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?
So… a bright shining lie based on misinformation (Gulf on Tonkin, etc) that our leaders knew was unwinnable from the get-go (Pentagon Papers) and killed hundreds of thousands unnecessarily … Good metaphor https://t.co/CUkmXa1bBh
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.
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.
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.