Shipbuilding

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574300482236378974.html
I agree with both the criticisms and the recommendations. Yet they come up short. There are at least two major lapses here: he does not indicate how to reduce frivolous lawsuits without threatening meritorious ones and he does not really address the incentive for doctors to order unnecessary tests and procedures to line their pockets. Also, though the "pay for performance, not activity" recommendation would help to some degree, there seems little else here that would constrain the explosion of the costs of Medicare/Medicaid. Cost/benefit analysis and imposition will be unavoidable. Jindal's program would make a start (and I mean a start at building a better ship with lower running costs, unlike the Obama plan to invite a bunch of new passengers aboard from Mexico and turn over the ship's operation to the ship's treasurer)--but it does not suffice.

This I Like

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/07/becker-20090714.html The conclusion of this paper (which I read and found persuasive) suggests that within 3 years electric cars will be fully cost competitive with conventional cars without subsidies. The condition necessary to achieve this cost competitiveness is that electrification of the fleet must occur through a battery switching model such as the one being implemented as we speak in Israel, Denmark, Australia and Hawaii by the company Project Better Place (which has already raised $400 million in venture financing) and its partner Nissan-Renault (which has a $600 million program to develop the cars). The idea is to have stations spread around the country that can quickly (3 minutes) switch out used batteries for new for those drivers who have signed up for this service in the form of a monthly payment plan. Drivers would therefore only have to pay up front for the electric car (which costs the same as a conventional car), but essentially lease the batteries through the company operating the switching stations (instead of paying for gas). This company, of course, has access to much cheaper financing than consumers, effectively making the battery cheaper. It makes electric vehicles vendable by solving the problem of their high upfront costs and the problem of limited range. There will also be public and private plug-in stations as a supplement to the switching option. The bottom line is that electric cars will be cheaper because their fuel (electricity) and maintenance costs are cheaper and this price advantage outweighs the disadvantage of building the switching stations and manufacturing the batteries. I think the key is the roll out, which will have to saturate one region at a time--otherwise there will be too few charging and switching stations in a given area to motivate consumers to buy electric. This is the plan: Israel first in 2010, then Denmark, then Australia by 2012. A 5-10% increase in electricity demand would result if the entire car fleet converted to electric.And this demand would be temporally flexible, a form of demand highly compatible with the intermittent production of electricity by renewable sources. Once this is demonstrated, other countries and other car manufacturers are likely to jump on the concept--especially given the relatively low investment cost the manufacturers would face to sign up. Israel might be the best place to start given how determined they are to escape the oil trap. Deutsche Bank's analysts concluded that this approach may represent a "paradigm shift." Considering the paper's conclusion that 64%+ of all vehicles sold in 2030 will be electric, that's an apt description. So shall we see. This is the kind of audacity the private sector flashes out at its best: it's too bad that many of the sources of greenhouse gases do not appear so amenable to a purely private sector approach. Government is slow, inefficient, and incompetent--but the tragedy of the commons scenario presented by climate change necessitates its involvement in many aspects of mitigation.

Shocking Figures

I consider all of the these numbers shockingly low. Note the consistency of the cognitive gaps across different socio-economic and educational backgrounds. Remember, the numbers below are misleading in the sense that the higher the income or education of their parents, the higher the percentage of people take the SAT. If 50% of each group took the test, the differences in scores would be larger. This misleading element is also true of the racial categories--they systematically underestimate the IQ differences because the higher the race's IQ level, the higher the percentage of people take the SAT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Education2.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png More idiocy in action: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/04/education/04education.html

This is just another move in the socialist levelling agenda.

A Strange Lapse

DNA Not The Same In Every Cell Of Body: Major Genetic Differences Between Blood And Tissue Cells Revealed

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090715131449.htm I wonder how these scientists could be so foolish as to make an assumption of this sort. Was it groupthink? Was there some persuasive, if implicit or inferential, evidence? On the surface, it does not appear to be a normal part of the scientific learning process. It is a very expensive mistake, in time and money.

Reasons for Unreason

http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/white_pride_is_uncool/ The second half of the article is especially interesting and, because the problem is systemic, difficult to correct.

AA

This is interesting methinks. Have a gander at yer Congressmen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:G._K._Butterfield,_official_photo_portrait_color.jpg He is a self-identified black man and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. If this guy qualifies for full-on affirmative action (blacks have the advantage of the lowest standards of admission, hiring, promotion...etc), who the hell doesn't qualify? Next time I apply for something, I'm going to "self-identify" as a black hispanic Polish American Indian gay woman who had a sex change operation to become a man. I count 7 diversity points there. A Harvard MBA might be nice (preferably graded on the black curve).

Legalizing PC

The Ginsburg dissent in Ricci v. DeStefano, most of which I read, is one of the worst Supreme Court opinions I've ever read for sheer illogicality. It's embarassing, and the problem isn't that she's stupid: there simply isn't a coherent set of arguments available to defend her preferred form of social engineering. Of course, most organizations evade this Title VII issue with more political acumen than New Haven evidenced. For example, Chicago's fire department makes its promotions by administering a test designed to achieve an 85% pass rate. They then award promotions by lottery from this pool of "qualified" firefighters. They get racial diversity, but they do not get the best leaders since they don't weed out the witless and the lazy.

I wrote a reply to a NY Times editorial on this issue (guess which side they took). They never posted it. Here it is:
 

Apparently the city leaders in New Haven and their supporters at the NY Times think that the most important criterion in selecting leaders for the fire department is "well-balanced racial diversity." Not competence, not leadership, not commitment--instead they prioritize racial politics above all these things and thereby sacrifice lives and resources in the line of duty.  In the end they're letting political corruption and political correctness corrode the city government’s efficiency at one of its most crucial junctures—where people’s lives are actually at stake.

Are the supposed benefits affirmative action contributes to social cohesion in this country worth the economic, social, and psychological costs of this transparent lie? The implicit premise underlying these policies is that certain races cannot engage in intellectual competition on an equal footing with whites and Asians--and, if this is the case, the choice faced by decision-makers is whether to lower the standards for the uncompetitive races or effectively exclude them from those positions which confer the most power upon their holders. Unfortunately, as noted in the editorial, most cities have opted for what the NYT deems “better tests”—which really means tests that are simple enough for virtually everyone to pass, allowing HR to base hiring and promotions on “other factors” than actual demonstrated competence and thereby to achieve a preconceived notion of racial balance.

The Western world, in its moral and material successes, is founded on the concept of the value of the individual as such. This much elaborated concept, with accretions of depth and meaning extending over millenia, has invested mankind with a dignity never conceived, much less attempted, by any other cultural tradition. From the Greco-Judaic source-springs, and all heirs and contributors to them, we have in our possession--in our minds and, maybe, in our souls--the grandest of all inventions: the idea of the human individual as an end in himself--no longer deemed dirt and manure for a tyrant's whimsical gardens, whether he plants by socialist or royalist or any other plan, cultivated to secure Leviathan's moral and practical predominance over the individual. And they want to sacrifice all this to some socialist fantasy? Reinvent the sort of state machine that necessarily reduces man to what is contemptible? And perfect this pulverizing machine? What? And the effort, even the mere thought, does not resolve them into puddles of self-contempt? Human bio-diversity indeed!

Dumb and Dumber

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/30/obama-health-care-reform-opinions-columnists-public-option-medicare.html

This is a quality breakdown of the great Obama conspiracy. Of course, it begs the question: what have the republicans to offer as a counter? Assuming systemic reform is unnecessary is head-in-sand stupid. The single government action on this issue in the last 8 years only made things worse. But, as bad as throwing a couple of extra rocks in our backpack was, Obama now wants us to divert into the socialist swamp.

I do side with Obama on the cost-effectiveness initiative--despite clear risks, it is one of the few things anyone has proposed that might actually provide a rational route to cost control.

Precedence

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/steve-martin-michael-jackson.html Now we know where Jacko got those moves! This is pretty impressive, especially if you remember the original. Or is this the original?

This Looks Serious

http://www.physorg.com/news165512266.html For some years I've expected a cure or near cure for cancer to resolve out of research into improved diagnostics. But, here we have an article leads me to question this, despite continued progress in diagnostics. The ability to clear the entire organism in 15 days might be sufficient--though in some cases a few cancer particles might remain in the bloodstream, requiring another round of nanorod treatment. And there was always a fundamental practical difficulty with the diagnostic route, which seemed likely to prevent it from becoming a cure-all (though it might be 90-95% effective): virtually all of us have multiple cancerous or pre-cancerous tissues in our bodies at any given time, almost all of which are benign--and if we can detect them all, this creates the dilemma of deciding which of these tissues to treat, since treating them all would do more harm than good for most patients. There would have to be a way to distinguish metastatic cancer from the body's many other non-threatening instances. A perfect cancer-killing treatment regime eliminates this dilemma.