Letters to the Editor
Borduin
Published Letters: 33 Editor's Choice: 11
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Sloppy article
[Read the article: What's good for Bill Gates...]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The whole H1B question is certainly deserving of good reporting and analysis. Unfortunately, that's not what we get from this article.
Ms. Clarren makes so many unexamined assumptions here it is hard to know where to begin. For instance, based upon a sample size of one, we are apparently expected to conclude that there is a surfeit of U.S. citizen software engineers looking for jobs. Ms. Clarren doesn't do much validation of her data sample, though. Does Mr. Besser have problems getting along with fellow employees? Is he actually a good programmer? Does he use deodorant? Or is he just a victim of a greedy software industry looking to shave a few bucks by hiring cheap foreign-born labor?
To answer the final question, we might actually need to expand our questioning a bit further. Is there really a shortage of U.S. citizen software engineers? How many software engineers do U.S. universities graduate each year, and how many of those are foreign nationals? How does that compare to employment trends in the software industry as a whole? Is the $13K difference in salary due primarily to willingness of foreign nationals to work for less money, or to the fact that they take entry-level jobs? And the real kicker - even assuming that foreign national engineers will work for less money (not my experience), why on earth would a company try to save a small percentage of an engineer's salary by hiring a foreign national through H1B in the U.S., rather than hiring them in their home country for a third to a quarter of the salary, and having them ship their work here for free via Internet?
Poor Ms. Clarren, Microsoft and friends wouldn't give her good answers to such questions. What is a reporter to do? She could do a bunch of investigation and research, and write a long article full of boring statistics and hedged conclusions. Or she could whip up a quick "Fox left" piece, setting up a strawman to stir some good liberal resentment of Bill Gates, Microsoft, greedy corporations, and dumb, unprincipled legislators!
Full disclosure - I'm a former software executive, and a long-time liberal who wishes we liberals would apply as much intellectual rigor to our causes as they deserve.
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Do NOT cancel my subscription
[Read the article: Was the 2004 election stolen? No.]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bill Clinton is fond of saying that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats require evidence. I am sorry to say that, based on the reponses to this article, it would seem that quite a few of us Dems aren't too choosy about the standard of evidence required.
What do Intelligent Design, Colin Powell's 2003 WMD presentation to the UN, and RFK jr's article have in common? They all start from an "obvious" conclusion, create theories to explain that conclusion, and then selectively choose "facts" to support the theories. All alternative analyses are ignored entirely or dismissed without serious consideration.
It has been clear since before the election that Blackwell was determined to use his position to effectively disenfranchise Democratic voters in Ohio. That he succeeded to a certain degree is almost indisputable, and outrageous. But RFK jr's article goes well beyond that, repeatedly misusing data in a way that supports the most negative possible interpretation. Manjoo could certainly have done a better job of acknowledging the seriousness of the abuses that did occur, but he is correct in his assessment that RFK jr used data and arguments that have been seriously questioned for more than a year - often by Democrats. See, for instance, the extensive of posts and responses on the mystery pollster site mentioned by Manjoo. Either RFK jr was unaware of these criticisms, in which case he is guilty of very sloppy journalism, or he chose not to acknowledge those counter arguments, in which case he is guilty of dishonesty. In either case, I am not happy to have his "journalism" so prominently associated with the only party I see that might become capable of effectively leading my country. And if you're going to cancel your subscription to Salon for pointing out serious flaws in a article by anyone - liberal or conservative - then I think you lose your right to complain about compliant, special-interest driven media.
This might not be so important if not for the fact that so many Dems are convinced that the election was stolen, and by implication that if we have fairer elections, we Dems will win. If you think this way, I have one piece of exit poll data that really should be taken seriously - from the CNN.com 2004 election poll. Among voters who said their vote was mostly "for your candidate" rather than "against the other candidate", voters went 59-40 for Bush in the first category, 70-30 for Kerry in the latter category. Considering that the "for your candidate" category was 69% of voters, barely more than one quarter of voters were enthusiastic about Kerry as their president. You can argue how much of that was due to candidate, campaign, party platform, or SwiftBoaters, but if you really care about who wins next time, those are the arguments to have.