Newmark's Door

Martin Hutchinson, "Back to 1693".

I have written before in some detail about the likely effect on the global economy of the removal of government debt markets. In general, it should improve financial availability for the private sector, while starving profligate governments of the means to implement "Keynesian" stimulus and other wasteful policies. Thus it may well improve economic performance in the long run, certainly compared to the anemic growth and high unemployment suffered in most countries since 2009. 

Needless to say, however, the 2010s will be a grim decade, because the transitional and wealth effects of eliminating the government debt markets that have formed the centerpiece of the last three centuries will be enormous - a Reinhart/Rogoff depression of spectacular severity.

Poor management.

Some fine candidates here, including The Last Waltz, Europe '72, and Live at the Apollo. 

But my vote, now and probably always, goes to It's Too Late to Stop Now.

"The myth of renewable energy".

Renewable energy sounds so much more natural and believable than a perpetual-motion machine, but there's one big problem: Unless you're planning to live without electricity and motorized transportation, you need more than just wind, water, sunlight, and plants for energy. You need raw materials, real estate, and other things that will run out one day. You need stuff that has to be mined, drilled, transported, and bulldozed -- not simply harvested or farmed. You need non-renewable resources . . . 

"Wind power causes more deaths than nuclear power".

"Calif. renewable energy goals come at a price".

It boils down to, of course, that some users are idiots. I can emphatize  empathize--(Thanks, Henry!): professors have some students who are (sometimes) idiots. 

But in both cases the professional will be more productive--and ultimately happier--if he tries to redesign the system or change his approach so as to avoid the errors.

No, not the Energizer bunny. The Voyager spacecraft.

"This slideshow is filled with images of vanity plates so geeky that they prompted someone else to take a picture and post it on Flickr."

"43 million light years away from Earth, NGC 4151, named by astronomers, Eye of Sauron, after the all-seeing symbol of evil in The Lord Of The Rings, is one of the nearest galaxies to Earth to contain an actively-growing black hole."

Here's a tip: you want to stay far, far away from an "actively-growing" black hole.

"Getting high in Venice [CA] beach." I gotta agree: "The Westside is the Bestside!"

Link via Metafilter.

Heather McDonald:

Basri commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors. Basri was given responsibility for a $4.5 million slice of Berkeley’s vast diversity bureaucracy when he became the school’s first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion in 2007; since then, the programs under his control have undoubtedly weathered the recession far more comfortably than mere academic endeavors.

UC Berkeley’s diversity apparatus, which spreads far beyond the office of the VC for E and I, is utterly typical. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally. UC Davis, for example, whose modest OWS movement has been happily energized by the conceit that the campus is a police state, offers the usual menu of diversity effluvia under the auspices of an Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations. A flow chart of Linnaean complexity would be needed to accurately map all the activities overseen by the AEVC for CCR. They include a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations. The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.”