Peter Orszag signs on to the Georgist land tax.
This is a great story. Men suck. Women are awesome.
Here’s a good interview on the aftermath of a (justified) cop shooting, and the toll it took on the shooter.
Kevin Carey argues in favor of a national university, making heavy use of technology as a way to address runaway costs. This idea might sound familiar to you. The George Washington angle is great.
Sweet: Turning a silo into the ultimate treefort.
A peek inside the birth tourism industry. In the greater scheme of things, this sort of thing isn’t likely to involve the kind of numbers to have an effect.
Finding a lost city in Mesoamerica.
Here’s a list of the 20 quirkiest cities in the US. Austin, New Orleans, and Portland taking the first three spots doesn’t surprise me… but Kansas City’s presence on the list (#8) does!
When politics and humor intersect, this cartoon seems to be the inevitable result.
Raising the minimum wage has some expected (though eminently logical) new supporters. Will they fill the void in Seattle?
Mother Jones actually has some nice words to say about the Washington Free Beacon. The WFB is… odd. Good news stories juxtaposed against obvious photoshopped images of birds combusting mid-flight due to solar panels. But it works, and it’s one of comparatively few conservative sites I read with devotion.
An Indian-American friend of mine argues that one of the main reasons that India never became a manufacturing hub the way that China did is because graft made it impossible. American-expat-in-China Matthew Stinson tweets of this New York Times article, that graft in China is so ubiquitous that it tends to go unnoticed.
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About that second one: there are plenty of women that suck, too. Granted, there are people out there who are awesome, but there are also some people who are just jerks a lot of the time. And there are also people who get caught up in the mob mentality of “I’ll mock this person like other people are doing, or else they might group me in with him.” It’s just like the pecking order in any junior high…
That’s the truth.
oh my bob, the musical-chairs analogy that a commenter gave is so apt.
I was low on the pecking order (no surprise) but I remember pecking on a girl even less popular than I was, and it’s one of my deepest regrets as an adult, and one of the things I find so hard to comprehend: why was I not nicer to her when I knew how much it sucked to be picked on? Why didn’t I stand up for her? Yes, she could be immature and annoying but so was I….
Also, I know you can’t judge a lot from a face, but that photo of Dancing Man (where he is smiling a little), he looks like a nice guy. And definitely not deserving of the stupid comments people made.
Both FedU links go to same place
Fixed.
National Uni: Not a bad idea. The only sticky spot is how to deal with classes that require lab work?
(cynical) They’ll hire all the science professors who got fired in the consolidation of other universities to teach labs in basements around the country (/cynical).
I remember freaking out mildly over the whole “MOOCs are the greatest thing since sliced bread” (because the corollary to that was: “We can keep the ‘rockstar’ professors employed teaching them, and the competent but unexciting people can go flip burgers or something”). But MOOCs kind of died and I think while a Federal U might be an interesting idea, the idea of closing many of the state schools in favor of it is not a good idea.
Did the CNN piece suggest closing state schools? If so, I missed that (& I just re-skimmed it). I got the feeling that instead the article was suggesting that Federal U would work to co-opt state school facilities & resources (since state schools get a lot of federal money).
It wasn’t said openly but I wonder if that’s a goal.
Also, telling profs teaching a 4/4 load “Yeah, you can just add another class, it’s your federal duty” would be problematic – a lot of us are close to the point where something would have to give (research, caring for family, service) if we had to take on more workload.
It was suggested at one time here that we could add-on online classes “without too much extra work.” They quickly learned that was not so when the first few volunteers to teach online found that the learning curve was steep, equipment failure was chronic, and prep time was sometimes longer than for an in-person class.
I’m probably paranoid given the whole MOOC thing but seriously, it was talked about in some circles like, “We can have the Ten Best Professors teaching every student in the nation” (and everyone else winds up unemployed). So I’m a little twitchy about things that might compete with the existing model.
I’m a good teacher but nowhere near the superstar I’d have to be to keep my job in a marketplace so competitive that the number of positions in the nation were cut in half….
I took an online grad course once. The prof video recorded himself teaching the class one semester, then put all the videos, slides, notes, etc. online and we went at it. If we had questions, we could email, or do live chat, or call (by appointment).
It worked pretty well & there were no equipment failures beyond the first week (class site login issues). It was a bit more challenging that an onsite class, in that it required a lot of personal initiative, but the videos were handy, because if something didn’t stick the first time, I could re-watch the video until it did, or I at least had a clear question for the prof.
Oh, and this was back in 2007.
I took a couple VHS classes in college. Science courses would be tough, but this was business and social studies. The latter was particularly interesting because the videos were several years old and acted like certain things were tight around the corner that hadn’t happened (like a national hate speech law).
Mine was Matrix Methods Of Kinematics for Robotics.
That sounds more interesting than “Modern product distribution technique and theory.”
Also, harder.
It wasn’t too bad, basically coordinate transforms on top of coordinate transforms.
Of course if you don’t know how to do coordinate transforms…
An Indian-American friend of mine argues that one of the main reasons that India never became a manufacturing hub the way that China did is because graft made it impossible.
I think it’s more so that the Chinese government was far more willing to invest and push manufacturing and infrastructure growth for export growth, while the Indian government never really did the same thing.
Here’s a list of the 20 quirkiest cities in the US. Austin, New Orleans, and Portland taking the first three spots doesn’t surprise me… but Kansas City’s presence on the list (#8) does!
In other words, they came up with a list of large American cities. 🙂
And then ranked them according to quirk!
I suspect some New Yorkers will argue that the city has lost its charm and quirkiness due to gentrification, but some would argue that the city was never really as bohemian as one would have suspected.