- The web is going to shit… if you hang out in a walled garden (social media), but not if you’re curious! Read more.
- “Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged. Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them“
- Read this long update on Australia’s water markets. I think the journalists are wrong when they write Australia’s experience turning a public good into a tradeable commodity [1] has had far-reaching consequences… Trading water, Australians have discovered, is tantamount to transferring wealth [2]… since (1) scarce (rival) water needs to be managed as a private good if one wants to avoid a tragedy of the commons and (2) trades exchange water for money; it’s the granting of licenses that transfers wealth, and the government has done a shit job at it. Indeed, the authors later write: The government’s licensing system is “a failure of public policy,” says Jason Alexandra… a former senior executive at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the government agency that manages the river basin. Authorities, he says, aren’t abiding by their own sustainability principles. He believes the state should freeze floodplain licenses and launch an inquiry.
- Read: Don’t worry about honey bees. They are — as “pollinating livestock” as likely to go extinct as chickens. Worry about all the wild bees and wasps whose populations are plunging under the twin pressures of habitat destruction and climate chaos.
- Read: Bureaucratic bloat has siphoned power away from instructors and researchers at universities… raising costs and damaging learning.
- Listen to this discussion with Jonathan Haidt on social media and Gen Z.
- Read this defence of getting some sunshine (rather than none)
- Read this entertaining description of Europe’s “excessive” holidays.
- Listen: Confessions of a Black Conservative
- Read: Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures … as pay-to-publish services are “caught” certifying AI-, plagiarised- and ghost-written papers as legit.
H/T to GH