Category Archives: Education

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

Luxurious College Apartments

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…built on debt:

When people ask why college tuition is so high, defenders of the higher-education system point to things like “Baumol’s cost disease” (costs in industries without much productivity growth tend to rise, because they have to compete for labor with more productive industries) and declining state contributions to public colleges. No doubt these play a part. But this cannot explain the vast upgrades in college residential amenities that have taken place in the 20 years since I graduated from college, when a student union and some ivy on the walls was about the best you could expect.

But of course, our parents were paying for it, and they didn’t care whether we had a swimming pool. A certain Spartan element was supposed to be part of the ritual of college attendance, just as it had been when they were in college. What changed? I suspect the answer is that rising tuition, and the increasing reliance on student loans, has placed more of the financial responsibility into the hands of students. And the students shop for colleges based on … well, about what you’d expect when you give tens of thousands of dollars to 18-year-olds and ask where they’d like to spend the next four years.

This is policy insanity.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Thursday’s Debate

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A good description of how Rubio and Cruz (finally) teamed up to expose Trump as a fraudulent incoherent empty suit. And I find Christie’s and Huckabee’s endorsements of him despicable.

[Update a few minutes later]

Does anyone actually believe that Trump is being audited because he’s a “strong Christian”?

Even Trump’s sincere Christian supporters don’t believe that he’s a very sincere Christian, at least according to the very polls Trump prints out and sleeps on like a dragon atop a pile of gold. (Though, looked at from the right angle, it’s more like a guinea pig hoarding all the shredded-paper cage-lining.) In fact, only 5 percent of Republicans believe that Trump is “very religious,” while nearly half think he’s “not at all” religious or “not too religious.” I know he now says that “nobody reads the Bible more than me.” But, again, I can’t imagine anyone actually believes him. (I also would have thought this is the kind of lie truly God-fearing people would not utter, for fear of, you know, lightning bolts or salt-pillarification.)

Anyway, all of this public religiosity is fairly new. Before he ran for president, if you played the word-association game with 100,000 Americans, I’d venture that not one of them would have said “Christian!” when asked, “What first comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?”

Apparently, according to Trump, that’s only true of normal Americans. The IRS is different. It’s like the eye of Sauron searching the land for “strong Christians.” When its cruel gaze landed upon the failed casino magnate, beauty-pageant impresario, thrice-married and confessed adulterer who’s talked about how his own daughter is so hot he’d date her if she wasn’t his daughter and bragged about how it doesn’t matter what critics say about you so long as “you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” and who told Howard Stern that his ability to avoid getting the clap while sleeping around was his “personal Vietnam,” the IRS immediately saw the truth of the matter.

Suddenly, the alarms at the IRS Christian persecution squad started flashing. Over the P.A. system came: “Code Red! We’ve got a ‘strong Christian’ in sector 7!”

If you don’t see that Trump is a con man, you’re the mark.

[Update a while later]

Ace explains why Trump is no Ronald Reagan (and I’d note that “Steve Goddard” on Twitter has lost his mind on this issue):

A big problem I have with Trump not knowing things, and clearly never have thought about things, combined with his obvious desire to pander and make the big sale, is that when he’s caught out without any good answer, and senses that he’s losing the room with an unpopular answer, he usually (75% of the time) tries to get back on the right side of popular opinion and embrace the liberal position on the issue.

You couldn’t do that to Reagan, because Reagan always had a series of facts to back him up, and because he’d been thinking about things — not feeling about them; thinking about them, theorizing about them — for years, like during his famous GE addresses.

Unlike Trump, he never felt that he was “losing the room” with an unpopular conservative answer. He was always confident and in command, because he had earned being confident and in command. He had done the homework — he wasn’t some Millennial who had feelz that xe was right. He was a thinking, intellectually-voracious man who tested his own thoughts until he knew he was right, because he’d looked at the question from several directions.

When Reagan felt he was addressing a hostile crowd, he didn’t immediately attempt to placate them by offering them a liberal position he flip-flopped to on the spot. Instead, he went into his mental note-card file and tried to convince them of the conservative opinion.

And a lot of the time, he did.

My problem with Trump is that he is a dealmaker trying to make a sale. Right now he’s trying to make a deal with conservatives — so this is the very most conservative we’ll ever see him.

If he gets the nomination, he now starts working on making the second part of the deal with the other party in the negotiations, the general public.

So this is the most conservative we’ll ever see Trump — this is the absolute most conservative he’ll ever be — and he’s not conservative at all, except, possibly, on immigration. He combines liberal policy impulses with frankly authoritarian or even fascist ones, which he thinks are “what conservatives want,” because, frankly, he conceives of us as ugly-minded, stupid dummies who get off on this shit.

That’s why he didn’t put the “Ban Muslims” line in a more palatable, persuasive form, like “Reduce immigration from Muslim-majority countries or countries with a terrorism problem to a level where we can vet each individual applicant.”

No, he put it in the most bigoted, ugly way he could think of, because that’s about his level, and because, also, that’s what he thinks “conservatives” are.

Yup. It’s ironic that his supporters think he “tells it like it is,” when he really tells it like he thinks his audience du jour wants to hear it.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Twitter’s War On The Right

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Ed Driscoll has a roundup of links. Ken White (no fan of Stacy’s) is enraged. And more from Allum Bokhari.

I find it outrageous that Twitter has put Anita Sarkeesian (among others) in charge of policing speech. I won’t be surprised if I get suspended at some point.

As I’ve been tweeting occasionally as Twitter seems to be determined to reinvent itself into irrelevance, they are opening up a market opportunity for a social medium that allows everyone short posts of 140 characters, shown in chronological order.

[Early afternoon update]

From the Harvard Business Review, why Twitter is losing users:

Abuse has become something like a systematized feature of life as we know it, in this age of discontent — and maybe that’s why it is an age of discontent. We expect to be mistreated by our bosses, ripped off by contracts we can’t read, swindled by fine print and hidden clauses, deceived by our politicians, and misrepresented by our representatives… and now, on the medium where we spend the majority of our waking lives, heckled and bullied by complete strangers.

In turn, we internalize the lessons of abuse, becoming little abusers ourselves. We expect to have to mistreat our customers, exploit our communities, bully our peers, cut corners, manipulate our colleagues, bail on our obligations, package the lowest common denominator at the highest possible price as a miracle-in-a-can… not just if we want to get ahead, but merely to anxiously tread water. And though it takes different forms, abuse is essentially what’s being piped through the tubes of the internet, or through the headquarters of VW, and into the water of Flint, Michigan.

The tech industry turns a blind eye to it. Courts excuse it. And abuse stops being the exception, and becomes the rule. We grow accustomed not just to the abuse itself, but to the fact that nothing’s going to be done about it. It’s treated as a customer service problem, or a PR crisis, not a core business issue.

Note that nowhere in this word salad is what constitutes “abuse” actually described. Which is what allows the Social Justice League to shut down dissent.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related: Rutgers students melt down after hearing a conservative speak.