This is my best guess as to why so many partisan culture war enemies are bashing libertarians today.

I imagine AI is making extremely high “cognitive ability” less important to employers—especially really big ones. While I have serious misgivings about it, I’m in the camp that generally thinks the use of it will hasten a revived appreciation for creative capacity, virtue, authenticity, etc and, on the whole, create far more opportunity for small/distributed closely-held businesses than very large financialized ones. That will further erode the signaling aspect of contemporary college’s value prop; it was never all that important to small employers and was primarily a BigCo thing. Also, school age population is now declining, so the education industry is going to aggressively battle back against all immigration restriction, as the global market is their only growth channel. They’ve played out the middle class and the poor, they’ve played out women, and re-institutionalizing old people for retiree classes will only take them so far. They desperately need internationals. Meanwhile, in parallel to the fevered efforts of entrenched institutions to preserve themselves, we’ll see more schools like @RalstonCollege emerge—small institutions with emphasis on virtue, art, literature, philosophy, discussion, etc. Schools have always been and still are the pathway toward societal (including polity) leadership, and as their enrollment becomes far more dominated by immigrants and children of recent immigrants, that’s going to put them even more culturally at odds with the general public. There’s a lot there. Obviously I think it’s all really interesting. Who knows how it will unfold? This is the sort of thing I would love to have Ivan Illich’s take on.

Of course cognitive ability matters, but beyond a certain point, each unit of additional brain power brings diminishing returns. If there is a most important trait, it is definitely not “Do they have a high test score”; it’s much more likely to be something like “Do they make those around them better”. A myopic focus on SAT score, GPA, etc without regard to one’s capacity for (and interest in) bettering those around him will, in the long run, destroy an organization. The United States and its institutions became infatuated with standardized testing during WW2. Standardized testing did not exist during our period of ascendance.

Listening to @nntaleb and @ggraham on @yeomanpodcast . A conversation sounds so much different than listening to an audiobook and has humanized Taleb for me. Were I to go back and start listening to anti-fragile and the Black swan again, I wonder how I'd receive it?

As noted by @p_bruce73752, Big Bicycle began advocating for federal funding of paved roads decades prior to Big Auto. The League of American Wheelmen (founded in Rhode Island in 1880) lobbied for federal road standards and state funding of road paving. Albert Pope, a bicycle tycoon, used his leadership position within WAR to begin lobbying for federal funding of road paving in 1892. At the time, SCOTUS (wisely) regarded federal funding for internal improvements to be unconstitutional, so fed spending on road building was extremely constrained. Pope began manufacturing automobiles (electric!) in 1896, and the push to get federal dollars intensified. In 1907, SCOTUS' (terrible) Wilson v Shaw decision blew open the door for that funding to flow. In 1916, under Woodrow Wilson (among the two worst presidents of all time) and with the encouragement of Henry Ford, Congress passed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 and began allocating real dollars for road infrastructure. This article (which quotes @PeterNorton12) shares some of the bicycle-related history. history.com/articles/good-ro…

Massive federal subsidies are why we don’t have flying cars, change my mind!

Maybe the dominant image in the work is marriage. You see that from the poetry, you know that from the novels, also from the essays. A man married to land, a man married to community, and then don’t forget Tanya, a man married to his wife and his family. So marriage is this wonderful image that runs throughout. And, as usual with Mr Berry, everything is on a personal level. It’s not abstracted. This is the real commitment then: a man married to land, community, his wife and family. —Dr James Kibler speaking on the essays of Wendell Berry @AbbevilleInst, 2011

That is like explaining that the reason for fertility decline is Americans just prefer to not have babies. A hundred years of direct and indirect subsidy of auto-dependency, from all levels of government, especially federal, with much of that financed via public debt obligations laid upon future generations that have led to hundreds of millions of people buying cars, generally with more debt, and buying houses designed for cars (as codes and zoning requires), also with more debt, and when a business tries to paddle against that current and fails, you explain its failure by saying Americans simply prefer auto-dependency.

So many zoning and building code violations.

Socialized the cost, privatized the reward.

General Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox and General Wade Hampton both would be good candidates for a movie biopic.

So many zoning and building code violations.

Introduce yourself by listing ten bands you’ve seen live: Rush Blues Traveler Vertical Horizon Dave Matthews Band War The Swingin' Medallions The Doobie Brothers The Outfield The Blue Dogs Drive-By Truckers

Funded in part by the NIAID/NIH and NSF.

What are some examples of things the federal government does that make America better?

So many zoning and building code violations.

Didn’t have Jocko planning a civil war on the bingo card.