Newmark's Door

Best one for "power users" is $230 at Amazon.

Related: "A $500 Router and the Price of Convenience".

"Vegans have no idea how much animal cruelty they’re responsible for."

The last time I bought a car I noticed that, at least for the models I was interested in, the number of car colors seemed to be less than I remembered from years ago.

This piece has some enormous lessons.

1. "Science" can be go badly wrong when a small group of individuals, who've taken control of journals and funding in a field, decided to protect their positions at the expense of truth.

2. This is especially true if controlled experiments are few to none.

3. This is even more especially true if the federal government is involved.

Do 1 through 3 remind you of anything?

4. Nobody--absolutely nobody--should be allowed to tell the public what to do unless they've had a thorough grounding in the difficulties of establishing causality.

5. Unexpected effects are almost everywhere.

Related: salt, too, was terribly misjudged.

Mary Willingham and Jay Smith posted this before the amended notice of allegation against UNC-CH was released. It's deeply felt and strongly argued.

Indeed, many of the actors at UNC who facilitated shameful athletics favoritism over the years are still with us on the campus; some of them exercise positions of real influence. Over the past two years there has been a lot of rearranging of deck chairs on the good ship Carolina Way (though, to be fair, sometimes the deck chairs were simply left in the exact same spot.) But there have been no signs of a bold change in direction. Until Carol Folt, Jim Dean, and other leaders tell the world their plans for countering the influence and the long-established habits of the many athletics-friendly personnel at UNC, until they outline the steps they will take to overturn an institutional culture that fostered fraud and willful blindness for decades, skeptics will be right to scoff at the “70 reforms” and the diversion they were meant to create.

UPDATE: link fixed now.

Yet another example of how government all too often is a vast machine that turns good intentions into unsatisfactory results.

Link via Instapundit.

Arnold Kling reviews a forthcoming book by Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.  Kling likes it but . . . 

In his important new book (forthcoming, May 24, 2016 from Basic Books), Yuval Levin offers a diagnosis of America's illness and a prescription for a cure. His diagnosis blames both the left and the right for promulgating an untenable vision of an individualistic society under the umbrella of the central government. . . . 

For me, Levin offers an appealing vision. However, I wonder if it can ever attract broad public support. In 2016, it appears to me that Americans do not value freedom as much as they used to. If President Obama represented the nostalgia for the era of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, then currently his party seems to be moving even further to the left, with many believing that some form of socialism is the answer. On the Republican side, it seems ironic that the candidate who gained ascendancy by promising to wall off our southern neighbors would appear to wish to run the United States like a Latin American strongman. And on college campuses, many students and administrators prefer "safe spaces" to free speech.

Tells me as much about San Francisco as I care to know.

San Francisco, America’s boom town, is flooded with the cash of well-paid technology workers and record numbers of tourists. At the same time, the city has seen a sharp jump in property crime, up more than 60 percent since 2010, though the actual increase may be higher because many of the crimes go unreported.

Recent data from the F.B.I. show that San Francisco has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the nation’s top 50 cities. About half the cases here are thefts from vehicles, smash-and-grabs that scatter glittering broken glass onto the sidewalks.

The city, known for a political tradition of empathy for the downtrodden, is now divided over whether to respond with more muscular law enforcement or stick to its forgiving attitudes.

"Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos just published his annual letter to shareholders, and new this year is a lot of talk about how Amazon calculates big risks."

A paper based on the Presidential Address Northwestern professor Alice H. Eagly delivered at the 2015 conference of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Abstract of the paper (available free online):

In an ideal world, social science research would provide a strong basis for advocacy and social policy. However, advocates sometimes misunderstand or even ignore scientific research in pursuit of their goals, especially when research pertains to controversial questions of social inequality. To illustrate the chasm that can develop between research findings and advocates’ claims, this article addresses two areas: (a) the effects of the gender diversity of corporate boards of directors on firms’ financial performance and (b) the effects of the gender and racial diversity of workgroups on group performance. Despite advocates’ insistence that women on boards enhance corporate performance and that diversity of task groups enhances their performance, research findings are mixed, and repeated meta-analyses have yielded average correlational findings that are null or extremely small. Therefore, social scientists should (a) conduct research to identify the conditions under which the effects of diversity are positive or negative and (b) foster understanding of the social justice gains that can follow from diversity. Unfortunately, promulgation of false generalizations about empirical findings can impede progress in both of these directions. Rather than ignoring or furthering distortions of scientific knowledge to fit advocacy goals, scientists should serve as honest brokers who communicate consensus scientific findings to advocates and policy makers in an effort to encourage exploration of evidence-based policy options.

Link via The American Interest, via Instapundit.