A new efficient catalyst, from common elements. This could be useful in space, too, though platinum might be less rare there.
Category Archives: Business
Ivy League
I didn’t even take SAT in high school. I worked for a year after graduating, then went to community college, then transferred to Ann Arbor. It would never have occurred to me to do all the crazy things kids do to get into these overrated schools.
[Monday-morning update]
This seems related: Targeting “meritocracy.”
The real solution to this problem is the one none of the anti-meritocracy articles dare suggest: accept that education and merit are two different things!
I work with a lot of lower- and working-class patients, and one complaint I hear again and again is that their organization won’t promote them without a college degree. Some of them have been specifically told “You do great work, and we think you’d be a great candidate for a management position, but it’s our policy that we can’t promote someone to a manager unless they’ve gone to college”. Some of these people are too poor to afford to go to college. Others aren’t sure they could pass; maybe they have great people skills and great mechanical skills but subpar writing-term-paper skills. Though I’ve met the occasional one who goes to college and rises to great heights, usually they sit at the highest non-degree-requiring tier of their organization, doomed to perpetually clean up after the mistakes of their incompetent-but-degree-having managers. These people have loads of merit. In a meritocracy, they’d be up at the top, competing for CEO positions. In our society, they’re stuck.
The problem isn’t just getting into college. It’s that success in college only weakly correlates with success in the real world. I got into medical school because I got good grades in college; those good grades were in my major, philosophy. Someone else who was a slightly worse philosopher would never have made it to medical school; maybe they would have been a better doctor. Maybe someone who didn’t get the best grades in college has the right skills to be a nurse, or a firefighter, or a police officer. If so, we’ll never know; all three of those occupations are gradually shifting to acceptance conditional on college performance. Ulysses Grant graduated in the bottom half of his West Point class, but turned out to be the only guy capable of matching General Lee and winning the Civil War after a bunch of superficially better-credentialed generals failed. If there’s a modern Grant with poor grades but excellent real-world fighting ability, are we confident our modern educationocracy will find him? Are we confident it will even try?
I’m quite confident that it won’t. As Glenn often says, these people aren’t educated, or competent. They’re just credentialed. They’re the very opposite of elite.
[Bumped]
Health Care
Yes, access to it is limited by overregulation:
The problem is that healthcare consumers have limited options. At the two ends of the spectrum, they can see a licensed doctor, or they can do it themselves. One option is extremely expensive, time-consuming, and reliable, and the other is free and still time-consuming but not as reliable. In between, there are few other choices. It’s possible to use a service like Teladoc or visit a drugstore clinic in some areas for minor issues like strep throat, an earache, or a sprained ankle, but in the absence of the current system of occupational licensing, there’d be a much broader continuum of possibilities between my unlettered amateur visits to Dr. Google and visits to an actual doctor’s office.
The problem is compounded by the fact that we pay for health-care via “insurance” coverage, which isn’t really insurance but just prepaid health-care. This system requires lots and lots of rules about what can and can’t be covered and what constitutes medicine. The entire healthcare market would function much more efficiently if there were more options. For treating a lot of conditions, you don’t need someone who went to four years of medical school and worked through a grueling residency. Better to save that talent for more challenging stuff and allow people to seek marginal improvements over DIY diagnosis.
But instead, we’re forced to buy “insurance” that isn’t really insurance, and they’ve totally destroyed the concept of insurance.
Cursive
I think it’s important that kids learn it, but honestly, if I had to write long hand, I wouldn’t write. I detest the drudgery of dragging a writing utensil across paper. Without a keyboard, I have no idea how I’d have gotten through life.
The Tea Party
Jim Antle says that the Republicans have repealed and replaced it. It was another victory for the statists.
Guess we need to primary some of them next year.
[Later-afternoon update]
Arizona resident Bob Zimmerman is less than impressed with his senior senator. Emphasis on the “senior.”
“Smart” Teevees
All I want is a large-screen video monitor I can feed a video signal to. I don’t need speakers, or Internet in it. But apparently, you can’t find one any more. I did a search at Amazon for “tv -smart” and no televisions came up.
[Thursday-afternoon update]
Hey, this
[Bumped]
Wind And Solar
You’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that researchers have been underestimating their cost.
Space Property Rights
More common law than Marxism, and that’s a good thing. I am cited.
The Bulk Interior Of The Moon
Water on the moon seems to be like gas and oil on earth. The more we look, the more we find.
Elon’s Mars Plans
Eric Berger reports that he’s probably getting more realistic.