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We have the technology.

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CBS follows up with a reasonable question: “Is Maxine Waters really as dumb as she seems?”

Well, you can’t say that she doesn’t represent her district.

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Let them go back to being their own Kingdom and see how they like it.

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What is that old phrase? “Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small”?

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Roy, this is the blog I was talking about. (I love the author’s pseudonym, too.)

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It needs to be made.

But what Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Mankiw, and Mr. Cowen are talking about is a consumption tax and an income tax. There’s nothing to prevent the politicians from making this deal on reducing income tax rates to get a consumption tax, then turning around a few years later and raising the income tax rates back to what they were before, using the same approach that President Obama is now using as an argument for returning to the Clinton-era tax rates. If history is any guide, the consumption tax rate will get increased over time too, same as the Medicare tax rate and the Social Security tax rate have been. At least in the absence of a consumption tax, the politicians can’t keep raising the rate of it.

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The responses tended to split into two categories: One said that I was overemphasizing the pragmatic aspects of graduate school at the expense of the “life of the mind” for its own sake. The other set of responses, and by far the more numerous, were from graduate students and adjuncts asking why no one had told them that their job prospects were so poor and wondering what they should do now.

More discussion about graduate study in the humanities.

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon “the life of the mind.” That’s why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.

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Well, I thought it was interesting.

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This may actually be what Jobs had in mind, a platform for Useful Stuff rather than a consumer appliance. In which case, Go Steve; I’m glad I own Apple stock.

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And about fargin time, too. One of the things I’ve been waiting for is the development of sophisticated simulation environments that will allow people to practice useful skills in a realistic environment to give them a leg up when they get into the Real Thing. Aircraft flight simulators have made huge strides in this regard, and some would say that high-end computer games have given us a reserve pool of potential tank gunners and fighter pilots the way life on the prairie gave us a huge pool of potential infantry riflemen during the 20th century. (We still have a long way to go — how many people were not surprised when, in THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, the party in Moria, surrounded by orcs, stood around and waited for whatever it was that had scared off the orcs. I was bouncing up and down in my seat: GUYS, IF THE ORCS ARE RUNNING THEN YOU OUGHT TO BE RUNNING TOO. DON’T JUST STAND THERE WITH YOUR THUMBS UP YOUR BUTTS. But nobody listens to me….)

So this is a welcome development.

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The New York City public schools have adopted a policy that bans most bake sales but allows the sale of pre-packaged items such as Doritos and Pop-Tarts, the New York Times reports. The policy is in the name of the students’ health….

Student health is, of course, to be overseen by the public school, an instrumentality of the State, rather than by the parents, who just Aren’t Qualified to make such decisions. (I’ve got the machine that goes ‘ping’ over here somewhere….)

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To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn’t exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.

My view is that psychiatry is a pseudo-science, like astrology, in which the principles of the discipline bear no causal relationship to the real world and its operations. To the extent that it actually accomplishes anything at all, it is because of incorporation of real scientific fields like medicine.

Jerry Pournelle says:

DSM has, in my judgment, far too often been influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, and used to justify payments from insurance; it is, in my judgment, one of the many reasons for the high costs of health care, since “mental health” coverage is now generally required in state mandated healthcare insurance policies as one of the “minimum” requirements. As to the conflicts between the Freudian analyst based theories of mental disorder and the behavior-based medical theories that generally prescribed chemical treatment, that was just beginning when I left psychology graduate school. Of course my emphasis in psychology was in engineering and human factors on the one hand, and mathematical and statistical analysis using tests and measurements on the other, so I am hardly an expert on abnormal psychology.

I am very glad that the DSM did not exist when I was growing up. I would almost certainly have been diagnosed with a disorder that could only be cured by drugs. As it happens, I was “cured” by being forced to learn a modicum of self-discipline.

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What if we achieved the urbanist dream, with people deciding en masse to move back to the city? Well, that would create a big problem, since there would be no place to put them. Many cities hit their peak population in 1950, when the US total was 150 million. Today it is over 300 million, with virtually all the growth taking place in the suburbs.

A similar problem arises with mass transit: If everybody shifted to using public transportation, as the Crust keeps insisting they must, it couldn’t handle the load — and the tax-funded subsidies necessary to prop up most mass-transit fare strutures would quickly break government budgets.

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Stan Still, Anna Sasin, Hazel Nutt, Barb Dwyer and Justin Case are among some of the country’s unluckiest people who have been given the unfortunate names by their parents, it found.

Some parents think of their children as pets, judging by the names they hand out. I’d sue.

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The fact that so many celebrities – and especially footballers – have the emotional attention span of the average teenager ought, you would think, to be taken into account before they let the needles at them.

Without being personally acquainted, we can be sure that now Johnny (Depp) has found contentment with Vanessa (Paradis) he deeply regrets that large Winona (Ryder) Forever on his right bicep.

Oh, the intolerable burdens of modern life…. I seem to recall Angelina Jolie having the same problem when she broke up with Billy Bob Thornton. And I won’t even get into the Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson story.

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Which is just another way of saying that the dollar isn’t worth what it used to be, of course.

“As your reward, I will give you a pigeon’s egg the size of a ruby….”

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Yet Another Cute Little Car.

Add a Vulcan mini-gun with heads-up display, and oh, baby….

Eric Raymond.

I knew it was getting bad out there, with the nominal unemployment rate at 10% and the actual hitting 17% and 6 applicants for every job. But my friends are mostly university-educated professionals in high-skilled tech jobs — last fired, first hired, and bright enough that if they had to change careers or found their own business they could probably hack it. Except…except for these two, who I’ll call A and B. What’s happening to them is bad. Very bad. And it illustrates a problem that’s going to get worse barring some drastic changes in the system.

We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

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Yet Another Cute Little Car.

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PG has just released their proposal today, in a “healthcare manifesto.” The central problems facing hospital design happen to have already been solved in the design of first-class cabins for airlines, they say.

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It emerged that the S301 – now in trials with the SEALs in Hawaii – had cost just $10m to develop, which contrasted especially well with the $885m+ spent on the ill-fated Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS).

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Well, they are French, after all.

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We have the technology.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

When all is said and done, what’s in it for you? Or, better yet, what’s in it for them, the “social-justice queers”? They’ve got their tenured positions at the universities or their jobs at liberal magazines or their book contracts. They’ve got their six-figure executive salaries at gay-rights groups and their prestigious appointments to government jobs. And you’ve got (maybe) some symbolic policy change that is, at most, of indirect value to your quality of life.

Wake up, chumps. The poverty of the poor is not caused by the wealth of the rich, and discontents of gay people aren’t the result of heterosexuals monopolizing happiness. The politics of spite and envy — which is to say, the agenda of the Democratic Party — can never lead to “social justice,” because there is no such thing as “social justice.”

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We’re urging him to call it ‘Obamacare’.

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Some people just have too much time on their hands. This is on a par with seeing Jesus in your morning toast.

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Your future under Islam. Don’t say that you weren’t warned.

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Be the first on your block … er, section….

John Stossel whacks the FDA.

We’ll hear from people like Bruce Tower. Tower has prostate cancer. He wanted to take a drug that showed promise against his cancer, but the Food and Drug Administration would not allow it. One bureaucrat told him the government was protecting him from dangerous side effects. Tower’s outraged response was: “Side effects—who cares? Every treatment I’ve had I’ve suffered from side effects. If I’m terminal, it should be my option to endure any side effects.”

Check it out.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back for a Big Mac….

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Doing well by doing good — for himself and his cronies.

Want to know why Warren Buffet and Bill Gates Sr. like  high taxes? Because they’re still left with millions while you’re left with squat.

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Have you ever noticed that people who like mass transit are the sort of people who, in an earlier age, would have played with trains? Instead, because they were deprived as children, they seek to play with our transportation choices — and our money too, of course.

Total travel time for the trip: Just over 2 and a half hours – nearly twice as fast as driving. Projected one-way ticket price: $55 – less than half the cost of a flight.

How much less exiting that would be, phrased as “Just over 2 and a half hours – twice as slow as flying. Projected one-way ticket price: $55 – more than twice the cost of a drive.”

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Yeah, we all need more sticky stuff in our lives….

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Prosecutors in Milan brought the case after being contacted by charity Viva Down and argued that the boys privacy had been violated and that Google should have removed the footage quicker than it eventually did.

I’m trying to come up with some plausible excuse for an Italian court to have jurisdiction over three suits in California, and I’m not finding one. Apparently the boys that did the bullying are the alleged victims; that doesn’t say much good about the Italians.

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An Australian government programme that imposes restrictions on Aboriginies in an attempt to stamp out sexual abuse of children in remote outback towns has been branded racist and ineffective by the United Nations.

And, let’s face it, the U.N. knows from ineffective and racist.

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The Bloomberg administration has made getting rid of inadequate teachers a linchpin of its efforts to improve city schools. But in the two years since the Education Department began an intensive effort to root out such teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.

Slow? Say ‘glacial’.

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I don’t think I’ve ever been sad when a Supreme Court Justice has retired.

Preach it, brother.

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This is news?

The rot spreads.

I’m glad I got out before everything well to Hell.

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Not a step up.

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After 4 years of no numerical or posted daytime speed limits on these classifications of highways outside of urban areas, Montana recorded its lowest number of fatal accidents on the affected roadways.

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A pointed reminder that corporate executives are bureaucrats, not capitalists.

I am reminded of the Jew, caught, who denounced other Jews to the Gestapo so that he wouldn’t be the only one on the train to Auschwitz.

Needless to say, I don’t buy from Sears.

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I would not work for a company that indulged in such juvenilia during a job interview, unless they were hiring me for a position the duties of which included solving silly puzzles. No wonder everyone at Microsoft has ADD; they select for it.

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I’m thinking not.

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Somehow, this just says ‘America’ to me. Perhaps it’s the ketchup.