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: Economics
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.
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.
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.
An Inland Spaceport
In Michigan? Chuck Lauer (who lives in Lansing) told me about this last month in DC.
Michael Mann’s Smears At Newsweek
Future Visions, Current Issues In Space
I haven’t read it yet, but this testimony from the Brookings Institute looks like it could be interesting.
Space Tourism
Alan Ladwig reminded me this morning of a paper I wrote on the subject almost two decades ago (about a year and a half before I started blogging). It’s interesting to read it now and see how well (or poorly) it holds up. Few policy makers paid much attention to it at the time.