Gongol.com Archives: August 2017
August 17, 2017
Why retain monuments to traitors?
The President tweets his opposition to removing Confederate statues from public display. This is a good time to re-familiarize with the drawbacks of the endowment effect. Just because we already have something doesn't mean it's valuable enough to keep. If we need monuments to keep public spaces beautiful, perhaps Rosa Parks statues would be a good substitute for those of Confederate generals.
The President has tweeted out his endorsement of a fictitious counter-terrorism strategy. You will not find such nonsense recommended anywhere in the US military's wide range of professional reading lists.
A plan to revitalize the American economy
Some good ideas; others may need some work. All worth serious examination.
Don't impute motive where it does not exist
There's really no reason to think otherwise: The President is just winging it.
What stops airlines from making seats smaller
At some point, it becomes impossible to effectively evacuate in time to stay in the good graces of the FAA
It's getting difficult to recruit enough truck drivers
One major issue: Depending on how quickly autonomous vehicles reach the mainstream, this could be an occupational track heading into a narrow lane
A bad prescription for social media
Columnist Leonid Bershidsky correctly identifies that anonymous accounts on social media are responsible for a whole lot of bad behavior and cultural damage. But then he suggests that social-media sites "should be regulated in the same way as a TV station or a newspaper, which always knows the authors of the information it publishes." This argument is both radical and misled. The notion that government should step in to regulate social networks betrays a wildly misplaced confidence in the virtue of the regulators.
Scientists find a whole lot of genes that affect intelligence
The genes themselves aren't new, they're just newly-discovered. If we start to develop truly new genes...that would be a game-changer.
