Read it.

The lesson seems clear: Unions go on strike = life gets more pleasant for everybody.

Read it.

Gotta love Australians.

The real surprise is that it involved a female sailor — these days, that’s unusual.

Read it.

The process still requires the craftsmanship and care of a skilled luthier in assembling the instrument, but Dr. Sirr sees the process as an opportunity for ordinary musicians to have access to the world’s most treasured instruments at a fraction of the price.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Proposals to cut Saturday service and close underused post offices in order to save billions of dollars have met united opposition from Democrats and many of the conservative Republicans who swept into office campaigning on smaller government.

Cornell University associate professor Richard Geddes compared efforts to save the postal service to the closures of under-used military bases. In concept, lawmakers support closing unneeded facilities — just not those in their own congressional districts.

Read it.

What vegetarianism eventually leads to. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here.

Read it.

They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn’t bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don’t be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, “a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs.”

They are engineers.

Yet another politically unfashionable group to worry about. Note that the guy raising the alarm is not an engineer.

Actually, this isn’t hard to figure out: Engineers are just as permeated by their cultures as anybody else; unlike Queer Studies majors, though, they actually build stuff that works.

Read it.

TO satisfy our ever-growing need for computing power, many technology companies have moved their work to data centers with tens of thousands of power-gobbling servers. Concentrated in one place, the servers produce enormous heat. The additional power needed for cooling them — up to half of the power used to run them — is the steep environmental price we have paid to move data to the so-called cloud.

Well, of you left-wing assholes would allow us to build nuclear power plants, it wouldn’t be a problem. Nuclear power plants have no environmental price except in the fever dreams of Jane Fonda and her crowd.

Two researchers at the University of Virginia and four at Microsoft Research explored this possibility in a paper presented this year at the Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

I am not making this up.

Read it.

A large explosion has been reported in the Iranian city of Isfahan as the regime issued conflicting reports apparently designed to deny any suggestions of a sabotage attack on its nuclear facilities.

Not another one….

Pass the popcorn.

Bryan Caplan tells the truth about education.

I’ve been in school for the last 35 years – 21 years as a student, the rest as a professor.  As a result, the Real World is almost completely foreign to me.  I don’t know how to do much of anything. While I had a few menial jobs in my teens, my first-hand knowledge of the world of work beyond the ivory tower is roughly zero.

And the same goes for the vast majority of professors, especially in ‘humanities’.

Yes, I can train graduate students to become professors.  No magic there; I’m teaching them the one job I know.  But what about my thousands of students who won’t become economics professors?  I can’t teach what I don’t know, and I don’t know how to do the jobs they’re going to have.  Few professors do.

Treasure this moment of honesty.

Many educators sooth their consciences by insisting that “I teach my students how to think, not what to think.” But this platitude goes against a hundred years of educational psychology. Education is very narrow; students learn the material you specifically teach them… if you’re lucky.

Other educators claim they’re teaching good work habits. But especially at the college level, this doesn’t pass the laugh test. How many jobs tolerate a 50% attendance rate – or let you skate by with twelve hours of work a week? School probably builds character relative to playing videogames. But it’s hard to see how school could build character relative to a full-time job in the Real World.

Read it.

The US military has built a stone circle in its Air Force academy to give pagans, druids and witches somewhere to practice their religion.

And read Fallen Angels by Jerry Pournelle et al. to find out how this story ends.

Steve Sailer is shooting some post-Turkey-Day fish in a barrel.

On p. 6 of Back to Work, I tripped over a sentence of 85 words. Alerted, I began to keep track of Clinton’s XXXL-sized sentences. By page 20, I had found additional leviathans of 91, 105, 110, 98, 118, and a round 200 words. I decided to give up counting. But, then, on pp. 23-24, Clinton lets loose with a blue whale of a sentence comprising 346 words.

Cicero did that all the time — but then, he wrote in Latin; it’s doubtful Clinton could distinguish Latin from latte.

In the past, the Clintons have been notorious for not acknowledging their ghostwriters. For example, Simon & Schuster paid Barbara Feinman $120,000 to write It Takes a Village for Hillary Clinton, but the First Lady refused to mention Feinman’s name.

Shucks, I’d have done it for half of that.

Read it.

Critics of a controversial trend in advertising are proposing legislation that would force companies to inform customers when the models in their ads have been photoshopped in order to improve their appearance.

Coming soon: Legislation banning unrealistic plots and scenes in books, movies, and video games. And don’t get me started on Weight Watchers.

Seth Matlin is the founder of offourchests.com, the driving force behind the “Self Esteem Act,” which seeks to make consumers more aware of the digital enhancement that occurs in advertising.

‘Progressives’ are all about ensuring that your life as dreary as theirs.

Matlin believes that digitally enhanced advertising creates unrealistic expectations for young women and that advertisers are giving young girls the impression that they will never be good enough. He argues that by focusing on physical beauty, and by photoshopping already beautiful models, entire segments of the population are being excluded.

‘We’re going to enhance your self-esteem by making sure that you have no prayer of being anything other than fat, ugly, and stupid.’ The anti-Burger-King: Have it our way — or else.

Ross Douthat pees all over the Legend of JFK. And about time, too.

THE cult of John F. Kennedy has the resilience of a horror-movie villain. No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.

Kennedy was arguably the most incompetent President of the 20th century until Jimmy Carter.

Read it.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

This is somewhat untimely, but still worth pondering.

I have never understood the bleeding-heart whiners who sob and moan over the fact that people convicted of murder get terminated.

This is not tragedy, such as people who contract fatal diseases or die in freak car accidents. This is not (popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding) oppression, like Christians run over by Muslim tanks in Cairo. This is not even obvious miscarriage of justice, like some poor black kid getting lynched by a mob of Democrats because he kissed a white girl, as happened far too often in the South. This is a long-established system (granted, less than perfect) for removing from society people who have demonstrated that they do not choose to live by the same rules as everyone else, rules that are objectively demonstrable as necessary for society to exist at all. Who could have a problem with that, except someone who has become so totally detached from reality that his judgment is suspect in every realm of life?

Certainly, there are people on death row who don’t belong there. There isn’t, however, anyone on death row who doesn’t belong somewhere other than wandering around loose where he (and it’s almost always a he) can bother innocent citizens — Pat Boone doesn’t wind up on death row. Considering the number of murders who happen every year, and the number of people who are executed for murder every year, one could almost say that it’s more likely somebody in prison will die of food poisoning than of deliberate execution.

There is a very good case to be made (certainly from a Christian perspective) against capital punishment, but there is no good case to be made for letting these people out on the street. I’m curious how these armchair judges would feel about hosting such convicts for five or ten years in their spare bedrooms, just to prove their sincerity?

Read it.

Comfort Suites will pay $132,500 to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit filed against the hotel chain on behalf of a San Diego hotel clerk with autism, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Monday.

Tarsadia further agreed to sweeping changes, including revising its policies and procedures with respect to ADA compliance.

One of those sweeping changes, I’ll bet you, is a determination never again to hire somebody with a disability, even if it means spending whatever it takes to automate that job so as not to run any risk by hiring someone at all.

And the dimwitted wonder why companies aren’t hiring….

Read it.

This city has long been a resettlement site for refugees, sent here by the State Department for a chance at a better life. More than 60 languages are spoken in the school system, with Somalis, Sudanese, Iraqis and other recent arrivals mixing with children whose ancestors came from Quebec to work in the mighty textile mills along the Merrimack River.

I don’t suppose that the inhabitants were consulted about whether they wanted to turn their quiet New England town into some sort of U.N. dumping ground. Why don’t they go to New York City, which delights in that kind of thing?

In a highly unusual move, Mayor Ted Gatsas and the city’s Board of Aldermen asked the State Department in July to halt resettlements here for now. A tide of more than 2,100 refugees over the last decade — most recently, Bhutanese families coming from camps in Nepal — has been more than the city of 109,500 can assure jobs and decent housing for, Mr. Gatsas said.

Oh, as if that’s ever been a consideration.

Read it.

The actual meat of the discovery is that graphene has been successfully chipped off a block of graphite using a chemical solvent. These flakes are then filtered to remove any larger, print head-clogging chunks, and then turned into a polymer ink. Despite its amazing properties, graphene hasn’t yet found a way into our computers is because it’s currently very hard and expensive to produce, isolate, and use in silicon circuits. Cambridge’s discovery probably won’t help IBM bring 100GHz graphene circuits to market, though — but it could enable, quite literally, wearable computers.

We have the technology.

Read it.

“When everybody’s somebody
Then no-one’s anybody.”

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

How will you handle even simple purchases without power, communications or cash? As we increasingly transact via credit cards, online and even cell phones, cash has become much less prevalent. If the ATMs are down, and you don’t have enough emergency cash on hand, what do you do?

Already, it seems that for a broad range of demographics, especially those under 25, cash is already dead. Or, if there are emergency radio broadcasts and the broadcasts says that emergency help is located at a certain park in a certain city, what good is that information to a GPS reliant person who never learned to read a map and doesn’t own any maps?

Mormons will be fine; they’re required to have a year’s supply of food on hand. The rest of us, well….

Freeberg nails it yet again.

My theory is mostly the same, although simpler. It’s like saying, how come only-children aren’t as excited about becoming competitive? Answer there, as with here, is: There is no reason to be. Logic is the Great Equalizer with creed and race; group-think is not. Group-think reverberates its messages within social or working groups, and the simple fact is that our social and working groups remain racially polarized. Yes, it is embarrassing to the left, to the protest movements, and to Occupy Wall Street. It puts the big-reveal on the idea that we as a society cannot protest our way toward racial harmony.

If it made sense, you could recruit across communities, racial, gender, sex-preference lines. The irony is that capitalism does this. If something makes sense, people move. Occupy Wall Street doesn’t make sense, and it only appears to make sense when you’re being moved toward it as part of a big flash-mob crowd. Things look different outside of the crowd. Rather like drinking large amounts of alcohol; the drunk thinks all his jokes are funny, and he isn’t quite talking loud enough.

Read it.

Tell the truth, we’ve all had days like that.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

“Look deep into her eyes: Is she the stupidest person on Earth, or does she actually know what she’s advocating?” (The death toll of Mao’s Cultural Revolution is estimated from 1.5 million to 20 million.)

Her name is Colleen. She’s a 20-year-old student from Vermont – 95% white, where the unemployment rate is a relatively low 5.6%.

She attends Johnson State College, where in-state tuition is a modest $8,568 a year. We may therefore dismiss as implausible any idea that Colleen is part of an oppressed group whose plight justifies “revolution,” cultural or otherwise. So why was she in Zuccotti Park last week? Dunno.

It’s the romanticization of victimhood. Liberalism teaches kids to identify so profoundly with “victims” that, no matter how comfortable or privileged their own circumstances may be, they have to protest on behalf of the downtrodden, the exploited, the oppressed. Otherwise, they feel inauthentic, full of guilt about being un-victimized.

We live in a country where the people who complain the loudest about oppression are not oppressed in any rational sense of the term. Coupled with the fashionable concern for ‘poor’ people (who aren’t really poor as the rest of the world understands the word) and ‘rich’ people (who mostly earned what they have and are still pilloried as blood-sucking parasites), there comes a time when one is forced to conclude that the inmates are in charge of the asylum, and the safest thing to do is find a convenient hiding place in which to wait for things to get better — if, indeed, they will get better.

Read it.

She had hosted the bash – which saw guests knock back champagne, wine and beer – to celebrate the birthday of her wealthy ex-husband, Roderick Hamilton.

Read it.

A pointed reminder that respect for women is not a Muslim value.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, points out some inconvenient truth.

It’s one of the ironies of American history that when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth rock they promptly set about creating a communist society.  Of course, they were soon starving to death.

A fine illustration of the fact that there is no truth about human behavior, nor a so high a stack of empirical proof, that cannot be ignored by the foolish and ignorant.

Read it.

Read it.

The researchers, led by Andrea Ferrari of the university’s Department of Engineering, created an ink able to deposit graphene on a flexible silicon substrate, using this year’s favourite magic material to improve the efficiency and performance of an organic semiconductor material.

We have the technology.

Read it.

A former NBA superstar was been tugged in by a bunch of hoop-shooting strippers as their head coach ahead of the launch of a basketball league comprised entirely of topless dancers.

The 23-strong Rick’s Cabaret International chain of “upscale adult night clubs” set up its league after spotting a hole in the market – due to an acrimonious dispute between the NBA and players that has shut down the league for the last five months.

Just think of the ratings.

Read it.

And the Brits don’t even do Thanksgiving. Talk about cultural dominance….

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The archaeologists found the 42,000-year-old bones of tuna and sharks in a cave on East Timor near Australia, providing strong evidence that people were deep-sea fishing back then, according to their findings, published in Science.

Read it.

“The New Malthusians” sounds like the name of a new wave or punk band, but just as new wave is old school, there is never anything new about Malthusianism no matter how many times it gets punked. Only the band members change.

When the world’s population reached the estimated 7 billion mark a few weeks ago, the most famous Malthusian of modern times, Paul Ehrlich, made a few encore appearances for old time’s sake, but for the most part Ehrlich and his generation of Malthusian rock stars, such as Garrett Hardin, Lester Brown, and the Club of Rome, appear about a fresh as Keith Richards after a 7 am wake up call. The old guys really need to be retired (well, actually, Garrett Hardin is long dead anyway), to make room for the new kids. The criteria for making the list are simple: a winner’s Malthusianism has to be essentially unmodulated from the older kind, be relentlessly monotonic, be extremely lucrative, and/or a pretext for increased centralized political power.

Read it.

The deposits rival the world’s leading current source of mined jade, in Myanmar, formerly Burma, the experts say. The implications for history, archaeology and anthropology are just starting to emerge.

For one thing, the scientists say, the find suggests that the Olmecs, who flourished on the southern gulf coast of Mexico, exerted wide influence in the Guatemalan highlands as well. All told, they add, the Guatemalan lode was worked for millenniums [sic], as compared with centuries for the Burmese one.

Read it.

Sure, we need more of those people in this country! Open the borders! Make ’em all citizens! All is forgiven! Y’all come on in! Barack will give you a pony!

Read it.

Thereby proving that the missile sheild is necessary. Thanks, Dmitri. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Read it.

Although close to the United States in population and combined economic power, our European allies and partners continue to shrink in terms of military capabilities.

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Led by bioengineer James Hickman, the team pulled off the feat with help from Brown University Professor Emeritus Herman Vandenburgh, who collected muscle stem cell samples from adult volunteers. After close examination, they then discovered that under the right conditions, these samples could be combined with spinal cord cells to form connectors, or neuromuscular junctions, which the brain uses to control the body’s muscles.

Megan McArdle puts Mitt Romney’s ‘business experience’ under a microscope.

Perhaps awed by this résumé, his debate opponents all failed to offer the obvious rebuttal: If he loved the private sector, why did he ditch it to seek public office? Romney’s last immersion in business was more than a decade ago; his last full-time job was as governor of one of the most liberal states in the country. The other Republicans onstage didn’t dare ask the question that ran through my mind as I watched this performance: How, exactly, did almost 25 years with Bain prepare Romney for the presidency?

Now consider what a consultant does. Consultants are, as any firm will tell you, the “best and the brightest,” culled from elite undergraduate and graduate programs. But they rarely lead anything larger than a small team; the average Army second lieutenant nine months out of a third-tier state college probably has more direct reports, and more deliverables.

Read it.

I’m worried that the wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs.

The problem appears to arise because of a mismatch in expectations between the site and the prospective reader. The reader is there to read. The site is there to make money, of which providing something to read may or may not play a part. In the online world, advertising is the prevalent business model; and in the advertising model, money goes to those who attract attention. Unfortunately, much of the advertising world doesn’t differentiate between favorable attention and unfavorable attention. (See here for why this is a bad idea.) In any event, providing an unencumbered reading experience is lower in priority for the site than for the prospective reader.

Read it.

Yeah, hows that hope & change working out for ya?

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Egypt’s rulers of levels of brutality that sometimes exceed those of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, saying that the hopes of protesters had been “crushed” since the former president was forced to step down.

This is where conservative pessimism about change shows ‘progressive’ optimism the door.

Read it.

Quel dommage.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

The notion of an executive washroom with its own special key now seems mostly ludicrous, but it was an actual thing–and I’m not sure that giving executives special bathrooms is actually noticeably less corrosive to social cohesion and personal happiness than giving them fatter pay packets.

It suddenly occurred to me that this is a standard feature of the work lives of blue state elites–(Update:  By which I mean, affluent people who attended elite schools, not “high income people who live in blue states”):  almost all of their contact is with people just like them.  Same education, usually the same few states of origin, and a pretty uniformly shared set of values about what work is for and how it should be done.

These people tend to vote Democratic.  Small-business owners, who work in much more diverse environments, tend to vote Republican.  I’m not going to speculate on why this might be so–but I suspect that it matters.

Read it.

Consider the resources that GE spends to lowers its tax bill, not just the many millions spent on clever accounting and accountants and the many millions spent on lobbying but also the many inefficient ways that GE structures its businesses just to avoid paying taxes and the many millions it invests in socially wasteful projects just in order to produce privately valuable tax credits. Now add to that the allocational inefficiencies of taxing some firms at different rates than others and you have a corporate tax system which wastes a lot of resources and raises relatively little revenue. Indeed, a corporate tax system with a tax rate of zero could well be preferable as it would waste fewer resources and raise not much less revenue.

And consider that this same throw-money-at-the-problem system exists for people like, oh, say, Warren Buffett — which is why one always hears a sniggering sound in the background as he loudly claims that his taxes aren’t high enough.

Mickey Kaus is always worth reading.

Let’s just suppose, as a thought experiment, that the New York Times is a liberal conspiracy.  In this hypothetical alternate reality, the paper’s editors would like the government to do more to redress the material disparities generated by our version of capitalism, and they commission stories designed to bring this better world closer. They might think it a brilliant idea to get the U.S. Census Bureau to calculate, not just how many people are poor according to the government’s fancy new Supplemental Poverty Measure (which takes into account regional cost of living, and government benefits like food stamps, plus medical expenses and taxes**) but how many are under 150%of this new poverty line. Not poor, but “near poor.” Bet there are a lot of them!

I’ll just bet there are.

So the NYT piece notes, in its lede graf, that within this “near poor” category “many own homes.” Some 20 percent of the “near poor,” it turns out, own their homes mortgage-free. One reason they don’t earn much income may be because they don’t need it to pay the rent! And DeParle contacts Robert Rector of the Heritage Institute, who notes that “near poor” is a loaded term designed to “suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.”

Imagine that. ‘Poor’ people who really aren’t all that poor after all. Where have we seen that before?

…unlike the old poverty line, it doesn’t measure Americans’ absolute level of material well-being or destitution, but their relative measure of well being. It’s pegged to the expenditures of the 33d percentile rather than a fixed amount of purchasing power (set, under the old poverty line, at three times the cost of a “minimum food diet” in 1963). Under the old poverty line, “poverty” could be eliminated as society got richer–an achievable and widely shared goal. But the new poverty line will rise as society gets richer (“adjust for rising levels and standards of living”). The newly measured poor will always be with us in substantial numbers, just as there will always be a third of the American population trapped in the bottom third of the income char

ts.  That will yield a permanent, inextinguishable stream of NYT front page “poverty” stat stories–even if  “poverty” no longer means ”poverty” in the sense we now understand the term.

The ‘poor’ you have always with you, by definition. Funny how that works.

If I were inclined to be paranoid–-and I am–-I’d say it’s an audacious, slimy bait-and-switch by liberal activists inside the government anti-poverty bureacracy.

Naw, that couldn’t happen. Could it?

Read it.

No one I know puts “scale” into perspective better than Randall Munroe at xkcd. If you haven’t seen the latest, you should take the time to dive into what may be his largest image ever (and he’s known for creating large images) dealing with money. I warn you, though, it may suck up a lot of time as you go through it:

Read it.

The appeals court said Michigan’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits services of public accommodation from discriminating on the basis of marital status among other grounds, extinguishes doctors’ common law right to decide with whom to undertake a physician-patient relationship.

The California of the North. No wonder its economy sucks.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball pees all over the new Jobs biography … with (I think) good reason.

Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn’t really “invent” anything — not in the sense that Industrial Revolution inventors did. Jobs understood technology but was not an engineer. He had profoundly exquisite taste but was not a designer. What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were.

If this is the standard for innovation, then what product, from any company, has truly been innovative? Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone. But, I say, the differences between those products and Apple’s iPod and iPhone weren’t “tweaks”.

Jobs, like Henry Ford, was a genius-level synthesist — taking stuff that was already out there in a rough form and fitting it all together in a way that made it available (and acceptable, which is an oft-neglected essential factor) to a large number of people.

Read it.

Not the sort of thing you see every day.

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Christensen retells the story of how  Dell [DELL] progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek [LSE: ASKD]—the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can—and does—now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Christensen also describes the impact of foreign outsourcing on many other companies, including the steel companies, the automakers, the oil companies, the pharmaceuticals, and now even software development. These firms are steadily becoming primarily marketing agencies and brands: they are lopping off the expertise that is needed to make anything anymore.  In the process, major segments of the US economy have been lost, in some cases, forever.

Of course, it’s not the pursuit of profit per se that causes the problem, but the pursuit of insanely short-term profit, a distinction that Christensen doesn’t care to make and which the author of the article appears delighted to avoid.

Christensen recalls an interesting talk he had with the Morris Chang the chairman and founder of one of the firms, TSMC [TSM], who said:

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.”

Chang, who is Chinese and therefore sensible about business, obviously understands the necessary distinction, and assumes that his listener understands it as well, which I suspect is not the case.

Yet another case of smart people asking the right questions but unfortunately grabbing a not-quite-right answer and running with it. (Cf. the ‘cult of the shoe’ in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.)