George Rebane
College students can’t write, like in cursive handwriting. More and more are in dire straits at schools that don’t allow laptops in the lecture halls. Years ago the loss of that ability was described in sci-fi stories of a future when writing skills had withered and people ‘wrote’ by speaking to computers with speech-to-text capability. Now that future is here, and we shall see how we do when requirements for making some quiet notes arise.
Dollar General in Alta Sierra, what a kerfuffle. Residents there protest the advent of a store carrying cheap merchandise that will attract a class of people who benefit from such offerings, and whose obvious presence in that neighborhood may lower real estate values. Mac Young in the 13mar18 Union calls such voices discriminatory (here). And, of course, they are in both the politically correct and classical meanings of having the ability to make studied distinctions. These people of Alta Sierra are exercising their right to voice an opinion about a likely effect that such traffic will have on their heretofore pristine community of well-kept and prim houses which dot the hillsides on the road to the county’s premier country club.
Russian collusion is most evident in the collectivist conclaves of New England – Boston town to be specific. Here they are welcoming large Russian LNG carriers in their harbors discharging the natural gas required to heat their homes for the remainder of their globally cold winter. They are financing Putin’s adventures rather that approve the pipeline that would have brought in Canadian and American gas to satisfy the needs of all of New England. They see no conflict in what passes for their rationale as the region’s liberals join with the usual activist suspects – Greenpeace, Sierra Club, … – to oppose safe, sane, and sustainable native solutions. (more here)
[update] Rebane Doctrine dictum – Relinquish to higher government ONLY things that you or the more local government can’t handle – a hierarchical solution for benevolent governance. (Am reading Taleb’s latest – Skin in the Game (2018) – on which I’ll report later. I have found Taleb’s ethics and political philosophy to fly in fairly tight formation with my own credo and socio-political doctrine.)
[14mar18 update] In ‘Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle’ liberal columnist William Galston cites The New Geography of Jobs (2012) by Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, who argues that achieving creativity in the workplace still requires face-to-face efforts by people drawn from a critical mass of proximal workers – telecommuting just won’t do. There’s a lot more to be said about that which also bears on the decades-long, mostly misguided, but still persistent efforts by our own community to attract jobs and workers. Moretti’s findings support the A21 stack-and-pack objectives of depleting rural populations in favor of dense, highly-regulated city living. For another view of how and why cities (among other complex systems) evolve and renew themselves, I recommend the important and highly-readable Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (2017) by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West.
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