Is the USA short of SWEs?

Reposted from Quora, to be sure.  Lightly edited.

Is there actually a STEM shortage that requires foreign workers? If so why are Americans lacking in these fields?

• EDIT: please also read Kathryn Berck's answer to Why does the US have an H1-B Visa program when we have great universities and a well educated population? to find that some of the statements I make below are misleading.
• This is kind of an addendum to Ernest W. Adams' excellent answer to Is there actually a STEM shortage that requires foreign workers? If so why are Americans lacking in these fields?
• Consumer warning: I am in the middle of reading Why Nations Fail so I reflect some of its thesis.

TL;DR: the industry that employs these damn’ foreigners also provides some of the fastest progress and best value in the USA.

Many excellent Americans, including a girlfriend of mine, a crush of mine, and others I’ve known, have gone into the legal and medical professions even though they mostly had the brains to go into STEM. Why? Those two professions have high barriers to entry, reinforced in the USA by government-mandated licencing that gives foreign credentials much less weight than domestic. This boosts the incomes of Americans in those professions artificially, for which they express their gratitude to their lawmakers every election season in the customary manner $$$.

The only STEM field I know well, software, has no such barriers or licences that matter, and will accept anyone who can demonstrate the needed ability. I’ve worked alongside engineers from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Lebanon, Mexico, … Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, but nobody from Western Sahara, Yemen, nor Zimbabwe. (I myself am from England.) Do I need to spell it out? Oh: I just did.

I expect even the Canadian would have found it tough to qualify as an attorney in most states of the US. Almost for sure, the others would have found it very tough. So my ex-girlfriend and others command famine prices for their talent, and the famine is caused, just like real famines where people starve to death, by government policy. Does anyone care to suggest that the USA spends too little on medical care and lawsuits?

Now, if you think Google or Amazon or Apple or Facebook are charging famine prices for the software they provide, or that American software is less good than what other countries build, please shout it from the rooftops. The only criticism I hear (living in Silicon Valley) is that these giants pay their engineers too much and thereby drive house prices up, causing gentrification etc. Certainly house prices have climbed. Don’t tell me that people who buy a three bedroom house for a million bucks are underpaid.  But these foreigners are paying such prices, out of their income from work.


Footnote: if you want to shout from the rooftops about privacy on the Web, you have every right to do so, but the aforementioned companies would not offer you any better privacy if they were forced to hire fewer engineers at higher pay.

as I bite my nails tonight

... I am reminded of some frogs

battleships: a widespread misconception

Does this look as if I'm reposting another answer that I wrote for quora.com? It should. Enjoy.

Why has the concept of battleships/pocket battleships been wiped out of modern military warfare?

The vulnerability of unescorted battleships to air attack is not the reason. A battleship could be part of a carrier group, protected by the carrier's air umbrella, and be at no more risk than the carrier itself, besides being a smaller target. (Test run of this argument: the advent of torpedoes did not make battleships obsolete, but did mean that they needed a screen of destroyers.)

The true reason is that big guns are no longer the longest-range weapons afloat, nor do they deliver the heaviest warheads. Since the 1940s, naval battles are fought at ranges of hundreds of km using aircraft and guided missiles, or if at close range, stealthily using torpedoes and depth charges. I hope I don't need to elaborate on why it's hard to fire a 16-inch shell stealthily from underwater. More importantly, the long ranges of aircraft and missiles have made 16-inch shells as irrelevant as pikes and cutlasses became during the 19th century. If an opposing ship is close enough to you that you can use these weapons, the fight is already over. As for thick armour, conventional bombs can be built far bigger and deadlier than a 16-inch shell, so a ship that could "just sit there and take it" would have to be about as big as a shopping mall or football stadium, and would not be much more manoeuvrable. The best defence (for a warship) really is attack, or sometimes escape.

The theism question

I posted this some weeks ago on Quora, but thought a wider audience might care to see it. I've edited some material that isn't very relevant, and fooled with the punctuation.

I did not and do not think that theism is necessarily irrational. It follows rationally enough, from premises that I regard as made-up.

<digression>

Please bear with me. I owe this observation to a perceptive former student of my father's.

The private schools in England, where I was educated, had spent the 19th century, and probably the 18th, churning out empire-builders: teaching boys to be the military officers and civilian administrators who would turn "Wider still and wider // Shall thy bounds be set" from poem into reality. After 1947, such people were no longer required, but high technology certainly was, as was culture, so the schools set themselves a new task: to churn out creative and innovative individuals. Eccentricity had long been tolerated, but now it was to be encouraged. Traditions and ancient assumptions were still important, but they could be questioned. And the questions deserved thoughtful answers.

</digression>

As a young boy, I knew I had to look both ways before crossing the street, and I knew why. I knew that it was customary, when eating, to hold the knife in the right hand, because that was the dominant hand, but since I was left-handed, I often held it in my left hand. I knew that the school began each day with a hymn and a prayer, then a few announcements by the head teacher. I didn't need to ask why the announcements were made. And I never got a serious answer about why the hymn was sung and the prayer whispered. Tradition, to be sure, and pretty-sounding tunes, but that was all. I tried to sing in tune.

When I got older and could ask better questions, there was the same shortage of answers ... of thoughtful answers. God the creator? Sorry, we more or less understand how the Earth formed from a disc of gas and dust. God the lawgiver? The school makes the rules for us boys, and Parliament makes them for grown-ups. Redeemer? My parents love me; I'm not a Sinner with a capital S, just occasionally naughty. Celestial cop? not when the other boys are getting away with X, Y, and Z every day. And so on.

I don't ask anyone to believe that my thinking on this subject was watertight, or that it is so today. But a massive weight of evidence pointed, in my mind, to theism being an excuse to sing pretty songs and occasionally threaten people with divine vengeance for doing things that, for the most part, weren't especially evil. Oh, and give comfort to the insecure by telling them that, yes, in the end the good guys will win. But my limited knowledge of history already had shown that the only way to make the good guys always win was to use a flexible definition of "good". When I was a boy, we were deep in the Cold War, whose least unlikely outcome seemed to be that a modus vivendi would solidify over generations whereby the USSR didn't actually threaten us, nor we them. There did not seem to be much that gods could do to help. Certainly they had not yet done so. (I hadn't read or heard of Judges 1:19.)

Summary: theism as a hypothesis could account for only a few things, which already had more detailed secular explanations.

There also seem[ed] to be real advantages accruing to people who "had no need of that hypothesis". If you used physics instead of Genesis 1, you not only knew why the Earth and Sun were here, but you could build aircraft. If Parliament made the laws, it could change them in response to new developments (when I was born, England had only the feeblest of laws against drunken driving, and none against advertising tobacco products. Just to be clear, on principle I believe that if a product can legally be sold, it should also legally be advertised, but that's a separate argument.) As for the good guys winning, we beat Hitler with a little help from the USA, we beat Napoleon with a little help from Russia, and the USSR could be contained if not beaten. Except in Vietnam. Yes, I supported that war, like the parents in The Free Electric Band Lyrics .  Being an atheist did not make me all-wise, nor does it now.

One more thing. My schools emphasised Latin and Greek, and those subjects brought classical mythology in their wake, which was fun. I was perhaps better acquainted with the Twelve Olympians than with the Three in One And One In Three. It did not escape my attention that the gods of Homer, with their all-too-human frailties, were now deemed worthy of a place on the fiction shelves. Clearly it had been possible for intelligent, cultured, civilised, technological people to sincerely worship deities that existed only in their imaginations. Equally clearly, people were much the same two or three millennia later as they had been in those times. QED.