.com folder in my browser listing of cookies, but to no avail.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

American Exceptionalism

This is true:

Let me throw down this marker: The West is superior to the rest of the world in every significant way, we should aggressively back our allies over our enemies, and the guiding principle of our foreign policy should always be America’s interests. No apologies. No equivocation. No doubt.

What are your questions?

Well, if you're a normal American, you won't have any questions - these truths are self-evident. But if you're a progressive, you're gonna have a little sissy snit fit like so many libs did in the wake of the President’s triumphant Warsaw speech. There’s one thing that always sets them off - uttering the truth/heresy that not only is Western civilization the best and most advanced culture in the history of humanity, but the United States of America is its greatest manifestation.

The immigrants and refugees get it. Which way are they always headed? North, to the comparative paradise of the Western world, or south, to the hellscape of the Third World? That's a gimme. They are never headed south, and everyone knows it. Yet the left still insists that we stop believing our lying eyes and start believing the liberal Fifth Column of multicultural liars infesting America’s alleged elite.

Except our eyes aren’t lying, and now we have a President who won’t lie either. It makes them nuts.

American exceptionalism is not a given, though.  It must be worked for and nurtured.  It's taken a hit because of liberals, especially the anti-free speech crowd in our universities and greater culture.  It's taken a hit by the socialists, who want to replace the so-called Protestant work ethic with sloth, envy, and greed.

Do not take our freedoms or our prosperity for granted.  They are not a given. I'm glad to have a President who values the ideals that have made America exceptional.

As The Democrats Continue To Make Stuff Up About Trump/Russia...

Remember Secretary of State Clinton's "reset button" of 2009?

Russian media have been poking fun at the US secretary of state over a translation error on a gift she presented to her Russian counterpart.

 

Hillary Clinton gave Sergei Lavrov a mock "reset" button, symbolising US hopes to mend frayed ties with Moscow.

But he said the word the Americans chose, "peregruzka", meant "overloaded" or "overcharged", rather than "reset".

Daily newspaper Kommersant declared on its front page: "Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton push the wrong button."

Relations between Washington and Moscow have cooled in recent years over Russia's role in the war in Georgia, US support for the entry of Georgia and Ukraine to Nato, and the planned US missile shield based in central Europe. 

During the 2012 election, President Obama essentially gave central Europe to the Russians in true Munich 1938 style.  Peace in our time-ski.

During that same election, Obama's trademark arrogant attitude was on display again, on the side of the Russians:

I'm tired of hearing the Democrats talk about Russia.  They need to shut up and go drink their Slurpees while the adults clean up their messes and pull their car out of the ditch.

Inequality

This seems so obvious to me that I'm surprised it came from the BBC:

In a paper published in April in the journal Nature Human Behaviour called ‘Why people prefer unequal societies’, a team of researchers from Yale University argue that humans – even as young children and babies – actually prefer living in a world in which inequality exists. It sounds counter-intuitive, so why would that be? Because if people find themselves in a situation where everyone is equal, studies suggest that many become angry or bitter if people who work hard aren’t rewarded, or if slackers are over-rewarded...

“We argue that the public perception of wealth inequality itself being aversive to most people is incorrect, and that instead, what people are truly concerned about is unfairness,” says Christina Starmans, a psychology post-doc at Yale who worked on the paper.

“In the present-day US, and much of the world, these two issues are confounded, because there is so much inequality that the assumption is that it must be unfair. But this has led to an incorrect focus on wealth inequality itself as the problem that needs addressing, rather than the more central issue of fairness.”

Starman’s co-author Mark Sheskin, a cognitive science post-doc at Yale, puts the findings of this research succinctly: “People typically prefer fair inequality to unfair equality”.  (Boldface mine--Darren)

This comports entirely with common sense, and also explains why socialism/communism doesn't work.

The reason this matters is that trying to create a world with no wealth disparity is at odds with people’s perception of fairness, and that could potentially lead to instability. A society where no poverty exists sounds rather utopian, but if that society is equal-but-unfair then it risks collapsing, argues Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University.

You socialists--you don't want to deny science, do you?

Clamping Down On Student Press You Don't Like

It's one thing for President Trump to attack the press that is so unfairly aligned against him, it's another thing altogether to try to stop the ideas in the press from being distributed--especially if the press in question is a student newspaper, and especially if that student newspaper is in California, which has very strong student press freedoms:

Employees from Chico State’s Student Health Center may have violated state law last semester when they removed all copies of the student newspaper after it published an article they deemed offensive, according to internal email correspondence reviewed exclusively by Heat Street.

The op-ed, written by student reporter Roberto Fonseca and published by The Orion in May, criticized Chico State’s Gender and Sexuality Equity Center. Fonseco also challenged the existence of rape culture, systemic racism, and non-binary gender identities.

California law prohibits “the unauthorized taking of multiple copies of free newspapers,” especially “done… to deprive others of the opportunity to read them.” Such behavior “injures the rights of readers, writers, publishers, and advertisers, and impoverishes the marketplace of ideas in California,” state statute says.

But the day after Fonseca’s article ran, the Student Health Center’s nursing supervisor, Jill Cannaday, informed the Student Health Center staff that she and Dr. Deborah Stewart, the medical chief of staff, had removed all copies of the Orion from their lobby “for fear their articles may trigger a patient waiting in our reception area.”

Cannaday specifically referenced “the awful op-ed piece” about the Gender and Sexual Equity Center, which she said “involved negative stereotypes about gender and culture.”

I wonder how long it will be before taxpayers get tired of funding such tyrants, and paying off such lawsuits.

At least two other Chico State employees applauded this possible illegal removal of newspapers.

“Thank you for this. I appreciate it,” wrote Melissa Hormann, a nurse in the Student Health Center.

“OMG. This is amazing. I love you. You’re the best. THANK YOU!!!” wrote Lindsay Briggs, an assistant professor in the Health and Community Services Department. As Heat Street reported last month, Briggs also publicly denounced the student reporter on Facebook, calling him “a repugnant student” and a “sh*tty student,” also writing, “F*ck you Roberto Fonseca.”

Kinda hard to defend that, no?

Email correspondence from Chico State’s Journalism and Public Relations Department also showed concerns that the university would not protect free speech.

“Various faculty are labeling Roberto’s column as hate speech,” Wiesenger wrote. “Two faculty members I spoke with—both of whom claim close ties to the president—said they do not support the First Amendment, don’t support unfettered free speech on campus and are questioning the need for an independent, student-run newspaper on campus. … The university’s Public Affairs Office, led by one of our news alumni, is (and has been) openly criticizing The Orion and has the ear of the administration.”

I can't see that Chico State has a leg to stand on.

Free Speech on Campus

Jonathan Haidt talks about political correctness and the snowflakes of our time, how it came to be, what it has brought and what it may bring.

Source: https://charlierose.com/videos/30146

Haidt's comments from 8:19-9:30 are so important and so correct.  And for those of you for whom this is important, Haidt is a self-identified leftie!  In his book The Righteous Mind he talks about that, talks about his being a speechwriter for John Kerry, etc.

"That's a slur, not an argument."  Brilliant.

Ubering

As I've been driving for Uber for just over a week, I didn't know things were bad enough such that changes needed to be made:

Ridesharing service Uber introduced a new wait time fee and a shortened cancellation window in an email sent by the service Wednesday evening.

The wait time fee will compensate drivers for time spent waiting for their passengers once they have arrived at a pickup location. Two minutes after a driver arrives, the charge will begin. A note will appear in the rider's Uber app.

The new wait time fee will be per-minute based and will vary based on your vehicle option and city, according to Uber.

"Many drivers have told us that some of our support policies feel stacked against them and seem to put riders’ interests above theirs," an Uber news release reads.

I've been kept waiting--the only ride I've canceled was for a passenger who not only didn't show up, but didn't respond to my text messages, either.  That passenger was charged $5 by Uber, of which I got $3.75.

Are you considering using Uber?  (I probably won't drive myself to the airport and park in the economy lot ever again!  Uber is so convenient to/from the airport.)  Let me share some tips that will make things easier for both you and your driver:

• If you're at a house, please ensure the address can be easily seen, especially at night.  If not, then when you see on the app that your driver is about 1 minute away, please step outside.  Looking for addresses on dark houses at night--no muy bueno!
• If you're at a business, please identify the business by name--every business in that shopping center is at 123 Main Street, and it's a big shopping center!  If you're not able to do that, then as soon as you're told your driver is on the way, please send a text like "I'm at the Trader Joe's".
• If you're at a mall, please identify which mall entrance you're waiting at!  "The main one" isn't much of a help, as many malls have many entrances, none of which is a "main one".
• Similarly, if you're in an apartment or similar complex, be very clear where you'd like me to meet you.
• If you know a better way to get where you're going than what my GPS is telling me, please share it with me!  I want to get you to your destination as efficiently as possible.

So those are a few suggestions I have. Here are a few of my pet peeves.

• Please don't smoke just before you get in my car.  Ew.  Just ew.  I Febreze the seats each day before I leave home, but still, my next passenger...
• Yes, we're adults, but I don't want to hear f***ing this or a-hole that, whether you're talking to me, your fellow passenger, or someone on your phone.
• Please don't think you're going to eat in my car.
• I'll ask if you'd like the a/c on or the windows open, or if the radio is too loud (it's barely audible, but you might not like my music).  Please don't ask me to turn the radio to your favorite station.  Some Uber drivers might be OK with that, I think it's a bit presumptuous and rude.  Hey Macy's, please turn off that elevator music and crank up some headbanging heavy metal or misogynistic rap--no, not gonna happen. 

Some observations I've made in my week-plus of driving:

• Most people are genuinely nice and friendly.
• I can't believe how many people commute via Uber to fast food jobs.
• I enjoy driving around much more than I thought I would.
• I'm learning about parts of the greater Sacramento area that I've never even been to before.
• You meet all kinds of people when you drive for Uber, most of them kind and decent.
• I can charge your Android phone while we drive, but I need to get a USB-to-Lightning cord for all the iPhone users.

Update, 7/9/16: Picked up a lightning charging cable yesterday.

"Republicans Buy Shoes, Too"

While Michael Jordan's titular quote may or may not be real, it's still a smart quote.  It gets to the heart of business--don't tick off your customers or they'll go somewhere else.  Perhaps the administrators at our nation's universities are now learning that lesson, albeit a bit too late and to the detriment of their schools:

The reality, the counselor said, is that while the dislike of Yale surprised her, there are other colleges that parents are vetoing. "Many won't consider Oberlin or Wesleyan, and Brown is completely off the table," she said.

At some level, such antipathy toward those and other colleges isn't surprising. Their students are liberal, and conservative publications love to write articles with headlines like "Oberlin Is an Insane Asylum." And those articles attract more attention than articles in conservative publications in which, for example, a conservative student at Brown urges people not to stereotype his institution and praises the way the administration handled a disruption of a speaker by liberal students.

Another counselor said that she had several students and parents -- liberals -- who said that they didn't want to consider colleges that have been in the news for incidents in which some groups were seen as taking positions against free speech.

Yet another counselor, this one based in New York City and serving families who are generally liberal, said she too is hearing more parents ask about colleges' political reputations, only sometimes based on real information.

This article, which slanted left, didn't even mention the University of Missouri, which experienced dramatic drops in applications after their 2016 drama:

Fewer freshmen are applying to the University of Missouri for fall enrollment than a year earlier, and race protests that put the Columbia campus under a national spotlight contributed to the drop, according to an internal email from MU’s director of enrollment.

Don't badmouth people if you want them to buy your shoes.

Update, 7/11/17:  They chose...poorly:

After it was reported at the end of June that the University of Missouri, crippled by a plunge in enrollment after its debacle over charges of racism in 2015, was attempting to recoup its losses by  renting dorm rooms to football weekend visitors, there is now this: The New York Times reports that the university is temporarily closing seven dormitories and cutting over 400 positions, including those of some non-tenured faculty members.

You might expect that the decline in enrollment occurred primarily among whites, after the flimsily-supported racism charges of 2015 resulted in the resignation of the university’s president; The Daily Wire reported, “Many parents and alumni responded by refusing to contribute money to the public university. For example, donations to its athletics department dropped 72% last year.”

But here’s the big surprise: as the Times notes: “Students of all races have shunned Missouri, but the drop in freshman enrollment last fall was strikingly higher among blacks, at 42%, than among whites, at 21%.”

So-called Rote Memorization In Math

It used to be fashionable in some math circles to believe that students don't need to memorize anything.  They can look it up!  Anyone with more than two operational brain cells can tell you that that's a ridiculous idea, but some people still cling to it.  Here's one less reason to cling:

Abstract

Between 1995 and 2010, most U.S. states adopted K–12 math standards which discouraged memorization of math facts and procedures.  Since 2010, most states have revised standards to align with the K–12 Common Core Mathematics Standards (CCMS).  The CCMS do not ask students to memorize facts and procedures for some key topics and delay work with memorized fundamentals in others. 

Recent research in cognitive science has found that the brain has only minimal ability to reason with knowledge that has not previously been well-memorized.  This science predicts that students taught under math standards that discouraged initial memorization for math topics will have significant difficulty solving numeric problems in mathematics, science, and engineering.  As one test of this prediction, in a recent OECD assessment of numeracy skills among 22 developed-world nations, U.S. 16–24 year olds ranked dead last.  Discussion will include steps that can be taken to align K–12 state standards with practices supported by cognitive research.

How Army Football Is Different From Other Football Programs

When Army's (that is, West Point's) football team is on the field, they're different from the players on the other side of the ball in at least one important respect:

Last Friday, word came that an Army football player from the West Point class of 2010, 1^st Lt. Stephen “Chase” Prasnicki, age 24, had died two days earlier, serving in Afghanistan.   

I first read the news on Facebook, in Army QB Trent Steelman's post about his former teammate from the 2009 season: "Thank you for paying the ultimate sacrifice brother. RIP Pras.” 

Along with the respectful words of condolence was a collage of photos: #17 in a Black Knight football uniform, the soldier in camouflage uniform, a bride and her husband in dress blues. 

Army Times reported, “Two soldiers who were killed in an improvised explosive device blast earlier this week in Afghanistan were identified”, adding, “they died Wednesday in Maidan Shahr, Wardak province, of wounds caused by an improvised explosive device.”

Rest in peace, indeed.

How I Spent My Day

A friend and I took a day trip to San Francisco today.  She has the selfies on her phone, here are a few pictures I took:

click to enlarge pictures

An adult with baby turkeys in my neighborhood as I was heading out this morning

Looking from Fort Point, directly under the Golden Gate Bridge, towards the City before the fog burned off

A container ship coming into the Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge

Chinatown

The Transamerica building

A very steep street

Levi's Plaza

 Pier 39

View from Pier 39

As you can see, it was a beautiful day once the fog wore off.

The Things We Do For Our Dogs

I'd love to be outside setting off fireworks, but "safe and sane" fireworks are bad enough for my dog, and it seems everyone and his brother has illegal-in-California fireworks and is setting them off. The explosions send my dog into fits.

So as I've done for the past many years, he and I are inside, with the air conditioner on, watching tv with the volume turned up. At around midnight I should be able to safely let him outside.

The Problem Has Been Correctly Identified, But The Cause Has Not

The City University of New York is offering a math course targeting SJWs.

“Quantitative Reasoning (QR)/Quantitative Literacy (QL) skills are essential for social justice,” Professor Esther Isabelle Wilder writes in the description for an online “Numeracy Infusion Course for Higher Education” (NICHE)...

According to Wilder, disparities in mathematical literacy are “linked to inequalities in our educational system,” and serve to “perpetuate socioeconomic disadvantages among minority and vulnerable populations,” something she said she has observed among her own students.

While I applaud the study of mathematics, I lament its targeted use in such a way.  As I wrote several years ago:

I assert here that a math class is not the place for social science. Math is a "hard science"--that is, it's replicable and predictive. I know that every time I add 3 + 4 the answer is going to be 7, no matter what. Social science is a "soft science"--different people, in different conditions, will act in different ways. Three plus four will always be seven. This attempt to politicize the math classroom, and to politicize with an unambiguous leftward bias, is another in a long string of attempts to water down the math curriculum so that "every student can succeed." What it really does is ensure that no student succeeds because no one learns any real math! The left doesn't believe in absolutes, it doesn't believe in standards, it doesn't believe in individuality. No one is better than anyone else, no one is more capable, we're all one big mass. This is why the left preaches about "group" identities (racial, ethnic, sexual orientation) while the right preaches about individuals. The left thinks we're all equal--hence the union mentality--the right says we all have an equal opportunity to pursue our potential. This is yet another big difference.

Social science should not be injected into a math curriculum. Rather, math (as a hard science) should be injected into the social science curriculum (a soft science)--that would truly be teaching "across the curriculum". Don't bring your politics into math; rather, use math to justify (or disprove) your politics.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The problem has been correctly identified, but the cause and solutions promoted by lefties could not be more incorrect.

A Valuable Use For Math

The perfect behind? It's all in the figures: Scientists find mathematical formula for a flawless bottom

• Scientists say they have a mathematical formula for the best female bottoms
• They say it all hinges on a number, the ratio between the waist and the hips
• Perfect behind expressed scientifically has a ratio of 0.7-the same as many stars
• Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor all obtained a perfect scored

As I said, a valuable use for math.  Now let's not be sexist, the other half of the population needs their butt-numbers calculated!

Weight

200.6 lbs.

This Isn't Very Common Core-icle

When does a "black box" number/algorithm get the nod over deeper understanding?  Almost never, but sometimes:

I’m still wary of equipping students with black boxes, but these days I’m willing to do it, so long as three conditions are met. I hesitate to share this crude checklist, knowing my colleagues out there in the profession will have wiser ways to frame the tradeoffs. (After all, aren’t checklists too binary, too black-and-white, for an idea as elusive and shaded as “understanding”?)

Nevertheless, my checklist goes something like this....

Star Chambers

It amazes me that anyone could think that hounding men out of college without real due process was ever a good idea, but the last Administration made it policy:

For years, college campuses across the country have been conducting witch hunts to expel or punish men accused of sexual assault. Those may soon be coming to an end, thanks to the Trump administration.

Colleges and universities have conducted these witch hunts at the order of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which during the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter and additional guidance that all but assured students accused of sexual assault would not get a fair hearing.

These campus star chambers, conducted behind closed doors and hidden by federal privacy laws, have resulted in an unknown number of expulsions. More than 100 of these punished students have sued or are now suing their universities for violating their due process rights and discriminating against them because of their sex.

I hope every one of those lawsuits succeeds.

As a taxpayer who supports 3 different state university/college systems, I would like our institutions of higher education to focus on teaching and not on adjudicating crimes.  Leave crimes to law enforcement and the courts.