Seen in my Barrio

I haven't had much time to be at the computer lately, so just enjoy this, located not three blocks from where I live:

The Minimum Wage is Your Boss's Way of Saying 'I Don't Care'

Last month, I started working at a non-profit group called CET - the Center for Employment Training. This organization provides job training to people who lack the skills or the opportunity to earn at least $10 an hour plus benefits.

Why is a program like this necessary? The minimum wage in this country is $5.15 an hour. Not long ago, Congress voted down an proposition to increase it to $7.25 an hour. What do those numbers mean? Simply this: that it is perfectly possible to be fully employed and still live in deep poverty, and that the lowness of the minimum wage combined with the lack of a comprehensive welfare system encourages people to stay out of the workforce.

Take, for example, somebody who earns $8 an hour - on the high end of the unskilled-jobs scale. Multiply $8 an hour by 40 hours a week by 50 weeks a year, and we get the paltry sum of $16,000 gross income. Clearly, such a person is one unexpected expense away from total insolvency. And this assumes a single person with no chronic costs such as children, a medical problem, or major insurance fees.

A couple of weeks ago, the secretary of HHS showed up at CET and announced new restictions on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) - what most people know as 'welfare'. This was part of the completely bogus 'Deficit Reduction Act' which sought reduce ever so slightly the gargantuan defecit Bush has accumulated by cutting the miniscule amount of money spent on social programs. It might've escaped his notice that when people are denied basic assistance they end up costing the government more, due to the icreased need for emergency services.

Reducing welfare benefits is supposed to encourage people to get off the welfare rolls and find work. The effect, however, is usually just the opposite. Receiving public assistance in the U.S. is such an exercise in humiliation that those who receive it find their will being methodically broken.

It is useless to tell them they should 'look for decent work'. There is no such work to be had, and everyone knows it. Even with a high school diploma - and 1/3 of Americans students drop out - the well-paying bluecollar union jobs of yesteryear are long gone.

The result of this is plain: the vast majority of people who are forced off of welfare are worse off once they are in work than when they were out of it.

In most - though not all - European countries with expansive welfare systems, unemployment is much higher. But there, unemployment is rightly taken as the natural outcome of economic factors and not as some kind of wrenching personal shame. I may be young and ignorant, but I am not so ignorant as to the think that American laborers could ever compete against Chinese laborers forced to work for 0.50 an hour twelve hours a day. That is one example among many.

If we are ever going to deal with unemployment in this country, we shold first admit that it is going to happen, and try to do what we can for those afflicted with it.

I Suppose it was Inevitable

My older brother - who is an Army revervist - has recently been informed that he will be sent to Iraq in the near future. His time with the reserves was nearly over, and if no doubt this was part of why he is being sent.

The saving grace to this is that he's a mental-health specialist, not a combat soldier. This means he'll be attached to a base attending to the needs of soldiers, which will - I hope, I hope - be safer than if he were going on the patrols himself.

If I ever hear that opponents of the war 'don't support the troops' or are secretly happen when Americans get killed, I don't know if I will be able to contain myself. This war is the product of bloodless think-tanks and armchair heroes for whom the value of a soldier's life is a purely political calculation.

Maestro C-3PO

I, Robot starring Will Smith is generally a terrible movie and an insult to Isaac Asimov. Even so, it does contain one nice bit of dialouge:

Smith: [explaining why robots can't have feelings] Could a robot write a Shakespeare, or compose a Beethoven?

Robot: Can you?

Not a bad come-back for a robot. And, indeed, I found myself thinking about it a couple of months ago while composing this string quartet for a music class.

Up until I actual took a fairly in-depth course on musical composition, it had always been a kind of sacred mystery to me. Notes followed one another in patterns which instantly let me know what sort of mood was implied, but without giving a clue as to how the composer knew how to arrange them in such a way.

As I found out, composition is not nearly as creative a process as I thought. There are many, many rules governing voice leading, harmony, chords, progressions, and transitions.

Why, then, couldn't we come up with an auto-composition computer program? It would much simpler than the old thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand typewriters bit, as there are far fewer possible note combinations than words.

The implications about human creativity are not, I think, earth-shattering. After all, doesn't the great artist know when to break the rules?

There is, I believe, a short story on this same topic, in which an old-fashioned lover of classical music teaches his robot servant to play the piano better than any human musician could. However, ultimately the robot refuses to do so, even though being a piano virtuoso is easy for him, saying "But it was not meant to be easy..."

Gore's Still Got It

My access to the internet is limited, so I'll be brief.

A few days ago I saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's deocumentary about global warming. It's detailed, concise, and terrifying. Gore is direct, thoughtful, and funny. Anybody who still has any lingering doubts about global warming needs to go see this movie (and stop watching Fox).

Does this mean a Gore run in '08? While I don't think his life-long ambition to be president has softened any, his tolerance for campaigning probably has. And while it's not impossible to come back eight years after a close presidential election and win (Nixon did it), it seems like a risk the timid Democrats won't take.