During their time as rulers of Mosul, one of the many things the Islamic State banned was games that used balls. Some Mosul children responded by inventing a game they called "Haram Football," played with an imaginary ball. In August, 2017, a month after liberation, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs watched a group of Mosul children play this game and videotaped them. Alÿs has been studying children's play in conflict zones around the world, and made the Mosul film part of his "Children's Games" video exhibit.
Many journals require authors to include a statement that "data is available on request," but these guys tried to get data from authors who included such a statement and only succeeded 17% of the time.
Vietnamese immigrant Kimmy Duong donates $20 million to George Mason University: "America has been wonderful. She has adopted me, accepted me and given me what I need most: love and opportunities." (news story, Twitter/X)
In his 2021 book, RFK Jr. wrote that the germ theory of disease is a big pharma op and must be rejected; he prefers the old "miasma" theory, but he even gets that wrong. Summary on Twitter/X.
Noah Smith: "We are living in the cyberpunk future."
Bonobo matriarchy is maintained by females ganging up to beat up on males. (NY Times, original paper)
Company that sells filtered shower heads offered their customers a choice between a China-made version at $129 and a US-made version at $239. Not a single customer opted for the American-made version. (Company blog post, summary on Twitter/X)
Noah Smith says that MAGA will not build anything, and its tech backers will be bitterly disappointed: "We have now seen what the MAGA movement has planned for America, and it’s pure destruction."
One acre of solar panels produces as much energy as 31 acres of corn grown for ethanol. (Article, summary on Twitter/X) Corn-based ethanol is a scam and always has been.
Rattlesnakes living on islands have venom that has evolved to be especially deadly for their favorite prey.
The group chats where Marc Andreesen and friends helped to create the Tech Right: "Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens."
Excellent piece on Vietnam by Damien Cave and Tung Ngo in the NY Times, highlighting that the war is mostly forgotten and everyone is focused on making money.
Theory of the Iberian power grid collapse, on Twitter/X.
The earliest English treatise on cheese.
Using Paleogenetics to connect a modern Pueblo group to the ancient peoples of Chaco Canyon. Cool, and we need more of this kind of work to persuade Indians to allow genetic testing of themselves and ancestral remains. It is, however, false that archaeologists generally denied these connections; everyone I know believes that the Hopi and Pueblo are descendants of the people who built the cliff dwellings. (news article, original paper)
Interesting piece on how water/sewer systems work. The author is correct that aging systems will cost hundreds of billions to maintain over the next decade; Baltimore County recently had to issue a billion dollars in bonds to repair leaking, failing water pipes, and that's just one medium-sized county.
Today's past post is Interesting Moments in Religious History, an astonishing archaeological coincidence.
Professor Bryan Caplan calls on the GMU Board of Visitors to abolish their DEI office.
In the same vein, the powers the Trump administration is using to attack universities were crafted by liberals to fight race and sex discrimination. If you think the President should not have the power to defund universities he dislikes, maybe you should have objected when democratic administrations claimed this power relative to trans rights.
The Manhattan Institute's plan for getting US government debt under control. Not endorsing this but it shows the tough choices involved. This came up because Jessica Riedl, one of the plan's authors, was complaining on Twitter/X that the Trump administration had no plan for getting the debt under control and somebody said, "Oh yeah, what's your plan?" It seems very common for the ignorant to assume that everyone else is as ignorant as they are.
5 comments:
It seems very common for the ignorant to assume that everyone else is as ignorant as they are.
Dunning-Kruger Effect. The more ignorant a person is, the less able they are to understand that they -are- ignorant.
The classic example is a man who robbed a bank and took no visible means to obscure his face, who was then shocked when the police knocked on his door, having found him via security camera recordings. He insisted that it was impossible for the cameras to have recorded his face, because he had doused his face in lemon juice. Apparently, he had learned that lemon juice was used to make "invisible ink", and believed that his face had literally been invisible because of it.
In fact, he was so convinced of this fact that he was incensed at the police for "framing" him, insisting that the footage showing his face must have been doctored and falsified, as it wouldn't have been possible to see his face. His lack of critical thinking skills was so profound that the only explanation he could accept was the delusion that he had been the victim of a government conspiracy. He was utterly unable to conceive of the possibility of his having been wrong about how things actually work.
"In the same vein, the powers the Trump administration is using to attack universities were crafted by liberals to fight race and sex discrimination. If you think the President should not have the power to defund universities he dislikes, maybe you should have objected when democratic administrations claimed this power relative to trans rights."
I feel so owned right now.
The thing is, what the story behind the ownage reveals is how much--and I think it's a lot--the enjoyment of individual or group rights in practice entails the denial of rights to others. This includes, for example, the right of business owners to control their own labor practices, the right of schools to control their own admissions policies, the right of the religious to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs, the right of towns or states to, for example, ban assault rifles or abortion if their residents believe their well-being or their beliefs require it, the right of bullies to be themselves vs. the right of victims not to be bullied, etc., etc., etc., as well as the obvious, at this point almost ritualized left-right conflicts over freedom of speech on university campuses and elsewhere.
It seems to me the policy of making federal funding dependent on compliance with the various "Titles" was one clumsy attempt to, so to speak, square this circle, by restraining or coercing individual and institutional behavior without using direct police power that would obviously violate first amendment rights. Clearly a problem with this is that enforcement of the policy is selective, based on whichever faction happens to be in power and its ideas about what/whose rights are to be promoted, and which curtailed. The currently governing faction's use of police powers against foreign students would, arguably, be another attempt to coerce speech while not directly attacking the speech rights of citizens.
I wonder if ultimately human life, like all organic life, really is lived under an essentially Hobbesian flux of power and continual change. In that case, this sort of ownage is historically otiose, since people will do what they have the power to do.
If you think the President should not have the power to defund universities he dislikes, maybe you should have objected when democratic administrations claimed this power relative to trans rights.
The power isn't the problem. The guiding principles behind its deployment are, as is the erosion of checks and balances.
The president has many powers. The idea behind each and every one of those powers is that they are supposed to be used in accordance with certain broadly shared American ideals and values, and that potential abuse of said powers is supposed to be checked by congress and the courts.
For example, the president could, in theory, order the military to kill anyone he dislikes, merely because he dislikes him. But this does not happen in America (that we know about), because it would fly so severely in the face of our principles, and because there would be an immediate response from the rest of the government who would move to impeach the president for such an act. All presidents have the power to order such military actions, and yet none do for obvious reasons.
See also the problem with modern American police. We all agree that law enforcement should have certain powers, up to and including the deployment of lethal force. But we agree to that empowerment with the tacit expectation that usage of said powers will be held to the highest standards, and that abuses will be responded to appropriately.
Sadly, as with so many other similar aspects of our society, that expectation has been eroded over time. Police are granted qualified immunity, and their actions are allowed to be guided not by the highest ideals of bravery and service, but by the shallowest excuses of cowardice and self serving.
The power of the police isn't the problem. The corruption of the police is.
Likewise, the power of the presidency is not the problem. The corruption of it is.
@ G.
On one level, I would agree with you. I would further state that, in my view, certain uses of coercive power are good--like, for example, forcing, by means of intrusive inspections, employers to maintain safe work spaces, or forcing, including at bayonet point, southern states to accept equal voting rights for all citizens.
A problem is that we do not live in a country with "broadly shared ideals and values." The current right and its power grow, in significant part, out of long-held resentments of power used for the kind of purposes that I support. And now they are in a position to use government coercion for causes they support.
The thing is, I would not say that the solution to this is restriction of federal or government power overall, because "the power you use today could be used against you tomorrow." That would not make us all free, and secure in our freedom. Rather it would simply (re)devolve coercive power onto subordinate, intermediate powers, the restraint of which was the original object of the "progressive" extension of government power in the first place (for this purpose, I mean "progressive" in the early-twentieth-century America sense).
One acre of solar panels produces as much energy as 31 acres of corn grown for ethanol. Corn-based ethanol is a scam and always has been.
I will note, an acre of solar panels is a WHOLE LOT of glass, aluminum, cables, etc. Whereas an acre of corn is mere seeds, added to mechanically tilled soil.
Solar panels cost about $13 per square foot. An acre is 43560 square feet. Obviously "an acre" of solar panels isn't going to literally cover that entire amount, but we can probably safely assume at least 2/3rd coverage of the available surface area would be desired, so let's call it 28750 square feet.
That's a cost of $373,750 to cover that amount of area with solar panels.
Meanwhile, the cost to produce an acre of corn is about $856.
An acre of solar panels might produce 31 times the energy, but it also costs 436 times the price.
If you plant 31 acres of corn, you only pay $26,536 dollars.
If you install one acre of solar panels, you pay 14 times that.
Eventually the solar breaks even, since you have to pay the cost for the corn every single year. But it takes 14 years for that to happen - at which point, you've used up at least half of the lifespan of the solar panels.
Now, yes - there's the added fact that corn by itself does not make energy, and it has to be refined into ethanol, so that's a factor as well.
But I think you can admit that corn is not so much a "scam", as it is an option that offers different strengths and weaknesses.
Yes, obviously solar is more efficient from the standpoint of space utilization. But that's theoretical efficiency - cropland is cheap and plentiful in much of the country, and people have the acres to spare putting them to use for something cheap like corn. But what they usually do NOT have is the money for the MUCH higher upfront installation costs of solar - nor the necessary electrical grid infrastructure to store or transport that energy.
Farmers in rural communities can grow corn cheaply and easily on land they potentially would otherwise not even use, and they can store that corn without any special equipment, infrastructure, or safety concerns. But installing solar panels at a very high cost, AND installing batteries to store the electricity it produces, AND getting a proper connection to the larger grid to offload that energy? Not really very feasible for most rural folks.
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