My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars: Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth. (Defector)
• How America Can Break Its Highway Addiction: In the 1980s, an unlikely alliance slowed the construction of nature-destroying dams. We just might be able to pull it off again. (Slate)
• Are Professional Forecasters Overconfident (lol) ? The post-COVID years have not been kind to professional forecasters, whether from the private sector or policy institutions: their forecast errors for both output growth and inflation have increased dramatically relative to pre-COVID. (Liberty Street Economics)
• Anatomy of a Trump conspiracy theory: It should come as no surprise that Trump, the country’s chief election denier and a champion of the anti-Obama “birther” movement, is susceptible to conspiracy theories. But as Trump has gotten older, the rabbit holes have grown deeper and more radical — a backdrop to his distrust of the media and refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 election. The result — on display as he falsely claimed immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio — is a candidate who’s become a walking liability for his own campaign. (Axios)
• Did Matthew Perry’s Assistant Have a Choice? Hollywood Veterans Aren’t So Sure. Shooting your boss up with ketamine may be extreme, but refusing commands means “you risk losing your job, your health insurance, your home, everything.” (Vanity Fair)
• How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity: If reality television began as a crude simulacrum of real life, today the opposite can feel true — that actual life is approximating reality television, and we’ve all been conscripted as cast members. (New York Times)
• When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means. Companies whose futures depend on plastic production are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on plastic shopping bags and other items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators. (ProPublica)
• 9/11 responders are getting dementia. They want the government to help. Research shows cognitive impairment is afflicting World Trade Center responders at higher rates than the general population. (Washington Post)
• Major outlets change standards for hacked emails, protect Trump: For weeks, major American media organizations — including The Washington Post, Politico, and the New York Times — have possessed internal Trump campaign documents. What do these documents say? We don’t know because all three outlets have declined to publish the documents — or excerpt a single sentence. This is a much different approach than the Washington Post took after hackers connected to the Russian government leaked internal emails from Clinton campaign officials and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Washington Post published dozens of stories based on these leaked emails. The steady drumbeat of mostly unflattering articles was a major part of the election narrative in the days and weeks before election day. (Popular Information)
• Why Does Yellowstone National Park Turn Us All into Maniacs? Petting bison, cooking food in geysers. Ride along with our writer on a wild trip to our nation’s most iconic national park at the height of tourist season to see all the bad behavior. (Outside)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group. The firm manages over $430 billion. His new book “The Highest Calling: Conversations on the American Presidency” is out this week.
September is the Cruelest Month
Source: Marquette Associates
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