Newmark's Door

I've always thought so, but I figured I was just confused. Probably not.

Almost nothing reveals the true agenda of extreme environmentalists like their extreme hostility to possible technological solutions to climate change.

Yet when climate altering technologies are proposed as Plan B alternatives, there are outcries.

"President Obama has been working assiduously to persuade the world that the United States is at last serious about Plan A — winding back its greenhouse gas emissions," Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Australia and author of Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.

"The suspicions of much of the world would be reignited if the United States were the first major power to invest heavily in Plan B," he wrote.

Al Gore, meanwhile, has dubbed geoengineering techniques "simply nuts." And a litany of other environmental advocates and outlets have called artificially interfering with Mother Nature "insane."

This certainly does sound cool, especially as compared to the old system.

Link courtesy of Michael Greenspan.

If 10 or even 20% of the students complain, I would probably be inclined to ignore them.

But more than 90%? I would think something was wrong.

But can he block a 350-pound nose tackle? 

Some NFL players spend their offseason working out. Others travel around the world. Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel has done both while also getting an article published in a math journal.

Urschel, the Ravens’ 2014 fifth-round pick who graduated from Penn State with 4.0 GPA, also happens to be a brilliant mathematician. This week he and several co-authors published a piece titled “A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector of Graph Laplacians” in the Journal of Computational Mathematics. You can read the full piece here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0565

Link via Economics Job Market Rumors.

Matthew Continetti does a superb job hammering James Wolcott and by extension all those who so fear and complain about the "very rich". Just terrific.

The character that emerges from McLean’s description of Hobson, I hasten to add, is sympathetic and winning. She was not born to riches and she has overcome the prejudices of others to lead a, by all accounts, successful and committed life. Clearly she is driven, a striver, a networker, a prodigious achiever who not only has lived up to every expectation the meritocracy imposes on young people, but has also flourished beyond them. What fascinates me is how liberal journalists like James Wolcott seem not to make room for Hobson and her milieu in their bilious descriptions of the “very rich.” How enormously wealthy liberal Democrats might as well not exist, how for left-liberal writers the chain of association whose first link is “rich” inevitably includes “conservative” and “Republican” and ends with “bad.”

I certainly agree with Mr. Greenspun's last paragraph: the opportunity cost of college is often underemphasized, even neglected. 

But this is too strong:

Economists, who get paid to teach at colleges, experiment with ways to get more young people from poorer-than-average families to become customers of colleges. Nobody seems to question whether this might be biased and/or misleading advice. . . . When experimenters provide students with advice regarding college they don’t share comparisons regarding other careers. 

The information economists "don't share" is all in the public domain. It's even, for students with a Net connection--and those aren't hard to find these days--at their fingertips. I think a bigger part of the problem is kids aren't seeking enough information. Why that it is seems complicated. 

Link courtesy of Chug Roberts.

George Leef nicely makes the case for the 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision as the root of the problem.

But it would be nice if there were a test of this. I haven't seen one. 

With this information I hadn't known:

But these explanations don’t help us explain political differences among Jews across countries or over time. American Jews share a religious tradition, historical inheritance, and minority status with most Jewish communities around the globe — and yet only Jews in the United States are concentrated on the left. Jews outside the U.S. are sometimes centrist, sometimes rightist, and occasionally indistinct from the general population, but never as tightly clustered on the left as American Jews.

(The paper referred to the article is here.)

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson write, in effect, "Not necessarily."

(And guess what? Innovation seems to respond to incentives. Who knew?)