Why your hamburger hates America

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Another explanation for the state of the nation.

I think this explains a lot, about politics, healthcare, etc. Of course, the trick is that it is a false dichotomy.

And I thought it was my electronic life.

We have seen the future and it sees us.

One hundred fifty years of research proves that shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits — and overtime destroys them. So why do we still do this?

The New York Times—the most valuable real estate in journalism—devotes its op-ed space today to an argument by University of Chicago professor Luigi Zingales to “eliminate government subsidies” of college students (by which he apparently means all Pell Grants and federal student loans). He would replace this system with one in which venture capitalists invest in promising students and in return, receive “a fraction of a student’s future income,” or, better yet, “a fraction of the increase in her income that derives from college attendance.”

This proposal is worth discussing not because there is much danger that it will literally come to pass but because it shines sunlight on the mind-set of many conservatives, exposing a way of thinking that does in fact result in many policy decisions that are hurting American higher education.

There are lots of problems with Zingales’s proposal, but the most important one is that it conceptualizes higher education as an almost purely private good. His new system, he says “would make only the beneficiaries of a college education—not all taxpayers—pay for the costs of it.”

• Culture
• Television & radio
• Television

56 Up: ‘It’s like having another family’

It began as a one-off look at how the class system defined the hopes and aspirations of British children. Now, almost half a century later, the Up series has evolved into one of the world’s great documentary projects. But how have these films affected the lives they follow?

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• • Stephen Moss
  • guardian.co.uk,Monday 7 May 2012 20.12 BST
  • Article history

The original participants reunited for 21 Up in 1978.

Seven Up! first hit the screens in May 1964, and was intended as a one-off programme, a snapshot of the British class system and the way it conditioned so much of life. Tim Hewat, the Australian founding editor of World in Action, had the idea for the programme, and took as its starting point the Jesuit saying: “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” The programme makers went looking for posh kids and poor kids, expecting them to play their allotted roles in life.

prettayprettaygood:

via Time:

Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal’s drug…

With apologies to my Dartmouth friends, but this is horrifying.