meritocracy

I heard some guy on the radio this morning saying that tech companies need to have workforces that 'look like America.'  In other words, they need to institute skin-color quotas. I'm totally against this.  I want this country to be a meritocracy, in which people are given jobs on the basis of competence and nothing else.

I'm beginning to think that, in their heart of hearts, a lot of black 'leaders' believe that blacks will never be able to compete successfully against whites and Asians, which is why they need to be given everything, including jobs.

trump vs.hillary

Which of these two candidates would get us further toward First World America? I don't think it's the 'Make America Great Again' candidate.  We don't need a candidate who's as anti-science as Trump, at this late date still calling climate change a 'hoax' and a 'phony issue.' On the other hand, the thing that REALLY bothers me about Hillary is that she's so beholden to the black vote-- having piled up hundreds of delegates in southern primaries in states she doesn't have a prayer of winning in the fall-- that in office she would be nothing but a Quota Queen. More handouts and set-asides for black folks, which IMHO are the last things they need.  I think they need to start living in the real world with the rest of us for a change.

It's a dismal choice, but in the event I'll hold my nose and vote for Hillary.  Laws and executive orders can be repealed, but a ruined planet can't be.

the tradeoff

The basic tradeoff for those dependent on the productive people (taxpayers) is this:  We want to provide enough of a 'floor'-- food, clothing, shelter, medical care-- to give these people some basic opportunity to 'make it' in life.  But we don't want to provide such a cushion that they just decide to stay on it rather than try to become productive citizens.  Of course, some people simply don't have the wherewithal to become productive.  This may become even more true in the future, when the productive people will be those with rather specific abilities and skills.  The main thing is this:  Unproductive people-- those being supported by the taxpayers-- should not be reproducing.

default life

At a certain age, people should just be given a job, even if it's a make-work 'public works' job.  It's better -- and cheaper-- than letting them hang out on the streets and then warehousing them in our prisons.  This would be the 'default life' you'd be given if you couldn't decide on your own.

fewer, but brighter: population and iq

It seems to me that eugenics is going to make a comeback, for one specific reason:  the more we come to understand the human genome, the more we will be able to isolate those components of it that have to do with intelligence.  Very few experts in psychometrics or neuroscience doubt that there is a significant genetic component to intelligence.  To the extent that the human species can now control its own evolution, we will move in the direction of being an ever more intelligent species, particularly the kind of mathematical-logical intelligence that is the basis of science and technology.

This means that we will probably have a much smaller human population because it requires so many resources to raise and educate children and young people to a high level.  But it will be a uniformly more intelligent population.  And that's a good thing.

'majority minority'

A lot is being made of the evident fact that within a couple of decades the US may no longer be a majority-white country.  On the face of it, I have no particular objection to this.  As long as we have a citizenry that is civilized, educated, and responsible, I don't care what color they are.

There is, however, one major caveat to this.  If, over the course of this transition-- and seemingly as a direct result of it-- we seem to be sliding into becoming a third-world country, then this will stop.  There are two major criteria for determining this:

1.  The public schools.  If the public schools as a whole seem to be deteriorating to the level of unruliness and low achievement of ghetto schools, this trend will stop.

2.  Even more obviously, the crime rate.  If the crime rate in general begins to approach that of the ghetto, this trend will stop.

These two things probably go hand in hand.  People of low educational achievement have far more of an incentive to become criminals than others, because they have fewer and more unpalatable options.  If the public schools remain pretty good and even improve in low-income areas, fine.  If the crime rate continues its downward trend of recent decades, hunky dory.  But if these two criteria seem to indicate that we are becoming a third-world country, as a direct result of this demographic transition to 'majority-minority' status, then that trend will stop, and in fact be reversed.  Trend, as they say, is not destiny.

meritocracy

This country should be as much of a meritocracy as possible.  To that end, we should abolish all racial and ethnic categories as legal constructs.  If that were the case, the government couldn't require universities and workplaces to set up affirmative action quotas for less competent people.  Nor would freebies be handed out on the basis of these irrelevancies, either.  We should concentrate on economic inequality, which is the real problem.