It seems to have become my full-time job to correct this kind of thing. As for the notion that the new space policy “ends human spaceflight,” I feel like I’ve been playing whack-a-mole with that nonsense since February.
Egalitarian Policies
…that caused the economic disaster:
This does not strike me as a story about how income inequality caused the financial crisis. Rather, this is a story about how policies intended to reduce inequality had the unintended consequence of precipitating America’s worst economic slump since the Depression. It’s very important that we’re straight on what the story is, since different stories may have very different implications for policy. If the story is that the level of inequality itself—and not our ideas about or political reactions to it—indirectly caused the crisis, then we may think that narrowing the gap is a matter of urgent necessity. But if the story is that an ill-conceived political attempt to reduce inequality—and not the fact of inequality itself—led to apocalyptic economic devastation, then we may well conclude that it is better to refrain from equalising initiatives unless we are quite certain they will not backfire.
Darn those pesky unintended consequences.
Who Knew?
Men like to look at beautiful women.
We like sunsets and mountain views, too, but for some reason, it doesn’t arouse so much…emotion…in our partners and life mates, when we indulge in it.
Hey, the beauty of nature is the beauty of nature…
I could write a lot more, but I’ll let the comments fray commence, it being late on a Friday night.
Hyperinflation
What will it look like?
Oh, joy. With a bonus history of Chile.
I’ve Heard Of Walking A Mile For A Camel
…but this is ridiculous:
63-year-old Lions fan walks 425 miles to attend practice.
Now that’s a fan. Twenty-five miles a day is a pretty good pace for someone that age. If he keeps it up, he might live to a ripe old age.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of Michigan football, what is the world coming to? First the Big Televen becomes the new Big Twelve with the addition of Nebraska (that’ll rev up a new rivalry with the Wolverines, who haven’t forgotten having to unfairly share the title in ’97), but will also screw up the traditional game with tOSU as the last game of the season. Apparently, they’re going to put the Wolverines and the Buckeyes in separate divisions (which makes no sense geographically) so they can hope for matchups in a title game, but don’t want to risk having them play each other two weeks in a row. Bo and Woody are both rolling in their graves, I suspect.
Two For The Price Of One
Were the dinosaurs wiped out by a dual strike?
Internal Combustion Engines
…aren’t done yet. I wonder if transonic combustion could improve the performance of rocket engines as well?
Triage
The Dems don’t have enough campaign funds to go around. What, you mean they’re not going to pour all their money into Alvin Greene?
A Future History
How the US solved the Middle-East problem. You could almost say it was a final solution.
We Treat Them Too Well
Thoughts from Frank J. on the vermin that perennially infest the nation’s capital:
Anyway, I guess the whole idea for how our country would work was that we’d basically govern ourselves and hire some people — our representative and senators — to represent us in the federal government, as none of us have time for that. And since we’d all elect them together out of our entire population, we’d pick only the best people to do it.
But here’s the problem. Who are the people who tend to run for political office? Political office is hard to get and takes a lot of effort, so only ambitious people seek it. That wouldn’t be so bad if we got smart/ambitious — and the useful kind of smart, not the pointless write-a-doctoral-thesis-on-transgender-Native-American-pottery “smart.”
But what do ambitious, capable people do in this country? They start their own businesses and lead successful lives comfortably away from the fickleness of the ballot box. So that just leaves the people who are ambitious but useless and just love the thought of being able to meddle in all the useful things everyone else is doing. And then the whole election process, where the politicians constantly lie and change their positions on issues to keep their jobs, tends to weed out the people who aren’t also sociopaths. So the system we have has basically set us up to be governed by ambitious, useless sociopaths who love to meddle in everything actual contributors to society are doing. So lawyers, for the most part.
And when you put these people in charge, of course they’re going to just try to grab more power so they can interfere even more, hence the steady bloating of government we’ve seen throughout American history. So what do we do? Change the system to make sure we get good, qualified people who aren’t arrogant weirdos to be our legislators?
Good luck with that. Fortunately, he has a better solution. They won’t like it, though.