Not at all Top Gear-ish.
H/T to Jon for the link.
February 7, 2011
Licensing as a tool for restricting competition
Stephanie Simon addresses the pro and con positions on licensing for various jobs:
[E]conomists — and workers shut out of fields by educational requirements or difficult exams — say licensing mostly serves as a form of protectionism, allowing veterans of the trade to box out competitors who might undercut them on price or offer new services.
“Occupations prefer to be licensed because they can restrict competition and obtain higher wages,” said Morris Kleiner, a labor professor at the University of Minnesota. “If you go to any statehouse, you’ll see a line of occupations out the door wanting to be licensed.”
[. . .]
At a time of widespread anxiety about the growth of government, the licensing push is meeting pockets of resistance, including a move by some legislators to require a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis before any new licensing laws are approved. Critics say such regulation spawns huge bureaucracies including rosters of inspectors. They also say licensing requirements — which often include pricey educations — can prohibit low-income workers from breaking in to entry-level trades.
Texas, for instance, requires hair-salon “shampoo specialists” to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the “theory and practice” of shampooing, before they can sit for a licensing exam. That consists of a written test and a 45-minute demonstration of skills such as draping the client with a clean cape and evenly distributing conditioner. Glass installers, or glaziers, in Connecticut — the only state that requires such workers to be licensed — take two exams, at $52 apiece, pay $300 in initial fees and $150 annually thereafter.
California requires barbers to study full-time for nearly a year, a curriculum that costs $12,000 at Arthur Borner’s Barber College in Los Angeles. Mr. Borner says his graduates earn more than enough to recoup their tuition, though he questions the need for such a lengthy program. “Barbering is not rocket science,” he said. “I don’t think it takes 1,500 hours to learn. But that’s what the state says.”
In harder economic climates, expect to see a push towards trying to get some form of certification or licensing imposed in new fields. For example, I’ve seen several attempts to introduce mandatory certification for technical writers, usually with the intent of limiting access to the (reduced) pool of writing jobs in the field. Usually the biggest fans of certification are those who think they’re in a good position to dictate the requirements for certification (and often run courses/seminars which, I assume, would automatically appear in the final list of requirements).
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Blameshifting, subcontinental style
Strategy Page talks about the common belief in Pakistan that suicide attacks are not really the fault of other Muslims:
While the Islamic terrorist attacks in Pakistan have created a lot of hatred against Islamic militants, many Pakistani government officials, and media executives, blame non-Moslem foreigners for all the Islamic violence. To Westerners, this is bizarre, but to more than half the population of Pakistan, blaming India and Israel (and the West in general), for Islamic suicide bombers killing Pakistanis, has some traction. The basic theme is that India, with the assistance of those clever and diabolical Israelis, are deceiving Moslems to become suicide bombers. In some cases, where there are no bodies left behind, the Indians or Israelis can be blamed for doing the deed themselves. This sort of thing is regularly reported in Pakistan.
Since India and Pakistan (literally, “the land of the pure.”) were created out of British India in 1947, Pakistan has seen India as preparing to invade and conquer them. There followed four wars with India, all of which [were] started by Pakistan. While many Pakistanis have figured out that India has never had any interest in taking over Pakistan, especially as Pakistan slid into a malaise of corruption and economic decline. But those who ran the Pakistani government (a very small group, be they politicians or generals) found it convenient to blame someone else, and India was always a convenient scapegoat. Israel was added when because Israel has long been considered the archenemy of Moslems, and especially since Israel became a close ally of India. The West is blamed because their economic success must have, somehow, come at the expense of the morally superior Islamic world.
On the national level, as at the personal level, having a shadowy “nemesis” to blame for your misfortune allows you to avoid looking for the actual root causes of your situation.
Update: A writer at The Economist reports on revisiting Pakistan after five years away:
Much of the news we read from Pakistan is a grisly catalogue of suicide-bombs, sectarian slaughter, political assassination, grinding insurgency and collateral damage from the war in Afghanistan.
So, on a first visit to Islamabad and Lahore in nearly five years, my initial response was to think how the relentless tide of such reporting obscures another truth about the country: how pleasant it can be; how helpful and hospitable the people; how many well-informed, articulate and enlightened cosmopolitans there are to talk to. In the past I have always argued that Pakistan has a tolerant, flexible core that is far more resilient than it is often given credit for. Surely, that remains true.
A second response, however, was to acknowledge how much worse things had got in those five years. Three sorts of decline stand out—the linked problems of worsening security and the spread of Islamist extremism, and the economy.
[. . .]
One of the commonplaces of analysis in Pakistan is that the roots of extremism lie not just in the war in Afghanistan and the “Islamisation” of public life introduced by General Zia ul-Haq a generation ago, but in economic hardship and lack of opportunity. The economy is lurching along on IMF-provided crutches, just a few months from the next crisis. Most people also agree about some of the basic reforms needed—in particular a broadening of the tax base. But the political parties want to make sure that it is the other parties whose voters’ pockets will suffer from the broadening. So reform is deadlocked.
Pakistan is indeed still not as bad as you might think from the newspaper headlines. And when Mr Hoodbhoy, for example, talks of an impending bloodbath it is still possible to think he exaggerates. But Pakistan is bloody enough already, and it is for now a depressing and frightening place. It is not just that the decline seems unimpeded by the end of Pervez Musharraf’s inept, corrupt military dictatorship and the advent of Asif Ali Zardari’s inept, corrupt and army-reliant civilian administration. It is that the arguments of those who claim the trend is remorseless and heading for disaster seem more persuasive than those I have deployed over the years to refute them.
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X-47B takes flight, Navy pilots feeling threatened
Lewis Page looks forward to the day US Navy aircraft carriers don’t have pilots cluttering up the works:
The disappearance of swaggering pilots from the flight decks of US naval aircraft carriers came a step closer on Friday with the first flight of the X-47B robot tailhook stealth jet.
The X-47B is intended to demonstrate that unmanned aircraft can take off from aircraft carrier catapults and land back on deck again using tailhook and arrester wires. Such arrested landings have long been regarded as one of the most difficult and dangerous feats for human pilots to master, and US naval aviators tend to measure their manhood (or occasionally these days, womanhood) by the number of “traps” in their logbook.
Not content with automating the Top Guns out of their main trick, the X-47B is also intended to demonstrate autonomous air-to-air refuelling. This is another vital trick which human pilots find quite difficult (the act of flying the probe of the to-be-fuelled aircraft into the basket trailing at the end of the tanker plane’s hose is traditionally described as being of similar difficulty to “taking a running fuck at a rolling doughnut”).
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Postmodern Monday
A little postmodernism to lighten your Monday morning burdens:
Surrealism in the works of Rushdie
John N. Humphrey
Department of Sociolinguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1. Sontagist camp and capitalist theory
The main theme of the works of Rushdie is a self-justifying totality. The subject is interpolated into a capitalist theory that includes narrativity as a paradox.
It could be said that if Lyotardist narrative holds, we have to choose between Sontagist camp and the subcultural paradigm of narrative. Sontag suggests the use of surrealism to deconstruct class divisions.
Therefore, the subject is contextualised into a Sontagist camp that includes reality as a reality. Several sublimations concerning the role of the participant as observer may be discovered.
Thus, Porter[1] suggests that the works of Rushdie are postmodern. If constructive objectivism holds, we have to choose between capitalist theory and postdialectic narrative.
2. Rushdie and Sontagist camp
“Sexuality is part of the meaninglessness of language,” says Lacan. However, Sartre promotes the use of surrealism to analyse and read sexual identity. The subject is interpolated into a cultural rationalism that includes narrativity as a totality.
In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the distinction between without and within. It could be said that Sontag uses the term ‘surrealism’ to denote a mythopoetical whole. Baudrillard suggests the use of neodeconstructivist desemioticism to challenge elitist perceptions of truth.
However, the subject is contextualised into a capitalist theory that includes art as a reality. A number of constructions concerning surrealism exist.
But the characteristic theme of Geoffrey’s[2] essay on materialist postcultural theory is the absurdity, and hence the paradigm, of capitalist class. The subject is interpolated into a capitalist theory that includes sexuality as a whole.
Thus, the example of surrealism prevalent in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is also evident in Midnight’s Children, although in a more self-referential sense. Sontag promotes the use of Debordist image to analyse sexual identity.
However, the main theme of the works of Rushdie is not narrative, but subnarrative. Derrida uses the term ‘capitalist theory’ to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent collapse, of neotextual art.
3. Consensuses of economy
If one examines the conceptualist paradigm of narrative, one is faced with a choice: either reject capitalist theory or conclude that consciousness is responsible for capitalism. Therefore, the characteristic theme of Parry’s[3] model of Lacanist obscurity is a posttextual paradox. Marx suggests the use of capitalist theory to deconstruct archaic perceptions of society.
However, Lacan uses the term ‘surrealism’ to denote not discourse, but subdiscourse. The primary theme of the works of Rushdie is the genre of capitalist class.
But Sartre uses the term ‘capitalist theory’ to denote a self-justifying totality. The subject is contextualised into a surrealism that includes truth as a reality.
4. Rushdie and Sontagist camp
The main theme of de Selby’s[4] analysis of surrealism is the role of the writer as participant. Thus, an abundance of theories concerning the common ground between sexual identity and class may be found. Derrida uses the term ‘Batailleist `powerful communication” to denote the role of the observer as participant.
In the works of Rushdie, a predominant concept is the concept of capitalist language. But the premise of surrealism implies that society, surprisingly, has significance, but only if truth is equal to reality; otherwise, Marx’s model of presemioticist narrative is one of “the textual paradigm of context”, and therefore part of the meaninglessness of narrativity. The characteristic theme of the works of Rushdie is the bridge between culture and sexual identity.
Thus, several desituationisms concerning Sontagist camp exist. Lyotard’s essay on capitalist theory states that reality is a product of the masses.
Therefore, Geoffrey[5] holds that we have to choose between surrealism and semantic theory. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie reiterates capitalist theory; in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, although, he analyses Sontagist camp.
In a sense, Marx promotes the use of the neodialectic paradigm of narrative to modify and challenge language. Lacan uses the term ‘surrealism’ to denote the role of the artist as poet.
1. Porter, Z. ed. (1998) The Failure of Discourse: Surrealism in the works of Fellini. And/Or Press
2. Geoffrey, J. W. I. (1986) Sontagist camp and surrealism. Loompanics
3. Parry, J. K. ed. (1994) Reassessing Modernism: Surrealism in the works of Mapplethorpe. Cambridge University Press
4. de Selby, A. (1989) Nihilism, surrealism and neotextual libertarianism. University of California Press
5. Geoffrey, O. R. ed. (1974) Poststructural Narratives: Surrealism and Sontagist camp. Yale University Press
H/T to Andrew C. Bulhak and Josh Larios for the link.
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QotD: Genomics
There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.
Charles Stross, “Reasons to be cheerful”, Charlie’s Diary, 2010-12-31
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