Category Archives: regulation

Academic Apostasy

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What are our post-high school academic institutions coming to?

Dartmouth Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Mike Mastanduno said this:

More than I’d like to, I hear this: “It’s really hard to teach on Thursday morning because of what the students do on Wednesday night.” I hear that from faculty. What I never hear, and what I’d love to start hearing from students is, “It’s really hard to do what we want to do on Wednesday night because of what’s expected of us on Thursday morning.”

Dude—party, man. It’s what we’re here for.

Maybe things might change a little, though. Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon is looking to make changes.

He wants to reorganize the dormitory system into “house communities” in which students will tend to reside for their college career instead of moving around frequently. Shockingly, they will

have dedicated space for study and social interaction….

Say, what!? Dude, chill.

But wait—there’s more:

I am asking the faculty to consider a number of ways to increase the rigor of our curriculum—from curbing grade inflation, limiting lay ups, to not cancelling classes around celebration weekends, to earlier start times for classes on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Dude, hold up—don’t listen to that Dean….

 

Dude….

Driving Death Rate

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It fell sharply in 2012, the latest year for which data were studied by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Assuming Fox News accurately summarized the study, I have a couple questions.

Improved vehicle designs and safety technology have a lot to do with the reduced risk, but a weak economy that led to reductions in driving may also have played a role….

Well, yeah. This is why I’d rather see the death rates per (million? hundred thousand?) miles driven. The Edsel in its half-day might have had a very low rate per million sold, too. Or a sky high rate. Four of the cars the Institute identified as having no deaths in 2012 were luxury cars—which won’t have as many miles driven per model as a middle-class car like Honda Accord or a Ford Taurus.

Then there’s what the Institute used for their baseline: 48 deaths over the 2008-2009 time frame. I have to wonder, given events in the latter half of 2008 and extending through 2009, how many of those 48 were due to design and technology and how many were due to driving while distracted by distraught and/or suicide by driving accident. One such death would skew the results by two per centage points.

The Left’s War on the Poor

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It’s exemplified by California’s egg-laying chicken cage requirement. In 2008, California voters

required the state’s poultry farmers to house their hens in significantly larger cages. The state legislature realized this would put home-state farmers at a disadvantage, so in 2010 it compounded the problem by requiring that eggs imported from other states come from farms meeting the same cage standards, effective Jan 1, 2015.

That’s an expensive requirement: $40 per egg layer.

The number of egg-layers in California has fallen by nearly a quarter in the last two years, and quite a number of egg producers outside California have declined to meet the California standard and so to stop selling their eggs in that state.

As a result,

the average price for a dozen jumbo eggs is $3.16, up from $1.18 a dozen a year ago, and in some parts of the state it’s more than $5.

Who’s paying those outlandish egg prices? Among others, it’s the financially poor citizens of California.

What’s humane, exactly, about this cavalier inflation of the cost of food for those poor? Does anyone seriously think the highly intelligent folks behind this cage law—especially the state legislators who thought it would be a good idea to compound the problem—didn’t know this sort of outcome would result?

Another Reason

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…not to do business through ObamaMart and to get rid of Obamacare and with it ObamaMart. Even the AP has the tale.

When you apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, dozens of data companies may be able to tell that you are on the site. Some can even glean details such as your age, income, ZIP code, whether you smoke or if you are pregnant.

The data firms have embedded connections on the government site. Ever-evolving technology allows for individual Internet users to be tracked, building profiles that are a vital tool for advertisers.

Connections to multiple third-party tech firms were documented by technology experts who analyzed HealthCare.gov….

Additionally, former Chief Information Officer for President George Bush the Younger and current corporate cybersecurity consultant Theresa Payton was cited by the AP as saying

[T]he large number of outside connections on HealthCare.gov seems like “overkill” and makes it “kind of an outlier” among government websites.

It’s hard, too, to look past the idea that the ObamaMart designers from Kathleen Sebelius on down didn’t know this was a player at the time they chose not to put any security protections into the thing.