Newmark's Door

"I taught there for 18 years, but the details of its conduct as revealed in a recent lawsuit shocked even me."

Forthcoming soon. Details. YouTube channel.

Give it to an undergraduate you love.

There are some schools--which ones, I leave as an exercise for the reader--where this gentleman probably would have gotten a raise and a promotion. But that's not how the Wolfpack rolls.

Some more details here.

If it weren't for the fact that when it soon comes public WeWork could well be one of the most "crowded" short trades ever--like Beyond Meat, for which I apparently massively overpaid for a few puts--I would short WeWork. This article quotes the registration statement as follows: “We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.”

Oh yeah, I really want to short elevating the world's consciousness.

"Similar proposals have been tried in the past, but every time the resistance has been beaten back and significance testing has remained the standard. Maybe this time the fear of having a career’s worth of results exposed as irreproducible will provide scientists with the extra motivation they need."

Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it.

My conjecture is that this is a widespread condition:

There was a combination of reasons why I decided to leave teaching, but the one foremost in my mind was this — I came to the conclusion that about a fourth of the students in my classes were in the wrong place. They were wasting their time, my time, and theirs’ or their parents’ money.

The issue, as I saw it, was their lack of intellectual curiosity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We all have different interests. Some were there as a way of delaying adulthood for four more years. (Many of them managed to do that for five, six, or seven years.) There’s nothing essentially wrong with that either, but it ought not be subsidized with taxpayers’ money.

Seinfeld pretty much ruined all the rest of comedy TV for me. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that.")

I'm not a big traveller but if you are, you might find this interesting.

If I were a traveller, this is a list of places I would like to visit.

If you buy it, watch your olive oil.

Ikaria Greece, Okinawa, Nicoya Costa Rica, Sardinia, and in the U.S., Loma Linda CA.

At first the audience tends to be . . . skeptical.

That Van--such a comedian.

Any one of them could ruin your whole day.

I wasn't worried but in case you are.

Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and Nashville are the happening cities, replacing struggling places like Chicago, Hartford, New York, Baltimore and Providence.  We would urge people to go to our friend Travis Brown’s wonderful book “How Money Walks,” which shows the places Americans are moving to and from.  

I agree with Glenn Reynolds who has long contended that Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton--among others--should give big chunks of their endowments to less fortunate schools.

It's all about equity, don't you know.

Short answer: every once in a while is OK, but don't make a habit of it.

And I now have a new poster child--probably never to be topped--for the in vogue ironic phrase "First World problems".

This is yet one more example of why government should not try to pick business winners.

. . . the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo hoped it was catching lightning in a bottle by spending $750 million in taxpayer money to land what then was a fast-growing business in a hot, environmentally friendly industry that promised to bring nearly 1,500 jobs to job-starved Buffalo. . . .

For $750 million, you expect more.

A nice statement on why, like establishing causality, prediction is difficult. Sample:

3. History is the study of surprising events. Prediction is using historical data to forecast what events will happen next.

Do you see the irony?

Historical data is a good guide to the future. But the most important events in historical data are the big outliers, the record-breaking events. They are what move the needle. We use those outliers to guide our views of things like worst-case scenarios. But those record-setting events, when they occurred, had no precedent. So the forecaster who assumes the worst (and best) events of the past will match the worst (and best) events of the future is not following history; they’re accidentally assuming the history of unprecedented events happening doesn’t apply to the future.

The Babylon Bee doing its thing.

A few weeks back Treasury Secretary Mnuchin made an embarassingly stupid statement. Here's the corrective.

John Tamny:

Why would anyone want to be well below average, and expect to be paid in perpetuity for it? That’s only possible in government . . . 

A charming six minutes. (Link via Instapundit.)

A very nice story. Good on Ford Motor.

"There's a vending machine for baguettes in San Francisco. It beat a bakery in our blind taste test."

Deirdre McCloskey is optimistic about the world's economic future.

So cheer up. The end is not near. The American story of raising up the poor, our ancestors, and our fellow humans, is not close to finished.

Nicole Gelinas argues that ". . . in buying a house and the land it sits on, the purchaser is also taking on a share of the jurisdiction’s future liabilities." And in a lot of our states and cities those future liabilities are large and getting larger.

I hope you never need it, but  if you do . . .