NYTimes: “Colleges and universities must reassert the liberal arts ideals that have made them great but that have been slipping away. By liberal arts, we mean a broad-based education that aspires to send out into society an educated citizenry prepared to make its way responsibly in an ever-more complex and divided world. We worry that at many schools, students can fulfill all or most of their general education requirements and take any number of electives without having had a single meaningful discussion that is relevant to one’s political life as a citizen. Over the past century, what made American higher education the best in the world is not its superiority in career training, but educating students for democratic citizenship, cultivating critical thinking and contributing to the personal growth of its students through self-creation. To revive American higher education, we need to reinvigorate these roots.”
FT: ““This meeting could have been an email” is a common workplace complaint. For some companies, it is now a guiding principle. Since the pandemic cut ties to the office, more people are working when and where it suits them best, rather than the standard nine to five. This “asynchronous” approach means colleagues overlap less and have to communicate in different ways to do their jobs effectively. That means fewer meetings — whether in person, hybrid or virtual — and more detailed memos, instructional videos and collaborative documents, as colleagues record their work in shared online workspaces that are available 24/7. “It’s just about ensuring that when I sit down to work, I have the information I need to start,” says Kyle Daigle, chief operating officer of GitHub.”
Noah Smith: “The internet as we know it — social media sites and the Web — is becoming a generally worse place to hang out. Wading through oceans of advertisements, algorithmic randomness antisemitic Russian bots, Tiktok-poisoned shouters, AI slop, and deepfakes is just not a fun way to spend anyone’s precious limited lifetime. Better, perhaps, to simply withdraw from the public internet, to spend one’s time chatting directly with friends and having fun offline, and maybe watching TV or reading a book or a Substack. That sort of human interaction worked fine before the internet, and it will probably work just fine today. Maybe someday historians will look back on the era when we lived our lives on social networking sites as a brief anomaly.” [Via Arnold Kling, who adds: “With their advertising-based revenue model, at some point the only way for Google and Facebook to grow revenue is to worsen the consumer experience. People have shown a preference for content that they don’t pay money for, and now they are getting what they want good and hard.”]
Donald Boudreaux: “The principal case for a policy of free trade has never been one of raising the living standards of poor-country citizens by lowering the living standards of rich-country citizens. While it’s true that free traders recognize that ordinary people in poor countries gain from free trade, it’s emphatically untrue that free traders think that these gains come at the expense of ordinary people in rich countries. From the start, the case for a policy of free trade has focused on the gains that such trade promises to ordinary people in the home country, be it rich or poor. Gains from trade are mutual, a reality that isn’t changed one iota by imposing a political boundary between the traders. Protectionism therefore strips both foreigners and Americans of these gains. It follows that free trade in America should be embraced by anyone who truly wishes to “put America first!” — indeed, also by anyone who admits to caring only about Americans and not a hoot about non-Americans.”
WSJ: “Quantum computers [can] perform some calculations far, far faster than their conventional counterparts. It also could soon be helping smooth some problems in our daily lives. Ordinary computers store information as binary digits, or bits, which can be either zeros or ones. Quantum computers use qubits, or quantum bits, which are much richer objects. Their values can be a complex mixture of zero and one because they rely on this behavior of atoms and smaller particles. Qubits can also coordinate their actions with other qubits instantaneously, no matter how far apart they are—a phenomenon that Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Eventually, quantum computers could make it possible to engineer materials at the molecular level and crack many of the defenses used to secure the internet. The massive, high-quality machines needed to perform these tasks are likely still at least a decade away…While these quantum machines are still small and error-prone, the advances are spurring companies and researchers to pursue more practical applications—such as swiftly calculating how to minimize the distance airline passengers must go to make their connections.”
