We have long known that the robots were coming, but now that they are here, the mismatch between our modern education system and the technology-fueled workplace is glaringly apparent. As robots expertly perform routine tasks and increasingly assume broader workforce responsibilities, we must ask ourselves an important question: What is our key human differentiator?
Tag: natural
Including the Renegade
Are efforts to promote inclusion therefore self-defeating? Not if you’re careful, because actions speak louder than words. As I’ve argued before, the best way to make people feel included is just to be friendly and welcoming. Sermons divide us. Common decency brings us together.
Defending Scoundrels
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ~ H. L. Mencken
What’s Historic?
One of the main goals of history is to create enough psychological distance (and hindsight!) to sift the fundamental from the ephemeral. But doing this is easier said than done.
Immigration and Redistribution: The Research to Trust
Evaluating the quality of research is laborious. Unless you re-do the whole paper yourself, how do you know the authors were not only truthful, but careful? Faced with this quandary, one of my favorite heuristics is to ask: Did the authors want to find this result? If the answer is No, I put a lot more credence into the results. In research as in the law, statements contrary to interest count more.
“No-Knock Raid” is Just Another Term for “Violent Home Invasion”
On January 28, home invaders murdered 58-year-old Rhogena Nicholas and 59-year-old Dennis Tuttle of Houston, Texas. Nicholas and Tuttle wounded five of the (numerous) armed burglars before being slain. The Houston PD brought guns, battering rams, and overwhelming force to what they didn’t even expect to be a knife fight. It was supposed to just be a quick episode of “law enforcement theater,” a show of force to show the mere mundanes who’s in charge.
Groundhog Day
I don’t get it. Why this human propensity to wig out over an excruciating obsession with air currents? The physics behind weather has long been known. The Earth has a tilt and rotation, an orbit about a living sun. It’s cut and dried. The poor weatherman on TV has to come up with something to keep us buying pork’n’beans.
Poverty and Success
Poverty is not the fault of billionaires or of “greedy capitalists” or of some systemic injustice that keeps “po’ folks” down. Poverty is the natural and predictable result of ongoing poor choices, and until people realize this and start taking responsibility for their own culpability in their financial situations, we will continue to hear the growing chorus of complainers demanding political intervention to redistribute money from those who earned it to those who did not.
Sorry, Innocent Bystanders
The world is full of problems, and most people want government to solve these problems. When government solves problems, however, they usually create some new ones. If you’re lucky, the victims of the new problems are the very bad guys who created the original problems. Serves them right! Yet more often, the victims of the new problems are innocent bystanders. They’ve done nothing wrong; they’re just caught in the crossfire.
The Best Things I’ve Learned About Raising Children
I don’t consider myself a parenting expert, but I have helped raise six kids (along with their mothers), and being a father has been one of the most rewarding things in my life. And while I’m not a perfect father, I think I’m pretty good at it. Mostly because I absolutely love it.