April 16, 2013

Mark Zuckerberg's NAABP (National Association for the Advancement of Billionaire People) gets loophole inserted in Gang of 4*2's immigration bill

From the Washington Post:
Facebook flexes political muscle with provision in immigration bill 
By Peter Wallsten, Jia Lynn Yang and Craig Timberg, Tuesday, April 16, 6:12 PM 
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg generated international attention last week for his entry into Washington politics. In launching a new political group, he positioned himself as a leading advocate to help aspiring entrepreneurs and other ambitious immigrants achieve the American dream. 
Yet behind the scenes on Capitol Hill, Facebook lobbyists were engaged in another form of politics: pressing to insert a few new words helpful to Facebook’s business interests into a sprawling legislative proposal. 

That would be the first time in the history of the world that immigrationist rhetoric was ever deployed in the service of special interests.
The deft maneuvering came during the drafting of the new bipartisan Senate immigration proposal being released this week. It underscores the rising clout of a young company that is following the road paved by such technology forebears as Microsoft and Google, moving from indifference toward Washington to persistent, sophisticated engagement. 
The payoff on the immigration provision could be substantial, allowing Facebook and other technology companies to avoid a requirement that they make a “good-faith” effort to recruit Americans for jobs before hiring from overseas. Facebook could also sidestep proposed rules that would force it to pay much higher wages to many foreign workers. 
... The new carve-out for Facebook and other firms, critics fear, could help companies evade the stricter proposed regulations being hailed by lawmakers as a way to crack down on ­abuses. 
Facebook officials declined to comment on the specific H1B provision, instead couching the company’s lobbying on the issue as part of a broader push to improve the country’s economy.

Ask not what your Economy can do for you -- ask what you can do for your Economy.
... “Modernizing the immigration system so it helps the U.S. economy and responsibly promotes innovation is a top priority for Facebook and all of our tech colleagues,” Jodi Seth, a Facebook spokeswoman, said by e-mail.

If only Facebook's spokeswoman were named Jodi Sith.
“We are working with the Hill and others to explain how our businesses work and to make sure reforms don’t have unintended consequences that might undermine the purpose of the bill.” 

I bet Facebook doesn't want unintended consequences. They paid good money to have the bill repurposed and they want what they paid for.
Facebook faces stricter regulations because the company recently surpassed a key legal threshold and is now considered to be “dependent” on H1B visas. The U.S. government classifies companies as dependent when more than 15 percent of their workers hold H1Bs. Facebook said it is “just over” the 15 percent line. 
The new H1B regulations in the Senate deal are aimed largely at big outsourcing firms — most of them based in India — that employ tens of thousands of new H1B workers each year. More severe limits would be placed on companies with more than half of their workers on the visas, including stiff fees and an outright ban to take effect in 2016 on these firms hiring additional H1B workers. 
... Then this year, as momentum built for an immigration bill, Facebook began pushing for an even broader exemption. 
Working with lobbyists for Compete America, a trade group representing U.S. tech firms, Facebook helped secure a workaround: Any worker in the process of obtaining a green card “shall not be counted” toward the 15 percent threshold. 
That means Facebook and other companies could file just enough applications to fall back below the 15 percent line. The language, pulled from a draft copy of the legislation, was reviewed by The Washington Post. 
Supporters of the workaround said severe backlogs in the green-card program have left many workers for Facebook and other firms on H1Bs, driving up the companies’ percentage. 
“We need to crack down on firms that abuse the H1B system, but some companies’ H1B number is inflated because their employees remain stuck in the backlog,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key architect of the new immigration plan. “It shouldn’t be seen as a company’s fault when the government simply takes too long to process green cards.” 
In an op-ed for The Post last week, Zuckerberg questioned why there are not enough H1B visas for immigrants while introducing his new group, FWD.us.
“Why do we offer so few H-1B visas for talented specialists that the supply runs out within days of becoming available each year,” Zuckerberg said, “even though we know each of these jobs will create two or three more American jobs in return?” 
... Joel Kaplan, the head of Facebook’s Washington office, was a senior aide in the George W. Bush White House, where he worked with his friend Cesar Conda, now chief of staff to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a key immigration negotiator. 
Kaplan was a driving force behind pressing the lawmakers to include the green-card exception, according to people familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings. 
... Without the exception, Corley added, some firms might be forced to pay foreign workers more than U.S. employees performing the same jobs.

You mean, without this exception, Facebook might, conceivably, have had an incentive to hire Americans? The horror, the horror ...
... Bruce Morrison, a lobbyist for U.S. electrical engineers, said the Facebook provision creates a substantial loophole. The measure requires only that green-card applications be at least “pending” — meaning U.S. government approval is not necessary for a temporary H1B worker to be classified as permanent by a company seeking to avoid stricter regulations. 
“It could just be a matter of paper pushing,” said Morrison, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut who wrote key pieces of the H1B visa law in 1990. “All you have to do is file a piece of paper, which doesn’t even have to be approved or approvable.”

Cecilia Kang and David Nakamura contributed to this report.

Whites and Guns

From my new Taki's column on "Guns and Whites:"
Age-adjusted homicide victimization rates from the Center for Disease Control.

Read the whole thing there. I included a list of celebrities who have New York City "concealed carry" permits.

Will Big Data change the world?

Everybody is talking about how life will never be the same again as we enter the Age of Big Data. Here, for example, is David Brooks' new column on Big Data. As I've mentioned before, I started working in Big Data 31 years ago. After I got my MBA in 1982, I joined a newish firm that was the first to effectively exploit for marketing research purposes the inundation of data from checkout scanners at supermarkets and drug stores. 

We paid to put the new laser scanners in every supermarket and drug store in four small cities, such as Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We recruited 2,500 households in each of our four test markets to identify themselves as they went through the checkout lane, so we could track every single consumer packaged goods purchase they made. We could finally answer quantitatively an endless number of questions that brand managers and marketing professors had dreamed up since WWII about consumer behavior. Do people who buy Tab by the six-pack also buy Lean Cuisine when it's on sale? Any question like that imaginable, we could answer.

 Furthermore, we could do over 30 years ago what Jim Manzi called for in his recent book Uncontrolled: use these towns and giant real world laboratories, where we could control the TV commercials seen by each of our panelists in their own living room. If P&G wanted to test a new Mr. Whipple spot for Charmin, we could divide our panel up into two cells with identical Charmin purchasing over the last year, then show one cell the new commercial and one cell the old commercial, then record which cell bought more Charmin over the next year.

We caused a sensation in the consumer packaged goods world. Wall Street said the world would never be the same and our stock doubled on the day it went public in March 1983. 

For awhile, we made a lot of money, so it definitely changed our world.

After awhile, though, brand managers at P&G got tired of paying hundreds of thousands to find out much how sales would go if P&G management granted their fondest wish of having their advertising budget doubled. The usual answer was: not much, if at all. The only time doubling an already generous P&G-sized ad budget was likely to move the needle was if P&G had some real new news about their brand to convey (which, being P&G and investing heavily in chemists to improve their products, they actually sometimes did). 

As this lesson sank in, it set off a mini-recession in TV advertising around 1986. So, did testing. Every year after that, we'd write into our budget that this would be the year that the world would rediscover how incredible this testing service was, but instead sales just eked slowly away. The company finally shut down the service late last year.

By 1987, however, we'd moved into even bigger Big Data, collecting all the supermarket sales for about 25 million people. 

That too changed the world. Yet, somehow, the world kept spinning on its axis. 

Let me offer another, more well-known example: baseball. I first became fascinated by baseball statistics in 1965 when I was six. Let's see if I can remember Ken Boyer's 1964 MVP line: .293, 24 homers, 111 RBIs. ... Nope, it was really .295 / 24 / 119. 

A vast amount has been written since then about how Big Data has revolutionized baseball. For example, today we know that Ken Boyer wasn't really the best player in the National League in 1964. No, a vast amount of statistical analysis has uncovered the electrifying news that the best player in 1964 was actually -- and you'll be stunned to learn this -- Willie Mays

Oh, wait, everybody back then knew Willie Mays was the best player in the National League. I was six and I knew. According to the latest Big Data analysis, Willie had been the best player in the league for 9 of the previous 11 years, just like most six-year-olds would have more or less guessed.

So, how much has baseball changed since 1965 due to the famous revolution in Big Data? Michael Brendan Dougherty says we are in a Golden Age of baseball, while Ross Douthat has caveats, citing my post on moneyball making baseball worse.

To check how much has changed, I turned on the radio to listen to the Dodgers like I did in 1965. Some things have changed, but others haven't, such as Vin Scully, who was a veteran announcer in 1965 with 16 years experience with the Dodgers, is still doing the play-by-play in 2013.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Assheuer demonstrates Assmann's anti-Semitism

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Biblical Blame Shift 
Is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann Fueling Anti-Semitism? 
By Richard Wolin 
Jan Assmann has been described as the world's leading Egyptologist—a characterization that few these days would dare to dispute. A 74-year-old emeritus professor at the University of Heidelberg and honorary professor at the University of Konstanz, Assmann has held guest professorships at Yale, the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. 
In addition to his specialized work as an Egyptologist, Assmann has staked a more general claim to distinction as a leading theorist of cultural history as a result of his pathbreaking work on "mnemo­history"—a concept he has developed over the past three decades with his wife, Aleida Assmann, and other researchers. 
In his recent volume, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Assmann recapitulates a number of his most important findings. Building on the work of previous theorists of cultural memory as an approach to historical understanding (such as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs), Assmann's notion of mnemohistory suggests that, from a cultural point of view, the way history is remembered is more important than—to quote the German historian Leopold von Ranke—"the way it really was." ...
As Assmann explains his methodology in Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: "Even if sometimes the debate over history, memory, and mnemotechnics may appear abstract and academic, it seems to me to nevertheless lie at the very heart of current discourse. Everything points to the fact that the concept of memory constitutes the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies that will shed light on all the interconnected fields of art and literature, politics and sociology, religion and law." 
Assmann points out that questions of historical remembrance are frequently the object of contentious cultural negotiations and disputes. Often, such struggles go far toward determining the cultural self-understanding of a given society or social group. To take one example that resurfaces often in Assmann's work: At various points in European cultural history, the memory of ancient Egypt, as the "other" of the West, has assumed a pivotal function. Thus in both the Old Testament and early Christianity, Egypt was hyperbolically constructed as a "negative totem." For the ancient Jews, it became the symbol of worldly corruption ("the fleshpots of Egypt") and soulless idolatry. Among Christians, it became one of the essential sites of paganism—a past from which believers needed to free themselves in order to accede to the promised land of salvation. 
Assmann's approach systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. ...

Everybody knows Moses was the good guy and Pharaoh the bad guy. I mean, who are you going to believe: the world's-leading Egyptologist (who, allow me to point out, has a funny name) or Cecil B. de Mille? I rest my case.
What Assmann essentially describes in his writings is an improbable and presumptuous theory of historico-theological "blowback." 
By introducing the "Mosaic distinction," Assmann argues, the Old Testament established the foundations of religious intolerance, as epitomized by the theological watchwords: "No other gods!" "No god but God!" ... In Of God and Gods, Assmann goes so far as to suggest that the "religion of the book" was proto-totalitarian. "The Torah with its commandments and prohibitions ... served as a script for leading one's life, running one's business, performing the rituals, ruling the community, in short regulating every aspect of individual and collective existence," he argues. "This was a new phenomenon in the history of writing as well as that of religion and civilization generally. Never before had writing served such comprehensive functions." 
At the risk of lapsing into what, by his own admission, might be viewed as anti-Jewish stereotypes and polemics, Assmann invokes several chilling, if familiar, instances of mass slaughter from the Old Testament as confirmation of his thesis concerning the inherent relationship between "exclusive monotheism" and predatory violence. ... 
Of course, there is no archaeological evidence to support the claim that any of these alleged divinely mandated bloodlettings actually occurred. Instead, it is commonly acknowledged that they were conceived by the anonymous biblical authors as cautionary tales to illustrate the risks of straying from the basic precepts of the Old Testament's austere ethical injunctions. ... 
A major failing of Assmann's approach is that it systematically neglects ancient Judaism's robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Numerous prescriptions in the Old Testament, known as the Noachide Laws, stress the importance of providing hospitality and succor to strangers. As we read in Leviticus (19:33-34): "When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as your self, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." ...  
A number of astute critics have also pointed out that, from a social-evolutionary perspective, biblical monotheism represents a significant ethical breakthrough, providing a normative basis for the idea of universal human brotherhood—a characterization diametrically opposed to the "exclusionary" mentality that Assmann considers predominant. Historically, the Exodus parable, which Assmann judges the ur-text of exclusionary monotheism, has served as a foundational narrative of political emancipation: humanity's deliverance from the injustices of bondage and oppression. 
Assmann censures monotheism's ostensible "world alienation"—its embrace of a transcendent, invisible God who dwells outside of, rather than within, the world. But that divine barrier, in fact, underwrites the ethical distinction between justice and injustice, what is and what should be, mere life versus life led according to principle. This perspective conveys the idea that the moral life is something that must be achieved by a demanding process of existential reorientation and conversion. It "alienates" men and women not from the world as such, but from the world conceived as a locus of oppression and injustice. That was the reality that the Israelites were forced to confront during their 400 years of bondage in ancient Egypt. ... 
Thus as the journalist Thomas Assheuer has pointed out in discussing Assmann's work: "The appeal to a just God was the answer to an experience of violence and suffering that can no longer be compensated by myth."

And, no I'm not making this up. I've never heard of Assheuer before, but Assmann is a big deal in German intellectual life (as is Mrs. Assmann).

Personally, when I was eight, I thought the Book of Joshua, with all that smiting of the wicked Canaanites who had the effrontery to be living on land the Hebrews coveted, was awesome.

L.A. school board president: Problem with L.A. schools is too much discipline

From the Los Angeles Times:
Defiance no reason to suspend students, board president says

By Teresa Watanabe 
April 11, 2013, 2:29 p.m. 
Administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District would no longer be allowed to suspend students for mouthing off or other acts of “willful defiance” under a groundbreaking school board resolution set to be proposed next week. 
Amid rising national concern that harsh discipline practices disproportionately harm minority students, the resolution by board President Monica Garcia would mark the first state ban on suspensions for willful defiance. 
Instead, schools would be required to use less punitive alternatives to deal with behavioral problems.  Students have been suspended for such acts as wearing hats, tapping their feet on the floor and refusing to read as directed under the willful defiance category, which accounts for nearly 42% of all suspensions in California and about one-third in L.A. Unified. 
Garcia was scheduled to appear at a rally Thursday with hundreds of students and community activists to kick off a citywide campaign to pass the resolution, the School Climate Bill of Rights. ...
Faer said two decades of research has shown that suspending students does not improve behavior but only places students at higher risk for dropping out or running afoul of the law. 

Yeah, but suspension gets them out of the classroom, allowing other students to learn. But who cares about the cooperative students who want to get an education? They're not official victims, so they don't count.
Studies have also shown that harsh discipline policies are used more frequently with African American youth and students with disabilities. In an analysis of federal data released this week, the UCLA Civil Rights Project reported that African Americans accounted for 26% of L.A. Unified’s suspensions in 2009-10 but make up less than 10% of the district’s students. 
However, the district has made progress in reducing suspensions overall. The number of instruction days lost to suspensions decreased to 26,286 in 2011-12, compared to 74,765 in 2006-07. 
Garcia’s resolution would direct all schools to develop two alternatives to suspension that research has shown to be effective: restorative justice practices, which include peer mediation, counseling and face-to-face meetings among involved parties and a program to improve schoolwide behavior through clear expectations and incentives. 

How about afterschool detentions doing humiliating litter pick-up in front of other students under the domineering command of an assistant football coach? It's not as if the human race has zero experience at how to intimidate young punks into line.
The resolution would also require the district to release data on suspensions every quarter and set up a complaint process for students and parents if their schools do not establish the two prescribed alternative programs.

LAUSD schools already have to release suspension data every year for the benefit of plaintiffs' attorneys trawling for disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. (For example, here is the suspension data by race for the expensive new East Valley high school in North Hollywood. This campus cost $130 million to build for 1,593 seats, but its enrollment is only 1,001, or $130,000 per student.) Apparently, though, the civil right lawyers don't find that fast enough for the purposes of getting their hands in LAUSD's deep pockets.

There's always a lot of talk about how We Need Better Teachers. One way to get better people to go into teaching is to not make their working days a living hell in the name of fighting racism.

If you want to see the mindset of the people who work to undermine the schools, watch Mike Leigh's insufferable movie "Happy-Go-Lucky" about a London schoolteacher. From my review in The American Conservative:
Most people in “Happy-Go-Lucky” have pleasant government jobs. Judging from this movie, the British welfare state exists mostly so people with soft college degrees can have some place to hang out together while making plans for which pub or disco to go to after work. ...
One vignette of this momentum-free movie unwittingly exemplifies the female cluelessness that has made Britain’s schools a dystopia of juvenile male thuggishness. When one of her students starts punching other children, does Poppy punish him? No, she signs the bully up for counseling, which consists of three adults—the headmistress, Poppy, and her future boyfriend—sitting around praising the little lout and asking him what’s the real reason he hits people. (Actual answer, but not one conceivable in Mike Leigh's mental universe: it’s fun.) 

The evolution of "The Simpsons"

The development of The Simpsons over its first few years is a fascinating case study in getting things right. Here's a 90 minute video of a discussion among five early Simpsons writers about how they did it: Conan O'Brien, Al Jean, Jeff Martin, Jay Kogen, and Mike Reiss.

(And here's Audacious Epigone's post crowd-ranking The Simpsons by season.)

Downes Syndrome

Highlighted in the New York Times right now is a quickie by their immigration editorialist Lawrence Downes, a favorite mouthpiece for the views of world's richest man Carlos Slim, who owns 8% of the NYT, on why there should be massive numbers of phone calls between America and Mexico (which Slim is happy to provide, at his monopolistic markup):
TAKING NOTE 
How Not to React to Boston 
By LAWRENCE DOWNES 
The marathon bombings are no reason to halt immigration reform.

No matter what happens, just keep repeating: The Grand Strategy of the Bush Administration -- Invade the World, Invite the World, In Hock to the World -- hasn't failed; it just hasn't been fully tried yet!

Teaching Company course on IQ

A commenter recommends as a good intro to the subject of I.Q. the Teaching Company's course "Intelligence and the Human Brain" (which has, intelligently enough, subsequently been given the more Jonah Lehreresque title "The Intelligent Brain").

The lecturer:
Dr. Richard J. Haier is Professor Emeritus in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been teaching and conducting research since 1984. He earned his B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University. Before his appointment at Irvine he was on the faculty of Brown University’s Alpert Medical School. 
Professor Haier’s main research interest is the structural and functional neuroanatomy of higher cognitive processes, especially intelligence. In 1988, he and his colleagues conducted the first modern functional brain imaging study of intelligence with positron emission tomography (PET) and proposed a hypothesis linking good performance on an intelligence test to efficient brain function. Professor Haier’s more recent research with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has identified specific brain areas where gray and white matter features correlate to the g factor of intelligence and other intelligence factors. In 2012, he received the Distinguished Contributor Award from the International Society for Intelligence Research. 
In addition to his many professional publications, Professor Haier’s research has been featured on NOVA scienceNOW, NPR, CNN, and CBS Sunday Morning, and in numerous newspaper and magazine articles.

My crazy conspiracy theory

I have this crazy conspiracy theory. Yeah, I know conspiracies never happen. Still, call me nuts, but I suspect that there is this massive conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Leaders of both political parties are conspiring together to write secret long term nation-changing legislation. To pass it they are conspiring with the President, the press, big business, the Catholic Church, radical leftists, the financial industry, an Antipodal media baron, big landowners, lobbyists, foreign interests, Facebook, and the world's richest man to cheat the average American out of his patrimony.

Okay, forget I ever said that.

April 15, 2013

GOP frontrunner for 2060 Presidential nomination named

From the NYT:
Mr. Bush, 66, who has remained largely removed from the spotlight in the four years since leaving the White House, returned to television screens on Monday in a series of hospital snapshots with his new granddaughter, Mila, who was born to Jenna and Henry Hager in New York on Saturday night. 

Boston marathon: Who did it?

Open for comments.

Mother Jones: What America needs to get high test scores is the blond teaching the blond

Kevin Drum writes in Mother Jones a bit of boilerplate Conventional Wisdom, subversively self-parodied, however, by the caption for the photo intended to demonstrate what effective early childhood education would look like.
Day Care, the Final Frontier 
—By Kevin Drum| Mon Apr. 15, 2013 12:13 PM PDT

In 2011, Jon Cohn wrote a story called "The Two Year Window," about new research demonstrating the importance of the first two years of a child's life. Roughly speaking, most child care that's average or better is probably OK. But down in the bottom third, conditions are often bad enough to cause permanent cognitive damage, sometimes at a biological level. One third is a lot of kids. 
Appropriately, two years later Cohn is back with a follow-up, "The Hell of American Day Care." Children who get proper attention and interaction, he says, "tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it":

The caption in Mother Jones reads, "Unfortunately, this is the exception in America, not the rule." Evidently, the blonde teaching the blonde is the exception, unfortunately, not the rule.

By the way, all this talk about how there's a "two year window" right after birth to equalize IQs, which makes "Day Care, the Final Frontier," is so 2005. By 2015, I predict, the new conventional wisdom will become that the Final Frontier is Prenatal Care, providing a window exactly eight months and twenty-nine days long.

Kaus on Rubio's BS

The downside of Mickey Kaus as a blogger at the Daily Caller is that he doesn't Feed the Beast anywhere near as often as other bloggers, and unlike more successful bloggers, posts only on a fairly small number of subjects where he knows what he's talking about.

The upside of Mickey as a blogger is, well, stuff like this:
Marco Rubio was defensive and jargon-addled on ABCs This Week. He was slick and effective on NBC and  CNN and somewhere in between on FOX,  But he was selling BS on all four networks. Here are three examples: 
1. Rubio repeatedly said it would be “cheaper, faster and easier” for illegal immigrants to go back home, wait 10 years, and apply for a green card (under current law) than to go through the longer “alternative” green card path created by his amnesty bill. That’s absurd. If Rubio’s bill passes, how many illegal immigrants are going to go home and wait 10 years versus accepting the bill’s more-or-less immediate legalization and then waiting to get their green cards?  The answer is a number approaching zero. Why? Because under Rubio’s bill they will get to do the waiting while living and working legally in the United States. That’s certainly easier than “self-deporting” for ten years under current law. 
2. Similarly, Rubio argues that his bill won’t privilege illegals over those waiting in line abroad to get green cards, because it will take longer for illegals to get the green cards through his amnesty. But, again, the illegals–having been more or less instantly legalized–will get to do their waiting while having already achieved what the people waiting in line abroad can only dream of achieving: a legal life in the United States. Illegals FTW!

3. A controversy erupted late last week over the pro-amnesty “Gang of 8″s ambition to achieve a 90% apprehension rate of illegal border-crossers. Rubio’s camp–including his chief of staff, Cesar Conda–claimed this was a “trigger” that, if not met, would block the newly legalized illegals from proceeding down the road to green cards and citizenship. Democrats claimed it was just a goal that, if not met, wouldn’t block anyone. On Fox, Rubio basically admits the Democrats are right. 
WALLACE: You say it’s a trigger, the number, 90 percent apprehension rate has to be certified by the Department of Homeland Security before the 11 million illegals, a decade from now, can begin to apply for green cards. 
But the Democrats on your “Gang of 8″, including Dick Durbin, who will be on in the next segment, saying, no, it’s not a trigger. It’s just a goal that they have to be working towards. 
Now, is it a trigger that has to be met or is it a goal? 
RUBIO: Yes. Let me tell you why it’s a trigger because, basically, homeland security will have five years to meet that goal. If after five years, Homeland Security has not met that number, it will trigger the Border Commission who will then take over this issue for them. So, they’ll have five years to get it done. They have to create these two plans — a fence plan, there has to be a fence component to this, and a border security plan. 
And if at the five-year mark, they have not achieved that 90 percent or 100 percent, then they lose the issue to the Border Commission who has money set aside so they can finish the job and they can get to that number. 
In other words, all that’s triggered is a commission, not any holdup in the march to green cards (which means there will be little incentive to actually achieve the 90% goal). 
Bonus BS: Rubio press aide Alex Conant tweets that 
Without temporary worker program to fill US demand for low-skill labor, people will find way to come illegally despite new fence 
Really? Hasn’t Rubio been busy telling us that his plan would secure the border? Now his flack tells us people “will find a way to come illegally” despite it? Doesn’t this mean that those who can’t get into the guest worker program (maybe because it’s full, or because they don’t qualify) will be able to “find a way” in as well–so the elaborately negotiated limits on the number of guestworkers will be routinely violated and, in practice, meaningless? Doesn’t it also mean that those who are drawn by the prospect of the next amnesty (because, you know, ”we can’t deport them all!” and “Latino voters”) will “find a way” in too? 
How secure is this new Rubio border going to be? Seems like it’s secure when he wants it to be and insecure when he doesn’t. Maybe we should find out before we turn on the amnesty magnet! Just a thought.

"Congressional Influence as a Determinant of Subprime Lending "

Via Marginal Revolution, a study on New Century Financial Corporation, an Orange County subprime lender, whose collapse in early 2007 was the the first crack in the dam.
Congressional Influence as a Determinant of Subprime Lending 
Stuart A. Gabriel, Matthew E. Kahn, Ryan K. Vaughn 
NBER Working Paper No. 18965 
Issued in April 2013 
We apply unique loan level data from New Century Financial Corporation, a major subprime lender, to assess whether attributes of Congressional Representatives were associated with access to and pricing of subprime mortgage credit. Research findings indicate higher likelihoods of subprime loan origination and lower mortgage pricing among borrowers represented by the Republican and Democratic leadership of Congress. Black borrowers also benefitted from significantly larger loan amounts in those same districts. Also, borrowers received mortgage interest rate discounts in districts where New Century donated to the Congressional Representative. Findings provide new insights into the political geography of the subprime crisis and suggest gains to trade between New Century Financial Corporation and targeted Congressional Representatives in the extension, pricing and sizing of subprime mortgage credit.

April 14, 2013

Marco Rubio: "Two ... Thousand Dollars!"

Rubio Offers Full-Throated Support for Immigration Bill 
By ASHLEY PARKER and BRIAN KNOWLTON 
Senator Marco Rubio offered an extraordinary endorsement of legislation to overhaul the nation’s badly strained immigration system on Sunday when, after holding back for weeks, he appeared on no fewer than seven television talk shows to explain and defend a plan that he said would be “a net positive for the country, now and in the future.” 
As Mr. Rubio, a Florida Republican who is a member of a bipartisan group of eight senators preparing to unveil their immigration legislation on Tuesday, pressed his case again and again on the airwaves, new details of the bill emerged. Prominent among them was a proposed fee of roughly $2,000 that illegal immigrants would have to pay before they could earn legal status. 
As part of that plan, which was still being completed on Sunday, these immigrants would have to pay $500 when they apply for a temporary work permit, and would have the next 10 years to pay the remaining $1,500 or so, a person familiar with the negotiations said. ...
A Senate aide described the $2,000 figure as “significant but not impossible, punitive but not unreasonable.” Democrats and immigration advocates had originally pushed for a lower amount. 
... In each appearance he spoke with a sense of urgency, arguing that the plan did not constitute amnesty for illegal immigrants. ...
Even Karl Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush who is known as a hard-nosed partisan strategist, welcomed the cooperation on immigration.

Even Karl Rove!

L.A. Times: "Immigration bill would spark surge of legal arrivals"

From the L.A. Times:
Immigration bill would spark surge of legal arrivals 
The immigration debate often focuses on people in the U.S. illegally, but a reform bill's biggest initial effect could be a sharp rise in legal immigration.

By Brian Bennett and Lisa Mascaro, Washington Bureau  
April 13, 2013, 8:13 p.m. 
WASHINGTON — While much of the debate over immigration has focused on the fate of the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. without legal authorization, one of the biggest immediate impacts of the reform bill being prepared in the Senate would be a sudden, large surge in legal migration. 
The U.S. admits about 1 million legal immigrants per year, more than any other country. That number could jump by more than 50% over the next decade under the terms of the immigration reform bill that a bipartisan group of senators expects to unveil as early as Tuesday. The impact would be felt nationwide, but areas that already have large immigrant communities would probably see much of the increase. 
The immigration package includes at least four major provisions that would increase the number of legal immigrants, according to people familiar with it. Some of the parts could generate as much controversy as the provisions dealing with those who enter the country illegally or overstay their visas, according to those with long experience of the politics of immigration. 
Supporters say that higher levels of legal immigration would meet the U.S. need for certain kinds of workers. Increased legal migration also would reduce most of the incentive for illegal border crossings, backers of the plan say, and would allow border agents to focus on smugglers and people with violent criminal records. 
Opponents such as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who has long opposed measures to increase immigration levels, say new workers would depress wages and crowd out Americans looking for work during a time of persistently high unemployment. 
"The masters of the universe in glass towers and suites, they may not be impacted by this, but millions of struggling American families will," Sessions said in an interview Friday. "We do need to be sure we aren't exacerbating unemployment and wage erosion in America."

Good first sentence, Jeff. Work on the second one.
The surge would come in several ways: The bill aims to eliminate the current backlog of roughly 4 million people waiting to be reunited with family members in the U.S. The 11 million now in the country without legal authorization would be eligible for citizenship only after that backlog was resolved. Reunification efforts would require boosting the number of visas issued each year.

You know, if they really want to reunite, they can always go home.
To keep the additional inflow under control, the bill would stop allowing adult siblings of immigrants to qualify, but children and parents would continue to be eligible. 
In addition to family unification, which allows people into the country permanently, the bill also aims to increase temporary visas for both high-wage and low-wage workers. The number of visas for high-tech workers could nearly double to more than 120,000 per year.

Because Mark Zuckerberg isn't rich enough.
At the other end of the wage scale, a new visa system would allow businesses to bring in workers for jobs including janitors, housekeepers and meatpackers.

Because nothing says well-paid like janitor, housekeeper, or meatpacker. Because nothing says high test scores like the children of janitors, housekeepers, and meatpackers.
The numbers would start small, but as the unemployment rate declined, it could reach 200,000 a year by the end of the decade. And growers could bring a total of about 330,000 new farmworkers into the country during the decade. At least some of those low-wage temporary workers eventually would be allowed to seek permanent residency.
The bill's authors expect that legal immigration eventually would decline again, but only 10 years after the bill passed, once the backlog of residency applications shrank.

Just keep repeating to yourself: "But it's good for The Economy. Who am I to stand in the way of The Economy? The Economy doesn't exist for me, I exist for The Economy."

How is the hot new field of "Data Science" different from dull old marketing research?

From the NYT:
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,” and by most accounts this hot new field promises to revolutionize industries from business to government, health care to academia. 
The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions. 
In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.

I started in the marketing research field in 1982, working on the "purchasing habits of grocery shoppers" using the new flood of data from checkout scanners. By 1987, we had all purchases from about a tenth of the supermarkets in the country. My wife worked on "tissue samples of cancer patients" in 1987. 

I wouldn't discourage people from getting interested in these kind of fields, but “the sexiest job in the 21st century?"

People make a lot of money by (roughly in order) owning things, selling things, and motivating and managing (and firing) people. Analyzing stuff is fine work to get paid to do if you have an analytical personality, but, in the long run, don't expect to get paid like the sales guys. 

The culture of golf

Golf is one of the few spectator sports that has an honor system, which makes it increasingly out of date. In contrast, baseball always had a culture in which getting away with cheating was admired. There were occasional players famous for their sense of fair play -- if the lone umpire during the dead ball era had his vision blocked, he would sometimes ask Ivy League gentleman Christie Mathewson to call the play for him -- but that was famously exceptional. Baseball is a team game, where loyalty to teammates is considered more important one's conscience. Golf, however, is different.

The honor system in golf is not for showing off Presbyterian rectitude for its own sake, but to facilitate gambling, which has always been a huge part of the game. Golfers wander all over a quarter square mile or more of landscape, providing endless opportunities for cheating. The chief enforcement mechanism in a culture of betting is a concern for one's reputation as a sportsman. The statements made by other golfers about Tiger Woods this week have been in the ancient tradition of gentlemen policing their game, which is why it has struck many observers as atavistic.

Here is one of the less famous incidents of golfers calling penalties on themselves, but I saw it live on TV and it was still pretty amazing: Arnold Palmer calling an extra stroke on himself on the 69th hole of the 1984 U.S. Senior Open while in second place:
Miller Barber, who won 11 PGA Tour events before enjoying tremendous success on the Senior Tour, had begun the final round one shot behind the iconic Palmer, but Barber had gone ahead with a series of 10 straight pars and as they stood on the 15th green, Barber was now ahead by two shots.  
Palmer had air-mailed a 7-iron over the green at the par-3, chipped to 10 feet, and missed his par-saving putt, leaving it just on the edge of the cup. He walked up and nonchalantly stabbed at it, but he stubbed his putter and never touched the ball. After sweeping it in on the second try he immediately informed Barber that his score was a double-bogey 5.  
"I couldn't believe it,” said Barber, who was so thrown by the incident that he went on to three-putt for a bogey, though his lead still increased to three shots. “In my wildest imagination I wouldn't have known he had done it if he hadn't spoken up.’’ 

I saw this happen live on TV. When they came back after the commercial, the announcers were stunned that Palmer had added a stroke to his score. They showed the replay about 8 times of Arnie raking in the 1 inch putt, but there was nothing visual to show that the great man had made two motions. But he knew, so he told his rival to add an extra stroke on his scorecard.

Like Tiger today, Arnie was not getting any younger in 1984 and was running out of competitive time. Fortunately, he came back to win one more senior major the next year.