Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

Well, it was choice between doing that or sticking a pencil in my eye. Mere milliseconds before halfway blinding myself, I thought of a third option ... shutting the fuck up.

 

If Cal Tech were looking to hire faculty members to research the cure for cancer or to find a zero polutant means of mass transportation, would hiring someone with the best qualifactions be the only factor or should geopgraphic diversty be a consideration.

Perfect SAT scores and and straight A's do not necessarily equate to the best student nor does it equate to the smartest person to graduate. But if you are looking to educate the best students in the fields of medicine and engineering I'm sure that I would want the absolute best possible student. And someone exlain why a student's geographic or demographic profile would help him find a cure for cancer

 

I was talking about students, not faculty. I think the elite schools like to spread out their reach. Have a friend who is a counselor at a private school and when parents ask him what's the best way to ensure their kid gets in Harvard, he tells them if that's all they care about, they should move to North Dakota.

 

Sounds like a Gannett mainstreaming policy.

 

About 15 years ago, my friend's sister's boyfriend's parents moved into a school district with a Gary, Indiana, address for college application purposes, as I recall. Or at least rented an apartment there and sent him to school at that high school. He ended up going to Notre Dame, and, if I remember correctly, she said he did not think he would have gotten in without the lower socioeconomic school district attached to his application. (He's white.)

 

Thank you, Simone.

 

Of course not. Didn't you read his post? Borrowing is BAD!

 

Really? You should have included a picture of Capt. Obvious with that post.

I have long said the victorious North should have marked off squares of property for disenfranchised blacks right after the war. Start with the northwest corner of South Carolina, the first state to secede. The first black chosen in a lottery gets first crack at the property squares. And so on.

That and a quarter buys a cup of coffee -- none of it happened.

 

BTW, I held the elevator door for a black person today AND I went to a black-owned business.

The gold medal factory is grinding out a pair as we speak.

 

It's how the money is spent.

Take the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge for example:

The project was nearly a quarter of a century in the making. The old bridge partially collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Politics and public planning delayed construction for 13 years. It took another 11 years to build the new bridge. But the excitement was tempered by the cost of the majestic single tower, self-anchored suspension bridge. It cost five times over its original estimate. Today out on the street, it's not hard to find people who say it's a beautiful bridge, but they wonder whether the public got what it paid for.

Bay Area Commuters Angered Over Mismanagement Of Bridge Project

It cost $6.4 billion, and the folks running the project consider it a success:

Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, says public frustration over the cost and quality of the bridge is justified. But ultimately, he says, the project was successful.

 

Because our kitchen is still under reconstruction, I brought hope dinner last night from Panda Express. Today, I'm feeling especially successful.

 

It really isn't that complicated. An Asian American doesn't bring as much to the table in terms of variety as an actual Asian.

Like that line from that terrible remake of Karate Kid when Will Smith's kid is asking the Chinese guy on his flight questions in Chinese and the Chinese guy responds back that he grew up in Detroit and doesn't know the language.

Being black in America means you have lived a different life than a black person who was born and raised in, say, England.

He or she doesn't have a lifetime's worth of experience in dealing with other Americans.

If, of course, you don't think that the black American experience isn't any different than the white American experience you would think that it was a crock of shit and confusing.

But if you actually acknowledge that the two cultures, despite being in the same location, can be quite different it begins to make more sense.

Partially related, a friend in higher education refers to people who attended the same school for all their degrees as "inbreds" and thinks that by attending the same university, they don't have the experience of going to different schools for undergrad, masters, Ph.D, post-doctoral research. He puts the "inbreds" in the do not hire pile regardless of race.

My Ph.D equipped brother has said that attending different schools enhanced his employment opportunities.

He's a climate scientist, by the way, and says the world is warming to the point that it will catch on fire someday and no one will be able to put it out.