Long Game

"Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan:   No Scalia, No Rumsfeld, No Cheney.  No Bushes and all of their appointments and disasters.  No funding of dictators like Saddam Hussein (Reagan propped him up big time) or psychopaths like Osama Bin Laden (that worked out well)." This is one hell of a rant.

"Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated."

"The Nexus 5 has the largest screen of any of Google's Nexus devices so far, a full HD 1080p screen with lots of new software features. Unfortunately, most of those new features come at a cost, as larger, higher-resolution displays drain more battery life than their smaller, duller siblings."

"Back in the early '90s, boomer pundits across America declared Generation X a group of apathetic, coddled, entitled slackers. Born between roughly 1961 and 1981, they lacked any political idealism-"stuck in a terminal cynicism," as The Dallas Morning News observed. Gormless narcissists, their "intimacy and communication skills remain at a 12-year-old level," one expert wrote. Even Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons-one of Generation X's most influential masterworks-com­plained that "there's no intellectual pride or content to this generation. The domi­nant pop culture is MTV and the Walkman.""

"I'm tired of arguing about inequality. It's frustrating. It's unproductive. Nobody is really interested in the analytical arbitrariness and moral insidiousness of measuring intra-national economic inequality."

"The top 1 percent aren't killing the American Dream. Something else is-if you live in the wrong place. Here's what we know. The rich are getting richer, but according to a blockbuster new study that hasn't made it harder for the poor to become rich. The good news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago. But the bad news is that people at the bottom are just as likely to move up the income ladder today as they were 50 years ago."

Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and "should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."

Humbling. "On December 23, 2013 two days before my 60th birthday, I swallowed a stomach full of pride and walked into the Department of Social Services to ask for help. It is something I never imagined I would do. I am ashamed to admit that I am one of those people who thought it would always be someone else, someone worse off who just didn't or couldn't work hard enough, who would need that type of assistance. I was wrong, because I am the new working poor."

"Cheap and ubiquitous building blocks for digital products and services have caused an explosion in startups. Ludwig Siegele weighs its significance"

"INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were."

"Many years ago, I visited Four Corners in the American Southwest. This is a small stone monument on a polished metal platform where four states meet. You can walk around the monument in the space of a few seconds and stand in four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. People lined up to do this and have their pictures taken by excited relatives. To walk around the monument is indeed a thrill, because each of these four states has a richly developed tradition and identity that gives these borders real meaning. And yet no passports or customs police are required to go from one state to the other."

"In the 1980s and 1990s, NASA and the FAA were studying whether or not in-cockpit napping could improve the job performance and safety of pilots flying long haul routes. The results are somewhat technical, but almost all contemporary news articles citing a measurable increase in on-job performance due to napping are actually based on this data."

"When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might."

"I could write a book refuting the nonsense regularly expounded by New York Time's columnist Stanley Fish. Oh, wait, I almost have written a book about it! I already commented on this blog regarding Stanley's thoughts concerning academic freedom, deconstructionism, and the New Atheism (part 1 and part 2). I was going to leave Fish alone for a while, but today three friends independently sent me his latest column and asked me to write about it, so here we go, again..."

"Guaranteeing a minimum income to the poor is better than our current system of welfare, Zwolinski argues. And it can be justified by libertarian principles."

"A big house with a yard is a shining emblem of the American Dream. And cul-de-sacs, the culmination of winding roads that slice suburbia into space-maximizing lots, are just one mechanism suburban planners use to entice homeowners into buying property. They create space, make us feel safe, and allow for conveniences like large driveways."

"At the edge of empires lies Kurdistan, the land of the Kurds. The jagged landscape has long been the scene of imperial aggression. For centuries, Turks, Persians, Arabs, Russians and Europeans looked to the mountains to buffer their territorial prizes farther afield, depriving the local mountain dwellers a say in whose throne they would ultimately bow to."

"Going gluten-free is all the rage these days. It's the diet of choice for Hollywood starlets and health nuts alike; supermarket aisles are packed full of products touting their lack of the stretchy protein. But for a lot of people, the gluten-free lifestyle may do more harm than good."

Largely fluffy in that way-broad brush, but still contains some nuggets to keep in mind on our journey to oversimplify generational changes. :) I will note, though, that the most important bit (to me) was the idea that Gen X'ers are more relatable than Boomers. This simplification is largely true, in my experience. This isn't because of any innate goodness, just economic realities. My boomer dad-in-law is super nervous about having [extremely low amounts] of medical debt: for him it's a *very* new phenomenon. For his kids, it's far huger debt and quite regular and we simply accept it. See also: Old Economy Steve. "Concern over our careers (or lack thereof) continues unabated for all of us 20-somethings entering the job market full speed ahead. While plenty of people have proffered advice to the newly minted generation of workers who do manage to get a job, and plenty of managers have offered advice to other managers on how to hire millennials, there's a distinct lack of genuine dialogue between millennials and Gen X-ers in the workplace- a shame, because our generational differences are largely superficial. "

"Ella Benson was a junior in college the first time she took it. With a class assignment due, she was offered the drug as a means to stay up all night and crank out something respectable by morning. It worked, and Benson now says it was the first time she "really connected" with something she was working on. "It was the first paper I wrote where I felt like I came up with an idea that was meaningful and important," she said. "I got an A on it." An A for Adderall."