"fetishization of IQ"

All things being equal, it sure is. If you were to randomly pick two American 8 year olds, one born into a "wealthy" family, and the other born to a single mother in the ghetto, and you had to bet which would be "wealthy" at age 35 - who would you pick?

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but I have seen a fair number of businesses f*ck themselves up because they thought there'd be an advantage to picking someone they were personally acquainted with over a random applicant, and it turned out their pal couldn't actually do what they were tasked with.

"Don't hire your friends" is usually pretty solid advice.

u

id. I did too, but lit out to England before it could pay off in Australia.

After I graduated I drove to California with my wife and then started looki ng for a job. I never worked anywhere where there were any other Harvard g raduates, at least none that I knew of.

I think the biggest indicator of whether you will become wealthy in how yo u spent your allowance when you were in grade school. Did you spend your a llowance in the week you got it, or did you save your allowance so you had money if anything came along that you really wanted?

Dan

Or likely even your friend's friends.

I think " Don't hire someone because they are your friend " is better advice. Some times friends are the most qualified. Some times they are not.

Dan

Sorry, my parents were a little too preoccupied beating the SHIT out of each other to worry about my personal finances very much.

It's easy for me to do. I didn't have many friends growing up, I spent a lot of my junior high school experience asking my father to come pick me up from school and drive me home to use the bathroom, because I was worried whether Jabez Miller would be waiting to stab me to death in the lavatory. He tried once on the schoolbus.

One time a local drug dealer named Chris broke two of a sophomore's ribs right on the table in the cafeteria during lunch. He was 19 years old and still in his sophomore year of high school - not sure how he managed to work that. I confronted him about it, and he wasn't pleased. Later that day the school principle mentioned to me that it would be best if my father came and picked me up from school, because Chris and several of his friends were waiting for me in the parking lot outside. Chris was armed with a 9mm handgun and ready to kill.

I'm not sure if any of these experiences resonate with you.

you

did. I did too, but lit out to England before it could pay off in Australi a.

king for a job. I never worked anywhere where there were any other Harvard graduates, at least none that I knew of.

Wise choice. The elite universities in the US seems to exist to suck in the children of the wealthy, who can be milked for lots of money - by no means all of it in fees - and take in enough scholarship kids to keep up academi c standards. The children of the wealthy get the best jobs, and getting wor k with them means working twice as hard to cover the work they should be do ing.

The jobs one should be looking for are in new industries, with room for exp ansion, where the new wealth is created, some of which may stick to your fi ngers.

you spent your allowance when you were in grade school. Did you spend your allowance in the week you got it, or did you save your allowance so you h ad money if anything came along that you really wanted?

I didn't get an allowance when I was in grad school - I had a government re search grant, like everybody else. At that stage everybody knew how to be c areful with money, so it wasn't any kind of useful indicator of future succ ess.

Nobody I went through graduate school with made enough money to qualify as wealthy - in the sense that I have never seen their names in the newspapers . I'm well-off, but not so well-off that anybody (except the tax office) is going to bother to notice.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

That's bigoted and absurd. I was born into poverty, like my father before me, like John, and Jim, and probably many others here. I left Europe when I was seventeen with the money I'd saved from my part-time job for plane fare, and one month's rent. My Dad bought my plane ticket instead, so I spent the money on a motorcycle in the U.S., and I've paid my way ever since.

I simply do *not* accept the assumption that black Americans or women are inferior or permanently disadvantaged at birth.

There is plenty of evidence piled up by scholars--Walter E. Williams for one--that the Great Society, welfare, and handouts have actively destroyed the most important thing for any child's success, families, especially devastating black families.

"Let's examine a few of the most crippling problems in the black community. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family. Actually, 'breakdown' is the wrong word; the black family doesn't form in the first place. As late as 1950, female-headed households were only 18 percent of the black population. Today it's close to 70 percent. In the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households. In 1938, 11 percent of black children were born to single mothers; today it is close to 75 percent."

The children born to an unmarried mother are almost condemned to poverty by their mother's *choice*. It's simple math--one earner with external responsibilities like that can never make as much as one so encumbered, plus another who is not.

These programs destroy people's pride, strip their ambition, and incentive to work. They're dehumanizing, demoralizing, dispiriting; enough to grind anyone into the dirt.

And yet we have idiot masterminds who've done nothing, who've built nothing, accountable for nothing--who cannot even count, or balance their own checkbooks--who tell us the reason they keep failing is that we just didn't do enough.

Even now, after we've spent $22 trillion on the Great Society--a sum larger than the national debt, a sum that threatens the very society--we're told it's not nearly enough.

It's never enough. It never will be enough. Why? Because it doesn't work. After fifty years of failure, it couldn't be more clear. It's

*causing* the problems. We're *creating* dependence & dysfunction, not fixing it. We're ruining people's thrift, their virtue, their independence. And without those, the society will fall.

Best, James Arthur

ote:

sn't true in more egalitarian countries (with Scandinavia having the most e galitarian cuountries.

r was a doctor. There is a distinction between poverty and not being wealth y. If your parents had enough money to feed you well, and to live in a subu rb where the schools were good, you didn't start poor. They might not give you enough money to buy a house when you grow up (which is what wealthy par ents do), but they did give you a lot, and a lot more that is given to the kids who grow up in actual poverty.

58k in 1971 was a lot more than 200k today, especially after taxes.

But my dad's parents were missionaries in China, abjectly poor in money terms, and worse once his father was taken, then died a Japanese prisoner of war. Dad had a paper route in elementary school, his pay being used to help feed his mom and brothers.

Dad paid his way through university digging ditches with a pick and shovel, as a plumber's apprentice, and later walking high steel (because it paid more walking steel above the 3rd(?) floor). Slender, his anatomy professor called him to the front of the class as an example of how to tell a man's occupation from his build. My dad, the professor professed, had clearly never done any hard labor.

As explained in another post, I left home at 17 with money I'd earned myself, and a ticket my Dad pitched in at the last, once he saw I was set on leaving. I immediately got two full-time minimum wage jobs, lived on part of one, and saved the rest. I've paid my way ever since.

Sloman got his PhD at taxpayer expense, which he repaid by decades of idling, then, despite being well-situated, draining two continents' social safety systems of monies intended for the poor.

Cheers, James Arthur

you

did. I did too, but lit out to England before it could pay off in Australi a.

king for a job. I never worked anywhere where there were any other Harvard graduates, at least none that I knew of.

you spent your allowance when you were in grade school. Did you spend your allowance in the week you got it, or did you save your allowance so you h ad money if anything came along that you really wanted?

Yep. You've reminded me--the best predictor of success, bar none, is the 'marshmallow test.' Set a kid in a room with a marshmallow. Explain that if they leave it and wait, they'll get two, but if they can't wait, they'll only get the one.

The marshmallow test tests a kid's ability to delay gratification, which is the single trait most essential for success. Delaying gratification also requires / combines foresight, planning, and discipline. Willingness to put off till tomorrow, in exchange for a better life.

Social programs encourage the exact opposite. People who accumulate any savings on them are disqualified, thus thrift and/or delaying gratification are harshly punished.

Cheers, James Arthur

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Your father ended up as doctor, so he almost certainly wasn't born into abs olute poverty, and you certainly weren't.

The gradations are poor, adequately off, and rich, and your parents were ce rtainly adequately off.

John hasn't talked about his family here, that I've noticed. Jim Thomson ha s, and they weren't poor. They weren't wealthy either, but clearly not livi ng from hand to mouth.

-time

That's not something a poor person could say - no poor man's father ever bo ught their son a plane ticket.

It's not black Americans or women who are disadvantaged at birth - it's the children of all really poor parents. Adequate social security can do a lot to minimise the disadvantages - it will never put lots of book in the pare ntal home, but can get the kids to school with an adequate breakfast in the ir stomachs, which lets them take full advantage of whatever education is o n offer.

In places where they do welfare right, and hand out enough money to let the children of poor families get an adequate education - and their parents to buy enough food to let the kids stay healthy enough to get the full benefi t of that education, the children of the very poor do a lot better than the y do in the US.

Walter Williams thesis seems to be that not doing much doesn't seem to help , so you shouldn't do anything.

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Because the way welfare was structured, having a man in the house cut off t he welfare money. This was a choice built into the welfare scheme. It isn't built into - say - the Swedish welfare scheme.

Unless they live in Sweden.

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If you don't want to spend money on social welfare programs, you make them as unpleasant as possible for the people who need them. The British Poor La ws were designed this way, and Charles Dickens did well out of exposing how they worked. They don't have to be that way. Nobody is complaining that Swedish social s ecurity has that effect - but the Swedes do spend a lot more money on them.

It pays off in the long term - the children of to poor grow up to be produc tive employees, rather than being stuffed into an expensive prison system - but right-winger can't imagine that the world can be changed for the bette r, and are quite certain that it cant be done by spending their money.

The same idiot master-minds who suggest that you take a plane ticket to Swe den, rather than East Germany (which isn't there any more because it didn't work) to see an example which isn't failing.

Why not. It wasn't.

society/

points out that the "$22 trillion" was calculated by the Heritage Foundatio n, a conservative think tank.

I could dig into the imaginative accounting involved, but it's gong to be m ore right-wing nonsense, so why bother.

As the people who run you social welfare programs seem to have intended fro m the start.

Places that started off a bit more sympathetic to socialist ideas seems to be able to do better, perhaps because their social welfare programs aren't designed to fail.

Check out Scandinavia and Germany for a start. The Dutch had a pretty effec tive welfare system when I was there and it didn't seem to ruin anybody's t hrift, virtue or independence. It did have its evil side-effects - the Dutc h could get away with being absurdly ageist, because the people over 55 who wanted to work didn't starve because nobody would give them work - but the Dutch only imprison 75 per 100,000 as opposed to the US 684 per 100,000 or the England and Australia's 150.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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isn't true in more egalitarian countries (with Scandinavia having the most egalitarian cuountries.

her was a doctor. There is a distinction between poverty and not being weal thy. If your parents had enough money to feed you well, and to live in a su burb where the schools were good, you didn't start poor. They might not giv e you enough money to buy a house when you grow up (which is what wealthy p arents do), but they did give you a lot, and a lot more that is given to th e kids who grow up in actual poverty.

An affecting tale, but "missionaries" is the give-away. The churches look a fter their own - rarely generously, but it's no surprise that your father c ould go to university and study medicine, and found work that let him pay f or it himself.

l,

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Not a particularly able anatomy professor. Some people don't put on muscle mass, and while digging ditches is lot of muscular effort, the subsequent j obs were more skill than muscle - though he would have to put his back into it from time to time.

Middle class people can get two jobs when they want them ...

l

I certainly got a research grant that kept me fed and housed through my Ph. D. The official logic at the time was that what it cost me was what I could ha ve been earning in a regular job, and the grant paid half of that, so the g overnment and I were both investing equally in my getting that Ph.D.

I worked continuously from August 1969 - as soon as I'd submitted - until N ovember 1991 (when I got made redundant for the first time) and didn't get to draw any unemployment benefit until July 2003 - thirty-odd years. I paid quite a lot of income tax during this time.

I would happily have worked after 2003, and haven't stopped apply for jobs yet (and had my first job interview for ten years a couple of weeks ago). T here's not been a lot of intentional idling involved.

I'm just as firmly middle class as James Arthur is and his father was befor e him and certainly haven't taken more out of the collective welfare system than I've put in.

I think James Arthur actually knows this - it's been ventilated here before - but he's got his right-wing propagandist hat on and is trying for any di stortion which he thinks might stick.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I wasn't.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

r you

an did. I did too, but lit out to England before it could pay off in Austra lia.

ooking for a job. I never worked anywhere where there were any other Harva rd graduates, at least none that I knew of.

w you spent your allowance when you were in grade school. Did you spend yo ur allowance in the week you got it, or did you save your allowance so you had money if anything came along that you really wanted?

s

It turns out also to test the children's assessment of the reliability of t he promise, so there was a bit more going on is covered by your over-simpli fied analysis. Having parents you can trust is another advantage.

That's actually a feature of "designed to fail" social security systems. Me ans tested system should to be designed so that there is no 100% tax point, where what you've earned cuts off a subsidy that was worth as much what yo u'd earned. This isn't always in the minds of the designers.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Perhaps not now (all his quantum consciousness nonsense), but as a youngster he stuck with education hard enough to get a PhD in his early 20s. 90% of making a breakthrough is just showing up.

Anyhow, you mis-read, I didn't comment on judgement. Neither did I say that respect is an indication of effort, but that it is deserved for effort. Really, you couldn't have misinterpreted that more thoroughly if you'd tried.

I put it to you that the respect he has got *are* based on his (early) efforts.

Interestingly enough, we're currently hosting a British physicist working on that very effect, on a placement with this group at CSIRO:

The earlier SQUID detector work quickly found $4B worth of ore deposits in places that other surveys had found nothing, but the effect is very high-Q (narrowband). The recent SQIF work produces large arrays that allow broadband coverage and detection of RF magnetic fields.

Clifford Heath.

But you are unlikely to have been born into poverty either, otherwise you probably wouldn't have made it to Tulane. Not Harvard, but still a university.

Were you even the first person in your extended family to go to university?

And Australian study in the late 1940's found that the best single indicator of success at university was the number of books in the parental home, and the next best a near relative who had been to university.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

-people/485618/

which is a lot of respect. He's on record as saying that he would have pre ferred to save his name to be attached to an effect that did something, and his subsequent career demonstrates a similar level of judgement.

He seems to be have been in the right place at the right time. Most inventi ons get invented in several different places at much the same time, and if Brian Josephson hadn't taken on whatever research problem got him his Nobel prize, somebody else would have got there a few months later.

Respect isn't a well-defined attitude. I was being realistic about the fact that it's given rather than earned.

Not his efforts, but his discovery.

That's interesting. What's more interesting is that you didn't mention that it uses high temperature super-conductors to set up the Josephson junction s.

What's the actual working temperature? YBCO is super-conducting up liquid n itrogen temperatures, but people using them to generate high magnetic field s run it rather cooler than that.

Sounds cute. Are the same group planning on building a quantum voltage refe rence with 20,000 YBCO squids?

The US NS built one with 14484 SQIDs in liquid helium.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

That agrees with what I said, 90% is just showing up.

Fair enough. I said "earned", being realistic about the fact that it is more often earned than given, and is often given where it's not deserved. But still I maintain, any work to build capability deserves respect. People who do it are people I want to work with.

Correct, it's in LN2 I believe. Pretty hard to maintain a supply of liquid-He in outback Western Australia and many other prospecting sites.

I'll ask Colin when I see him next, perhaps tonight. He does the simulations; the CSIRO Manufacturing group has figured out how to make them (repeatable enough to be able to make large arrays).

I don't know. They have a standard Josephson reference in West Lindfield, of course. Also one of the six UTC clocks.

Clifford Heath.

I'm sure they appreciated the efforts trying to convert them to a bullshit, blackmail religion.

"Sure, we'll help you out. The only price is an eternity in Hell if you don't accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior."

Piss off.