Category Archives: Business

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

New York University

27 Comments

This account of life there reads like something from the Soviet Union:

This is daft, certainly. Even funny, in a macabre way. But it also raises a serious point: the university experience in America is now not one that will adequately prepare students for real life. In real-life democracy, people disagree — and normally they don’t die or suffer emotional injury because of it. In normal life, there’s no reason not to like someone with whom you disagree politically. On campus, opinions are often ontology: you are what you think. But this is dangerous logic: if I hate what you think, I must hate what you are.

Who is going to want to hire these people?

[Update a few minutes later]

“American higher ed is rapidly becoming a worldwide joke. What if the high-dollar foreign students stop coming?”

[Update a couple minutes later]

This seems related: Video shows that Millennials support socialism even if it results in starvation.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

The Dozenth Flight

13 Comments

I’m not going up to Vandenberg for the Formosat launch, but I’ll probably go to the beach (I’m assuming the marine layer will clear by then). I’d like to see SpaceX get to twenty flights this year, but I’d like even more to see them finally launch the heavy.

[Update a while later]

This is interesting, if true: Space will lose millions on this mission. Of course, it would have probably cost them a lot more to continue with the Falcon 1e. This is also the first time I’ve ever seen the marginal launch costs stated, at $37M. Also interesting, if correct.

Business, Economics, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Accuweather

7 Comments

Don’t use their app.

Still installing stuff on my new phone, but very carefully. I just started installing a voice recorder, but it insisted on having access to my pictures, the Internet, my location. Why? Nope.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems sort of related: A statistics professor was banned from Google. It is looking more and more like the old libertarian argument that we have less to concern with private companies than government is getting a little threadbare when it comes to concentrations of power like this.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Trump Versus Bezos

20 Comments

Why does Trump hate him so much? Because, as Virginia Postrel points out, Bezos is the anti-Trump:

Trump, who likes his staff to have the right “look,” would never cast a wiry guy who doesn’t hide his lack of hair as a big-time businessman. How can someone only five-foot-nine intimidate people into submission? In Trumpworld, intimidation, not value-creation, is what business is all about.

Bezos also has a sense of humor, often at his own expense, and a famously raucous laugh. Trump is humorless. He certainly doesn’t laugh at himself.

Bezos speaks clearly and has amazing message discipline even by the standards of successful CEOs — something that struck me when I first interviewed him way back in 1996. Trump: not so much.

Trump grew up rich, went to private schools, and had an undistinguished college career. Bezos grew up middle-class, went to public schools, and knocked the top out of Princeton, graduating with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa in electrical engineering and computer science. One had a rich father; the other has brains.

Ouch.