Read it.

Not that anybody who writes for the New York Times would be caught dead in a mall, of course. But they like to keep an eye on what’s happening in Flyover Country.

(When was the last time you were in a mall?)

Read it.

There was an article in the NY Times on Saturday about how the Hamptons elite are worried about middle-class strivers, who are young people who go to the Hamptons because of the glamour of the whole place even though they can’t really afford it; they tend to stay in illegal “share houses” and they get drunk on the beach.

For ‘Hamptons Elite’ feel free to substitute every ‘rich’ person whose smiling face has accompanied an article in the Axis of Drivel about how his/her taxes are too low. It’s not that their taxes are too low; it’s that everybody’s taxes are too low; it isn’t weeding out the almost-theres. So they want all tax rates to go up, something that they will survive but which will act to cull the herd.

Read it.

“It’s the economy, stupid!”  Thanks guy from 1992, but the economy did not tell you to go to college for something you knew in advance would make you unemployable, especially when that unemployable choice cost exactly the same as the employable choice, i.e. too much.  Lesson one at the academia should be the importance of separating vocation from avocation, as character actor Fred Thompson and electrical contractor Benjamin Franklin both understood. When I was six I wanted to be in Playboy.  Just because it’s your dream, doesn’t mean you should pursue it.

…

Before we blame them for their choice, we should ask why they felt they could make that choice.  I’m not trying to start trouble, but let’s choose something I’m familiar with, i.e. women: why would a smart high school junior, 4.0 and AP Everything, think that going to Hampshire College for English Literature was a good idea?  Why would her parents allow this madness, other than the fact that they were divorcing?  What did she think would happen given that she knew in advance there were no jobs for English majors?  Serious answers, please, I’ll offer four I had personal experience with: law school; academia; non-profits; marriage.  Don’t roll your eyes at me, young lady: let’s say you are the daughter of a lawyer and you major in English.  When you were 17 and you imagined your life at your Dad’s age– not the starving poetess fantasy you wrote about in your spiral notebook, but a glimpse of the bourgeois future you then thought you didn’t want– what kind of a house did you imagine in the “if that happens to me I’ll Anne Sexton myself” scenario?  A lawyer’s house or an English major’s house? In other words, the choice to major in English was predicated on information she received from multiple sources like schools and TV– sources I will collectively call the Matrix–  that every generation does better than the last, that there was a safety net of sorts, a bailout at the end, that future happiness was inevitable, and so we return to economics: the general name for that safety net is credit.  America was the land of the minimum monthly payment.  And if this analogy isn’t clear enough for you, let me reverse it: the ability of the economy to offer English as a major required a massive subsidy to make you feel like $20k/yr was the same as free.  If you had to pay it up front, you’d either be an engineer or $80k richer.  That subsidy is now worthless, not because the money doesn’t exist but because the bailout at the end, e.g the four options I suggested were operational 1977-1999 which guaranteed the payments would be made, won’t help.

Bottom line:

Imagine a large corporate machine mobilized to get you to buy something you don’t need at a tremendously inflated cost, complete with advertising, marketing, and branding that says you’re not hip if you don’t have one, but when you get one you discover it’s of poor quality and obsolete in ten months. That’s a BA.

I suffered from this one through two graduate degrees and ten years of living hand-to-mouth — until I learned better.

HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC General Orders No.11, WASHINGTON, D.C., May 5, 1868

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, “of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion.” What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from hishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to lend its friendly aid in bringing to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith.

Department commanders will use efforts to make this order effective.
By order of

JOHN A. LOGAN,
Commander-in-Chief

N.P. CHIPMAN,
Adjutant General

Official:
WM. T. COLLINS, A.A.G.

Read it.

A box of 9mm ammo at High Bridge Arms in San Francisco “has a shelf life of about five minutes,” according to Steve Alcairo, the general manager of the city’s only gun store.

Stock in Colt, Remington, and Ruger ought to be a good investment right about now.

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the concept of a city with only one gun store. Plano, Texas, has at lesat two within easy walking distance.

At that time, ammo makers like Hornady, Remington, and Black Hills all said they were able to find ways to meet such panic-buying onslaughts in the past. However, many of them said they have never seen a panic-driven climate like today’s.

Never before have the gun-grabbers seemed so politically powerful.

Read it.

Imagine if treating a mental illness was as simple as playing a video game — except your mind is the controller. That idea isn’t only real, it’s a therapy gaining traction in the medical community and among patients, who swear by its healing effects. Called neurofeedback, the procedure purports to treat a variety of illnesses — from alcoholism to post-traumatic stress disorder — for which mainstream medicine still hasn’t found adequate long-term solutions. While it’s been relegated to the realm of pseudoscience for decades, advocates are now hoping that new research can catalyze a revolution — one that’ll transform the therapy into a standard of care for thousands of patients.

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The last two big areas of human endeavor that haven’t yet been meaningfully automated are education and health care. People want the finest health care they can get, so costs increase. People don’t want to spend any more on education than they have to, so quality diminished. Here are some thoughts on what to do about the latter.

Read it.

Well, it’s Penelope Trunk, so I guess they had to make do. Still, it’s an interesting read.

Read it.

At last, somebody who appreciates the Apple accomplishment.

 The same pundits who doubted every new product Apple ever released are now, in hindsight, attributing Apple’s success entirely to “lucky” blockbuster products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and somehow drawing the conclusion that Apple can’t replicate its historical success because there’s either no more obvious opportunities left, there’s too much competition, or because other companies haven’t been able to figure out how to make money in a given field.

What they are missing is that Apple’s product success isn’t a matter of lucky products or of marketing magic. Apple is a cash machine because Apple has invested in building great products. And that means building the talent to conceptualize, develop, orchestrate, deliver and support those products. That’s something Apple’s competitors don’t currently seem to be doing.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, blows the whistle on Leftist hand-waving.

Ms. Warren and you are correct that worker pay in the long run is determined by worker productivity.  The productivity that’s relevant, however, is marginal productivity – namely, the value that ‘the last’ worker added to a class of production projects adds to the market value of the outputs of those projects.  But not all workers and not all production projects are alike.  The level of aggregation at which Ms. Warren and you conduct this conversation is meaningless for the point you wish to make.  You confuse trends in overall worker productivity with that of the marginal productivity of low-skilled workers.

If, all other things unchanged, consumer demand for neurosurgeons rises relative to that for general practitioners, the wages of neurosurgeons will rise relative to that of GPs.  The reason is that the marginal productivity of neurosurgeons will rise relative to that of GPs.  The same result will occur if, all other things unchanged, the number of GPs increases relative to that of neurosurgeons.  If the average productivity of physicians as a group rises over time, nothing in economic theory says that the productivity or the wages of all physicians must rise by equal amounts – by amounts equal to the rise in average physician productivity and average physician wages.  Indeed, nothing says that the wages of some kinds of physicians cannot fall even when average physician productivity is rising.

Don Boudreaux looks behind the curtain at the Left’s favorite word.

While driving yesterday I listened for a while to ESPN radio.  Among the topics that the show’s hosts explored was greed – in particular, the “greed” of professional sports franchises such as the Washington Redskins and the New York Yankees to produce and sell to fans ever-more logo-ladened paraphernalia.  Some of the radio hosts were more sensible than others, but every one of them assumed without question that “greed” is the appropriate term to use to describe the motivation of owners of pro sports teams to earn more money by supplying more of the likes of baseball caps, jerseys, and jackets emblazoned with team colors and images of team mascots.

All of the hosts agreed that there’s something a bit sleazy and disreputable about the aggressive production and supply of such paraphernalia.  In short, it was an all-too-typical shallow discussion of commerce.

For my purposes here I assume (I believe realistically) that professional sports-team owners’ actions to sell more of their teams’ paraphernalia are indeed motivated solely by their desire to earn more money for themselves.  But I ask: why are such actions described as “greedy”?

Read it.

Slate can’t deny that they do, but they make the best the enemy of the good to the extent that words can do so.

Whether charter schools have actually lived up to their initial promise is a hotly contested topic in the education reform debate.

It’s only hotly contested by people whose ox is being gored — unionized civil servants masquerading as teachers and their lickspittles in the legislature.

Read it.

Some clearly wish the Dakotas had remained a single state – if only to siphon off some of the $2 billion oil boom surplus money in North Dakota’s state treasury in a southerly direction. Re-union would cost the Dakotans two Senators, but it would gain them an elevated status within the United States. With 1.5 million inhabitants and an area of 148,000 sq. mi, Greater Dakota would be the 40th most populous state, and the 4th largest in area.

But there is another way to crumble the cookie: re-divide the Dakotas, in an eastern and western state. Makes more sense, says Shebby Lee: both halves of the former territory are divided by a natural barrier: the Missouri River, which enters both Dakotas in the northwest, then snakes across the territory, leaving it in the southeast [9]. Here the Missouri sets the precedent, by forming the eastern part of the border between South Dakota and Nebraska [10].

Read it.

Hey, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Foseti is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

In reaction to Richwine Affair, all right-thinking people are quick to proclaim that they don’t believe in a genetic basis for IQ. They’re much less quick to explain – with any sort of precision – what they actually do believe in. At best, we’re treated to some hand-waving paired with the phrase “social construct.”

Lots of ink has been spilled criticizing the genetic explanation. However, I’m unaware of any examination of the physical properties of the mainstream explanation. Let’s see what it actually looks like.

Read it.

Well, it’s by Michael Pollan, but read it anyway. He can’t be a food snob all the time.

 

Read it.

Manufacturing has increasingly reduced man hours in tandem with productivity-increasing technological improvements. It wasn’t the internet that killed these jobs, though technology reduced some of them. The inability to plan for the necessary shift of jobs to other fields revealed the lack of comprehensive, forward-thinking manufacturing and labor policies.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is especially dyspeptic today.

The Jason Richwine business has illustrated all over again for those who needed the reminder that even a society as technically sophisticated as ours is a great dark slough of ignorance and passion in which the small voices of reason and calm empirical inquiry must struggle to be heard above the bellowing of the night beasts.

This is why it is important to SUPPORT JOHN DERBYSHIRE (see top right).

Read it.

The events of May helped solidify national sentiment in favor of civil rights for blacks. President Kennedy reportedly said at the time that Connor had done as much for the civil rights movement as Abraham Lincoln. That’s a gross exaggeration. But by June 1963, Connor had done more than Kennedy for civil rights.

And, of course, Bull Connor — and all of his subordinates — were Democrats, something that has gone down the Memory Hole.

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A new, and potentially dominant, ruling class is rising. Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter. But while spending millions bending the political process to pad their bottom lines, they’ve remained far more popular than past plutocrats, with 72 percent of Americans expressing positive feelings for the industry, compared to 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas.

…

Perversely, the small number of jobs—mostly clustered in Silicon Valley—created by tech companies has helped its moguls avoid public scrutiny. Google employs 50,000, Facebook 4,600, and Twitter less than 1,000 domestic workers. In contrast, GM employs 200,000, Ford 164,000, and Exxon over 100,000. Put another way, Google, with a market cap of $215 billion, is about five times larger than GM yet has just one fourth as many workers.

Read it.

The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.

Read it.

I’ve been married and I’ve been single and married is better.

James Altucher is even more pessimistic than I am. I didn’t think that was possible.

1) The middle class is dead. A few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who manages a trillion dollars. No joke. A trillion. If I told you the name of the family he worked for you would say, “they have a trillion? Really?” But that’s what happens when $10 million compounds at 2 percent over 200 years.

He said, “look out the windows.” We looked out at all the office buildings around us. “What do you see?” he said. “I don’t know.” “They’re empty! All the cubicles are empty. The middle class is being hollowed out.” And I took a closer look. Entire floors were dark. Or there were floors with one or two cubicles but the rest empty. “It’s all outsourced, or technology has taken over for the paper shufflers,” he said.

“Not all the news is bad,” he said. “More people entered the upper class than ever last year.” But, he said, more people are temp staffers than ever.

And that’s the new paradigm. The middle class has died. The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.

And it was. The biggest provider of mortgages for the past 50 years, Fannie Mae, had as their slogan, “We make the American Dream come true.” It was just a marketing slogan all along. How many times have I cried because of a marketing slogan. And then they ruined it.

Michael Levin explains.

Prior to the 2008 attention span meltdown, books contained the precise amount of information people needed in order to feel informed about a topic. Today, most people no longer need to feel informed about anything. If they do feel an urge to learn something, even TMZ is usually TMI. Why would you need 400 pages about Harry Truman, or Lady Di, or even Lady Gaga for that matter, when the equivalent of four pages online would suffice?

Books are also boring. You can’t check the weather — or your stocks, or look at porn — in a book. All you can do is read it. The serious point here (I know the porn reference threw you) is that we’ve moved into a world of color, light and sound with which the frumpy old black and white book cannot compete. Reading something online may or may not stick with you the way reading it from a book might, but you can look up all kinds of side references, videos, speeches, and whatnot that a plain old book can’t offer.

One possible answer.

Read it.

One of the lessons of history is that peoples with nearly identical economic arrangements can have radically different political institutions, affording them equally varied access to civil liberties and influence on the decisions that shape their lives.  Thus it’s reasonable and, I think, necessary to talk about the factors that will help define the political dimension of America’s post-imperial future—and in particular, the prospects for democracy in the wake of imperial collapse.

There are at least two barriers to that important conversation.  The first is the weird but widespread notion that the word “democracy”—or, if you will, “real democracy”—stands for a political system in which people somehow don’t do the things they do in every other political system, such as using unfair advantages of various kinds to influence the political process.  Let’s start with the obvious example.  How often, dear reader, have you heard a pundit or protester contrasting vote fraud, say, or bribery of public officials with “real democracy”?

Yet real democracy, meaning the sort of democracy that is capable of existing in the real world, is always plagued with corruption. If you give people the right to dispose of their vote however they wish, after all, a fair number of them will wish to sell that vote to the highest bidder in as direct a fashion as the local laws allow.  If you give public officials the responsibility to make decisions, a fair number of them will make those decisions for their own private benefit.  If you give voters the right to choose public officials, in turn, and give candidates for public office the chance to convince the public to choose them, you’ve guaranteed that a good many plausible rascals will be elected to office, because that’s who the people will choose.  That can’t be avoided without abandoning democracy altogether.

Read it.

Ms Bentley was an Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member who was an active Soviet spy for most of a decade. Her story is perhaps a micro-version of the entire relationship between American Communism (aka progressivism) and the Soviet variety.

Many Americans joined the CPUSA and many spied for the Soviets. Many (if not all) also eventually broke with the Soviets. Obviously, these people were not all identical. They did not all come from the same background. However, when one reads their memoirs, one notices a lot of similarities. Ms Bentley is, in my opinion, the quintessential American Communist. In a way, her story is the story of them all and it’s laid out – in detail and in a matter of fact way – in this nearly forgotten book. Conservatives want you to remember Whittaker Chambers and progressives want you to remember Joseph McCarthy (if they want to remember anything at all). I would like you to remember Elizabeth Bentley.

Read it.

1. Floss. Shut up about blood and it getting stuck in your teeth or a general fear of dentistry and just floss.

2. Sell your microwave. You’d be shocked how much healthier you eat when you have to clean a pan after every meal.

3. Apologize to your partner; you know what you did.

Read it.

Jarvis soon soured on the commercial interests associated with the day. She wanted Mother’s Day “to be a day of sentiment, not profit.” Beginning around 1920, she urged people to stop buying flowers and other gifts for their mothers, and she turned against her former commercial supporters. She referred to the florists, greeting card manufacturers and the confectionery industry as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.”

Read it.

    So here is the challenge: a bottle of fine French wine sent to the first person who can show that Hispanic/Latino American intelligence and scholastic ability is on the same level as European American intelligence and scholastic ability.

Data please.

Read it.

From, say, California or Michigan to, say, Texas.

Moving provides one of the few limits on the megalomania of state bureaucrats.

John Derbyshire looks at your typical Democrat Congressman.

Rep. Weiner became ex-Rep. Weiner after Tweeting suggestive pictures of himself to female e-acquaintances and then lying about the matter. He resigned his seat, sub-editors at the New York tabloids showered so many puns and double entendres on the city that the Sanitation Department had to clear them from the streets with snow plows, and those of us who’d never seen eye-to-eye with Weiner (sorry, it’s contagious) assumed we had heard the last of him—that his premature withdrawal (sorry, sorry) from public life would be permanent.

…

Given the manner of Weiner’s leaving Congress, he didn’t seem very electable. As the New York Post opined, Weiner’s road to the mayoralty would surely be “long and hard.” Possibly so; but at the end of April Weiner was holding his own (look, you try writing with a straight face about this guy) in the polls.

Guy Somerset doesn’t believe the same things that everyone else believes.

Every schoolchild is taught that the evil Germans invaded Poland in 1939 because they loved killing people (usually infants). This crippled account of history with hatred as its crutch continues throughout high school and university only to be mended, to the extent it ever is, in graduate school or by self-education. Then the inquisitive mind learns that the war was perhaps not entirely caused by Germans’ insatiable need for babies’ blood.

Lamentably an area known as the Danzig Corridor was to drag Britain and France into a continent-wide conflict that resulted not in the legitimate surrender of a Polish strip of historically German land, but instead the sacrifice of Poland to decades of Soviet tyranny. Some heroic individuals foresaw this and attempted to avert it.

In the end, Britain and France blundered into a charnel house that need never have existed, and it was largely in the service of promises, assurances, and treaties with Warsaw. After all, they reasoned, had not Germany crossed a red line?

Thankfully history never repeats itself and the United States is blithely in the process of threatening the Syrian government over a set of red lines that the US drew.

That’s sarcasm, incidentally.

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INTJ here.

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Many conlanging projects begin with a simple premise that violates the inherited conventions of linguistics in some new way. Aeo uses only vowels. K?len has no verbs. Toki Pona, a language inspired by Taoist ideals, was designed to test how simple a language could be. It has just a hundred and twenty-three words and fourteen basic sound units. Brithenig is an answer to the question of what English might have sounded like as a Romance language, if vulgar Latin had taken root on the British Isles. Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.”

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Answer: Not as long as the eco-nazis freak every time they hear the work ‘nuclear’.

The Lion of the Blogosphere deals out some inconvenient truth.

1. Despite the myth in the conservative blogosphere that big business and rich people are Republican, in fact big business and rich people are far more Democratic than conservative-blogosphere types want to believe.

2. They are putting massive support behind more immigration so they can fill up their cubicles with cheap computer programmers from India.

The Republican party hasn’t been the ‘party of the rich’ since FDR. It is, however, the party of the Real Middle Class who run the small businesses of America and who are getting it packed up their pooper by the quasi-fascist alliance of the Crust Corporate and the Crust Political. All this noise about ‘soaking the rich’ is just handwaving to disguise the fact that (a) there aren’t enough rich to pay for all the promises coming out of Washington and (b) ‘the rich’ aren’t scared by tax increases any more than people who live on a hill are scared by flooding.

Read it. And watch the video.

George Will explains it all to you. This is one of the reasons why you want to go to someplace like Yale.

Read it.

Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. Beyond Meat — backed by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone via their company Obvious Corp — created an eerily accurate chicken substitute, for example.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Read it.

Sadly, life doesn’t come with an instruction manual custom designed for you.

But you can make one.

Freeberg, as usual, has some good stuff to say.

The medication explosion is both a cause and a symptom of the forced female-friendliness. It is a cause because drugging a boy so that he can pay attention to what he’s being told, is a different thing entirely from drugging a boy so that he will engage the problems and make effective decisions. Our drugs yield passive, not active, participation. This difference has deep meaning. I wonder why more people don’t make something of it.

And it’s a symptom because — again, I speak from personal experience — participating in any class structure that is female-friendly, when you’re a boy, is boring as snot. That, too, is another deeply meaningful point that people don’t talk about as much as they should, if they really want to make the situation better, and I’m left wondering why.

It’s difficult for me to use actual English words to describe the utter lack of respect or sympathy I have for people who claim to have difficulty capturing the attention of boys. Oh, I suppose I can relate to it a little bit. The problem comes about when they conclude that it can’t be done, and it’s time for some little blue pills. Have you ever taken a gaggle of zoned-out boy kids outside, and moved the subject matter around to something they want to learn? It’s quite a striking effect. Think of an old metal three-pound coffee can filled with mice, with a blowtorch put under it. It’s like that — but reversed, approach instead of avoidance — lots of writhing and jostling as everyone struggles to get a look. What we should be studying here, is not what drugs force the boys to concentrate on girl-stuff, but what subject matters bring about this writhing and jostling and sudden interest.

Very well said.

We could use the movies as an example. Men who actually enjoy being around their wives will take them to see Titanic, The Notebook, The English Patient, even the latest Barbra Streisand Farewell Tour. But a Twilight movie crosses the line into “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

Well, when it works for the movie house, it works for school. If the clock and the window are the most interesting things to watch in the classroom, there’s a problem.

Yup.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

When I did the Backpack Tour of Europe in 1980, I came to the same conclusion as just about all those young aristocrats who did the Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th Century: Italy is the best country to visit as a tourist.

He also quotes some interesting bits from Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times (unfortunately behind a paywall):

     Much commentary about immigration to Europe is written as if no reasonable person could possibly care who, specifically, a country’s residents are and where, specifically, they come from.

…

Another problem is that Italy is the land of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the Sistine Chapel. It might be possible to convince an American or an Australian to believe (or to say) that a big arrival of migrants will be a cultural “enrichment”. It is a harder case to make in Italy, even in the 21st century. Immigration may enrich Italy in many ways, but is unlikely to do so culturally.

 

Read it.

You can find anything on the Internet.

Read it.

People often ask who would get sued in a robocar accident. They wonder if it will be the occupant/passenger/driver, or the car company, or perhaps the software developer or some component maker. They are concerned that this is the major “blocking” issue to resolve before cars can operate on the road.

The real answer, at least in the USA and many other countries, is that in the early years, everybody will get sued. There will be no shortage of lawyers out to make a reputation on an early case here, and several defendants in every case. It’s also quite probable that it will be the occupant of a robocar suing the makers of the car, with no 3rd party involved.

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A day doesn’t go by where some boss doesn’t shut down discussion of something he wants to do by saying, “You need to have a positive attitude. You need to work on saying yes instead of no all the time.” It’s important to note that this is not an argument on the merits of his idea or the criticism of it, it’s an attack on the attitude of his critics, and really it is no different than if he had covered his ears and screamed “la la la la la, I can’t hear you!”

Yeah, I really hate those guys.

Read it.

New York-based startup HealthyOut already has a popular iPhone and Android app for quickly finding nearby restaurants and dishes that users can order and have delivered. Today at Disrupt NY 2013, HealthyOut is unveiling a new service, which will provide users with personalized menus of food delivered to help them lose weight or just eat better overall.

Launching first in New York City, HealthyOut’s delivery service is designed to provide users with healthy options two times a day, five days a week. By combing through the menus of restaurants around the city that deliver, HealthyOut will come up with 10 meals a week that can automatically be sent to a customer’s home or office.

This sort of service depends on close physical proximity of a sufficient number of food snobs in order to be viable. In the old days, when transportation was inefficient and slow, everybody operated this way. Fortunately for us, things have gotten better. Unfortunately for us, the ‘progressives’ who constitute our ruling class don’t seem to have gotten the message.

Steve Sailer is not impressed.

 I don’t know what kind of name Shaun Raviv is, but Vipul Naik is a polite and intelligent young graduate of Chennai Mathematical Institute in Tamil Nadu, India.

I admire his ethnocentric loyalty. His people have overpopulated their own country, with dire consequences. He strives to talk Americans into allowing his people to come to America in vast numbers to overpopulate our country.

Read it.

Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines or credit hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit.

Read it.

Hey, if it was easy, anybody could do it.

 

The Economist returns to the reservation and builds a McMansion.

Although the groups covered by affirmative action tend to be poorer than their neighbours, the individuals who benefit are often not. One American federal-contracting programme favours businesses owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged” people. Such people can be 87 times richer than the average American family and still be deemed “disadvantaged” if their skin is the right colour. One beneficiary of South Africa’s programme of “Black Economic Empowerment” is worth an estimated $675m; he is also the deputy president of the ruling party. Letting members of certain groups charge more and still win public contracts is nice for the few who own construction firms; less so for the many who rely on public services. The same goes for civil-service quotas. When jobs are dished out for reasons other than competence, the state grows less competent, as anyone who has wrestled with Indian or Nigerian officialdom can attest. Moreover, rules favouring businesses owned by members of particular groups are easy to game. Malaysians talk of “Ali-Baba” firms, where Ali (an ethnic Malay) lends his name, for a fee, to Baba (a Chinese businessman) to win a government contract.