Assorted Links

  • In praise of Rush Limbaugh.
  • Shangri-La Diet experience (“Bottom line: I lost three pounds in a week and a half”) of an artist named Elizabeth Periale.
  • Long interview with Tucker Max. “His fridge . . . is in one way very different: where you’d expect the six-pack of cold ones waiting for the game, instead you’ll find rows and rows of kombucha, the fermented health beverage.”
  • End of college campuses. Megan McArdle imagines a world in which college is replaced by distance learning. “95% of tenure-track jobs will be eliminated.” Jane Jacobs, in Systems of Survival, divided jobs into taking and trading. Teaching is trading if the student really wants to learn the subject. Teaching is taking if the student is forced to take (and pay for) the class. Scary thought: Every college student is asked about every class: would you take this class if you didn’t need to (and didn’t need to take other classes)?

6 thoughts on “Assorted Links

  1. If I had been asked that question, I would’ve replied yes to only about 5% of my classes.

    I don’t think college Is about educating people anymore. I think at this point it exists just to feed millions of unsuspecting people into gigantic loans that cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. It is the new slavery.

    latimes.com/business/la-fi-student-loan-delinquencies-20120306,0,6387032.story

    Undergraduate colleges are no more legitimate than law schools.

  2. Tom, I agree completely. It is no longer a good idea to attend most modern universities.

    I suspect that in the future, college will become compulsory in the same way that American grade-school was at one time provided by the private market, and has since become a forced part of every American child’s life.

  3. If no praise had ever been written about Rush, too much praise would already have been written.

    Seth: What about this example?

  4. When you cast about for a good to say in a person’s defense and the best you can come up with is a single instance of epistemic luck, well, as I said: no praise is plenty.

    Seth: I wasn’t casting about. I posted that link weeks before Rush’s current problems. There is a backlog of posts, that’s why it appeared recently

  5. Biologists are saying it will take years for the fallout from the BP oil spill to develop (https://gulfofmexicooilspillblog.com/2011/02/21/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-blog-effects-10-years-and-10-cm-thick/), and “Despite low concentrations of oil constituents in Gulf of Mexico waters from the Deepwater Horizon spill, fish were dramatically affected by toxic components of the oil.” (https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=121786). But if Rush Limbaugh says everything is fine, then the biologists must be wrong.

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