Archive for 2014

NEWS FROM AMERICA’S “SECURE BORDERS:” Cartels suspected as high-caliber gunfire sends Border Patrol scrambling on Rio Grande. “Border Patrol sources said the rounds were clearly identifiable because .50- caliber weapons make a distinctive noise when fired. Sources said they also believe this is the first time that Border Patrol agents have taken direct fire from the Mexican side of the river in this area.” So why didn’t they return the fire?

WHAT PART-TIME WORKERS NEED MOST: MORE WORK.

The plight of low-wage retail workers has generated much talk in recent years. As I’ve written before, I don’t find problematic the existence of jobs that do not pay enough to support a family. Retail jobs have never paid well, because retail margins tend to be pretty slim. The problem is not that retail is a low-wage job, but that an increasing number of people can’t find any other sort of job.

The natural response of many people is to say, well, these are the jobs we have now, so they should pay what factory jobs used to. Yet like the manufacturing jobs that went away, many of those low-wage retail jobs also face competition — from higher-productivity firms such as Amazon and Stouffer’s. Forcing up the wages might destroy even more jobs, leaving a lot of workers even worse off.

All this is old territory. A less reported side effect of all this, however, is labor-market slack: retail scheduling practices that make it functionally impossible for a lot of people to support themselves.

After all, even low wages left workers some options, however unpalatable, such as stringing together multiple jobs to make ends meet. Unfortunately, the weakness in the labor market has coincided with yet another market development: scheduling software and technology that allows retailers to manage their workforce as another just-in-time input.

Workers are asked to input blocks of hours when they will be available; the software then crunches through everyone’s availability and spits out a schedule that takes account of everything from weather forecasts to the danger that a worker will go over the maximum number of hours to still be considered part time. Obviously, you can’t string together multiple jobs this way, because each job requires that you block out many more available hours than you will actually work. Meanwhile, Steve Greenhouse reports on even worse practices that I hadn’t heard of: requiring workers to be “on call” at short notice or scheduling them for shifts and then sending them home if business looks light.

In this situation, no matter how hard you are willing to work, stringing together anything approaching a minimum income becomes impossible. That makes it much more deeply troubling than low pay.

I’m sure another layer of regulation will make everything just fine.

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Plus, bestsellers in Mysteries, Thrillers & Suspense.

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THE STANDARD NARRATIVE IS THAT WOMEN ARE MORE EMOTIONALLY SENSITIVE THAN MEN. But are they, really?

If this woman had been an InstaPundit reader, she’d probably have a happy marriage now.

FROM K.C. JOHNSON, some final thoughts on the Duke Lacrosse false-rape debacle. “Higher education is perhaps the only product in which Americans spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars without having any clear sense of what they are purchasing. Few parents, alumni, legislators, or prospective students spend much (if any) time exploring the scholarship or syllabi offered by professors at the school of their choice; they devote even less effort to understanding hiring patterns or pedagogical changes that have driven the contemporary academy to an ideological extreme on issues of race, class, and gender. At most, there seems to be a general — incorrect — impression that while colleges have the occasional ‘tenured radical’ who lacks real influence on campus, most professors fall well within the ideological mainstream. . . . The lacrosse case provided a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the mindset of an elite university—and the look was a troubling one. There is no evidence of any accountability at Duke: the university has the same leadership and the same hiring patterns it had in 2006. Several members of the Group of 88 have gone on to more prestigious positions, their efforts to exploit their students’ distress causing them no problem in the contemporary academy.”

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS:

Hashtag feminism (e.g. #YesAllWomen) is a scourge. It brings out the worst in contemporary feminism: injustice-collecting, trauma-valorizing, male-bashing. It also encourages group think and vigilanteeism. Other than that, it’s fine. . . .

I only recently came to appreciate the limited power of logic, reason and evidence to change minds. Most of us, whether we know it or not, are driven by emotion and group loyalty. Cognitive scientists have long known about a phenomenon called “motivated reasoning”—we tend to use logic and reason, not to discover what we believe, but to confirm what we already think we know. Instead of changing our minds in the face of contradictory evidence, we are more likely to seize on rationalizations for what we already believe. I see this tendency in myself once in a while and try mightily to resist it.

Plus:

The Millennials have been cheated out of a serious education by their Baby Boomer teachers. Call it a generational swindle. Even the best and brightest among the 20-somethings have been shortchanged. Instead of great books, they wasted a lot of time with third-rate political tracts and courses with titles like “Women Writers of the Oklahoma Panhandle.” Instead of spending their college years debating and challenging received ideas, they had to cope with speech codes and identity politics. College educated young women in the U.S. are arguably the most fortunate people in history; yet many of them have drunk deeply from the gender feminist Kool-Aid. Girls at Yale, Haverford and Swarthmore see themselves as oppressed. That is madness. And madness can only last so long. So, I plan to continue writing books and articles, making my Factual Feminist videos and lecturing at as many campuses and laws schools as I can. American colleges have been described as islands of repression in a sea of freedom. I want to encourage rebellion among the islanders.

A little rebellion — maybe even more than a little — would be a good thing.

STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWEETS pro-Hamas hashtag. I guess it’s nice that they’re not even trying to hide it anymore.