Greg Mankiw and Paul Krugman both think we should make income tax rates fairer: Mankiw thinks they should be lower and flatter, and Krugman thinks they should be higher and more steeply progressive.
"Fairness" is one of those magic words that basically everyone agrees they want, but no one agrees on what it means. It can paper over a lot of disagreement.
A couple of them seem just obviously correct to me, though I don't think I really qualify as an "expert".
Compare the riffs when the Big Arch marketing clip went viral, and the number of people who said the McDonald's CEO /should/ be, and look like, a guy who's obsessed with hamburgers.
His answer: we don't engage with the world as it is. We engage with "pseudo-environments", simplified pictures of reality we construct from the information available to us. We act on those pictures as if they were the real thing.
Not saying you need a full on ABA aria that spends four minutes on three sentences, but even in Wagner and Puccini (or Nixon in China!) you get extended sequences of one or two characters singing about their emotions. And for me that's where the most compelling musical work happens.
And other modern operas I've been to haven't been that stark, But they lean a lot more heavily on unstructured or semi-structured dialogue.
Dialogue is great, and recitatives are useful and functional, but no one walks out of The Magic Flute humming "O zittre nicht".
I almost feel like a lot of modern opera has gotten eaten by recitative.
Like, I went to The Crucible this past weekend, though sadly I had to leave at intermission. And in the first act there were basically no arias and one only chorus—the rest was all back-and-forth dialogue.
I make almost all purchases, large or small, on my computer. Even using a laptop feels cramped and uncomfortable.
The number of students who attend my office hours absolutely cratered a couple years ago.
At first I assumed it was just a slow semester but it's been consistent.
I assume that instead of asking me questions, they're asking ChatGPT instead. Not yet sure if that's a good thing.
Math is a humanities discipline that studied short persuasive essays within a very restrictive set of genre rules and assumptions. It just has a lot of interconnections with actual sciences.
This also sheds some light on the "Elements" example—one of the original works that defines the genre!
This is why math is a humanities discipline, not a science. (Obviously math is STEM, by construction.)
But in math we're not studying phenomena in-the-world; we're studying proofs, which are texts. The written paper IS the work. (And if you don't have it written you haven't done the work.)
Disadvantage to Substack that I hadn't thought about before: can't use a library to check out That One Article you need access to.
www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-09-29
This is 1) incredibly stupid 2) very bad
Kerry overperformed!
Also the snow was removing some lanes and there were a couple of blocks shut off by police. I don't usually drive in the morning but I had to today, and it was like ten minutes out and then an hour back.
This was a shitshow today and they haven't even done the closures yet!
Starting to feel about autocomplete the way my parents' generation did about GPS.
If I don't have to type my credit card number in every time, or my girlfriend's phone number, how am I gonna memorize it? That used to just happen, but now I need to actively drill it.
Someone introduced me to the song "I Was Not a Nazi Polka", mocking widespread post-war protestations by Germans that none of them had ever been Nazis or sympathizers.
And that's easy to ridicule, but it's important part of the peace that we /did/ let most of them sing the I Was Not a Nazi polka.
To the best of my knowledge it gets consistent but not enormous majorities in referenda. In 2024 got 59% versus 30% for status quo and 12% for independence.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Pu...
Even now, when there is a simple cartoonish moral binary, a lot of people seem to want to identify a different simple cartoonish moral binary. E.g. "this shows all the problems with capitalism" or "we need to expel all the moderates from the coalition".
Have a lot more sympathy for all those people scheduling meetings that could have been emails, now that I regularly get complaints that my emails should have been meetings.
This is a real problem with the political project of "ostracize everyone with terrible opinions".
If 2% of people have the terrible opinions, that can and does work. If 20% have the terrible opinions, it probably doesn't. If 40% of people have them, that's basically proposing civil war.
Apparently it's a volunteer position that "in no way affects his position as governor. "
bsky.app/profile/capi...
I teach calc. Some students rarely show up and get As on all the assignments, and I don't worry about them.
Some students rarely show up and get Cs, and if they're happy I'm okay.
Some students get Fs on tests, don't turn in half the homework, and show up the last week to ask how they can pass.
So all this "what are you going to do with a degree in X?" handwringing is sort of nonsense. Unless you know you want to go down a pretty specific technical career path, your undergraduate major just does not matter that much. Which I wish we conveyed to students better.
I kind of hate the applause (it's flattering but makes me uncomfortable), so I've started watching for when they start thinking about it and shaping my cadence so they don't actually have an opening to do it.
On some level this explains the last time; best numbers I can find are something like 35 over 60 when he left office in 2021.
Enough to "be disgraced" but not enough to be abnormal; comparable to W Bush.
(Data includes pre-Jan 6 polling but not a lot www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/d...)
I studied Latin for five years in high school, and while that knowledge has definitely attenuated, I regularly find my brain wanting to revert to Latin grammar.
This comes up most often with English nouns ending in -a. For instance, yesterday I saw a display of Santae in the CVS window.