Is it coming to California?
We can only hope. The question is, is Jerry Brown Gorbachev in that scenario, or Andropov?
The Higher-Education Bubble
Why it will be worse than the housing bubble:
Once again government has created the conditions for wholesale failure, and failure is upon us.
From 1976 to 2010, the prices of all commodities rose 280 percent. The price of homes rose 400 percent. Private education? A whopping 1,000 percent.
In the end, this bubble will be worse than the last. Even when homeowners got hopelessly behind on their mortgages, two options helped. First, they could declare bankruptcy and free themselves of their crippling debt; second, they could sell their houses to pay down most of their loans.
Students don’t have either of these options. It’s illegal to absolve student loan debt through bankruptcy, and you can’t sell back an education.
I hope that it has a disproportionate effect on the academic left. In a sane world, the first thing to go would be diversity programs, with “studies” departments hard on their heels.
Dealing With Cause Mongers
Lileks has it down:
Later, while putting together a post at the kitchen table: DING DONG
Two earnest cause-mongers campaigning on behalf of the earth. I wanted to say “nature ripped out the bunnies from their soft home and drank their blood, and you want me to help it? With money?” but I just said “sorry, I work at home, and I’m working now” before they even got the chance to start the spiel. Their faces fell from friendly to sullen in a second like souffles collapsing from the sound of gunshot, and they seemed perturbed. I hadn’t been unfriendly; I’d smiled. Just stated the facts. I’m under no obligation to stand here and listen to what you care about. Sometimes I’m tempted to cut out an editorial and tape it to the door, and when I see someone coming around with a Cause, open the door and start reading out the particulars of my cause, and ask them what they would like to do. I’d have a petition and everything. And if they signed, I’d say thanks, and close the door.
I lecture Jehovah’s Witnesses on space theology. They never last long.
Batman
Hilarious.
The Mysteries Of The Mind
A concussion that turned a man into a musical savant.
Commercialization Of Human Exploration
If I were in DC, I’d attend this event on the Hill on Friday. But in my experience, space historians won’t necessarily do a good job of extrapolating into the future, particularly when it comes to technological trends.
Well, He Can Still Fall Back On The Al Green Thing
So it turns out that one of the few things that Obama seemed to be actually good it, isn’t. He sux at basketball, too.
Rescuing Apollo Astronauts
…in lunar orbit. They thought of everything, which you can do when it’s important and you have a big budget.
The Oatmeal
Don’t mess with it:
…not only is Inman not someone who is likely to back down, he is about infinitely times more creative than whatever drone is running FunnyJunk.com. He has reposted the letter, annotated it and illustrated it, and included an enormous list of links to pages on FunnyJunk.com where his work was even then being displayed without credit. (They have since taken those pages down, because they’re sneaky like that and also probably don’t know about the Wayback Machine.)
He also declared that rather than pay the drone and/or his lawyer $20,000, he would try to raise that much money through donations, “take a photo of the raised money” and “mail you that photo, along with this drawing of your mom seducing a Kodiak bear” before donating the money to charity.
As of today (Tuesday) at 2 pm Pacific time, he had raised $120,414.
These morons never learn.
We’re In Reach Of The Goal
We are less than two grand from the goal for the space-safety Kickstarter project. I have an offer from a potential donor to match the next thousand that comes in, which means that the rest of you only have to contribute a thousand on your own over the next two and a half days to get it home. Please, have at it.