Charles Rosenbauer on the state of computer science; Mary Harrington on the AWFLs; IQ and Midwits; Twenty-somethings not in the labor force; Brink Lindsey on nuclear power;
YouTube has been playing a Heinz ad showing a young woman in an apartment complaining that “adulting sucks” and that you have to eat healthy all the time instead of stuffing your face with ice cream and cake while you were a kid. The ad suggest showering all of your healthy food with Heinz ketchup to ease the pain.
TL;DW: advanced technology and cheap energy have too many dual uses. IE, rocket technology is good for launching satellites but also for launching ICBM's. Nuclear power provides clean, reliable energy, but once you've got it, there aren't many additional steps required to use it to make a bomb. We became afraid of our own technology, really. I don't know if this is an argument that I've heard him make before, but I found it interesting.
> How did the stasists achieve cultural and political power? And what are they gaining from it?
Isn't the answer to the second question the conclusion of the first?
A technical answer is that collusion has become (and maybe is almost always) systematically easier than competition.
The AEC regime required entrepreneurial engineers and businesses to cooperate with entrepreneurial politicians to work on a lot of risky ways. A politician could get rich by supporting the development of nuclear power only by working to get it developed in his own area, to spur along multiplier effects and whatnot. That's hard and risky. The alpha is higher, but the beta is lower.
The NRC regime is basically the standard model of a barriers to entry. Owners and politicians collude to limit entry into the market, and thus extract rents. The alpha is lower, but probably not for an individual politician who now becomes a key member of the partnership maintaining the barrier. The beta is tiny. In short, the politician gets rich. And more powerful.
"How did the stasists achieve cultural and political power? And what are they gaining from it?" They get their dopamine hits from exercising control over people smarter, more imaginative, and creative than they are. It's really the only way they can compete. The other groups were busy doing interesting things, and didn't care who ran the local nonprofit or HR dept.
On the nuclear power issue, I was trained in the area and took a job in the nuclear/environmental division of Bechtel where we had several plants under construction. My first job was a problem where I came up with a design that would save about 10 million dollars, which as a young scientist/engineer I thought was great fun. However, when the idea went up and back down the internal bureaucracy I was told; yes it will work, and yes it will save money, but it will cost more than the saving to get it through the evolving regulatory system (1971). I switched to coal power plants where creativity was desired and allowed and the environmental problems were real.
The reactors at the universities were shut down and whole departments were destroyed. We now couldn't safely build nuclear power plants in the US unless we buy them from China or someplace that didn't shut down creativity.
Given that you want women to have equal political rights, I'm not sure what the point is of complaining so much about the correlation between female sex and political views you don't like. As someone who is myself more of a classical liberal than most of the women in my social class, I try my very damnedest not to pay too much attention to that correlation and to take women as individuals. Getting upset about "feminization" is another way of making politics tribal.
Agree entirely with the comment that younger people are less mature (and less independent) than in prior generations. The Covid lockdowns have made the situation significantly worse. This is especially true, I think, for boys. I don't know if there will be long-term consequences from the situation. But I don't believe it's a good trend.
Who is that "we"? We is that majority of the electorate that always turns out to get the free stuff. In the last election, millions turned out to thank Joe for canceling their students loans. Too bad that a judge waited 'til after the election to nullify Joe's Executive Order. One again, the joke is on all of us, not just on the "we": https://tippinsights.com/was-bidens-pre-election-peddling-of-student-loan-relief-legal/
What are Republicans doing wrong that so few educated women are attracted to their side of the fence? This is the parallel question to why do so few rural residents are attracted to Democrats.
Republicans allowed the education system to become an indoctrination system. College educated people are basically of the quality of high school educated people 50 years ago (as discussed earlier in the essay) and all that extra time in class, and selection process for who keeps going, is focused on indoctrination into leftist ideology. Hence "education" is heavily correlated with being leftist.
I would like to know the average fertility rate of these Affluent White Female Lefties...
They are multiplying by educating the children of everyone else.
Considering the almost non existent evidence for teachers influencing students, I would say that they're wasting their time.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=eD130243
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-13522-001
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-010-9141-8
YouTube has been playing a Heinz ad showing a young woman in an apartment complaining that “adulting sucks” and that you have to eat healthy all the time instead of stuffing your face with ice cream and cake while you were a kid. The ad suggest showering all of your healthy food with Heinz ketchup to ease the pain.
My two year old agrees.
Not sure if you saw it, but Peter Thiel spoke about the flying car thing at Stanford recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibR_ULHYirs
TL;DW: advanced technology and cheap energy have too many dual uses. IE, rocket technology is good for launching satellites but also for launching ICBM's. Nuclear power provides clean, reliable energy, but once you've got it, there aren't many additional steps required to use it to make a bomb. We became afraid of our own technology, really. I don't know if this is an argument that I've heard him make before, but I found it interesting.
> How did the stasists achieve cultural and political power? And what are they gaining from it?
Isn't the answer to the second question the conclusion of the first?
A technical answer is that collusion has become (and maybe is almost always) systematically easier than competition.
The AEC regime required entrepreneurial engineers and businesses to cooperate with entrepreneurial politicians to work on a lot of risky ways. A politician could get rich by supporting the development of nuclear power only by working to get it developed in his own area, to spur along multiplier effects and whatnot. That's hard and risky. The alpha is higher, but the beta is lower.
The NRC regime is basically the standard model of a barriers to entry. Owners and politicians collude to limit entry into the market, and thus extract rents. The alpha is lower, but probably not for an individual politician who now becomes a key member of the partnership maintaining the barrier. The beta is tiny. In short, the politician gets rich. And more powerful.
"How did the stasists achieve cultural and political power? And what are they gaining from it?" They get their dopamine hits from exercising control over people smarter, more imaginative, and creative than they are. It's really the only way they can compete. The other groups were busy doing interesting things, and didn't care who ran the local nonprofit or HR dept.
On the nuclear power issue, I was trained in the area and took a job in the nuclear/environmental division of Bechtel where we had several plants under construction. My first job was a problem where I came up with a design that would save about 10 million dollars, which as a young scientist/engineer I thought was great fun. However, when the idea went up and back down the internal bureaucracy I was told; yes it will work, and yes it will save money, but it will cost more than the saving to get it through the evolving regulatory system (1971). I switched to coal power plants where creativity was desired and allowed and the environmental problems were real.
The reactors at the universities were shut down and whole departments were destroyed. We now couldn't safely build nuclear power plants in the US unless we buy them from China or someplace that didn't shut down creativity.
Given that you want women to have equal political rights, I'm not sure what the point is of complaining so much about the correlation between female sex and political views you don't like. As someone who is myself more of a classical liberal than most of the women in my social class, I try my very damnedest not to pay too much attention to that correlation and to take women as individuals. Getting upset about "feminization" is another way of making politics tribal.
Agree entirely with the comment that younger people are less mature (and less independent) than in prior generations. The Covid lockdowns have made the situation significantly worse. This is especially true, I think, for boys. I don't know if there will be long-term consequences from the situation. But I don't believe it's a good trend.
Who is that "we"? We is that majority of the electorate that always turns out to get the free stuff. In the last election, millions turned out to thank Joe for canceling their students loans. Too bad that a judge waited 'til after the election to nullify Joe's Executive Order. One again, the joke is on all of us, not just on the "we": https://tippinsights.com/was-bidens-pre-election-peddling-of-student-loan-relief-legal/
What are Republicans doing wrong that so few educated women are attracted to their side of the fence? This is the parallel question to why do so few rural residents are attracted to Democrats.
Republicans allowed the education system to become an indoctrination system. College educated people are basically of the quality of high school educated people 50 years ago (as discussed earlier in the essay) and all that extra time in class, and selection process for who keeps going, is focused on indoctrination into leftist ideology. Hence "education" is heavily correlated with being leftist.
Marginally fewer Republicans are, or pretend to be stupid.