I'm sorry but this guy is a fucking idiot. Now Friedman takes some incredibly racist comment from some Indian newspaper claiming Indians would pay their mortgage because not to do so is shameful (as if Americans think it's ok to not pay their bills?????) and complete fiction that a temporary visa holder will buy up subprime houses (uh, you are temporary, why the hell would you buy a house in a temporary visa?)
As if magically an American worker given a decent job would not magically buy a home.
Hello asshat! Have you seen the layoffs in the United States, the numbers of unemployed Americans? Anyone connect the idea that income might have something to do with getting a mortgage?
Then we have some incredibly bad math paper which tries to claim that all of those with those funky sounding Chinese surnames and those others with the funky sounding Indian names are now magically, H-1B temporary guest workers! Congratulations all of you American citizens with the funking sounding surnames...you just had your citizenship revoked!
The purpose of revoking your status as an American? Why to skew results on patents in order to claim the United States needs more global labor arbitrage through temporary foreign guest worker Visas!
What the hell does it matter if the assumptions are based in pure fictional demographics!
I'm serious, these people should be fired for bath mathematics and economic fiction. Did you know that you are only an American if you have an English sounding surname? Hey, all of you funky Eastern Europeans or those Nordic weirdos forget it, you do not count now as a U.S. citizen. And you people, ya know those with those funky letterings from the Finno-Ugric languages....well, kiss your U.S. citizenship goodbye. According to these guys, you don't count because you do not sound English enough.
Forget things like innovation breakthroughs, such as things like The Internet which spawn a slew of additional patents, the total aggregate employment increases and decreases in occupational areas....well, hell, throw away any data point you do not like and even come up with a statistical formula that is completely invalid as a model!
Don't like what the formula is puking out as results?
What the hell, void all Academic integrity and change it! What's a couple of doubling up on variables as long as you change the names? The import thing is to confirm your conclusion. Must be fill in the blank Academic research where one has a conclusion and writes the rest to justify the desired outcome!
Why not come up invalid formulas..what the hell, sure looks good on paper! Hey, it's math isn't it?
I am so sick of these idiots getting free press time. They should be thrown onto the pundit garbage heap. I could get better methodology and analysis if I walked in to some homeless shelter with crayon and construction paper.
These corporate lobbyists and NASSCOM, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will stop at nothing to get your job. I'm sorry, this is absolutely absurd, pure Fictional Employment Theory.
Folks, don't take my word for it, read the original paper for yourself and find the flaw. Finding Waldo is harder believe me. One thing is certain, do not take press articles or op-eds as truth. Always read the original research which is being claimed as truth for often...it is not!
(FDR's policies did not work anyone as a case in point!)
That's quite the rant, Robert
Not that a old-fashioned rant isn't worth reading now and then. ;-)
They are trying to remove an amendment from the Stimulus
I forgot an additional in this absurd paper. They never propose the counter to show that if U.S. citizens had been used instead of temporary guest workers, the patent output would have been the same...then my favorite, literally they do not count all of the patent holders "surnames" of each patent. A patent can be generated by an entire team and is often the work for 2 or 3. Then, frankly inventors are left off of patents as well. This is completely illegal, but it assuredly happens in high tech. Ask anyone in Silicon valley if they know of an engineer who got screwed in a patent and their name left off, attributed to another ....I'll bet that survey would be > 50% who say yes.
I was thinking we should hold a contest. The research paper that is the most Economic fiction of the year award. There are so many to choose from so we could have the winner and then runner's up.
I am positive a lot of these think tanks and in this case, Harvard (which writes propaganda continually due to their own interests on this in their own newspaper) believe regular people do not read their research....well, the reality is we too have PhDs and Masters degrees, knowledge of statistics, scientific methodology....so I say we all use it and start blasting these things.
These "studies" end up on Congressional Staffers desks as "fact" when they simply are not fact and one can see this clearly when one reads the research paper itself.
This one, here. I mean seriously read this...
can you believe anyone in their right mind would take two homogeneous cultures and try to compare those to the most diverse, heterogeneous demographics in the world and claim that is valid? Jesus.
I'm just wondering if I wrap my mathematics into logs...can I get an Academic job at Harvard. Ooops, guess not because I won't conclude what they want in advance. God.
Yes, but
What inspired the rant? I couldn't find a single link to either the brain dead patent report (I wanted to see if they, like one Usenet troll I ran into about 15 years ago, thought my grandfather was Aramaic!) or Tom "I never met a foreigner I didn't like" Friedman's article.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
click on link
at the top. He references the paper, which I link to in a comment on here. The paper is pretty complex (although in my opinion written so to hide it's incredible assumptions and methodology flaws) and of course it's conclusions are being written as fact and now used around the Internets...
so I will link to the actual paper for when one reads it, hopefully you can parse out some of what I and probably others are pointing to and possibly find a few additional flaws.
Ok, I found them this time
Took a bit. I've *got* to change my CSS to make links a more obvious color.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Absolute garbage
It was apparent to me from the outset that their method of assigning ethnicity was totally useless in the modern world (and most likely, increasingly useless since the late 1700s and the first round of "global trade" with the invention of the Cutter sailing ship.
I didn't need to get more than three pages in to see that. Too bad I couldn't offer positive proof despite my "non-english" surname; my grandfather's patent for preform concrete stairs is 1958, and they didn't go back any further than 1975.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Give 'em HELL Mr. Oak!!!!
Again, Tom Friedman proves that he is a massive tool.
"....under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism it's just the opposite..."
---John Kenneth Galbraith
I'm sick of it
It's like they contract out corporate lobbyist agenda to these few people and in turn those people, as if the are independent (and who here believes Friedman can balance an algebraic equation never mind tackle international trade theory) and then they spin a great tale of pure fiction, which in turn is promoted by additional corporate media interests and presented as truth.
My God, the United States is on the brink of Economic Armageddon and these various institutions don't get it...if the middle class, the U.S. goes down, the entire world, including their corporate media empires....goes down.
Friedman is a mad man
The fact that such a moron could get crap like this in the NYT says plenty about why the Mexican billionaire Slim had to bail the newspaper out.
what is more scary
is that paper was funded by a NSF grant. Give me a break! "English sounding" surnames?
Friedman Must Be Humiliated
We must take Freidman down. His lies are part and parcel of the collapse of our economy. He still spews this globalization crap and Congress and CEOs listen.
We must expose this SOB like we did Harris Miller. Every time he opens his mouth we need to hack his nuts off.
Real People Know Friedman is a Phony
David Sirota is one journalist that has repeatedly exposed this globalist phony:
Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman
Tom "The Flat World Smells like my Bikram Yoga Rug" Friedman
"I am so sick of these idiots getting free press time."
You go, Rob!
This is a war on our middle class -- our community of neighbors, brothers, sisters and friends and all that this insufferable Neo-Frat Boy Friedman does it suck up to these corporate BFFs who loathe educated Americans, as if they can't get enough of their insider fraternal order.
http://tootruthy.blogspot.com/2009/02/gay-swami-times.html
Dickheads like this have got to go, along with the preening "new media" and blog ilk that refuse to report about how the Great Labor Shortage Myth was created in concert by self-serving academic institutions/think tanks and corporations who cook up their own data to "prove" an erroneous need for foreign workers when we do not have enough jobs for our own citizens. (Norm Matloff's debunking is great.)
Anon, David Sirota was great back in the day. He coined the term and wrote about the "Great Labor Shortage Myth" and at one time, used to write about the H-1B problem. He also referred to the "Flat,Smelly One" as Tom "billionairre blowhard" Friedman.
I haven't, however, read his columns use the term "H-1B" or write about the problem in a long time. Hope he hasn't caught the hubris disease.
Does anyone know how easy it is to file a patent?
Well it's very, very easy. I actually have filed for my very own patent last year.
I had written a cool piece of code that I was very impressed with and have plans to someday use this code if I ever started my own company. A lawyer friend of mine casually asked me if I had patented it.
This gave me the idea to investigate what would be involved. All that is required is to fill out some forms and pay a piece and copy and paste a limited number of lines of code. You don't have to prove that the software code or invention even works at all. (Mine does, by the way, but ai did not have to prove it.)
So people, please don't be impressed when someone quotes the number of patent filings. It's a total bogus number that proves nothing. Which makes the argument that patent filings by non-anglican names even more rediculous as proof of anything at all.
innovation vs. patents
This is a very good point because a high number of patents doesn't necessarily translate into innovation. They have to be critical patents. One might look at open source, which is assuredly a major innovation and of course there are no patents, it's under GNU Public License and other license variants.
The cost becomes prohibitive on patents and there are some corporations simply running to hit a market window and they are not taking the time to patent every little thing and also keeping their patent costs down. There are other corporations who want people to patent how they tie their shoelaces.
Is the work environment amendable to generating patents? That varies greatly from company/institution to company/institution and even project to project, time to time.
Then, the fees for individuals to file are high so odds are individuals will not patent much, unless they are going to try to strike out on their own and sell or license their own design.
Submit Kerr's paper to the IgNoble Awards
I think that we should nominate Bill Kerr's brilliant farce on patent innovation and bad H-1B statistics to the IgNoble committee. I think it would be bound to raise some very interesting humiliation for the authors.
After seeing that Mr. Kerr received his PhD from the Sloan School at MIT, and received funding for the study from the MIT George Schultz fund, I feel compelled to ask my alma mater to reconsider their qualifications for awarding doctorates for such fine work.
Academic Integrity
I gotta wonder about precisely how some people are getting advanced degrees and major soup can labels of credentials when they puke out papers that have such obvious errors in them as well. Think tanks, quite often and CATO is probably the worse, put out studies that are so full of flaws one really has to wonder what the hell is going on?
We know corporations set up (cough, cough) independent nonprofits to write (cough,cough) studies promoting their agenda but it seems also to be prevalent within Academia now.
The only thing I know to do is to read the papers for ourselves and analyze them directly. Seems like peer review is turning into a friend of my pal these days. I don't want to poo poo Academia here because most are exceptional, have integrity and also even almost chase around others who are misinterpreting their particular work.