FROM ROBIN HANSON, thoughts on the fertility crisis.
Archive for 2024
January 23, 2024
AN EARLY LOOK AT the next Porsche Macan.
A CLASSIC CHAMBERING: First Shots: Ruger .45 ACP LC Carbine.
DO WE EVEN WANT FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS TO RETURN TO THEIR OFFICES? Hordes of federal workers have continued to work mostly at home since the end of the Covid Pandemic, but pressure is growing for them to come back to their offices, at least half the time. Part of that pressure comes from Sen. Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican who has been talking about it for a year.
STAY WARM: Carhartt Men’s Knit Cuffed Beanie. #CommissionEarned
THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE: Nikki Haley’s Presidential Aspirations Are About to Crash and Burn in New Hampshire.
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE (ONGOING) DAMAGE DONE: Public Education’s Alarming New 4th ‘R’: Reversal of Learning.
The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.
Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more that a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos, many states and school districts are apparently leaving in place the lower standards that allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less, particularly in math.
It’s as if many of the nation’s 50 million public school students have fallen backwards to a time before rigorous standards and accountability mattered very much.
Read the whole thing.
I THINK THE SCREEN-ENTHUSIASM HAS GONE TOO FAR: The 2024 Lincoln Nautilus has a 48-inch panoramic ‘infotainment’ screen.. “When in Park, the luxury SUV’s screen offers gaming, video streaming, and—in the future—video conferencing.”
No thanks.
EVERYBODY HAS A DREAM: A New Billy Joel Single Is Nice, but C’mon — Give Us an Album! “I hope the song is good. I know it won’t be enough.”
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Association found between dark chocolate consumption, reduced risk of essential hypertension.
EVERYTHING LEFTISM EXPLAINED: Michael Watson of the Capital Research Center (CRC) lays out the ideological and institutional structural necessities that drive the Left to be so obsessive about everything.
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, CITIZENS: U.S., Chinese Researchers Wanted to Engineer Virus Similar to Covid One Year before Pandemic Outbreak, Internal Docs Show.
SHE’S AMBITIOUS BUT NOT THAT BRIGHT: Fulton County DA’s Case Against Trump Just Got Really Messy. “Things are not going well for Fani. It’s all of her own doing. She has gotten caught in some very unethical and corrupt behavior, allegedly, something she probably didn’t expect to happen. . . . It’s an ugly intersection of professional malpractice and personal soap opera.”
WOEING: United CEO casts doubt on 737 Max 10 order after Boeing’s recent problems. “United CEO Scott Kirby said the plane is already ‘best case’ about five years delayed and expressed frustration at Boeing for the most recent manufacturing problem in which a door plug blew out during an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 flight on Jan. 5, prompting the FAA to ground those planes.”
Unrelated, just weird: United CEO Scott Kirby is drag queen, pushes drag and DEI on staff.
DISPATCHES FROM THE STONE KNIVES AND BEARSKINS ERA OF COMPUTING: Cray 1978 versus iPhone 2022.
If you want to see a truly amazing trip down 44 years of memory lane, check out this comparison of the 1978 Cray computer, at the time the most powerful computer in the world, and the 2022 iPhone. I won’t bother giving you the specifics because the narrator, Dave Darling, does a very good job.
The Cray had 303 megabytes of storage and weighed a total of 5.5 tons. Compare that to where storage was 20 years previously:
This is a picture of an IBM hard drive being loaded onto an airplane in 1956. According to @HistoricalPics, which tweeted the picture, it’s a 5 megabyte drive, and it weighed more than 2,000 pounds.
iPhones are available one terabyte drives (with rumors last year that two-TB drives were coming). If this is how much computing has advanced in (almost) a half century, where will it be in another 50 years? But will people in the future do more with them than text and surf Pornhub?
READER FAVORITE: COSORI Air Fryer TurboBlaze 6.0. #CommissionEarned
NOW THAT’S A TELL: Watch Adam Schiff’s Face When He’s Called Out for His Lies During Debate.
THAT’S DISCOURAGING: Chance of recovery from lower back pain falls over time.
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Germany, Once a Powerhouse, Is at an Economic ‘Standstill.’
As the economy sputtered last year, the government was nearly paralyzed by bickering among members of the three parties that make up Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition. Then came a budget crisis in November, causing the government’s popularity to plunge in polls.
Many of those disputes were over how to fill a 17 billion-euro ($18.5 billion) gap in the budget after the country’s highest court in November threw out the previous spending plan. That decision was driven by the country’s so-called debt brake, a law enshrined in its Constitution to keep public deficits low.
But geopolitical crises and new industrial rivalries in China and the United States have weakened demand for German-made products abroad. Germany grew rich in recent decades by selling its goods to the world, racking up a trade surplus that strained ties with the United States under President Donald J. Trump.
The restrictions on borrowing are preventing the government from making badly needed investments in public infrastructure, from schools and public administration to railways and energy networks.
Germany has plenty of money for investments; they just choose to spend it on generous social welfare programs, instead.
Although I am a bit jealous of that “debt brake” that stops Berlin from trying to spend its way out of problems the way Washington does.
MARK JUDGE: The Claudine Gay story isn’t Roots, it’s Shattered Glass.
Roots was the epic 1970s miniseries that traced several generations of black Americans from slavery to modern times. It dramatized the resilience of Africans brought here in chains as they triumphed despite brutal racism.
The Claudine Gay story, on the other hand, is about how elites at one of America’s most respected institutions forfeited honor, integrity, and truth to virtue-signal their holy liberalism.
In fact, the Claudine Gay movie has already been made. It was called Shattered Glass and came out in 2003.
In 1998, New Republic writer Stephen Glass was found guilty of making up many of his pieces. Glass’s fabulism was so blatant and widespread that even his liberal colleagues had to take action — but not until after Glass’s lies had already been published.
In its best scene, the film depicts the moment when editor Charles Lane explodes at reporter Caitlin Avey, who has been defending Glass. Lane, the one honorable person left on staff, has to jackhammer through the liberal groupthink to find Avey’s conscience — and her sense of honor. “He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact, just because we found him entertaining,” he says. Then he drops the bomb: “It’s indefensible. Don’t you know that?”
A lot of today’s journalists still don’t know that — or they don’t care.
Just ask former CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter, who failed upward while trying to revive the career of newsreader turned failed propagandist Dan Rather to…teaching wannabe television pundits at Harvard: “The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place. Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)? At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.”
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: Israel Advocate Noa Tishby Shows Protestors Don’t Know the River or the Sea in “From the river to the sea.”
Making lemonade 🍋 from watermelons 🍉 pic.twitter.com/lM0CvA52q6
— Noa Tishby (@noatishby) January 22, 2024
BUT ITS DEI SCORE WAS PERFECT: ‘Um… Why Is Our Plane’s Wing Missing All Those Screws?’
The passenger took photographs of maintenance people with screwdrivers fiddling around with the panel where the missing hardware was noticed. (You can see the pictures in the linked article.) But then the flight was canceled and everyone was booked on other flights while they pulled the plane back for additional inspection and maintenance.
This incident wasn’t closely related to the Portland mishap. This was a Virgin Atlantic flight, not Alaskan Air. Also, instead of a Boeing 737 Max, this was an Airbus A330, a plane with a fairly solid safety record. Both Virgin and Airbus stressed to reporters that there was “no impact to the safety of last week’s aircraft.” They said that the panel with the missing hardware was “a secondary structure used to improve the aerodynamics of the plane.” They also said that each panel has 119 fasteners and its condition wouldn’t have caused any flight issues.
Okay. Perhaps that’s true. But if the plane didn’t need those “improved aerodynamics,” the engineers wouldn’t have included it. And if they designed it with 119 fasteners, it’s supposed to have 119 fasteners. They wouldn’t have added extra ones just to be decorative. You don’t add any superfluous weight to planes.
Fortunately, Washington, as always, is laser focused on this issue: Biden leads crowd in ‘Happy Birthday’ song for Buttigieg: ‘Pete turned 30 today.’