THE YEAR IN robots.
Archive for 2014
December 26, 2014
MORE ERRORS FROM Neil de Grasse Tyson. More here.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Pennsylvania ‘cheer mom’ of 3 arrested for having sex with daughter’s 17-year-old classmate in parked car. “Gibney, a mother of three, was a volunteer cheer mom at Pottsgrove High School where her daughter is a member of the cheerleading squad, reports NBC Philadelphia. The victim also attends the high school.”
SCIENCE: A New Study Suggests That People Who Don’t Drink Alcohol Are More Likely To Die Young. “The tightly controlled study, which looked at individuals between ages 55 and 65, spanned a 20-year period and accounted for variables ranging from socioeconomic status to level of physical activity. Led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin, it found that mortality rates were highest for those who had never had a sip, lower for heavy drinkers, and lowest for moderate drinkers who enjoyed one to three drinks per day.”
You don’t want to be anti-science, do you?
PROTEST BLOWBACK: After NYC Deaths, a Surge of Support for Police. The thing is, though, that Sharpton, et al., aren’t trying to win over the public, they’re trying to consolidate a hard core of support.
GOOD POINT: The Other Film Canceled Because Of The Sony Hack. Will it get a new lease on life?
IN THE MAIL: From Mercedes Lackey, Collision: Book Four of the Secret World Chronicle.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 596.
MEGAN MCARDLE: If Single-Payer Can’t Work In Vermont. . . .
“But Megan!” I hear you cry. “Single-payer systems are cheaper, not more expensive! Look at Europe!”
Alas, however, as I wrote at the time, there is nothing about single payer that will magically allow us to cut costs to European levels. People who believed otherwise were substituting a crude eyeballing of international statistics to substitute for reasoned analysis, in part because it told them what they wanted to be true: that they could have the universality and progressiveness of a single-payer system without having to ask the taxpayer for a giant heap of money to provide those benefits. They were, in the words of one of my favorite public-policy professors, “getting high on their own supply.”
Now, I know what you are preparing to say: I am allowing my ideological priors to blind me to the plain evidence in front of my nose. So let me explain. I concede that single-payer systems may well allow you to control the rate of health-care cost growth, thanks to government price controls on supplies and services, along with rationing or denial of expensive treatments. What it doesn’t allow you to do is easily cut the rate of health-care spending. None of the single-payer systems that are frequently held up as models for the U.S. have ever managed sustained cuts in health-care spending. All they’ve done is prevent it from growing so fast.
Also, I note that Vermont is small and fairly homogenous, yet still couldn’t pull it off.
AT AMAZON, Christmas Is Over, But The Year-End Deals Have Just Begun! Got a gift card for Christmas? Put it to work here!
Also, take 20% off Athletic Shoes.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 64% Off Select Pelican Camera Cases.
And, also today only: 40% Off Merrell Women’s Boots.
WHEN POLITICAL NARRATIVES MEET FACTS: Campus sexual assault under fresh scrutiny after new survey shows lower incidence.
When President Obama announced in September his “It’s On Us” initiative to combat college sexual assault, he declared that “an estimated 1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted in her college years.”
“One in 5,” Obama repeated, to drive home the point.
But now, in the wake of a new federal Department of Justice report showing the incidence of rape and sexual assault on campus at far lower levels and trending down over the last decade, that statistic is being called into question.
Well, that’s because it’s bogus. Which doesn’t stop Sen. Claire McCaskill, (D-Mo): “Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate.”
Old narrative: The statistical proof of our argument is overwhelming!
New narrative: Our argument is too important to be undermined by mere statistics!
MERRY CHRISTMAS, HATERS: “This kind of hate is all about progressive ideas of ‘social justice.'”
I’M PRETTY SURE THIS MEANS AMANDA MARCOTTE IS TRANSPHOBIC OR SOMETHING. Actually, I guess it would be “trans-insensitive.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Belt Tightening 101: Mitch Daniels has helped Purdue keep costs down for students.
Prior to his arrival in 2012, tuition at Purdue had gone up every year for 36 years, with annual hikes averaging close to 6 percent in the previous decade. Daniels has frozen tuition for three straight years and slashed room and board costs by 10 percent. “Instead of asking our students and their families to accommodate their budgets to our spending,” he says, “let’s see if we can’t adjust our spending to their budgets.” Purdue’s class of 2016 may graduate without ever having seen a tuition hike.
Erica Smith, a recent communications graduate from Michigan City, says that the tuition freeze was long overdue. She financed her education with loans she’ll be repaying for at least 25 years. “I feel hopeless almost,” she says. “But most of my friends have as much debt as I do. We joke about paying it till we die.” Smith says that cost hikes while she was a student added between $4,000 and $6,000 to her overall debt. “If tuition continues to rise, Purdue will be out of reach for middle-class people, like my niece,” whom she hopes will one day follow her to West Lafayette.
Daniels achieved the tuition freeze in part by postponing raises for some administrators, and some faculty members volunteered to forgo raises as well. Information-technology consolidation, bulk purchasing, eliminating off-campus storage, disposing of surplus property, and improving cash management also contributed—all techniques from Daniels’s playbook as governor. The former Indiana governor’s efforts to control costs have attracted national attention.
As they should. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, because universities haven’t really tried much to control costs. That will have to change.
BARACK OBAMA: One-Man Revolution.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why weight training is better for your waistline than running.
Actually, I suspect that most InstaPundit readers have heard this before.
HOPEY-CHANGEY: The Booming Economy vs. The Struggling Middle Class.
December 25, 2014
PUT MY SEAT IN THE NON-GRINCHING SECTION, PLEASE: Passenger tossed after flipping out over staff’s ‘Merry Christmas.’
REMEMBERING: The Last Victorian Leviathan Steam Ship.
SO, HAPPILY, THE INSTA-DAD WAS WELL ENOUGH TO JOIN US:
