Daily Beast: Asymmetric Information – Megan McArdle – fearlessly pointing out home truths shown by the Oregon healthcare study worth a look. But I thought this graphic remarkable on its own.
Grim but Telling
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Category Archives: Society / History
Cheating favors extinction…scientific proof of the obvious
Sacharomyces cerevisiae cells in DIC microscopy. Image: Wikipedia.
This was the case when the environment was benign. But when those stable populations were suddenly exposed to a harsh environment, all of the pure co-operator populations survived, while just one of six mixed populations adapted to the fast deterioration in conditions, the researchers found.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-favors-extinction.html#jCp
Proving once more that scum proliferate in the good times and cause catastrophic collapse when the good times end…so it is with yeast so it was with Rome….
Cool Coolidge
From the Liberty Law Site: Silent Cals 6 Simple Rules
1. “Don’t hurry to legislate.”
2. Don’t promise much.
3. Economize.
4. “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
5. The Meaning of Progress.
6. Humility.
Coolidge was not looking to return to the days of “horses and bayonets,” as Obama has joked. “We review the past,” he said, “not in order that we may return to it but that we may find in what direction, straight and clear, it points into the future.” Several of Coolidge’s speeches read like short history lessons, tracing the path of civilization from the Greeks and the Romans, to the Pilgrims and the Puritans, to Washington and Lincoln. To Coolidge, the history of western civilization culminated in the American founding.
Duh! … Well intended policies have negative impacts …
Well-intentioned policies to make achieving tenure more family-friendly actually have negative consequences for the salaries of college faculty, says a study co-written by University of Illinois labor and employment relations professor Amit Kramer:
“The norm in academia is that success requires the focused pursuit of academic work at the expense of other responsibilities, including family,” he said. “That suggests that the use of these policies may be detrimental to the career outcomes of tenure-track faculty members. In particular, evaluators may perceive stopping the clock for family reasons as an indicator that the faculty member lacks the commitment to his or her academic role. And that, in turn, may constrain their career prospects.”
This ‘unintended consequence’ should have been predicted (and my bet is that it was) by any rational adult who has worked in even a moderately competitive workplace (and academia in main line universities is anything but just moderately competitive.) This sort of thing is a fact of life among us monkeys, move on, nothing to see here! Trying to add some kind of anti-bias bias, as suggested later in the article, is nuts and will only make things worse.
If you want to provide this sort of benefit, do so knowing there will be ‘unintended consequences’ of this sort and allow your adult, professional staff figure out their own best path. I think providing more personal days per year and allowing them to accrue along with a reasonably strict use policy to offset impacts to the company / coworkers would be more fair and flexible.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-04-family-friendly-tenure-policies-result-salary.html
Eye Candy : Wired Photo Gallery
Boston…this is the proper takeaway
Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the much admired Archbishop of Boston: “The tragedy… shakes us out of our complacency and indifference and calls us to focus on the task of building a civilization that is based on love, justice, truth and service.”
From: The American Interest: Religion and the Boston Marathon
1968
A long post on a turning point year.
Interesting that Mad Men, the iconic cable TV show about admen in that pivotal era seems to cause so much introspection.
Many reasons, many of today’s thinkers were young then, TV was really getting its legs, technology was vaulting forward but was now seen as a mixed blessing rather than untrammeled good, the almost unlimited growth of industry and regulation…or regulated industry was sputtering as the dead hands of regulation, unionization, corporatist over-reach, the limits of top down management and aging leadership (and infrastructure) began to run up against emergent back pressure from a rising Japan/Asia, Germany/Europe, Communism as an apparently proven long term competitor/threat.
The Danes, Maybe too Nice? NYT article
Jan Grarup for The New York Times || Robert Nielsen, 45, said proudly last year that he had basically been on welfare since 2001.
Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault
By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: April 20, 2013
I’ve always found the NYT generally more nuanced than it rock ribbed critics make it out to be.
And you could say that this article supports welfare reform, tax reasonableness, fairness etc … Until you think a bit more deeply.
“Denmark is what progressive New Yorkers want to be even if they don’t know it,” the ‘Smithsonian’ liberal in me jeers. The Danes start from such incredible heights of social redistribution it would take huge changes to get it down to the fondest dream of leftish US liberals. In regards to this article, a progressive could comfortingly say “yes welfare can go to far” and then finish with “but we ain’t even close yet.”
This is a tiny, densely populated and historically rich and educate European nation. The Danish welfare state, the Danish tax regime, the Danish government, the country of Denmark…are simply impossible to compare to the US equivalents. It has no real international borders, a proportionally huge and productive coast (the US would count the whole country as a coastal region) it’s comparable to New York City and environs in size and population, it’s highly educated, pretty homogeneous and highly protected from outside threat. Things that work in Denmark simply cannot work in the US because of scale…and even in Denmark the Danish system is tottering.
One Two Three Four, We Could Get A Nuclear War
One Two Three Four, We Could Get A Nuclear War.
ARES a AWST blog….
“money quotes:”
Watts argued that many countries are no longer pursuing nuclear weapons as a direct counter to U.S. nuclear power, but to compensate for relatively weak conventional forces. That includes Russia, where Watts cites president Vladimir Putin’s emphasis on the importance of nuclear weapons, and post-Cold-War doctrinal writings that talk about using limited nuclear attacks as “demonstration and de-escalation” strikes, to deter or terminate a large-scale nuclear war.
…it’s like a police department whose only force option is to blow up the entire block where the perpetrator lives.
Indeed, U.S. extended deterrence is something that not enough people think about when they advocate further cuts in U.S. nuclear forces. The American “umbrella” covers nations such as South Korea, Japan and Turkey, which have the industrial and technological capability to go nuclear very quickly if they feel that they can no longer rely on the U.S.
Watts warns, “limited use of low-yield nuclear weapons will become the new normal and give rise to a second nuclear age whose dangers and uncertainties will dwarf those of the first.”
Crap!
This is a Really Good question
From The American Interest || Walter Russell Mead’s Viameadia:
As is so often the case in American politics, those who produce MSM coverage and those who rely exclusively on it for news were the last to know what was happening. We’ve seen almost nothing but optimistic and encouraging coverage of gun control efforts, ending as usual in painful failure and disillusion. Many gun control advocates and their allies in the MSM are stupified and stunned by the votes.
“Is there really any point in throwing your political career away in order to give a few days’ passing satisfaction to New York Times editorial writers?”
These your Genes?
Good short article at ars Technica. Patenting natural genes, particularly human ones has always seemed wrong to me. Hopefully the SCoUS will agree with me and many others at last.
The Photo is just eye candy…
This World and Others 