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April 17, 2005

THE WEEK IN REVIEW, III

Odds and sods from the last week:

The US Bureau of Labour Statistics reports some statistics about minimum wage earners, none of which is surprising to minimum wage detractors (friendly nod for the link and some stats.: The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid):

• Minimum wage workers tend to be young. About half of all hourly-paid workers earning $5.15 or less were under age 25, and about one-fourth were age 16-19. Among teenagers, about 9 percent earned $5.15 or less. About 2 percent of workers age 25 and over earned the minimum wage or less. Among those age 65 and over, the proportion was 4 percent.
• Part-time workers (persons who usually work less than 35 hours per week) were much more likely than their full-time counterparts to be paid $5.15 or less (about 7 percent versus 1 percent).
• 62 percent of workers on $5.15 or less work only part-time.
• 29 percent have less than a high school diploma.
• Among hourly-paid workers age 16 and over, about 2 percent of those who had a high school diploma but had not gone on to college earned the minimum or less, compared with about 1 percent for those who had obtained a college degree.

As much as I hate to cover anything to do with the upcoming election (given my firm conviction that the leaderships of all the parties need a firm punch in the face), the Lib Dems offer things shiny, Blair has evidently graduated from the same Free Lunch School of Economics that Michael Howard attended (meanwhile, the IMF says that we must either cut spending or raise taxes. Damn you, fiscal reality, damn you!), and the Conservatives are still being predictably stupid. In marginally more interesting news, Rover staff went on the march in London, presumably to demand some government bail-out or other. Pfft. Can it really suprising that MG-Rover went down the corporate pan when they were so inept that they somehow lost eleven thousand cars? This is either moronity on the massive scale, or proof that God exists (and that He hates MG-Rover). Fortunately, sanity has prevailed in this case; on Friday last-ditch efforts to save the firm collapsed (though I do feel sorry for those who will lose their jobs, and those who bought a Rover recently).

Is this the Sokal Hoax of the IT-weenie world? Via Dave Barry:

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.

Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.

The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.

To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.

For the easily amused (which includes me), here's SCIgen, the random compsci paper generator in question. Good fun.

Also, robotic suits (hat! tip!), Arthur Chrenkoff's round-up of good news from Iraq, the "anti-war" left's Jihadi connections, some peaceful religions, and an "oops, we just unleashed a deadly flu virus by accident" moment.

A teacher in jail for firing an airgun (an airgun, for goodness' sake) to scare off vandalistic yobs goes on hunger strike in prison. It's obvious to anyone with an iota of common sense that she shouldn't be there in the first place; if anything we should be rewarding people for that kind of thing, since the police aren't doing their job of maintaining order on the streets. Sticking with inane British political correctness, It seems that joking about the Pope's death is now effectively illegal; a man who posted a list of them on a spoof village website (which is brilliant) was threatened with an anti-social behaviour order. Whew, no creeping fascism there (link via the indispensable PC Watch).

Opinion and commentary: Jonah Goldberg on judges (in typically entertaining form), Dan Dordreaux on taking "harm" out of "harmony with nature", Michael Fumento on the joys of biotech food, Victor Davis Hanson on our not so wise experts, Rich Lowry in defense of being repressed, and an interview with Milton Friedman.

Environmental campaigners want Top Gear to be taken off the air (hat tip: Brian Micklethwait.):

Now the BBC Two programme has come under fire from the Transport 2000 pressure group, which has called for it to be taken off the air and replaced with a show that promotes "sensible driving in sensible vehicles".

AAARRRGH.

Sensible driving in sensible cars. Hmmm. While I cannot advocating killing people, I cannot help but think that the world would be a much better place if such people were quietly put to sleep.

Finally, breaking (in rather un-conservative fashion) my three-week-old tradition of a final quote from three weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens offers some wisdom on Iraq (via Lee):

Think back a couple of years ago to all the naysaying about bringing Jeffersonian democracy to Iraq. Well, here in America we have Jeffersonian democracy, yet we've never elected a black or a Jew as president. But in Iraq they have gone, in the space of two years, from a fascist dictatorship to holding fair, free elections. And the man elected is a member of an oppressed minority. That's something that we've never done here in America, and we've been around for over 200 years.

Indeed.

For some reason I've been unusually uninspired to write this last week. I'll be better soon.

Posted by Lewis at April 17, 2005 03:01 AM