Archive for 2013

THOMAS SOWELL: Barbarians At The Campus Gates. If law students acted this way, I’d write all 50 states’ bar examiners to note their conduct, with names named.

WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT? ‘I used sex and charm and whiteness’ to scam you all. That the scam was so effective says a lot about those who were scammed, and the intellectual foundations upon which their movement rests. Or maybe, a la Bill Clinton, chicks just dig jerks, especially if they pretend to have the right gender politics.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: NSA revelations remind me of Cold War Romania. “I grew up in Communist Romania when all Romanians assumed they were watched and listened to by their government. The feeling we had was that the government was something that had great power over us, but over which we had almost no power or control; something that we just had to live with, or under—like the weather.”

Our ruling class would like for us to feel that way, too.

HOW DARE YOU MOCK PRESIDENT OBAMA! YOU’RE A CLOWN!

JOURNALISM: Better Late Than Never: NPR Admits It Slandered South Dakota. “I don’t believe I have ever seen a representative of a media outlet take apart his own outlet’s story with the care and thoroughness displayed by Mr. Schumacher-Matos. The one thing he doesn’t do is address the motivations of those who reported and produced the false and misleading series, but it is easy to fill in that blank. The reporter and editors spoke from the liberal perspective that is taken for granted by pretty much everyone at NPR. They had a narrative that they wanted to push for political reasons. And they are sticking by their story, even though it has been thoroughly demolished, by me and by Mr. Schumacher-Matos.”

JOEL KOTKIN: How Can We Be So Dense? Anti-Sprawl Policies Threaten America’s Future.

Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering.

More recently density advocates span a much-discussed study of geographic variations in upward mobility as suggesting that living in a spread-out city hurts children’s prospects in life. “Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger,” quipped economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Yet the study actually found the highest rates of upward mobility not in dense cities, but in relatively spread-out places like Salt Lake City, small cities of the Great Plains such as Bismarck, N.D.; Yankton, S.D.; and Pecos, Texas — all showed bottom to top mobility rates more than double New York City. And we shouldn’t forget the success story of Bakersfield, Calif., a city Columbia University urban planning professor David King wryly labeled “a poster child for sprawl.” Rather than an ode to bigness, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the study found that commuting zones (similar to metropolitan areas) with populations under 100,000 — smaller cities that tend to be sprawled by nature — have the highest average upward income mobility.

Well, it’s cheaper to live in places like that, meaning that there’s more capital available to individuals.

BECAUSE IF IT’S BIG ENOUGH, WHAT WILL THEY DELIVER? UPS Tries To Get Ahead Of The 3D Printing Revolution. “Temergence of three-dimensional (3D) printing will have a revolutionary effect on manufacturing, but it may be equally disruptive for firms that make much of their living warehousing and delivering spare parts for companies. Now, one of the biggest delivery firms, UPS, is going to test 3D printing in its stores.”

Of course, someone will have to deliver 3D printing supplies. You can’t print those. . . .

I REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE SCOFFED AT THE IDEA: The Growing Role of Microsatellites. But, then, I remember when people scoffed at the idea of space tourism, too.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don’t Get. This one is really true: “Time is Not a Limitless Commodity.” You have a lot of time in your twenties, but if you waste it, the next thing you know you’re in your thirties, where you don’t have as much time.