aliendinerA new study finds that hand-dryers give white blood cells a good work out and make them muscular and strong, while paper towels will let their muscles atrophy as they get lethargic. So I strongly recommend that public restrooms please use hand-dryers.

Virginia Postrel argues that conservatives can make it in the academy, but only if they stop living in the closet.

Attention Michael Cain! Californians are moving to Texas! More seriously, I find the statistic about them moving to states with better business environments uninteresting because isn’t that like 47 of the other states?

Though I was critical of the Minnesota gun firm that made guns that transformed into looking like a cell phone, I find this pretty cool. I can’t tell if I’m being inconsistent.

Erin Einhorn looks at the hardships of Detroit kids that go to charter schools. I suppose it would just be better if we relieved them of that option?

Buyer’s Remorse? More than a third of millennials say they wouldn’t have attended college if they’d known the costs in advance. Is there an argument for a five-year price lock-in?

Leonid Bershidsky looks at Swedish and German approaches to prostitution. I’m somewhat partial to the Swedish model. That the German model created trafficking problems (and other degeneracy) doesn’t compel me to reconsider.

Maybe soda bans and taxes aren’t going to make everybody lose weight.

A new study shows that being a smoker is a cause, rather than merely an effect, of shafty treatment from potential employers. I was pretty meticulous about not showing any signs of being a smoker on any job interview.

Who’s not buying what Bernie Sanders is selling? Soviet refugees, that’s who. Many are, unfortunately, buying what Trump is selling.

I don’t think the problem is that we’re too reliant on GPS, but rather that they are not sufficiently accurate that we cannot be completely reliant on them.

Everybody’s raiding Kansas! Also while we don’t know where the unmatched socks end up, lost phones end up in Atlanta.

Wow! Infertile mice have been made fertile with 3D-printed ovaries.

Back home, there is a term for this: Alcohol Abuse.

Yep, the real story of Denny Hastert sexually abusing kids is the hypocrisy. What else would it be?


Category: Newsroom

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19 Responses to Linkluster NYC Subway Stations

  1. oscar.gordon says:

    If parents are doing all that for a charter school, it says something significant about the public schools.

  2. greginak says:

    It is extremely frustrating to see a group ( people pushing for healthier food so people can be less obese) that i have sympathy with be seemingly led by maroons. Gosh knows lots of people have that kind of bind, but its still a pain.

    • trumwill says:

      I thought soft drinks was kind of a decent theory! I have some issues with some of the approaches to it, but it did sort of make sense. A few years ago I would have bought it, but most of what I’ve learned since is that individual items probably don’t account for much.

      • greginak says:

        Yeah its the focus on individual ingredients or items that is epically flawed. Sure regular soda is not good for you especially if you drink a lot. But if you replace it with sugary fruit juice or Red Bull crap or Lattefrappacino’s you have haven’t improved anything. Nutrition types should be aware of this idea, it isn’t just taking a bad thing out, its what you replace it with. I think some have called it the Snackwell Syndrome. It’s great to cut out high fat foods but if you replace it with a dozen low fat cookies you aren’t helping.

        • trumwill says:

          It’s great to cut out high fat foods but if you replace it with a dozen low fat cookies you aren’t helping.

          Yeah, but sugar-free candy is great because sugar alcohol prevents you from going nuts with it. All junkfood should have this feedback mechanism attached to it.

  3. aaron david says:

    Uhm, I think most men are partial to Swedish models, Will.

    • trumwill says:

      Do you ever wonder if Finland gets jealous of Sweden and Norway? Finland gets high international marks for their education system, but other than that when we talk about Nordica, we typically leave them (and Denmark) out.

      • greginak says:

        Without doing any research on this i think the Finn’s are ethnically a bit different from the Norwegians and Swedes. Scandinavia traditionally consists of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. At the least those four countires are not all the same and have significant differences in many ways so how they bunch together is fraught with issues.

        • trumwill says:

          Finland is considered “Nordic” but not “Scandanavian.”

          Still closer to Scandanavian than Estonia or Russia, though!

        • Peter says:

          People from Finland don’t look any different than those from Sweden or Norway, but they speak a completely different language. Finnish isn’t even an Indo-European language.

        • Peter says:

          Finnish and Estonian have a relatively close relationship. While a person who knows one can’t really understand the other, there are some common words and grammatical rules. Something like English and German. Other than that, Finnish has a very distant relationship to Hungarian and to some tribal languages from central Russia, and that’s about it.

  4. Michael Cain says:

    So, 0.086% of California’s population moved to Texas, while 0.078% of Texas’s population moved to California, netting just over 12,000 people. Ignoring all other factors, Texas would catch California based on net migration in 955 years :^) Also, the people moving to California earn more than those moving to Texas — on a per-capita basis, California gained wealth in this exchange. And just for the record, I maintain my long-standing claim that if Texas’s population increases from its current 27.5M to California’s 39.1M (in round numbers, adding the equivalent of another DFW, Austin, and San Antonio metro areas), Texas will be either (a) as heavily regulated as California is today or (b) completely unlivable.

    • trumwill says:

      Killjoy.

      Truthfully, I think your last point is right in some respects, namely that more regulation would be required to hold that many more people. Especially in the area of water management, it seems to me. But I also think it depends in part of what type of people move there, and the attitudes they bring with them.

      • Michael Cain says:

        If I were a Texas politician looking out 30 or 40 years, I would have a nightmare of a strip city of 25 million people running continuously along the western edge of the blackland prairie ecoregion from DFW on the north to San Antonio on the south. And that non-Texans would have come to think of “Texas” as being “like the NE urban corridor or coastal California, only hotter and dirtier”.

        • trumwill says:

          I think the main difference between Texas and BosWash and coastal California is that the latter two have a unidirectional axis, whereas Texas is a triangle. A lot of the growth would be between DFW and San Antonio, but you also have a lot of space between Houston and San Antonio, and Houston and DFW. (And, for that matter, a direct connect between Houston and Austin). I’d expect a lot of growth there (as well as other isolated regions, as smaller cities become larger ones.

          This land is not really constrained by much, the way that New York is constrained by the coast (and just lots and lots of people) and California is constrained by coast, mountains, and federal lands. Which creates a greater degree of flexibility in handling an awful lot of people.

          The biggest constraint I see with Texas is water. Which is, to be fair, pretty significant.

  5. RTod says:

    “Yep, the real story of Denny Hastert sexually abusing kids is the hypocrisy. What else would it be?”

    Well, yeah, kind of.

    I mean, not for the victims, their families, and loved ones, obviously. But for the rest of us, it probably should definitely be about hypocrisy. Or at least something close to hypocrisy.

    People who look to be powerful, nationally recognized celebrity-authority figures are pretty much never humble men of deep moral principle, because if they were the latter they’d have no interest in being the former. Which is why people in politics who run on we-need-more-morality soundbites invariably end up being far worse people than their peers when you get a chance to look under the hood. It takes a special kind of moral bankruptcy to run on morality issues when you assume yourself exempt from having to adhere to them. (It’s the same reason Law & Order candidates play loser with the law, and populist candidates tend to be the most corruptible.)

    So, yeah, I actually think cases like Hastert are good reminders for everyone that a person stirring up the crowd to grab the pitchforks for society’s least righteous in exchange for power, money, and fame should always be kept at arm’s distance from real power. Especially in an election year.

    • trumwill says:

      It is the exact opposite of noteworthy and interesting that a politician who was sexually abusing kids didn’t say “Now, wait a minute, why don’t we just back off the whole infidelity thing?”

      I could sort of see it if Hastert in particular had been leading the charge, but even that isn’t really the case. He was a Good Soldier, which is exactly what you would have expected a Deputy Whip to be. His stylistic demeanor was primarily that of someone understated. He was thrust into the speakership mostly for being bland*.

      But it’s shocking that someone can dig up a few quotes in which he condemned Bill Clinton? That’s about as shocking as John Edwards doing the same.

      I don’t wholly disagree with your L&O point, but I think that says more about our cultural attachment to particular narratives than it does any deeper truth. We hold hypocrisy to be such an enormous sin that it seems to be the first thing we look for when something like this comes up.

      That strikes me as more interesting and noteworthy. The elevation of hypocrisy towards being the The Most Unambiguous Sin of All. When it’s actually not really even unambiguous.

      When the Mark Foley scandal hit, there were some murmurings about how slow Hastert was to take charge of that situation. It sort of seems that now we might have an idea of why. There’s been some talk about that, but not as much talk about the fact that he was pretty critical of Foley as Foley was on his way out the door. Because, uhhh, I guess he was supposed to stand by Foley or something to the end as a Brother in Pederasty. But in addition to being completely unrealistic, it’s… actually not desirable, either.

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