Western executives should hang his head in shame, resign, and give back all their fabulous salaries benefits and stock options. They have all FAILED their companies, their industries, and their nations. Their employees have seen this... often THEY were forced to train their foreign replacements as their jobs were "outsourced" to China and these execs ordered their people to train China to make their products and hand over the design documents. The past several decades have seen the West infested by a tsunami of executive incompetence as idiots who loved to golf and fly on executive jets demonstrated levels of foolishness not seen in a thousand years... they've made "fiddling while Rome burns" look good in comparison.

If you as an exec in a Western nation with Western workers and infrastructure politics and economics cannot easily out-perform a top-down managed communist dictatorship in quality, innovation, and price then you are a failure. No pile of sheepskins stamped with "MBA" is a match for a competitive spirit, a passion to learn and innovate, and a firm grasp on how to motivate and mobilize a western workforce in a market-driven free society.

On November 9th of 2016 he publicly claimed the stock markets were plunging in response to Trump's 1st election, and in projecting when the markets would recover said "a first-pass answer is never" - anybody who listened to this guy and panic-sold their stocks missed out on a great bull market as the Dow under Trump went from about 19000 to about 31000. Krugman let his personal animus towards the Bad Orange Man and his opposition to the POLITICAL policies infect his economic analysis/predictions and it probably cost a lot of his supporters a lot of cash, thus exposing a hazard in blindly following a credentialed "expert", particularly one you believe in because his politics align with yours.

This same guy beclowned himself praising Biden for his hands-on economic successes.

He always wants people to call him a "Nobel Prize winning economist", but even here he is being a bit dishonest. In his will, Alfred Nobel established five prizes: [1] physics, [2] chemistry, [3] physiology or medicine, [4] literature, and [5] peace. Note: there is NO Nobel Prize in Economics in that list. In 1968, the Central Bank of Sweden invented a "Prize in Economic Sciences" and handed a pile of money to the Nobel Foundation and asked them to administer the prize along side the Nobel Prizes. This is the award Krugman won - the Central Bank of Sweden's Prize in Economic Sciences. It is NOT a prize the late Alfred Nobel created or funded. If Trump created a prize in "Biglyness" and handed a pile of cash to the Nobel people and convinced them to administer it, there would not suddenly be a "Nobel Prize in Biglyness"

I do not allow any computers in my business that hold important data to touch the internet. If the newest bloatware OS from Micro$oft is no longer going to allow even installation without an online account, then that OS is now banned from my company.

I'd already mostly moved off of Microsoft with their endless cycles of new versions that do not support old hardware (driving new hardware purchases to replace completely functional hardware which, presumably, I'm supposed to toss straight into the landfills). Every new version since XP seems to just introduce more junk I do not need, while requiring higher clock rates, more memory, and more disk space just to be as fast as before, eliminates compatibility with perfectly functional but suddenly "obsolete" peripherals, and pushes newer versions of the installed applications, which in-turn introduce newer versions of file formats that force more business-wide upgrades to avoid incompatibilities between desktops... in a never-ending cycle that provides more money for MS and the other vendors but no actual benefit for the person spending all that money - me.

Am I the only one who sees no actual benefit in the desktop changes that have occurred since the very nice and clean Windows2000 UI?

Is it somehow odd that I see the artificial push to make everybody landfill mountains of perfectly functional hardware just because Microsoft needs a new infusion of cash from another upgrade cycle as something less that "green"?

Have we reached a point where everybody is so used to data breaches, ransonmware, etc that nobody cares any longer that the biggest companies are turning everything into spyware, paranoid licensing schemes, and pay-to-keep-running extortion machines that make data security impossible?

Now, if only Linux and BSD would find a way to better support a lot of the peripherals Microsoft pretends are obsolete, particularly in the printer, plotter, and scanner areas...

Whether you love Trump or Despise him, the simple fact is that his presence in the political arena broke the brains of a lot of people and the results have produced a number of spin-off effects. Some people see Trump and see a patriotic successful businessman, others see him as a rude, ignorant, uncultured fascist. People in this latter category, discarded all traditions in a reaction to him, seeing themselves as defenders of civilization and their every action as justified. People who supported Trump saw the others as going insane. We developed two dramatically different worldviews while looking at the exact same ink blot.

After Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, the permanent political class in government went insane and decided to throw out all the old rules in an effort to block his election, then prevent his being sworn-in, then destroy his administration, then try to eliminate his legacy, and then try to keep him from getting back into power. Nearly every person in the top levels of corporate media in the US has ties to people in these un-elected government positions, so the "mainstream media" in the US jumped into the effort and threw their credibility onto the flaming altar of their politics. This was not sustainable, as the public (even many of those politically aligned with the effort) began to see very big holes and fallacies exposed in the narratives being pumped.

We had major news outlets repeating stories over and over again about "Trump Russia Collusion" with formerly-respected journalists getting fired after being caught lying on air about basic facts. On-air talent and print reporters were routinely telling people Trump was going to be convicted of major crimes, up to and including treason, and that he'd be in an orange jump suit in prison. As this was happening, actual government reports were spilling-out proving the infamous "Steele Dossier" was just a pile of made-up garbage put together by a British spy and his Russian spy buddies while on the payroll of the Clinton campaign and it was never going to lead to any successful prosecution. This angered the right, who saw the media falsely attacking Trump and lying about him, but it ALSO angered the left who felt they'd been mislead and had their hopes dishonestly raised. This was a big bi-partisan failure for the press.

COVID was all tangled-up in the Trump fight and probably had an even bigger impact. Initially, the Trump people bragged the new experimental vaccines were available in record time, but the press down-played the vaccines and even advanced the anti-Trump narrative that they could not be trusted because they were developed under Trump. After Biden got in, the press flipped the narrative to be that the vaccines were perfect and every person had to be REQUIRED to take them and the Biden admin was making sure they were free as a great national health project. People were told to not, mask, then to mask, then to double-mask, and to "social distance", etc. Every new pronouncement was pushed by the media who were NOT doing their traditional job of being skeptical and asking hard questions. As the government lines about masks, vaccine effectiveness, booster effectiveness, etc kept changing the press just kept acting as a cheerleader, and ended-up looking positively Orwellian as they pseudo-facts and narratives kept shifting with nary an acknowledgement that anything had changed. Instead of the press looking into the arguments of critics, the press helped the government suppress any critics and any contrary information. Now that we know how messed-up all those narratives were and what a disaster those vaccines were, including that they were largely developed BEFORE the outbreak and the pharma people were less than honest with both the Trump and Biden admins, it leads to even more questions about the role of the press and whether it can be trusted at all.

The loss of press credibility is like a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Journalists would love to blame it on politicians using them as a punching bag, or failures of the public to understand them, or any number of other things, but what they need is a healthy dose of introspection. They went full-on partisan and sold out all their principles in the process, abandoning even the most-basic ideas of journalism- and everybody can see it; It cannot be unseen. They could not correct themselves at the time because they'd started with an already heavy political bias but then discarded anybody whose politics were impure, so they lost the in-the-room counter arguments and voices that might have cause them to return to skepticism and more balanced reporting. At the peak of the anti-Trump hysteria, NOBODY in the news rooms was a person who saw the inkblot differently from the rest, so there was no brake handle on the runaway train car. They'll only recover credibility when they come clean and admit to what they did, and bring people back into the newsrooms who are not in the same groupthink. I'm not holding my breath on that one and do not see any path for the press to recover.

Higher CO2 content in atmosphere -> more plant growth -> more deep green viewed from above = "darker"

That's just a place to look. We'll figure it out; it's certainly not some grand cosmic magic.

You rant about fossils...so what. That has NOTHING to do with the argument, unless you are now claiming we have the fossilized remains of every single jay that ever existed and can, therefore prove that this is the very first instance of a naturally-occurring hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay in the history of the planet. You lack every single bird's remains, and therefore your argument is completely unrelated to what I said.

All of your religious ranting about the true faith of AGW also has no bearing on what I posted; Climate change can be real (as I believe... the climate has NEVER been static) and it can be human-drive (as you clearly believe) and it STILL has zero bearing on what I posted. The truth of climate change and any causes has nothing to do with whether this is the first-ever such naturally occurring hybrid.

You folks who are ideologically focused upon "climate change" or the Bad Orange Man, or related stuff need to calm down, get a grip, and start noticing that not every damned thing on the internet is an offense to your religion. Some things are just stand-alone arguments and can be discussed without dragging-in mental illness. I was simply pointing out that the article is deceptive and seems to try to convince the reader that something unprecedented has happened, and that it is tied to a current pet theory (perhaps tied to politics, or grant funding, or popularity in the faculty lounge... I did not ho into that) but that there's no way to actually know if this is unprecedented, and that it's therefore silly to even tie it to the current scientific cause celeb.

As to geologic science... I took several courses way back in my university days, purely out of self-interest and in preference over fluffier optional subjects, so I'm perfectly comfortable with it as a science. I also have a family friend who is a geologist by profession. So, no, I don't think the field is voodoo, it's a solid field and it's more critical more human activities than most people understand. I do however object to ANY field of science being abused for ideological purposes, or anybody in a field abusing science while grinding a personal axe. In that strain, I have no issue at all with most of the field, but DO object when people take something like climate data estimated from core samples and place it into the same chart with data from satellites etc with ZERO common calibration and then claim to be able to work in tenths of a degree of temperature precision. THAT is not science at all, and that behavior would have earned a person a grade of "F" on a paper back when I was taking science courses. When climate studies became a big thing and a place government and NGOs were pouring buckets of money, it affected science, in my opinion, very negatively. A whole generation of science people found ways to tie their work to climate and thus got access to all those revenue streams. It's precisely the effect the late President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address right after the bit about a growing "military industrial complex", and not surprisingly is a part of the speech the modern political left never plays/watches/reads.

It's always interesting when we see a thing for the first time and (hopefully) properly document it, and perhaps even study it. This expands human knowledge and who knows what future benefit may come from the new information.

Sadly, it comes to us wrapped improperly in the propaganda of "climate change" alarmism. By dragging climate change into it, we're all supposed to see it as a warning sign of an impending apocalypse and it's likely intended to end-up as an argument in the related political fights. As with all the "hottest day ever recorded" or "most snowfall in 24 hours ever recorded" or any related headline, it exposes a larger truth about just how insignificant it is. The Earth has been orbiting the sun for [presumably] about 6 billion years [plus or minus whatever adjustments scientists will come up with in the future] and humans have been making scientific records of climate and of various plant and animal species for a REMARKABLY small part of that time. We have global climate data [and therefore, RECORDS] for something like 1/60000000 of the Earth's history and data on plants and animals of the entire world for even less of that. Indeed, we're STILL discovering species we never knew existed. Our records are simply INSIGNIFICANT in the big picture.

So, yes, we apparently have "the first DOCUMENTED wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay" (that's nice), but that's NOT the same thing as "the first wild hybrid between a blue jay and a green jay" (a complete unknowable). This is not even CLOSE to definitive... probably 99.999% of all blue and green jays have never been seen by humans, as for most of the planet's history most of the planet was unexplored and most of the birds were unseen by humans.

for you. If they can drop all borders, get everybody onto a universal electronic currency, institute a global tax on the middle class, and do away with pesky stuff like the US Constitution with its Bill of Rights (rights granted to individuals by a creator which government may not mess with, rather than rights lent to people by a government), then everything will be a constant drumbeat of race-to-the-bottom rhetoric by rich elites who have no intention of joining average folks in their new status at the bottom.

Don't want to work 7 days per week? Too bad, there are people in China who will do it!

Don't want a 15 hour work day? Too bad, there are people in some place in Africa who will!

Don't want to surrender a kidney so a rich guy can recover from drowning his in liquor? Too bad, there are prisoners in China having theirs harvested.

Don't want to eat bugs? Too bad, there are others who will!

There's literally no end to this evil. Klaus Schwab has famously told young people that, in the future, "you will own nothing and you will be happy". What this type of jerk is NOT saying is that you may not BE happy but you will say you are in order to avoid time in the gulags. The other thing they don't want you to notice is that THEY will not own nothing; they plan to own EVERYTHING and be actually happy as they lord over you like the kings and slave owners of old.

Separate states within a nation serve the same VITAL role as separate nations within the world.... FIREWALLS. When a bad idea gets taken for a trial run in one state, it can ruin that state but other states might avoid (and hopefully learn from) the error. Similarly, bad ideas can sink a nation and oppress its people, but the damage can be limited to that nation, and the presence of other nations provides places for humanity (and better ideas) to endure. Should the globalists idiots ever succeed, a single bad idea might sink the entire human race and nobody would be able to escape to a better place. These people and their ideas are the most dangerous and toxic humanity has ever come up with; they must be resoundingly defeated.

They invent NOTHING

They build NOTHING

They improve NOTHING

They just loot and pillage and strip companies, damaging suppliers, employees, and customers of already mature businesses somebody else created, then they spit out the husk hoping that some poor chumps with their retirement funds invested in poorly-run 401Ks will buy the wreckage and lose their money.

The people who build and run these outfits are soul-free maggots who pretend they are somehow adding value and efficiency, but the past several decades are the proof that this is not so. These are the insufferable selfish jerks whose bad-faith actions are routinely and unfairly attributed to ALL businesses and to all free market operators. Think: Mitt Romney, who pretended that looting businesses was the same as building businesses and who identified as an "entrepreneur". They are fundamentally destructive, but they're probably giving lots of "campaign contributions" [*cough* bribes] to politicians of all parties in order to prevent any real clamp-down on their dastardly practices.

Here's a chart from 2010 to 2021 (a bit down the page) which will suit this argument well. You can find others going back to the seventies if you like and it will not help your assertion a bit. I'm using the short table for ease. Surely we can all agree (for the current purposes) with the left that Trump, the Bad Orange Man(TM) is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER and thus his era would have the most draconian cuts those evil Republican scum ever implemented, right? Well LOOK AT THE TABLE. Gaze upon the massive reduction in education spending during his 1st term (2017-2020)!!!

Oh, goodness gracious, (or Golly!, or WTF?) pick your expression to align with your politics....

Yep. That's right. Education spending goes up and up and up every year no matter who is in the White House and no matter which party has the Presidency, or the Congress, or the state Governorship, etc. (well, technically, it dipped a bit during one presidency of the post 1970s... Barack Obama's, but it was not by much and probably did not matter at all) Education spending is the single most-popular normal government spending, other than social security and medicare, in the country and BOTH parties just keep increasing it. The constant chorus that Republicans "gut education spending" (like, presumably, some sort of fish...the imagery is probably useful) is just a huge political lie that works really well for the left when it energizes the teachers to get out there and support Democrat political candidates.

I'm not pointing this out because I think the Republicans are any better on education (I do not believe they are). I'm pointing it out because I believe that Objective reality matters and we CANNOT have honest debates and CANNOT get to any good solutions if we cannot all at least start from a common set of FACTS. I also think we've had enough extreme rhetoric lately, and we all ought to tap the breaks on it - it leads to incredibly dark places. No matter how much we each might like it, we DO NOT each get our own truths.

First, those teachers are, in may places paid quite well when you consider their annual pay and benefits compared to other people of the same educational level and then take into account that they work a LOT fewer days per year. industrial employees in this country, for example, do NOT take months off every year.

Second, and it's a BIGGIE, is that most teachers in the US are government employees, and their unions have negotiated INSANE payouts that most Americans are completely unaware of. The typical teacher in the US can retire after 20 or so years of working... at FULL PAY, and with inflation adjustments. So, if a person starts teaching at 25, retires at 46 or even 50, they often take NO PAY CUT and still keep excellent tax-payer-funded insurance. If they live to be over 70, as a great many do, they end up having taken so much money from the taxpayers that they were effectively paid well over TWICE the amount they were complaining about during their 20 years of teaching. Oh, and since the pay was effectively spread-out over twice the years, they are taxed a lot less on their total haul. I'm not aware of very many private sector employees with anything like that sort of pay and benefits scheme. I have a couple of former teacher relatives who retired the moment they realized they'd suffer NO loss of income by retiring and would no longer have to commute or face a room of kids.

There are 2 points you listed I will at least partially agree on: #4 is too true; the modern school is far too willing to back down in the face of an upset parent. I suspect it's partially due to fears of various ethnic/cultural matters arising (not ACTUALLY arising, just fears of them, and no specific ethnic group presumed) but it's also another problem: earlier generations of PARENTS would back-up the teacher when Johnny or Susie acted badly, and Johnny or Susie KNEW this and behaved in class (this was probably assisted by things like dress codes that used to be in effect). I also agree on #7 that there's entirely too much stuff that can be taught at home that the schools are instead wasting time pushing for political/ideological reasons; the educational system seems bent on creating "the new man" in a dream of creating a Star Trekkian future, but no such future is possible if the kiddies are going to be illiterates with no math skills, no historical knowledge, and no ability to reason.

Parents being satisfied that the schools are good babysitters while they're away at work is no indicator of the quality of the teaching or the curriculum. The fact that the parents have a brief encounter with the teacher, perhaps once, and the teacher seems friendly and the facilities look nice is also not a meaningful gage of anything.

This is why parents approve of THEIR schools while the test results show worse results. Of course, by THIS point, the current generation of parents were, themselves, dumbed-down by their educations in that system a few years earlier and are therefore even less capable of objectively measuring the quality.

It's NOT the same thing, but it is in some ways related to the stats that always show that most people hate congress, but like their own representative...

Anybody who has been in business, particularly in a technical field, for a number of years and has dealt with wave after wave of new employees over the years has probably seen the results of the education system up-close-and-personal.

It ain't pretty.

Over the past 20 years in particular, I have come to dread having to bring in a new young employee; it's like each year brings a new level of stupid. I've had junior people in the past several years hunkering down in their work areas, thinking they're not being seen and heard, calling former classmates and begging for help with tasks that the person in that same spot 10 years earlier would have easily accomplished. I've reached a point where I no longer want people educated in the public schools and instantly favor a home-schooled person. The home-schooled nearly always have better math and English skills, better work ethic, and are more creative and less cellphone addicted. I'll also favor the self-taught over the college-taught any day of the week. I think we've reached a critical point where many profs haven no real world working experience in the fields they're teaching, and are thus pumping-out grads with the wrong skills, used to using the wrong tools and the wrong methods. I'm not interested in wasting the time of senior employees teaching remedial classes to the unskilled with diplomas.

Oh, and I REFUSE to talk to the parents of any of these people. Previous generations went off and fought in SHOOTING WARS at ages 16-20 without mommy and daddy, but the current generation seems to think it's appropriate to get support from mommy and daddy after their college years. [eyeroll]

There was NO drop in education spending during the Reagan years... in fact the ONLY drop in K-12 spending in the US on a year-to-year basis was under Barack Obama. That drop is even more notable when you look at elementary & secondary education, but of course the secondary is not so much what this article is about. Year after year after year, education spending is the thing government has the easiest time raising taxes to fund; parents are often willing to vote for higher taxes even when they're already struggling financially. If you look at those charts and then look at student performance over those same years, you'll realize you're looking at a SHOCKING level of failure, and it only gets worse when you realize that the educational system has, for decades, been trying to hide this by periodically making the testing easier. If the tests had remained at the same difficulty level over the decades, it would be impossible for anybody not in a straight jacket in a padded cell to defend.

Just because some political jerks TALK big about education it does NOT mean they increase funding for it, and just because some others talk about reforming education or cutting the educational bureaucracy, it does NOT mean they're cutting total funding. We have a deeply-entrenched educational bureaucracy in this country that, along with their allies in the two massive teachers unions, squeals like a stuck pig and pretends students will be harmed any time anybody tries to reduce the administrator-to-student ratio. The fact that they're ranting and raving does not, however, mean ANYTHING is being done to reduce the dollars allocated per student as the actual data illustrates.

People need to learn to stop being such easy meat puppets for the political activists within government.

Incidentally, the fact that the standardized brick-and-mortar school house in America got standardized early in the industrial revolution in order to put every American kid into an educational machine and mold them into cookie-cutter diploma-certified high school grads that employers could stuff into any positions in industry like standardized gears in a machine does NOT mean that this is the best model for educating a human being. The one-size-fits-all model served BUSINESS interests well, and probably made military training easier in the era of the draft, but it cannot possibly have served the best interests of the individual human minds being trained in it and by now we probably should write it off as obsolete. The fact that this particular form of schooling serves a large number of ADULTS who work in the system may well be nice for them, but that also does not make it the ideal system that cannot be messed with. The kids should be first, no matter how many adult education workers get hurt feelings or even pink slips. After all, these are the very people who so often insist that THEY care more about the kids than everyone else.

Far too many people were told to go into debt and attend college and get that magic degree, only to find themselves in debt, and working jobs that either require no degree or do not line-up with the degree they got. Also, most people who went to college had the experience of being required to take a bunch of junk courses they had no interest in, and which were unrelated tho their majors, supposedly in the interest of becoming a "well-rounded" person - but are aware that many of these classes were more of a partisan indoctrination (politically or culturally) rather than being the traditional classical education stuff.

You can tell people all day long that they and their kids and grand kids all NEED those college degrees and all that debt, but as long as they see with their own eyes that this is not actually needed, large numbers of people will not buy-in.

Incidentally, before somebody replies critically, Yes I DID indeed serve my time in college, and I think it's highly important for people to do it IF THEY ARE TAKING THE RIGHT MAJOR FOR A GOOD CAREER. We NEED doctors and engineers and scientists etc with degrees, but we do NOT need carpenters, plumbers, store security people, baristas, etc with useless fluff degrees and so much debt they'll never be able to buy a house and live comfortably. If somebody is going to end-up in a blue collar career, they should not be wasting 4 years of their lives and going deeply into debt with college, and it's abusive to counsel them to the contrary. We sadly developed a system in which a lot of people have been told that blue collar jobs are awful and only stupid people do them, and this is wrong on both points.