Sample bias at our local public school

In our town that provides sanctuary to any undocumented immigrant who can afford a $1 million house on an $800,000 zoning minimum two-acre lot, the middle school teachers asked the students to write up “My Family’s Immigration Story”. These were then displayed in the hallway:

(Immigrants to Massachusetts killed or displaced nearly all of the natives, so 100 percent of the students in the school were able to come up with an immigration story.)

One of the above guys came here in 1853 with $12 and eventually owned a 440-acre farm. The latest batch of immigrants shouldn’t have any trouble doing that… as long as we can find another continent to steal from natives!

These are awesome examples of sample bias/selection bias. To get people to think that low-skill immigration will lead to economic growth, ask people who live in $2 million houses to write about their immigrant ancestors.

Separately, the teachers ran an event featuring five speakers talking about their immigration stories:

The majority of non-citizens were on welfare as of 2014. How many of the five folks invited talked about their use of means-tested subsidized housing, health insurance, food stamps, or Obamaphones? It turned out not to be a representative sample…

Why would unionized public school teachers have an incentive to promote immigration and, therefore, population growth? Although their compensation, including pension, is guaranteed, they are at risk of being laid off if the population of school-age children shrinks. They might be able to demand higher salaries if the population of school-age children grows.

Some other fun stuff from the visit. Profound philosophical questions raised by personal locker signage:

PRIDE march hampered by chainmail:

Art from the adjacent elementary school:

Related:

24 thoughts on “Sample bias at our local public school

  1. The non-citizens collecting benefits from the government are just doing it for sport. Why pay taxes when you don’t have to?

  2. The most obnoxious feature of American Left is their insistence on brainwashing children. Turns out, it’s the primary method for spreading their murderous cult.

    • Comparing the American Left to Cambodian genocides, is this the new Godwin’s Law?

      Phil it’s truly sad you encourage and feed these lunatics with your rhetoric.

    • Here are the pics. Enjoy the pics!

      Not flossing enough: https://images.app.goo.gl/aJDTvseJ9rd4y6oS9
      Social harmony in action: that’s where you find folks of all social groups: https://images.app.goo.gl/foEsEPcFCTqz2XnB6
      Not being sufficiently enthusiastic about socialism is bad for you: https://images.app.goo.gl/KKC1fEYNFA2PMSUn8
      Some people did something: https://images.app.goo.gl/McMXunUuaWnrowye6
      No divorce lawyer for him: https://images.app.goo.gl/5KRN4CK6q9ttv2dd8
      On line for a dollop of caviar and a free IPhone: https://images.app.goo.gl/XNevpxj1hGoGrjyk8
      Not a progressive ethnicity, (Chinese students, take note): https://images.app.goo.gl/mjLesmVpPAiqQyHz6
      Identified as a wrong (not sufficiently progressive) gender: https://images.app.goo.gl/p4iFYpix9nP5r3DMA
      Children are our future: https://images.app.goo.gl/sAayWuD1PJRSzjqk8

    • Not at all. Who’s the true socialist here?
      I have pics! Pics are waiting for the forum moderation.
      Also, how do you know it’s me who is lunatic? Ever visited a concentration camp? Can you name a nation that had Socialism in their constitution and no concentration camps?
      Long live the Democratic Kampuchea!

    • TrollsOutInForce: I don’t share the perspective of all of the folks who comment, but that’s the beauty of the Web!

      I wouldn’t use the term “American Left” because it implies that there are American politicians and voters with coherent political and social goals/plans. Republicans and Democrats both seem to support crony capitalism, but they favor different cronies. I wouldn’t call one “Left” and one “Right” as made sense in Europe in the 1960s.

      I also wouldn’t use the term “troll”. From what I have seen on Facebook, “troll” is used to describe someone with whom one disagrees and yet cannot prove wrong with any kind of logic or evidence.

      I don’t think it is unfair to say that socialism has often devolved in a “murderous cult.” At the same time, it seems unlikely that the local unionized schoolteachers are passionate about much beyond a fatter paycheck and lighter work responsibilities.

      Does averros think differently? I hope he/she does! I am not the boss of everyone.

    • @TrollsOutInForce:
      > Comparing the American Left to Cambodian genocides, is this the new Godwin’s Law?
      Well, Godwin’s law is all about Nazis. If the shoe fits, wear it.

      I agree with @Pol Pot Jr that the only observable difference between the modern American Left and the Khmer Rouge is that the former have no guts to fight with their life for implementing it in all honesty. (The slogans are all in place.) Life is so good: why risk it for a perfect concentration camp? in everything else, the rhetoric is seemingly identical.

      Let me repeat the challenge presented by @Pol Pot Jr: please name a single nation that has had socialism in their constitution and no concentration camps.

    • Let me repeat that if you think the majority of the U.S. voting public is a “murderous cult” then maybe that’s not a terribly productive viewpoint. Since that opinion is a-ok with the site author and people commenting, enjoy your the_donald and infowars level circle-jerk.

    • Here’s a typical lefty believing that is worth sacrificing dozens of millions of human lives for common good:

      “Did Hobsbawm really imagine, the writer Michael Ignatieff asked him, in a 1994 interview, that had “the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”

      Hobsbawm said yes, which got him into no end of trouble.”

      Naturally, the commie apologists in the New Yorker came up with excuses such as “the question of communism arose at a time when “mass murder and mass suffering [were] absolutely universal.” Millions were killed in imperial massacres, the Armenian genocide, and the First World War; then fascism marched and the suffering increased”.

      https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/eric-hobsbawm-the-communist-who-explained-history?utm_source=pocket-newtab

    • I’m “he” (not “she”), and unlike the half-educated American socialists who have zero clue where the second-hand ideas infesting their brains have been I do have As in my university transcript for courses like “Philosophy of Marxism/Leninism”, “Political Economy of Socialism”, and “Scientific Communism” – taught by the best authorities on the subject – the professors of Moscow State University. When I say that socialism is a murderous cult it is precisely because I know what I’m talking about.

      The reason for that is quite simple: the central tenet of socialism is that the interests of the collective (or, to me more precise, the self-appointed leaders) are above interests and lives of mere individuals. This implies that the individuals who dare to have a different opinion from what The Dear Leaders decreed should be suppressed by means of violence. Since such violence immediately provokes resistance, the socialists discover that (despite their desire for everything good and overall kumbaya and ever-lasting love) they will have to go and kill their opponents en mass to have a chance to keep a grip on power. GULAGs, Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, and such are not aberrations: they are unavoidable consequence of socialist core ideas. And let me tell you: go read their theoreticians. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Mussolini, Hitler, and such. They weren’t shy at all about their need to murder people who didn’t play along. It’s written very explicitly in their works.

      What you don’t understand is that the international socialism has been white-washed by American socialist academia… prancing around with swastikas and throwing sieg heils is rightfully considered totally unacceptable in a decent society. For some reason hammer and sickle are treated differently. Just to illustrate: everyone and his dog knows that Hitler and National Socialists (aka Nazis) murdered 6 million Jews. Just years before that a Jewish socialist ordered and supervised murder of 7 to 10 million Christians. I bet you never heard his name though it is not secret at all.

      A socialist of any stripe is no better than a Nazi. In fact, they’re not different at all, being members of adjacent branches of the same collectivist cult – the same cult which produced Munster Rebellion and other notorious orgies of sadism from French Great Terror to Cultural Revolution (the first act of contemporary remake playing now in American universities, just like it did in China).

      Oh, and American Left were fanboys of one A.Schicklgruber, until it became clear that they need to ditch it pronto or go swaying from lampposts. If you don’t know what America looked like during most of FDR’s reign, here are some very telling photos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute (fascists learned that from Americans – the actual Romans never used it; along with other fabulous inventions of American Left like eugenics). Nothing changed much after Germany was occupied – another 1 to 2 million Russian and Ukraininan POWs and refugees who survived Nazi concentration camps were shipped to the American Left’s new best pal, J.Dzhugashvili, to be shot and hanged on arrival (see: Operation Keelhaul). Excuse me for thinking that American Left are no different from their ideological brethren from over the pond. Even if they’re just ignorant young fools wearing t-shirts with the mug of Butcher of La Cabaña.

    • averros,
      100% that hard communists and American left are analogous: when I brought transcript of the some of the classes that you mentioned (“Marxism/Leninism”, “Scientific Communism”) I had a misfortune to sleep through and get a good grades due to drinking with young non-nerdy athletic lecturers to a US University Social Studies department I immediately got transfer credits for them in lieu of social science electives. Those were the only easy transfer credits, for others I had to take tests.

  3. More interesting would be kids telling stories about how their immigrant ancestors contributed to society (mine manually cleared rocks and bush to create farmland). These days the threshold for being a net contributor is $92k income.

  4. School must be strange, with all racial justice but no math being taught. There’s now a generation of gootube videos with millenials complaining about having no idea what a socket wrench is. It is better to be yourself & be a confirmed bachelor than be like everyone else & have meaningless arguments for 20 years followed by a divorce battle.

    • Why study math if you can use your lunch money to outsource your whole homework to the third-world kids and just collect the credentials? One does not need math or science in order to fight Nazis; you go to school in order to learn who to fight.

  5. Philg: (Immigrants to Massachusetts killed or displaced nearly all of the natives, so 100 percent of the students in the school were able to come up with an immigration story.)

    So can we say that current (undocumented) immigrants are working on displaying current natives, but without all the blood? They are simply using welfare etc.?

    This could be further improved if the innovative principles of being undocumented can be extended to home ownership — current owners have ownership documents, and others don’t, but if they just get into a house (are there immoral walls or doors or locks there?) they can claim to be undocumented homeowner?

    • Most of MA natives died because of epidemics brought by earlier fur and arms traders who did not occupy the land. First settlers settled on unoccupied land and cooperated and allied with natives with natives per admonitions of their spiritual leaders who deemed cooperation with their European governments a greater evil. They established property rights to protect both European settlers and natives. Europeans were helping natives and natives helped to protect Europeans from unfriendly tribes. As population density grew many conflicts took place as natives did not have concept of property law and used it only for temporary advantage. Finally, in 50 years, large bloody war erupted. British settlers fought with tribe that initially accepted them with help of tribe that initially attacked them. That last tribe was given rights to the land (and still has them). MA colonies fell under British rule because they requested British help and entered 100 year old depression that ended with American revolution.

  6. The disappearance of a healthy hardware startup ecosystem is a bigger issue than family-based immigration. The venture capital has effectively given up investing in physical electronics – those that work on device-level innovations, not sub assemblies that are glorified vehicles for selling time-wasting software. This, coupled with a continuous decline of public funding, results in fewer and fewer hardware startups.

  7. It’s disappointing the teachers missed an opportunity to be adventurous and explore the concept of immigration in other contexts. How about the Internet?

    At one time it was occupied by a tiny technocratic elite, there was little or no formal restriction on what might be said and security was not a major concern (see telnet, smtp, etc).

    But look at it today now that half the world has enriched the Internet. Spam, malware, spyware, 419 scams, censorship, capricious bans and unseemly squabbling are everywhere you look. That’s what I’d call making a difference!

    The children, I mean “students”, could offer stories like “My uncle scammed an old granny out of her life savings” or “My mom whipped up a backlash against someone and got them fired” or “My dad accidentally left the personal details of millions of people on a web site, how we laughed”.

  8. These are awesome examples of sample bias/selection bias. To get people to think that low-skill immigration will lead to economic growth, ask people who live in $2 million houses to write about their immigrant ancestors.

    Is there any evidence that there is such intent? This sounds like fake news. They’re probably having the kids in middle class and working class towns do the same things. Though somehow it provides a nice opportunity to rant about unions and Obama, etc., eventually leading to discussion of gulags.

    • Be great if teachers in low income skools did this. ICE comes in right after and rounds up kidz who talk about the coyotes who took them across.

  9. “Immigrants to Massachusetts killed or displaced nearly all of the natives, so 100 percent of the students in the school were able to come up with an immigration story.”

    Not your senior US Senator!

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