A Financial Product I'd Like to See: Career Insurance

As I was restating my argument for targeted, flexible adult education for the umpteenth time here, it occurred to me that the insurance industry may be overlooking an interesting product.

First, I still assert that the average high-skill worker in the US will have to be retrained for a new career at least a few times in his life, because technology and its attendant productivity increases are likely to destroy the market for his old job. That means that, a couple times in everybody's life, they're going to be stuck with the triple-whammy of having to live off their savings and unemployment insurance at exactly the same time that they'll need to be shelling out money for additional education, which in turn will prevent them from picking up even a part-time stopgap job.

This sounds to me like an insurable event. So why wouldn't the prudent worker take out "career insurance"? For a few bucks a month, you ought to be able to buy a policy that will pay for your educational expenses and support your household should you lose your job because it's become obsolete. I guess you'd have to be fairly clever in how you defined an "obsolete job", but this hardly seems like an insurmountable problem to me.

Best Quantum Mechanics Nerd Joke Ever

From xkcd, H/T Cosmic Variance:

On Dirty Jobs

Just wanted to save this, because it kinda rocked me back on my heels:


"Follow your passion--what could be wrong with that? Probably the worst advice I ever got." (11:20 into the clip)

Huh.

I'm a middle aged software engineer. Back when I started out, I was just a computer programmer. These days, I almost exclusively draw boxes on whiteboards and evangelize ideas and products to folks inside my company. I'm pretty good at it, and I make an excellent living doing it, and I like it a lot.

I can't say I like it more than just the simple art of writing a bunch of code and making it work. My job is so abstract that I can't even really describe it to ordinary, non-technical folks, and when I do, they often don't believe that you can get paid for doing that. A lot of the time, I can't believe it either. Part of the price of success is becoming more abstract, more political, more removed from the simply joy of doing your job at its most basic level. That price may be worth paying, but we ought to be aware that we're paying it.

I've been incredibly lucky to be able to do something that I used to love, and still like pretty well. My kids aren't so fortunate. They were encouraged to "follow their passions" and the result is that they've spent a lot of time doing things that were ultimately unrewarding. My son finally went to trade school and got certified as an HVAC technician 18 months ago. A few months ago, I asked him how he liked his job. He replied, "Nobody wants to grow up to be an HVAC tech when they're a kid." And yet, he has more security than my two girls, who are still following their passions, and who aren't very happy with the result.

Watch the video; seems to me that it cuts through a lot of nonsense that somehow we've started to assume was true.

No Kneeling Before Zod!

Sage advice from John Scalzi, who helpfully critiques the best and the worst of sci-fi movie presidents.

Most Shocking Thing Seen On Mad Men

Before leaving a picnic in the country, Don Draper hurls his beer can into the forest, while his wife Betty shakes the trash off the picnic blanket onto the grass. They load the car with their two children and drive away.

A New Addition For Your Swimmin' Hole

Giant pythons invade souteastern Florida. They're mostly Burmese pythons that were imported as pets, then escaped or were released into the wild.

Highly adaptable, pythons prey on cats, dogs, hares, foxes, squirrels, raccoons and even alligators, allowing them to thrive in a variety of environments.

After populating the Florida Everglades -- a vast marshland -- where it is estimated they number 30,000, the giant python is now spreading across the rest of the peninsula.

"Females may store sperm, so they can produce fertile clutches for years. And a 100-something pound snake can easily be producing 60, 80 eggs a year," said Mazzotti, adding that the reptile could eventually populate the entire southern United States.

Deficiencies in My Web Awareness

Somehow, I'd never stumbled upon xkcd. Who thinks up stuff like this?



Or this?



Error corrected. Safely RSSed.

Thank God For British English

"Great Tits Enjoying Warmer Weather--So Far."

And well they should.

And While We're At It...

...I also feel obliged to include this:



So painful. Right up there with Lyndon Johnson's "Mah Fellow Merkins."

I will hand this to Obama: Communication and demeanor is 50% of the job of President. Obama so completely outstrips the rest of the field in this crucial skill that the issue isn't even up for discussion.

"A Damn Ugly Bird"

Ran across a reference to this while channel surfing through Morning Joe this morning:



In the immortal words of Willie Geist: "That is one damn ugly bird."

Best Title For a Blog Post. Ever.

Tu Fin Combines the Elliptical Machine with a Rowboat for Some Reason. Need I say more?

Another One For the "Harbingers of the Apolcalypse" List

"TVs reinforced for those smashing Wii games."

"Wii have a problem but we have a solution," jokes the Panasonic engineer. The problem is that gamers using the Nintendo Wii are smashing plasma TV screens if the remote slips from their grasp mid-game. The company's answer is to reinforce the screens by applying old-style TV tube-making technology.

Requiescat in Pace

Toshiba announces that they'll stop manufacturing HD-DVD players. Sometimes the right things really do happen.

Be a Man

Over at NRO, Kathryn Lopez bemoans the state of manhood and the raising of boys in her "review" of Juno. She's disturbed by Mark Loring, the would-be adoptive father of the title character's unborn baby:

Mark Loring reminded me immediately of Leonard Sax. His book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, reiterates some of what Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about in her War Against Boys, and what many of us can see around us: While there are no interest groups worrying about how often they raise their hands or get called on in class, something bad is happening to our boys. Sax — a psychiatrist — writes: “What’s troubling about so many of the boys I see in my practice, or the boys I hear about from parents and teachers, is that they don’t have much passion for any real-world activity.” They’re playing video games that “seldom connect with the real world”; they are like Mark Loring, who sits at home and watches The Wizard of Gore while bemoaning the fact that he’s sold out and no longer plays in a band in bars. (He composes music for commercials to pay for kitchen remodeling while he really wants to be the next Kurt Cobain, as Vanessa complains when he announces he no longer wants to be married.)

(Read the linked Sax interview--the point about Kindergarten being harder on boys because of its emphasis on academics is well taken. In my experience, boys lag girls intellectually by about a year at that age, catching up to girls only when they encounter the train wreck that is puberty.)

But Lopez's piece turns out to be a fine lesson in why social conservatism is vaguely silly. Are there policy approaches to re-instilling manliness in American Society? Sure. Will they achieve only their intended consequences? Absolutely not. For some reason, social conservatives think that society is amenable to engineering in exactly the same way that economic liberals think that the economy is manipulable. Complex systems are complex systems. Be very careful.

Let's look at Mark Loring a little more closely: He writes advertising jingles for a living. In short, he produces intellectual property in the information economy. He bemoans the loss of his band. In other words, he feels isolated by working at home.

I liked Juno a lot, incidentally. But I certainly didn't read into it what Lopez did. Vanessa Loring (the Jennifer Garner character) is an ambitious, driven woman. She want to have the successful career and the kids and the happy marriage. She's single-minded about those things. Other than that, she's not paying much attention.

I know lots of people like that, men and women. At one time, I was somewhat like them (although I fell more onto the "workaholic" side of the spectrum). It used to be that ambitious, driven men were our social ideal. Lopez is right that that's changed.

But I also know lots of people like Mark Loring. In fact, I'm probably more like him today than I am like Vanessa. I work at home. I'm a software geek, not a jingle-writer, but frankly there's just not that much difference any more. Society probably benefits a bit more from the ability to make phone calls than it does from advertising but the topic is at least debatable. I blog (to very few people, apparently) for fun. And yes, I do feel isolated and unfulfilled.

But I am right smack in the big fat middle of the information economy. I am its poster child. The growth is happening around me and people like me. Is that a a reason to bemoan the fact that most men no longer aspire to be a character out of Atlas Shrugged? The world has changed--it's changed a lot. In the industrialized nations, the way we live would be utterly unrecognizable--and repulsive--to a man from the Enlightenment. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. I do know that it is what it is and there's no going back to an industrial economy, short of a complete economic and social collapse. That may happen. Maybe what we've wrought is unsustainable and needs a sharp correction.

Or maybe this is what social progress looks like. That it looks more like Brave New World than it does a Robert Heinlein novel may be regrettable but it's the way it is. It would be lovely to think that we are capable of consciously choosing our path forward. I'm not sanguine about our ability to do that. We simply don't have the technology. I suspect we're better off keeping our eyes open and enjoying the ride.

The Campaign for the World's Most Powerful Office: A Status Report

This is just too good. H/T Megan McCardle.

And For You Princess Bride Fans Out There...

ROUSes? Personally, I don't think they exist.

Where Are All the Good Political Putdowns?

Some choice ones from history, courtesy of the Wapo.

Lotsa Ideas From 2007

NYT has published its 7th annual year in ideas. Some of my favorites: blimp-based wind turbines, a theory for why the human appendix might not be vestigial after all, an experiment in how knots form spontaneously in strings of various lengths, saving gas through left-turb elimination, concrete that neutralizes smog, ocean wave electrical generators using dielectric elastomers, and, of course, the transparency-enhancing idea of the year, wikiscanning.

On Being an Old Engineer

There's an old joke about the five stages of an engineering project:

1. Boundless enthusiasm.


2. Creeping uncertainty.


3. Search for the guilty.


4. Persecution of the innocent.


5. Promotion of the non-participant.

The difference between an experienced engineer (i.e., an old one) and a newbie is that the old guys start the project on step 2.

On Vacation

For the 5 or 6 of you out there who are actually reading, I'm off on vacation through Thanksgiving.