jfruh

Johns Hopkins, then as now an elite institution located in Baltimore, encouraged local kids to apply, and was integrated long before the public schools were. Hopkins never had any kind of restriction on the number of black students, but they did have quotas on the number of Jews. That's because the black school system was bad enough (and blacks generally financially disadvantaged enough) that they knew they'd never have more than about 5 percent or so of their student body being black -- enough to show that they were liberal and enlightened, but not enough to change the character of the student body. But if they let in all the Jews who qualified, the school would be half Jewish, which would be unacceptable, as they'd get a reputation as a "Jewish" school.

This is also one of the reasons for the long-ago heyday of City College in New York: as a public college, they didn't discriminate, and so a lot of Jewish kids who would have otherwise qualified to go to the Ivy League ended up there.

My point is that all these problems would be easier to ignore or fix if Turkey had 10 million people. At 70 million, they'd have such a strong voice in EU institutions that they'd be as likely to change the EU as vice versa.

If Turkey were a Muslim country with a European toehold and a history of dodgy human rights abuses but a general trendline towards democracy and it had a population of about 10 million, the EU would be falling all over itself to admit it and show how enlightened it was.

But there's the assumption, isn't it? Actually two: that reusable will be cheaper, and that reusable and reliable can go together.

I'm certainly not saying they can't -- I am, quite literally, not a rocket scientist -- but the Space Shuttle program was the triumph of the idea that "Of course it'll be cheaper if we can re-use the vehicle." Which didn't work out in practice for the reasons outlined upthread. My point is that a space program should pick the goals of "This should get people up and back safely and cost $X a launch" because those are measurable. Maybe the best way to do that is with a reusable vehicle! But to make reusability a goal in and of itself, due to a sentimental attachment to the kind of vehicles we used to travel by sea, seems silly.

I'm not saying that a true reusable speacecraft wouldn't be revolutionary. And maybe it's possible with '10s tech in a way that it wasn't in the '70s. But picking "reusable" as a goal in and of itself, rather than using metrics like reliability or cost per pound to orbit, seems like a dodgy business.

The varying reactions to this interview are interesting to me in how they reveal people think about the market. I'm seeing a lot of pushback along the line of "So what? Most of what he says is true!" I think people's negative reaction is a result of a decade or more of an ideological push to get ordinary people's savings into the stock market, and, furthermore, to portray the people who are active drivers in those markets as job-creating heroes who know better than some government bureaucrat and who therefore deserve their high compensation. When it's revealed that at least one such marketeer dreams of profiting from a general economic collapse, that seems to invalidate the promises of an ideology that is often described in shorthand as "pro-market" or "pro-capitalism".

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/09/27/is-alessio-...

"You don’t need to spend very much time hanging around the comments section (or even many of the posts) at Zero Hedge to discern a strong nihilistic and even anti-capitalist strain to much of the thinking in that community. Independent traders are often men in their 20s and 30s who inherited a substantial sum of money and who for whatever reason don’t have a more attractive opportunity in the regular workforce. They work from home, they tend to have a strong contrarian streak, and they have a lot of time on their hands ... It’s a common misconception that all traders are die-hard capitalists. But in fact many of them are quite the opposite. They still want to make money, of course. But that doesn’t mean they want the stock market to go up."

Of course, if you're right, this fits in nicely with the NY Times' article from this morning, which basically said that the HP board hired Apotheker without meeting him, because the board members all couldn't stand each other and didn't want hang out together long enough to vet him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/business/voting-to-hire-a-...

These people, it's amazing.

ha ha ha WHAT

"OK, let's hire this enterprise software guy, then get mad when he restructures the company around enterprise software, then fire him but make his successor implement the plan the enterprise software guy put together! Can't fail!"

Edited to add: Several people replied to me saying "But some of us DON'T want to see a big chronological list!" Well, yeah, I said in my original post that I realized this. And in fact you already had the option to see only "Top news" instead of "All posts." What bugs me is the one-size-fits-all version that has now been imposed on everybody. Why is FB allergic to allowing different users to interact with their data in the way those users want?

Absolute percentiles are useful because they do show you where you stand in relation to the rest of society. Families making $250K may not be Scrooge McDuck-style super-rich, but they're indisputably in the top few percent of the nation in terms of income. It's hard for those folks to claim to be middle class when 90+ percent of their fellow citizens make less.

It's also worth noting that people's lifestyles and "necessities" expand to fit their income, particularly if their income goes up relatively gradually. I've literally heard people say, "Well, I make $400K a year but I'm not rich because it costs a lot of money to pay mortgage and taxes in Westchester County and send my kids to private school and drive a nice car." They think that "rich" means "disposable income I can spend a whim," when in fact living in Westchester and sending the kids to private school is part of being rich.

The Greatest Generation benefitted both from social security and from the defined-benefit pension plans their unions won for them.

Edited to add: Also, many got to go to college for free on the GI Bill, and so entered the professional workforce without the debt burden that their children and grandchildren would face. Makes it easier to save.