Michael Bay is the opposite of Woody Allen:
Woody Allen doesn’t understand anything about the human beings outside himself, while Bay probably engages in zero introspection but has a strong grasp on what many, many other people are — and hence what they like.
(Hat tip to TGGP.)
Samuel Adams was the Lenin of the American Revolution, Joseph Fouché says:
He conceived a hatred for the British Empire and a desire for American independence well before anyone else did. Adams skillfully used mobs alongside legal pretense to incrementally spread his agenda. Others followed his example. In the Worcester Revolution of 1774, the local population shut down the normal operations of royal government in west and central Massachusetts and drove royal officials out of those regions (the book to read is Ray Raphael’s The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord). The British crown lost control of inland Massachusetts before Lexington and Concord were even fought.
However, eleven years later, when many of the same local residents attempted to do the same thing in protest of the policies of a now independent Massachusetts, the state government put down their rebellion with Samuel Adams’s strong support. The difference? An apocryphal remark attributed to Adams captures some of the truth behind his attitude: “the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death”. Mobs protesting the actions of an unrepresentative government like the British Parliament, Adams argued, were valid. Mobs protesting the actions of a representative government like Massachusetts’s state government, on the other hand, were treasonous. This doctrine, supported by other Revolutionary leaders, especially the cabal behind the Order of the Cincinnati, was eventually enshrined as the higher law of the land in the slow motion coup d’etat that overthrew the Articles of Confederation and replaced it with the more authoritarian United States Constitution in 1787–1788.
In reviewing Higher Education?, Mark Bauerlein shares some statistics:
Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition and fees has risen 250% for private schools and nearly 300% for public schools (in constant dollars). The salaries of professors have also risen much faster than those of other occupations. At Stanford, to take but one example, the salaries of full professors have leapt 58% in constant dollars since the mid-1980s. College presidents do even better. From 1992 to 2008, NYU’s presidential salary climbed to $1.27 million from $443,000. By 2008, a dozen presidents had passed the million-dollar mark.
Meanwhile, tenured and tenure-track professors spend ever less time with students. In 1975, 43% of college teachers were classified as “contingent” — that is, they were temporary instructors and graduate students; today that rate is 70%. Colleges boast of high faculty-to-student ratios, but in practice most courses have a part-timer at the podium.
Elite colleges justify the light teaching loads of their professors — Yale requires only three courses a year, with a semester off every third year — by claiming that the members of their faculty spend their time producing important research. A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this “research” is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild’s need to credentialize its members. In any case, time spent for research is time taken away from students. The remoteness of professors may help explain why about 30% of enrolling students drop out of college only a few months after arriving.
I was following along, nodding in agreement, until that last bit. No, I don’t think the typical college drop-out is disappointed by the lack of professorial attention.
It’s amazing that professors have wrangled larger and larger paychecks out of a system the spawns far more Ph.D.s than could ever work in academia.
In an interview with Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation, Paul Romer discusses a different kind of charter city:
Kedrosky: Okay. So I’m curious, and I think one of my Kauffman colleagues has been talking to you about this idea as well. But as you sort of think about that idea and you think about it, you talk about it in the context of unoccupied land and so on, but obviously within this occupied land known as the United States, we’ve got cities that we’d love to see reenergized and even resurgent. And you think about a city like Detroit. Is there anything you can take away from what you’re thinking with respect to charter cities into some of the cities that are currently having their own troubles in the U.S. today?
Romer: Yeah. Well, I think it’s actually very informative to exploit the analogy between cities and firms. So what I’m talking about is a startup dynamic and applying it in a developing world where cities are very scarce. The developing world needs urban environments for billions of people in the next incoming decades. The United States is quite different in the sense that we’ve largely urbanized, so you don’t need a whole lot of new urban space. And what we’re dealing with more are questions like, you know, what’s the analogy for a workout mechanism when a city gets into a position where it’s in effect in a form of political or economic bankruptcy? And we don’t have good mechanisms to do a workout. We don’t have anything like takeovers and we should be thinking about those, I think, rather than a startup part of the process for dealing with most of the problems with [inaudible]. But the two illustrations of things that are a bit like a workout are in New York City, there was a reform agency set up by New York State when the City was going through serious financial difficult and that was part of a key turnaround in New York. Just by historical accident, Washington D.C. is under the formal control of the Congress, so when Washington D.C. got in a position that was, you know, as bad or maybe worse even than Detroit, the Congress basically just imposed a kind of workout process on D.C. as well. So I think we should really be thinking about basically the analogue of bankruptcy and takeover as a way to deal with assets that are trapped in cities where the current leadership and organization is not succeeding.
Kedrosky: But to press that a little bit further, and I buy that analogy, is part of the issue though then, and to bring back in the startup idea a little bit, that cities, as strange historically as it might seem, maybe they don’t fail often enough and part of the problem is they live on long past their sort of economic and political usefulness and we, for institutional reasons, try to find ways to continue to keep them there like Frankenstein on the slab? And maybe the answer is that we need to find a way, not even past workout, to let cities in some sense fail?
Romer: Yeah. Remember what bankruptcy does for firms. I mean, it doesn’t like blow up the assets of the firm. It just reuses them. It just puts them under a kind of control and redeploys them. So you do have these valuable fixed assets like infrastructure which ideally you would efficiently repurpose and reuse. So it’s probably not efficient to think about like putting up a chain link fence around, you know, some city and just saying, “Okay, nobody go there. It’s a dead zone.”
Kedrosky: Right.
Romer: We really should be thinking about how do we do in effect a kind of an organizational change that can use the existing assets more effectively.
Kedrosky: And this may be getting outside the sort of thing you follow. But I don’t know if you’ve been tracking what’s been going on with respect to one attempt here in California to do something like that in the context of the bankruptcy or the attempt at bankruptcy, the city of Viejo, California up in the San Francisco – well, up in your area – which I think declared bankruptcy a little over a year ago and it’s been trying to go through a workout process and a judge trustee process, and it’s been very interesting to watch. And one of the main things, pace your comments, that it’s kind of revealed is that we don’t have a process at all for doing any of this.
Romer: Yeah. I think it’s really a big gap in our legal and political structure that there isn’t some way to trigger something like, you know, like a voluntary reorganization. I mean, you know, just hypothetically, imagine that the residents in some city had the option to vote through, say, a referendum process to place the entire city political structure under the control of some, you know, like reorganization authority. You know, it could be a state authority, it could even be national. And suppose that authority also had the ability to just rewrite every, you know, every contract, every obligation of the city. So at some point, the residents of the city had the option not just to change who’s the mayor or who sits on the city council, but basically to pitch the whole control structure for the city to this other entity. You know, maybe there’s even a couple of competing reorganization authorities that, you know, manage workouts of these cities.
Kedrosky: So – and we’ve just got a minute or two left, a couple of minutes left. But as sort of an, and I’m guessing we both know the answer. It’s the same answer for all sorts of fresh ideas. But what’s been the response maybe both in the policy, but also in sort of the economic community to some of the ideas you’re proposing around charter cities? Shock, amazement?
Romer: No, actually, the response, both from policymakers and from academics, has been, you know, quite – there’s quite a lot of interest in rethinking some of these things that we’ve just taken for granted and haven’t examined before. So universally people have said, you know, this is a new idea and it’s interesting and we should be asking these questions. Now, a long side of that response, there’s a very common response which is, oh, but this is just not going to be politically feasible. And there, I think people are too kind of trapped by what’s familiar. It’s a very common fallacy. This is one of the things the entrepreneurs are the ones who kind of see through this. But most people are trapped by the kind of the fallacy that if something’s unfamiliar, then it’s impossible. And you know what the entrepreneur sees is, well, it’s something unfamiliar and something new, but it’s perfectly feasible, so we could do it. So I think people have been overly skeptical about the practical possibilities of something like this. And ultimately when this happens, everybody’s going to update and revise and say, “Oh yeah, you know, this actually could happen.” But still what’s been gratifying is how receptive people are to saying the questions you’re raising are very important questions and we should be thinking much more broadly about these questions and how to achieve this goal of basically transforming systems of rules that trap people.
NPR has a “special series” on how evolution gave us the human edge.
Naturally the piece on shoulder anatomy and thrown weapons caught my attention:
Shea explains that the secret of the modern shoulder is its ability to move the arm in almost any direction, even behind the back. That, combined with other early human traits, enabled us to throw with power and accuracy.
“We have a wrist that can move like a whip, that can accelerate through throwing,” he explains. “And your gluteus muscles — you know, your rear end, your thighs, your calves — these are things that make for good running, but they also make for good throwing.”
Early humans first used rocks as weapons to kill prey. As our bodies evolved, we became more able to use advanced weapons like spears and bows and arrows.
It also caught my attention that NPR was presenting the case that a meat-based diet made us smarter:
Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
It wasn’t a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.
“You can’t have a large brain and big guts at the same time,” explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor’s body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
Until, that is, we discovered meat.
“What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species,” Aiello says.
That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared — not a predator’s tooth marks, but incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That’s one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello’s favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it’s a tapeworm. “The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs,” she says.
So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, “we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas.” That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.
But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle — piped up and said, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
Under its classified Imminent Fury program, the Navy’s Irregular Warfare office leased, tested, and armed a Brazilian-made Embraer EMB-314 Super Tucano — a relatively inexpensive turboprop aircraft — for possible use in counterinsurgency warfare as close air support:
“Now we’re in an operational pause, trying to figure out how to get to Phase II. We need about $44 million,” he said. “Back to the method of venture capitalism, we’re working with the Air Force and Marine Corps, socializing it with those guys to see if we can get money invested and get to Phase II, where we’re taking four aircraft into theater.”
Naturally, the Air Force doesn’t want anything to do with a low, slow ground support aircraft:
“There is a not a need, in my view, for large numbers of light strike or light lift aircraft in our Air Force to do general purpose force missions,” [Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz] said, speaking at a Center for National Policy sponsored event in Washington, D.C. “With the platforms that we already have in our force structure, and our capabilities, we can service any close air support requirement. It’s as simple as that.” He could not envision replacing existing F-15, F-16 and A-10 aircraft with a light strike aircraft.
Somebody else does want it though:
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week, newly nominated Central Command head Gen. James Mattis reaffirmed his support for a turboprop aircraft to provide ground pounders with long loitering time, on-call recon and strike. [...] Mattis made an important point in front of the SASC earlier this year:
“Today’s approach of loitering multi-million dollar aircraft and using a system of systems procedure for the approval and employment of airpower is not the most effective use of aviation fires in this irregular fight.”
A few comments that caught my attention:
Joseph Fouché shares a parable from Robert Leonhard’s The Art of Maneuver:
When I first went to Fort Benning for Infantry Officer Basic Course, I encountered that nasty little insect known for its large nests and painful sting — the fire ant. My wife and I were just recovering from seeing our first cockroach when we noticed a fire ant mound in our front yard. Being an agressive infantryman, I assured my mate that I had learned how to deal with this menace. So, I grabbed a can of gasoline, kicked the top off the mound, and doused the swarm of ants that rushed up out of the ground. I beamed proudly as my wife patted my back with approval. The ants died instantly.
The next day I was dismayed to find another mound in my front yard. This one was about two feet removed from where the remains of the other still stood as a tribute to my military prowess. I defiantly repeated my highly successful tactics of the previous day as my wife looked on doubtfully. Again the ants died.
And again they returned the next day. There ensued a bitter campaign of man against ant. I never lost a battle. A week later, my front yard was pockmarked with brown spots, and I was out of gas. I had done everything a man could do. At one point, to my lasting shame, I even ignited the gasoline-soaked masses, which delighted me to no end but served only to cook the arthropod corpses. My wife frowned on this atrocity, so I desisted. Unable to explain how these devilish ants were able to recover their losses so quickly. I even offered to perform a body count to prove to my wife that I was winning this war.
Finally, in desperation we drove to the PX. In the garden shop I found an insecticide that was guaranteed to rid my yard of fire ants once and for all. The black label directed me to sprinkle some of the granules on the nest. The ants, thinking it was food, would carry it too the queen, who, upon ingesting it, would die. Once the queen dead, the rest of the ants would die or go away.
As I stood there reading the black label on the box, I received one of my most valuable lessons on maneuver warfare, though it did not occur to me then: the center of gravity of a fire-ant nest is the queen. Kill the queen, and the nest goes away for good. If you fail to kill the queen, it doesn’t matter how many ants you get. The masses are irrelevant to the campaign. I took the box home and tried it. Bitterly, I had to admit it worked. It seemed a terribly “unmanly” way to fight, but my wife assured me that she still considered me a great soldier. After all, was not the ruined front yard a memorial to the many battles I had won?
Corning’s Gorilla glass, which had been languishing unused since its invention in 1962, has become a $170 million a year business:
Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor.
Then in 1964, Corning devised an ingenious method called “fusion draw” to make super-thin, unvaryingly flat glass. It pumped hot glass into a suspended trough and allowed it to overflow and run down either side. The glass flows then meet under the trough and fuse seamlessly into a smooth, hanging sheet of glass.
To make Chemcor, Corning ran the sheets through a “tempering” process that set up internal stresses in the material. The same principle is behind the toughness of Pyrex glass, but Chemcor was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment.
Corning thought Chemcor sheets created this way would be the material of choice in car windshields, but British rival Pilkington Bros. intervened with a far cheaper mass-production approach. And another Chemcor adaptation in photochromic sunglasses also fizzled in the retail market.
Fusion draw finally proved its commercial value when Japanese electronics companies, looking for slim sheets free of alkalis that contaminate liquid crystals, turned to Corning’s soda-lime LCD glass in the 1980s. Corning rapidly turned into the world’s biggest supplier of LCD glass for laptops and that business blossomed around 2003 when LCD technology migrated to TVs.
In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. “Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,” said researcher Ron Stewart.
With relatively low startup costs, Gorilla should generate its first profit this year. And now that production is back on, designers are again exploring using it in unexpected places, like refrigerator doors, car sunroofs and touch-screen hotel advertising.
Among the 100-plus devices with Gorilla are Motorola Inc.’s Droid smart phone and LG Electronics’ X300 notebook. Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since “not all our customers allow us to say,” said Jim Steiner, general manager of Corning’s specialty materials division.
Jennie Rothenberg Gritz of The Atlantic interviews Andrew Hacker about what’s wrong with the American university system:
Are you against the idea of faculty research altogether, or do you think some research deserves to be funded by universities?
The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there’s a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.
And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it’s awfully difficult to say, “Here’s knowledge we don’t need!” It sounds like book burning, doesn’t it? What we’d say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done.
But what about lifesaving research — for example, finding a cure for cancer?
How much really valuable research is being done on cancer? When I was at Cornell, Congress announced that they were going to pour a lot of money into cancer research. So a memo went out to the Cornell professors — not just in the sciences, mind you — saying, “Can you take your current research and cancerize it?” There’s a lot of that going on. So sociology professors decided to research cancer communications, and so on.
And then there’s the whole issue of sabbaticals. Right now, about half a million academics — assistant, associate, and full professors — are eligible for sabbaticals. At Harvard and Yale, senior professors get every third year off, not every seventh. This coming year — are you ready for this? — 20 of the 48 professors in Harvard’s history department will be on leave. They’re expected to take that time away and have a publication come out of it. Even if a professor goes off to Tuscany, he says, “I’m taking my manuscript with me and revising it there.” We don’t need that many new publications. We absolutely don’t.
A lot of the pressure to publish is tied in with the pressure to earn tenure. You argue that tenure actually doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do — it doesn’t preserve academic freedom.
Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can’t be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We’ve seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don’t change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they’ve been trained to follow.
What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That’s a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave. There’s hardly any turnover in the senior ranks — not just at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford but at small colleges in Kentucky, everywhere. You go to a campus and over two thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate. In many ways, they become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking.
It’s an odd mix of grounded and ivory tower thinking.
When I first heard about the Siberian farm fox experiment, I thought, someone has to sell these domesticated silver foxes in America — and now someone is doing just that:
Are foxes expensive?
Just like some dog breeds, foxes are fairly expensive and are offered at $5,950.
Transportation from Russia and extensive paperwork is a significant part of the cost.
Can I breed tame foxes?
Institute of Cytology and Genetics is the only breeder for domesticated silver foxes that were selected for many generations. All foxes come neutered. It is illegal to breed Sibirian tame foxes bought from Siberian farm.
Trevor Butterworth summarizes Joel Mokyr’s latest book, The Enlightened Economy:
Why did Britain have an industrial revolution first? Why not France or the Netherlands, given their economic power in the 17th century and, at the time, the increasingly free market in ideas between Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and London?
Mr. Mokyr’s answer — articulated in densely packed but gratifyingly lucid prose — is that in Britain ideas interacted vigorously with business interests in “a positive feedback loop that created the greatest sea change in economic history since the advent of culture.”
Reduced to a thumbnail sketch, liberty and natural philosophy — a catch-all term for the study of “useful” knowledge — begat prosperity, which begat more liberty and useful knowledge, which in turn spread through Europe and the Americas.
[...]
The reason for Britain’s exceptionalism, Mr. Mokyr says, lies in the increasing hostility to rent-seeking — the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth — among the country’s most important intellectuals in the second half of the 18th century. Indeed, a host of liberal ideas, in the classic sense, took hold: the rejection of mercantilism’s closed markets, the weakening of guilds and the expansion of internal free trade, and robust physical and intellectual property rights all put Britain far ahead of France, where violent revolution was needed to disrupt the privileges of the old regime.Such political upheaval in Europe, notes Mr. Mokyr, disrupted trade, fostered uncertainty, and may well have created all kinds of knock-on social disincentives for technological and scientific innovation and collaboration with business. Much as we might deplore too many of our brightest students going into law rather than chemistry or engineering, it is not unreasonable to think that many of France’s brightest thinkers were diverted by brute events into political rather than scientific activism (or chastened by poor Lavoisier’s beheading during the Revolution).
I still think the term rent-seeking is a terrible bit of jargon.
As Aretae points out, the solution to rent-seeking seems to be either a strong central government (a là Augustus) or a weak central government (a là the American frontier).
I recently noted that Colorado doesn’t seem to be collecting an excise on medical marijuana:
Pot sales so far are expected to generate about $2.7 million in license fees, in addition to the more than $681,000 in sales tax collected from July 2009 to February 2010.
Jacob Sullum doesn’t think legal marijuana would yield an excise tax bonanza:
Gieringer suggests a tax of 50 cents to $1 per joint, which is extremely heavy even compared to the cigarette taxes that prevail in New York City ($3 a pack, or 15 cents a cigarette, on top of the federal excise tax of 39 cents a pack). Even a levy as big as Gieringer proposes would bring in revenues that “might range from $2.2 to $6.4 billion per year,” according to his estimate.
Federal excise taxes have changed since I last looked, but they shed some light on what’s “reasonable”:
State taxes can be much, much higher — but the pot-friendly states of California and Colorado don’t have high excise tax rates compared to other states:
California NORML argues that an excise of $1 per half-gram “joint” could yield $1 billion per year for the Golden State:
At current levels of consumption, an excise tax of $1 per gram of marijuana would yield $475–$550 million per year, while a tax of $ 2 per gram ($1 per half-gram joint) would yield around $ 1 billion, about the same as California’s current excise tax on cigarettes.
Other economic studies have attempted to evaluate the revenues from a marijuana excise tax. According to a study by Caputo and Ostrom [2], a nationwide excise tax would yield $3.44–$12.25 billion (inflation adjusted to current dollars). Adjusted for population, California’s share would come to $400 million–$1.5 billion. Similar results were obtained by Gieringer [3], who estimated $3.2–$6.4 billion based on a nationwide $1 per joint tax, or $400–$800 million for California. Doubling the tax to $2 per joint could bring the total up to $1.5 billion in California.
Sales taxes would generate another $240–$400 million, so the total tax revenue could grow quite large:
Another way to estimate the total tax revenues from marijuana is by drawing a parallel with California’s current tax on cigarettes. Fully one-half of the current price of cigarettes is accounted for by taxes and fees. On a $3.60 pack, consumers pay a $0.87 excise tax, $0.28 in sales tax, and another $0.74 for the tobacco settlement. A similar 50% level of taxation in a legal $3–$5 billion marijuana market would yield $1.5–$2.5 billion.
The number of Amish in North America has doubled since 1991. The Amish population is growing at an estimated 5% a year and now stands at 249,500, with communities in 28 US states — from Texas to Maine — as well as Canada.
Pennsylvania and Ohio each have more than 50,000 Amish.
Imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises, Niall Ferguson reminds us — sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt:
Think of Spain in the 17th century: already by 1543 nearly two-thirds of ordinary revenue was going on interest on the juros, the loans by which the Habsburg monarchy financed itself.
Or think of France in the 18th century: between 1751 and 1788, the eve of Revolution, interest and amortisation payments rose from just over a quarter of tax revenue to 62 per cent.
Finally, consider Britain in the 20th century. Its real problems came after 1945, when a substantial proportion of its now immense debt burden was in foreign hands. Of the pound stg. 21 billion national debt at the end of the war, about pound stg. 3.4bn was owed to foreign creditors, equivalent to about a third of gross domestic product.
Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed in Washington, as the US contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $US1.47 trillion ($1.64 trillion), about 10 per cent of GDP, for the second year running. Since 2001, in the space of just 10 years, the federal debt in public hands has doubled as a share of GDP from 32 per cent to a projected 66 per cent next year. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections, the debt could rise above 90 per cent of GDP by 2020 and reach 146 per cent by 2030 and 344 per cent by 2050.
These sums may sound fantastic. But what is even more terrifying is to consider what ongoing deficit finance could mean for the burden of interest payments as a share of federal revenues.
The CBO projects net interest payments rising from 9 per cent of revenue to 20 per cent in 2020, 36 per cent in 2030, 58 per cent in 2040 and 85 per cent in 2050. As Larry Kotlikoff recently pointed out in the Financial Times, by any meaningful measure, the fiscal position of the US is at present worse than that of Greece.
[...]
Quietly, discreetly, the Chinese are reducing their exposure to US Treasuries. Perhaps they have noticed what the rest of the world’s investors pretend not to see: that the US is on a completely unsustainable fiscal course, with no apparent political means of self-correcting.
(Hat tip to Patri Friedman.)
Sikosrky’s new electric helicopter, the Firefly, is actually a tried and true Hughes 269 airframe with an electric motor and lithium-ion batteries in place of the gasoline engine:
The 190-horsepower electric motor will draw power from three lithium-ion packs joined in parallel for a total of 135 amp-hours. Helicopters have never been known for their efficiency, and it looks like the Firefly is no exception. Sikorsky expects just 15 minutes of flight time from the craft, which at this point is merely a technology demonstrator.
This is clearly an early prototype with plenty of low-hanging fruit yet unplucked:
If they removed the drive shaft for the rear prop and used a separate motor there, along with eliminating extra main drive transmission parts, they could probably decrease weight and increase efficiency considerably. Perhaps they could even eliminate the swashplate linkages and use servos on the blades themselves, or servo-flaps.
(Hat tip à mon père.)