This post by Mark Judge at Chronicle may give you a new perspective on Amazon, the Washington Post, Mark Judge, or all three. Here’s a snippet:

At Amazon, things are very tightly organized. You are given a uniform, training, and very clear guidelines. There is a point system that penalizes you if you are late or absent. You get a point for arriving late or leaving early, even on your 30-minute lunch break. If you hit eight points you’re gone. You are expected to perform with efficiency.

It was reported that Bezos doesn’t mind firing a lot of workers because if they are there too long, the thinking goes, they get complacent. Bezos believes that workers who have been at the company too long get comfortable and their productivity declines. Amazon’s reported goal is to filter out the bottom 6 percent of performers to avoid a “march to mediocrity.”

The number of people who quit or are fired each year at Amazon is higher than the total employment at the company. Seventy percent of those hired leave within 90 days. This is double the turnover rate for similar employers and it costs Amazon an estimated $8 billion every year. When I worked at Amazon, there was a crazy dual emphasis on both working you to death and trying to make sure you didn’t quit.

That sounds remarkably like the workload of a Japanese salaryman and I can’t help but wonder if it is not deliberate. Consider this:

(Extracted from Amazon’s web site.) Mr. Judge has mentioned the high turnover rate at Amazon. I can’t help but wonder if kar?shi (death from overwork) is a phenomenon there. I suspect not.

His main point in the piece is that both Amazon and the post should be reformed by treating Amazon employees the way they treat Post employees and Post employees the way Amazon employees are treated which sounds remarkably vindictive to Post employees to me.

There is a crisis in elementary education. Far too many students are unable to read at grade level. Consider this piece by Hannah Schmid at Illinois Policy:

There is an early literacy crisis nationally, and students’ futures are at risk when they are already behind in fourth grade.

In Illinois, only one-third of fourth-grade students met or exceeded reading proficiency standards on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Every two years, fourth and eighth grade students across 50 states and District of Columbia take the national reading exam. According to the Nation’s Report Card, it is “the only assessment that allows comparison of results from one state with another, or with results for the rest of the nation.”

Illinois is one of 35 states and the DC in which just one-in-three (or fewer) fourth grade students met or exceeded reading standards in 2022.

Despite a smaller decline in proficiency following the pandemic compared to some other states, Illinois’ early literacy rate is the same as it was 12 years ago, meaning increases in education spending have failed to improve the literacy rate.

Research has pinpointed third grade as a critical reading milestone because students need to have learned to read by then or they will not be able to absorb the rest of their educations.

For more than 30 years we have been told by Republican and Democratic administrations that higher education was the key to a bright future for the United States. Judging by the above it’s no wonder that most of the employment growth over the last five years has been among immigrants. The jobs on offer either require no education or a college education. Young people educated here can’t hack it. Over that period real spending on education has nearly trebled. Here in Chicago on average a CPS teacher earns $70,000—40% more than the national average. That’s about the household income here and the CTU is angling for more.

My question is what’s the resolution? If young Americans aren’t prepared for college work, what good is college to them? Spending more seems to accomplish little.

Does anyone have any remarks about Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s visit to the U. S.? IMO the complaints about his stumping for Harris are not entirely off the mark but overblown.

Presumably, his visit is to make another pitch for striking targets in the Russian interior which if we are prudent we will reject. My understanding is that

1. the Ukrainians cannot do that targeting without the direct participation of U. S. personnel
2. Putin has made it quite clear that he will consider that an act of war by the United States

and to his credit President Biden has resisted that to date.

I think that Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column is one of his best. It is primarily a critique of the Biden Administration’s Middle East policy. After cataloguing the administration’s many failed overtures, he arrives here:

Mr. Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do. As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.

He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.

However, I think he errs here:

In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China. What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.

Japan invaded China (Manchuria) in September 1931. I honestly don’t know if Americans considered the invasion immoral. What I have read does not reflect that. I suspect that American missionaries in China did but that is not synonymous with Americans. What is unclear to me is whether Americans saw that as damaging to American interests or were largely disinterested. I suspect the latter. Smoot-Hawley had been enacted the year before and what little trade we had with China had been sharply curtailed. IMO during the 1930s Americans were more concerned about survival.

The second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. I think that Japanese atrocities during that war aroused some humanitarian concerns in the United States. Lend-Lease, considerably more expansive than our support for Britain and France, began in 1941, in significant part a response to those concerns. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was at the end of 1941 and it was a “Hail Mary”on Japan’s part, intended to prevent active U. S. participation in war in the Pacific and at least some Japanese leaders understood that at the time. Note that I do not sympathize with the Japanese. I do think they held a very bad hand and they gambled and lost.

I think that Dr. Mead is not particularly well-informed on pre-WWII U. S.-China bilateral trade. I suspect he’s imposing neoliberal ideas on the 1930s. I also suspect that racism played a role in the U. S. response to Japan’s invading Manchuria and then China proper. I haven’t studied the matter in detail but I think it’s a reasonable presumption.

Dr. Mead continues:

Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.

That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.

I think that Dr. Mead has the diagnosis wrong here. American prestige due completely to

1. American economic might and
2. American military might

with the latter being downstream from the former. We have had multiple military failures since 2001 including

• the attack on 9/11
• invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
• invasion and occupation of Iraq

and how do you characterize actions like removing Qaddafi in Libya? Or supporting Saudi Arabia in its war with Yemen? Were those moral and in our national interest?

I don’t honestly see how the U. S. can retain military and economic preeminence while deindustrializing and reducing our military budget. And that doesn’t even get into the “magical thinking on diplomacy” theme that is Dr. Mead’s main topic.

I’m not sure I see the Biden Administration’s problem as “magical thinking” so much as the strategy it, apparently, learned from the Obama Administration: preconceding what your interlocutor actually wanted. I do not understand the reasoning behind that. The other party will be so grateful it will do what you want in exchange? Now that’s magical thinking.

Yesterday Chicxago’s longest-serving alderman reported to serve his prison sentence on corruption charges. Judy Wang, Angelica Sanchez, and Marisa Rodriguez at WGN report:

CHICAGO — Chicago’s longest-serving alderman reported to federal prison on Monday.

Former Ald. Ed Burke faces a two-year sentence and a $2 million fine. Last year, he was convicted of corruption for using his position to benefit his law firm.

On Monday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed to WGN News that Burke is in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution Thomson in Thomson, Illinois. The low-security prison is home to nearly 2,000 inmates and just over 100 inmates in an adjoining camp.

I honestly believe that if all members of the Chicago City Council guilty of corruption were imprisoned the only way a quorum could be convened would be in the prison yard.

The chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party has been indicted on charges of corruption. Whether he will be convicted I can’t say but I doubt that anyone doubts he is guilty.

There are a number of Chicago stories that are receiving national attention. One of them is the ShotSpotter saga. ShotSpotter, somewhat ungenerously described by our mayor as a “walkie-talkie on a stick”, was installed in Chicago. The mayor decided it wasn’t worth paying for. The City Council decided to strip the mayor of the authority to approve or disapprove it. The mayor says that’s not legal. The company has terminated service and is starting to dismantle it in Chicago.

Now the editors of the Wall Street Journal have weighed in:

ShotSpotter uses acoustic technology to detect gunfire and dispatches law enforcement to scenes of violence before 911 calls come in. Chicago has deployed the technology since 2012, mainly in its south and west sides. The University of Chicago Crime Lab found it likely saves about 85 lives a year.

The system has detected more than 200,000 gun shots in the 13 months ending in August. Even Mr. Johnson must think the technology works since in February he extended the contract through the summer, which is when gun violence typically peaks and the city hosted the Democratic National Convention.

But last week he said he’d let the ShotSpotter contract expire, calling it a waste of money. He may be taking his cues from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who charged in May that ShotSpotter perpetuates “over-policing and unjustified surveillance” in minority neighborhoods.

The City Council disagreed and voted 33-14 to give Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling the power to override the mayor’s office. “If one life is saved with gunshot detection technology, then it is absolutely worth having,” Alderman Ray Lopez said.

It is true that Chicago has a nearly $1 billion hole in its budget. Chicago has spent $57.4 million on ShotSpotter since 2018. It spent $300 million housing, feeding, etc. migrants in 2023.

I don’t believe budgets have anything to do with the mayor’s opposition to ShotSpotter. I suspect the “over-policing” is his complaint (I would like to see a definition of “over-policing” that is not circular).

The population of Chicago is one third white, one third black, and one third Hispanic. Chicago homicide victims are three-quarters black, 20% Hispanic, with the balance being “Other”. In other words of the 85 lives the UoC says ShotSpotter saved, 64 were black lives.

Lately I have experienced something distressing. I am getting wildly varying results from different search engines. I am not entirely sure why that might be. It might be due to increased use of “artificial intelligence”. It might be because the search engine providers have different policies, particularly with respect to source they consider unreliable for one reason or another.

In other words they might be protecting me.

What I want in a search engine is a reliable and complete index of the information that is available on the Internet. I don’t want to be protected from knowledge that is bad for me from a search engine. I rely on online security companies for security and search engines for indices of information.

I’m starting to use multiple different search engines to do cross-comparisons which is a time-sucker. One of the challenges is that different search engines are not necessarily different search engines. Some search engines are actually frontends for Google or Bing.

I have noticed a lot of comments by regular commenters going into spam—not even into moderation but into spam. It’s nothing I have done. I suspect it’s due to a change in AKismet, the service I use to screen comments.

I have approved all non-repetitive comments. Hopefully, that will reduce the number going into spam.

I was interested in the observations of John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs’s on Dick Cheney’s support for Kamala Harris, quoted in this post at RealClearPolitics By Tim Hains:

MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.

Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions.

SACHS: There’s a very interesting interview of Putin in 2017 where he says, “I’ve dealt with three presidents now. They come into office with some ideas, even. But then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties,” he says, “I wear red ties but they wear blue ties. They come in and explain the way the world really is and there go the ideas.”

I think that’s Putin’s experience. That’s our experience. That’s my experience. Which is that there is a deeply entrained foreign policy that has been in place, in my interpretation, for many decades.

I do not believe that U. S. interests have much to do with the interests of that “administrative state”. They have their own goals and objectives.

One last point: doing anything about that will require much more than a single president. It will require civil service reform of a type and scale I cannot realistically envision.