* Do not ever use Paypal; this story from someone who gets their accounts frozen is standard (GoDaddy is also very bad). I had a nasty experience with Paypal that guarantees I will never, ever use them again, and I can tell you from experience that their legal department is just as jerky and condescending as their dispute resolution department, which is described at the link. By now, if you use Paypal, I won’t say that you deserve to have your funds stolen by the company, but I will say you really ought to know better. Search for “Paypal sucks” and you will find innumerable examples just like this one.

* Cultivate literary friendships. I do this but it’s seldom easy, especially when it comes to separating the posers from the authentic. But books are here as social devices, and yet I think they’re too rarely considered in this light.

* The Research Bust:

[A]fter four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?

* There’s a daft NYT discussion that asks, “Why Does the SAT Endure? It then narrows: “If [. . .] the test can be gamed, why are the scores still so meaningful to college admissions officials, and does the SAT put students who can’t afford to take prep classes at a disadvantage?” Colleges need some measuring device independent of schools and teachers. Otherwise they have no way whatsoever of knowing whether a 3.5 GPA from one school has any real relationship to a 3.5 from another. That this writer doesn’t even understand why colleges need some kind of objective metric yet has the NYT as a platform is distressing.

I agree with many of the criticisms of the SAT that are floating around, but they don’t really matter because the SAT (or some SAT-like device) is still necessary if colleges are going to have any means of evaluating heterogeneous school experiences. Anyone who fails to appreciate that need shouldn’t be given space to bloviate. Still, maybe colleges prefer to use the quiet, backroom method of simply admitting whoever they want, based on whatever criteria, to having open, fair, and standard processes.

* “The End of Stagnation and the Coming Innovation Boom;” especially note this:

Our ancestors were bold and industrious, they built a significant part of our transportation and energy infrastructure more than half a century ago. It would be impossible to build that same infrastructure today. Could we build the Hoover Dam? We have the technology, of course, but do we have the will? In building infrastructure many interest groups can say no and nearly no one can say yes. We are beset by a swarm of veto players. Time, however, is running out. We cannot rely on the infrastructure of our past to travel to our future.

I’ve seen this especially in watching Seattle attempt to build a light-rail system to alleviate its atrocious traffic problems. The number of lawsuits and amount of bullshit is staggering, so it’s taken the city and other players literally decades to get anything done.

Bill Gates and TerraPower are apparently trying to build a very low-cost, high-safety nuclear reactor in China; it’s pretty easy to imagine why they didn’t choose to do in the United States: NIMBies, lawsuits, scaremongering, people with veto power; the list goes on.

* This, from Jeffrey Goldberg, is basically true:

I think we’re only a few years away, at most, from a total South-Africanization of this issue. And if Israelis believe that the vast majority of American Jews — their most important supporters in the entire world — are going to sit idly by and watch Israel permanently disenfranchise a permanently-occupied minority population, they’re deluding themselves. A non-democratic Israel will not survive in this world. It’s an impossibility. So Israel has a choice — find a way to reverse the settlement process and bring about the conditions necessary to see the birth of a Palestinian state (I’m for unilateral closure of settlements but the military occupation’s end will have to be negotiated with the Palestinians) or simply grant the Palestinians on the West Bank the right to vote in Israeli elections.

(Hat tip Megan McArdle: though it doesn’t seem to have come to pass, since I first linked to this.)

* The brutal logic of climate change, an important and likely-to-be-ignored post.

* Unsurprising: Alabama Can’t Find Anyone to Fill Illegal Immigrants’ Old Jobs.