* “I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken” by Niall Ferguson. More on the University of Austin.
* “Inflation Is Up, But the Inflation Truthers Are Still Wrong.” Maybe.
* “The Melancholy of Subculture Society.” Gwern, and thus detailed.
* H.G. Wells, the prophet of the future, among other things. Unfortunately, this: “First, after two World Wars, his belief in perpetual progress came to seem fatuous, and then, in the age of Woolf and Joyce, his Victorian style looked baggy and gassy” matches my reading experience: I’ve at least skimmed The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and a few other of his novels, and wished for a better editor. I don’t think it’s his belief that seems fatuous; I think that, if he had a tighter prose style, he’d still be read.
* “Individuals matter,” by Dan Luu: seems obvious, and yet simultaneously something I never hear.
* “Marriott refused to host Uyghur conference, citing ‘political neutrality.’” Supporting genocide is an interesting definition of “political neutrality.”
* “The importance of complicated sex.”
* “How I got wealthy without working too hard: Specialize, Don’t live in big cities, Go full-remote.” Work in tech, too.
* “College professors have a right to provoke and upset you. It’s a part of learning. Whether from the right or from the left, calls to silence faculty voices on America’s campuses are inconsistent with the values of a university.” Seems obvious to me, though I still think it important to encourage students to think, without telling them what to think. I worry about the propensity towards telling students what to think, especially politically. See also “A drama professor told students they got their feelings hurt too easily. They decided to fight back.” One has to wonder about the student-loan burden and repayment experience of students in that department.
* Guy works impressively hard to upgrade the soldered RAM on his Dell laptop. A great tale but also note the conclusion: “I’ve now got an XPS13 with 16GB of memory. But next time I think I’ll just buy the 16GB variant upfront.”
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