While Asian countries are often accused of taking jobs from the West, the President of South Korea's Hyundai Motors visited factories in Russia and the Czech Republic. He said he was impressed by the quality of workers who were far superior to South Korean workers -- they never staged strikes and had far lower wages. While a South Korean factory takes 30 hours to make a car, the Czech factory takes 16. The visiting Korean managers could not keep up with the pace of production, so they received help from local secretaries in their 20's to fill their checklists. South Korean industry has been crippled by constant labor strikes demanding ever more wages and shorter working hours.

Do students who score high on achievement tests demand higher wages, cushy jobs, and become less internationally competitive?

http://headlines.yahoo.co.jp/hl?a=20131203-00000030-xinhua-cn
http://japanese.joins.com/article/999/178999.html?servcode=300&sectcode=300

So if physicists start mass-producing SpaceX rockets, are you saying they will somehow behave any better?

I'm sensing a gap in logic here. Are you saying that the books you list will magically get you an MBA degree?

Comparing PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, to other companies in comparable fields: do we see financial firms moving en masse to "low-tax cheap-labor cess pools"? Do aerospace companies do this? Last I heard, there are not a lot of financial or aerospace jobs in low-tax cheap-labor cess pools.

It could be that the likes of Boeing, VISA, BofA, etc. are run by plenty of MBAs and they do a fine job.

So he founded PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX. How would he have PayPal taken seriously by the global financial industry with no expertise in the financial industry? Until then, it will just remain a bit player in online transactions. If Tesla Motors and SpaceX are to become mass-market commodities, are physicists the best people to put in charge of marketing, litigation, customer service, and financing, to name a few departments?

Many startup bosses have said the same things before. When their businesses grow, they will quietly hire MBAs for needed expertise on complex accounting, legal issues, and human resources. Physicists like to think they are smarter than everyone else, but they often make big fools of themselves on non-physics topics that require social intelligence.

I got my PhD in statistical genetics. Why should we equate genetic homology to evolutionary homology? All these studies that speak of a hypothetical Adam or Eve assume that the same mutations could not have arisen independently in different parts of the world.

Are there any Western records of mice that act like this?

http://englishrussia.com/2013/08/19/strange-creature-no-the-mouse-line/

This may or may not relate to dark matter, but the other day, an electrical storm was passing over my house, and I momentarily saw a dark spot on the wall. Is there a scientific explanation for such phenomena? I've never had visual disturbances like that otherwise.

Nobody hires thousands of engineers. A typical employer will hire at most a handful of engineers, if they are needed at all.

I am a statistician for a major hospital chain. I do important work and I am a celebrity within the organization, but there has been no need for more statisticians. There is only so much work that requires formal analysis.

Yes, I've followed the boom of "bioinformatics" majors and their spectacular inability to get jobs. I've been to academic conferences that talked big about the promise of genomics, never mind all the unemployed PhDs scurrying around looking for jobs. I have read academic journals that talked big about the job prospects of such students, quoting an exceptional graduate that managed to get an assistant professorship somewhere. When I asked the writer about other graduates, they acknowledged that they had only interviewed that one student, and have no idea about how other graduates did. Why yes, "genomic medicine" has produced its laughable failures such as Bi-dil, along with other new age "biotech" companies that make up whatever random DNA and sell the "genome data" to customers, telling them that they are at risk for whatever random diseases. If you test a sugar pill on enough "ethnic groups", it will appear successful in at least one of them. And so it goes for billions of random DNA letters -- one can use the data to prove anything they like. Accordingly, real academics do not take genetics seriously.

Fire ants do interbreed.

http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities/fieldcrops/forages/events/FC13/03/ANR-1248%20Fire%20ants%20and%20cattle.pdf
http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/07/fire_ants_joes_outdoor_office.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=vxt5BqOKEAIC&pg=PA510&lpg=PA510&dq=fire+ants+interbreed&source=bl&ots=8eWZaSkLp_&sig=uJHTanPl1LV7mhieoReC1eX0plc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dwiYUdimJ-rI0gHttIGwBQ&ved=0CEwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=fire%20ants%20interbreed&f=false

Also, they do bite before stinging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ants

Different plant "species", such as of pine, do interbreed as well. The distinction of species vs. sub-species is often blurred in the wild.

I did not see such a chemical at the local hardware stores. I did learn the futility of any agent, since they bred faster than any chemical could kill them. They seemed to have a deep underground reservoir of breeders.

They naturally developed a population cycle. The lawn would be a sea of ants one year, then be relatively sparse the next year due to starvation or whatever diseases they had.

We just sold a home in Remlap, Alabama. The entire mountain that the house was on was owned by fire ants -- they built underground interconnected cities, so there was no point in spraying a mound. They were aggressive and bit you without provocation. When I got bit, my blood pressure dropped and I felt very ill for a few hours. The fire ants interbreed with local species, so they came in a large variety of appearances. The ones we had were very small and dark crimson, almost black. Their bite was all out of proportion to their size, though. We think they may have interbred with crazy ants because they liked to walk crazy zigzag paths.