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It should come as no surprise that all of these articles were researched by students with "faculty advisers"; I have noticed that students tend to be a lot more idealistic and extreme until they get out of the ivory tower and earn a living for about five years. This tends to cool a lot of ardor and introduce a great deal of realism. And to a great extent, professors are people who can't get real jobs, especially in technical fields, and have never gone through that broadening process. There's a weeding-out process in engineering, for instance: the best people get hired out of college with bachelor's degrees. The people who can't find jobs stay in school and get Master's degrees, and then the best remaining ones get hired. The residuum get their Ph.D's, and of them some get jobs and the rest become professors. College is the engineering equivalent of baseball's "farm club" system. The very best players go into the majors when they're still teenagers. Some play in minors for as long as ten years before getting their chance. Some players never emerge from the minors at all. (There are good professors, but the best people go into private industry because the pay is better.) In my entire career I've only worked with one engineer who had a Ph.D who was actually any good, though I've worked with several who were totally worthless. Actually, that's not true: there were several who were good but only one of them actually had his Ph.D in engineering. One of the finest programmers I ever worked with had a Ph.D in theoretical physics, for instance, which has little to do with software. So let's take a jaundiced look at a few of these stories, shall we? We'll start with the first one on the list: World Bank and Multinational Corporations Seek to Privatize Water. Well, not exactly. Or rather nothing like as much as this article would like you to believe. I have no doubt that something like this has actually happened, but to read this headline you'd assume that there was some sort of global conspiracy to make every drop of fresh water on earth belong to a corporation. What they've done is to take a few isolated examples and try to generalize a trend from it. I am not convinced that the trend is really there, and in any case there is a fundamental question as to whether this really is a bad thing. Well, they think so, but that's because they believe that fresh water is some sort of right. But it costs a lot of money to produce fresh water, and that's got to be paid for somehow. In many places it's paid for with a combination of taxes and user fees. I pay a water bill every two months, for instance. Of course, in the Third World this can be a burden, and the clear implication of this article is that someone (read US tax dollars) should be paying for this so as to give fresh water away in all these places. OSHA Fails to Protect U.S. Workers. Well, yes and no. The Occupational Safety And Health Administration is an agency of the Federal Government which is responsible for making sure that workplaces are not excessively dangerous for employees. It's been around for a long time and it suffers from the same problems as any government bureaucracy. It's also been the butt of jokes for decades; this one came out in 1972. But in fact OSHA has been responsible for major advances in workplace safety over the years. The problem these people have with this story is twofold: excessive idealism and insufficient scope. They don't look far enough back to see just how much progress has already been made. (Try reading about textile mills and steel mills and coal mining a hundred years ago.) They also assume that OSHA should be able to reduce workplace deaths and injuries to zero, and that is not practical. Some kinds of work are inherently dangerous. When you're working with big power equipment, or with high explosives, or with molten steel, or with very high power, or deep underground, then sometimes accidents will happen and people will be killed. OSHA could have a staff of a million people and still wouldn't be able to prevent this. OSHA is a partial success. In the pragmatic real world that's about all one can expect. Also, their criticism of the staff size of OSHA is a bit misguided, because OSHA depends heavily on tips. It is not the case, as implied here, that infractions are only found by routine field inspection of OSHA agents. Rather, they get reports from workers who say things are bad, and then the agents visit those places. Any person can call OSHA and report a problem that they see. Did the U.S. Deliberately Bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade? The very first sentence of this story 
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