A righteous Twitter rant from Phil Metzger:
Follow the thread. He lambastes the Alabama delegation, and how this actually harmed Alabama. He’s right. It’s tragic.
Category Archives: Business
The College Admissions Mess
Bottom line: our admissions process is badly flawed. I blame it partly on the decline in the predominance in academic values coinciding with the bureaucratization of the university. Administrators are crowding out faculty not only numerically but in terms of power. I blame it partly on our academic obsession with evaluating people on the basis of group characteristics, not individual merit. What would Alexis de Tocqueville say visiting 21st century America, learning that students bribe their way into a ticket for economic success by lying about their ability to hit tennis balls? Is that the new American exceptionalism?
Apparently.
[Update a few minutes later]
Yes. The college-admissions scandal should make everyone furious.
Academia has been infuriating me for years. It’s a generational disaster, not just for the kids, but the Republic itself.
Cave Systems On Mars
Bob Zimmerman thinks that this is very significant to settling the Red Planet.
CBD
Is it a miracle cure, or hype?
All I know is that I get a lot of spam in email about it.
EM-1
More reporting on Bridenstine’s announcement from last week, from Ken Chang at the NYT, and from Jonathan Callaghan at Forbes, the latter of which contains several quotes from Your’s Truly.
Climate Change
No, The New Republic, it’s not this generation’s Vietnam War.
College Children
What a societal disaster.
[Monday-morning update]
Are parents robbing children of their adulthood?
Yes. This is one of the things that drove the “keep your ‘child’ on your health insurance until he’s 26.”
Meanwhile, what happens when all of childhood becomes college prep. In this formulation, the kids are being robbed of their childhood. In some sense, both things are happening.
[Bumped]
The Midwest Flooding
Every year that this happens, I think about how nice it would be to have pipelines (or if the Boring Company works out, tunnels) into which the excess water from the Red, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers could be put, and pumped up the hill and over South Pass to the Green River, to “green” up the Colorado watershed and American southwest. You could have feeder lines from Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas. With the fracking, there’s plenty of energy up there to run the pumps. You could do the same thing in the southern section from Texas flooding across New Mexico, but most of that water would flow south to Mexico. Though I can’t manage they’d mind; it could compensate for what they no longer get from the Colorado.
Max Boot
Giving him the boot.
He does seem to have gone completely nuts.
The Overview Effect
Loren Grush scored an interview with Beth Moses about her recent trip to space.
I’m always amused at people who say that no one will want to do this twice, or that the market is limited. The only real limit to the market is the affordability.