Coding for children

Today’s #1 most-emailed article at the NY Times is about coding for children. The most-emailed article is usually a soft-news article that gives bobos advice on how to be better bobos. And the sub-category of how to raise good bobo children is probably the most popular.

The article itself sheds little light on anything. Some schools are teaching coding to children. For young children, the coding is more like playing video games than commercially useful computer programming. The issue of whether this is real learning or vocational is only briefly mentioned.

This article is no doubt causing a lot of confusion for bobo readers. On the one hand, coding sounds important in a computerized society, but on the other hand coders are nerds and at most organizations where bobos work, the computer programmers are low-paid Indians who smell funny. (There’s that Google company where the coders are said to have more prestige, but hardly any NY Times readers work at a place like that.) Should bobos encourage their children to code, or should they steer them towards more upscale pursuits such as literature, philanthropy or lacrosse?

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BehindTheLines writes:

A lot of kids don’t have the opportunity to start coding in their early teens. Part of it is that computer languages are harder now. With old fashioned BASIC, you could write “10 PRINT “HELLO”” and you could see the results. Now you need to download the compiler, create a class, yawn. To start coding now most people would need to have a formal class.

That’s right, computers don’t come with BASIC any more. If you have a Mac you can download XCode for free, but it is significantly harder and more complex than 10 PRINT “HELLO”

And only someone really desperate to get an H-1B and move to America will put up with the aggravation of trying to install Eclipse so you can program in Java.

More Rand Paul nonsense

In today’s NY Times, Rand Paul is spouting nonsense about drone strikes against “American citizens.”

I say that someone who is hanging out in Yemen with al Qaeda or other militant organizations isn’t entitled to Fifth Amendment protections.

Of course, if he wants to turn himself in voluntarily, then he should be entitled to a trial. But in Rand Paul’s universe, any terrorist who happened to be born in the United States is off limits and must be allowed to operate without fear of retribution from the United States.

Rand Paul trying to create more Democratic voters

Rand Paul says that Republicans should stop supporting Voter ID laws and stop supporting laws that prohibit convicted felons from voting.

What party do felons voted for? The Democratic Party.

What party to people who lack photo IDs vote for, the same photo IDs that you need to gain entrance to an office building or ride on Amtrak? The Democratic Party of course.

Thank you Rand Paul for trying to sabotage Republicans.

Will Catholic Republicans become Democrats?

The pope says that governments should redistribute wealth to the poor.

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Does this mean that conservative strategists will stop believing that Hispanics are “natural Republicans” because they are religious Catholics? Probably not.

Americans and climate change

The NY Times asks why “Americans are far less concerned about global warming than people in the rest of the developed world.”

But none of the panel of “experts” have any clue.

Climate change is like a religion. So a large percentage of Americans don’t care about climate change because they believe in Jesus.

In other developed countries, a much lower percentage of people believe in conventional religions, so they are seeking something bigger than themselves to believe in and to be passionate about, and the secular religion of climate change (which is a subset of Gaianism) fills that void in their lives.

Mass weddings at Alibaba

I think it’s interesting that Jack Ma, the CEO of Alibaba, holds a mass wedding for his employees every May. (There is some info about that here.)

In the United States, male and female employees are strongly discouraged from forming romantic relationships, but in China, big corporations have the exact opposite policy.

Today in the NY Post

Young women seek sugar daddies:

“I have a fancier lifestyle,” said an NYU student named Samantha as she hooked arms with a graying widower from Chicago. “I’m not going to downgrade to some NYU boy who buys dollar beers.

The history of the mafia and gay bars:

In particular, the Stonewall Inn holds a peculiar place in the confluence of gays coming out and goombahs staying out of sight. The largest gay bar in America, it opened in 1967 with the backing of the Genovese crime family. It had no fire exits, no running water to wash glasses, and the toilets routinely overflowed. But it was the only gay bar in the city where dancing was tolerated by bought-off policemen. And so the Stonewall became an institution.

Snapchat update disrupts schools:

Schroeder, who likened the addictive app to “crack,” said she had to take away her students’ phones.

“I have no idea what all was included in the update, but you would have thought it was crack,” she said in an interview with Silicon Alley Insider, a tech blog. “They seriously could not keep away from it. I even had one girl crawl under the table with her phone.”

All the news that’s not fit for the New York Times.

Guidos breaking bad in Staten Island

There’s an interesting New York Times article about how heroin use is surging among the guidos of Staten Island, and how small-time guido heroin dealers buy the stuff in the bad neighborhoods in the other boroughs and New Jersey, and resell it for a 200% markup.

It’s hard for the police to crack down on the trade, because the guido drug dealers keep a low profile and are careful about who they sell to.

Strangely, the article never uses the term “guido.”

The article also tries to describe the character of Staten Island, but I think the author of the article is sometimes describing the Staten Island of the 1950s before the Verrazano Bridge was built. That was a time when Staten Island had a small population, and there were town-like main streets mostly near the stations along the commuter railroad line. After the bridge was built, the woods were all torn down and the island became almost entirely covered with semi-attached houses. Strip malls opened up along Hylan Boulevard. The Staten Island Mall came. Guidos poured in from Brooklyn, fleeing from the blacks.

Give me robot waiters

In my previous blog post about robotic restaurants, commenters extolled the virtue of human servers. Maybe that’s true in flyover country where the waitress is likely to be a pretty young woman with a bubbly personality. The typical waitperson in Manhattan is a gay man who acts like he’s doing you a favor by serving you. The exception is if you eat at a really expensive restaurant, in which case the waiter is an older white man who is perfect at pretending to be an obsequious footman from Downton Abbey and treating you like a lord.

Since I can’t afford (or rather am not willing to pay for) the more expensive treatment, and don’t particularly like it anyway (although I suppose it’s preferable to the snooty gay waiter), I am all in favor of eating at a completely robotic restaurant and saving money on tips.

The end of free speech?

In the United Kingdom, a right-wing politician was arrested for quoting Winston Churchill in a speech, charged with “religious or racial harassment.” Apparently Winston Churchill has some politically incorrect observations about Islam that today are considered to be “racist.”

In the United States, there is no doubt that a lot of people think we should have laws like the U.K. does. This Donald Sterling guy is now considered the most evil person in Los Angeles because he told his gold-digging mistress in a private and possibly illegally recorded conversation his feelings about her hanging around with black men. Even though he was set to receive a “lifetime achievement” award from the NAACP before the recording was released.

Despite being the most evil person in Los Angeles, there isn’t much anyone can do about it. Liberals may decide that it’s time to abolish the First Amendment. Sterling’s wife may also be a racist. I think there could be new McCarthy-type hearings in which Congress tries to root out “racist” people.