REAL PROGRESS TOWARD SAVING THE PLANET: Congress passes bill to jumpstart new nuclear power tech.
They really need to give nuke plants the kind of regulatory holiday they’ve given to geothermal.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
June 25, 2024
HMM: New research shows why you don’t need to be perfect to get the job done. “When neuroscientists think about the strategy an animal might use to carry out a task—like finding food, hunting prey, or navigating a maze—they often propose a single model that lays out the best way for the animal to accomplish the job. But in the real world, animals—and humans—may not use the optimal way, which can be resource-intensive. Instead, they use a strategy that’s good enough to do the job but takes a lot less brain power.”
Congratulations, guys, you’ve just rediscovered Satisficing.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: NASA calls off spacewalk for second time this month.
PROGRESSIVE POLICIES ALWAYS MAKE THINGS WORSE: Distress, depression rates double among transgender Americans in 10 years.
Related: Neurosis and the Curley Effect. “Reading all of these pieces I’m seeing a story that goes something like this: Depressed, neurotic people (especially single women) are more likely to support Democrats. Democrats support policies and messaging that produce more depressed, neurotic people, especially single women. Now maybe this is an accident, but maybe it isn’t.”
THOUGHTS ON FELONIES: 21st Century Criminal Justice: Show Me The Man and I’ll Show You The Crime.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Randy Barnett A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: 99 SpaceX Raptor Engines Before New Mass Production of Thousands. “Elon Musk showed Everyday Astronaut the SpaceX Starbase and rocket factories. SpaceX has a new Raptor engine that will be a couple hundred pounds lighter without a heat shield. It will have built in cooling channels. This is the version of the Raptor engine which wil be produced by the thousands. The Texas Starbase will eventually be able to produce one hundred Starships and Boosters per year.”
THIS IS TRUE OF THE VAST MAJORITY OF WRITERS THESE DAYS: Tech Reviewers Write Reviews for Each Other, Not for the Public.
FIGHT THE POWER: Conservative students allege tyranny, intimidation by Tarleton State. “A Tarleton State University professor was allegedly forbidden from advising a Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapter because of its political bias, even though another professor is actively advising the Tarleton Progressives. The professor also reportedly told one of the would-be club’s leaders that ‘the higher-ups’ wanted her to know that she was on their ‘radar.'”
MONEY-LOSING EDUCATION: 33% of federal financial aid goes to negative ROI degrees.
JOEL KOTKIN: The Space Race Gets Serious. “We are shifting from the early era of space exploration to a more serious phase extending ever further from Earth’s orbit, focused on key opportunities such as mining and manufacturing as well as military purposes. This newly expanded playing field will determine not only who rules in space, but who ends up dominating Earth. . . . The new post-terrestrial boom is just taking off — space industry global revenues are up tenfold since the early 2000s. The World Economic Forum projects that “by 2035, the space economy is set to reach $1.8 trillion, up from $630 billion in 2023 and averaging a growth rate of 9 percent per annum — a figure significantly above the growth rate of global GDP.” These new opportunities are supercharging a vast entrepreneurial surge that includes more than fifty players creating everything from launch facilities and launch service providers to reusable rockets, landers and vehicles. Space Foundation reports a workforce growth of nearly 5 percent in 2023; Moon landings are reaching their highest frequency since the early 1970s. The likely big play will occur once rockets, robots and humans begin developing industrial capacity in space — some estimates suggest this will reach a value of $10 billion by 2030.”
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
BUT ONCE YOU DO KNOW, IT SEEMS KIND OF INEVITABLE, DOESN’T IT? I didn’t know that fat acceptance was part of what Pride month is about or that New York had something it wanted to call its “activism space.”
POLITICS OVER SCIENCE: Unsealed Court Documents Show That Admiral Rachel Levine Pressured WPATH To Remove Age Guidelines From The Latest Standards Of Care.
When the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care Version 8 was released in September 2022, a very strange thing happened: WPATH removed references to minimum age requirements for various medical interventions, describing the change as a “correction” in a notice that now reads, weirdly: “This correction notice has been removed as it referred to a previous version of the article, which was published in error.” Whatever happened, exactly, it’s clear that until late in the game the document did have age minimums until, suddenly, it did not.
The SoC 8 was supposed to have been created via something called the Delphi process. As the document itself explains: “Consensus on the final recommendations was attained using the Delphi process that included all members of the guidelines committee and required that recommendation statements were approved by at least 75% of members.” Suffice it to say that making a sudden, major change so late in the game calls into question whether that process was fully adhered to.
Thanks to a rather remarkable document just unsealed as part of Boe v. Marshall, one of the many American lawsuits over youth gender medicine, we now have a potential explanation for why the age guidelines were removed: direct pressure from assistant secretary for health of the Department of Health and Human Services Admiral Rachel Levine (who is a trans woman herself) and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
There was more science behind the lobotomy craze, which this strongly resembles.
PAULA BOLYARD: The Most Important Supreme Court Case You’ve Probably Never Heard Of. “Make no mistake: Public bureaucrats are terrified that Chevron could ‘fall’ and curtail the immense power they now hold. Understand that this is all about power and who should have it.”
June 24, 2024
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE’S NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP BASEBALL TEAM:
Takeaways: Tennessee baseball beats Texas A&M in Game 3 to win national championshiphttps://t.co/otnmFER5Td
— GoVols247 (@GoVols247) June 25, 2024
Congratulations @Volbaseball!!!! What a win. What a season! Go Vols!!! https://t.co/uknmi3Ld3I
— UT System President Randy Boyd (@UT_President) June 25, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.
AS GOD AND ROBERT HEINLEIN INTENDED: Could we launch resources from the moon with electromagnetic railguns?
READER BOOK PLUG: From Randy Barnett A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist.
I MEAN, DO WE HAVE TO ASK?
Ask yourself whether the LAPD or the local politicians would have protected the victims here or even allowed this to occur if the victims’ ethnicity was of a more politically favored group. https://t.co/PJg5u3KAT8
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) June 24, 2024
where my family eat and shop – and brazenly terrorized Jewish Angelenos with impunity and without any consequence.
These violent masked domestic terrorists bludgeoned Jews, vandalized synagogues, schools and stores, keyed cars, assaulted anyone who appeared Jewish …2/
— Sam Yebri (@samyebri) June 23, 2024
UPDATE:
The left destroyed Nick Sandmann’s life because he smiled at a protestor
Meanwhile, these people go unpunished https://t.co/uoJen3uYNH
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) June 24, 2024
There’s A Charlottesville Every Week, And Most Democrats Are Fine With It https://t.co/5vZlYsICfy
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 24, 2024
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: The Study of the Week Is A Study That Did Not Happen. “The main lessons of the cancelled RECOVER IV trial are hubris and dualities of interest. These lessons are key to understanding medical evidence.”
CDR SALAMANDER: Ethics & Ethical Failure in the Profession of Arms.
I THOUGHT WE HAD A DEAL: I Regret to Inform You That We Will All Grow Old, Infirm, and Unattractive.
But there’s a much deeper point here. Plus: “Our culture has abandoned any pretense of not worshiping youth, at this stage; go on social media and you’ll find 50-somethings lobbing insults at each other about being old, OK Boomer. There’s a complete collapse in the notion that aging is a natural and dignified thing, and a sweaty insistence on celebrating the young and instilling in them all of our hopes for renewal and justice, despite the fact that our actually-existing young people are afraid to talk to the cashier at McDonald’s. We’ve instilled our whole cultural space with the idea that to be old is shameful. So I’m not surprised that so many wander through life never contemplating the fact that, someday, they’re going to need to be taken care of again. Someday they’re going to experience “second childishness.” And people who have kids, in general and on average, are going to have a better support network than those who don’t.”