* The Dept. of Energy announces a $375 million loan for an automotive-grade battery recycling plant, which is sited for Rochester, New York. We didn’t work on this project, but we’ve written proposals for many adjacent DOE applications in batteries and other materials, so we know how arduous the underlying process for this one likely was.
* “More Students Are Turning Away From College and Toward Apprenticeships: Some white-collar training programs have become as selective as Ivy League universities.” This makes sense, for all the reasons I articulated back in 2017. There are also now programs like Western Governors University (WGU) that are designed to reward skills not time in seat. A lot of students presently in college probably shouldn’t be, and probably aren’t getting much if anything out of college—apart from debt. College isn’t the magic panacea it was made out to be for many decades; instead, college degrees were then relatively rare. Now they aren’t and, simultaneously, schools have reacted to the current student-loan environment by creating degrees that require almost no work and impart essentially no skills.
* “More Flexible Zoning Helps Contain Rising Rents: New data from 4 jurisdictions that are allowing more housing shows sharply slowed rent growth.” While this is obvious, there’s a weirdly large amount of denialism out there about the way increasing supply will over time lower prices.
* Looks like RSV vaccines will be available by next winter, which is great! Less illness is better than more.
* Closing Industry Frontiers, which compares the closing of the American frontier to the filling out of the Internet software industry over the last ten years. The next political frontier might be O’Neill habitats.
* Why the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) Deserves More Funding. Modern vaccine approaches may take out a large number of diseases in the 2020s and that’s great. The RSV note above concerns only one disease, but there are many others.
* One “secret” of writing is to write every day. (This is not really a secret: pros know it, but amateurs often don’t want to believe it.)
* “Lennar defies La Habra’s Measure X, files what could be ‘builder’s remedy’ application.” Building more housing is vital to improving human well-being, which is ultimately what the grant process is about, or what it’s supposed to be about.
* Is the college essay already dead? Maybe future essays are going to be written on computers without Internet access. Or, colleges could bring back the old school Blue Books!
* “US Cities Are Falling Out of Love With the Parking Lot: California and many local governments are scrapping requirements that once made cars the center of the urban landscape.”
* Bowdlerizing Roald Dahl and the Ethics of Art.
* “How to go car-free — or car-light — in Middle America.”
* “The educational skeptic’s guide.” There’s some quotable material in here for your next Dept. of Education proposal, although you’ll need to be judicious in your choice of quotes—which is almost always true when you’re questioning orthodoxy, however mild the questioning may seem. “Social desirability bias” (SDB) is a real thing, and a lot of educational improvement initiatives are bound up with SDB.
* “The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again,” which is bad for FQHCs and bad for anyone who needs healthcare (which is, over the course of a life, almost everyone).
* “Apartment Rents Fall as Crush of New Supply Hits Market.” Supply and demand matter, and homelessness is first and foremost a housing shortage problem.
* “Smaller, safer, cheaper? Modular nuclear plants could reshape coal country.” This would be a major step in the right direction, especially because coal plants tend to already have transmission lines and interconnect rights.
* “New Thinking on Peer Review at NIH.” Better peer review is welcomed. Like so many forms of institutional infrastructure that really got launched in the postwar period, “peer review” isn’t working well any more.
* Are parts of the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department run by gang members? If you don’t want the reporting filter, the original report is here and says things like:
The Department currently contains several active groups that have been, and still are, engaged in harmful, dangerous, and often illegal, behavior. Some of these groups have engaged in acts of violence, threatened acts of violence, placed fellow Deputies at risk of physical harm, engaged in acts celebrating officer involved shootings, and created a climate of physical fear and professional retribution to those who would speak publicly about the misconduct of such groups.
Ever seen the TV show The Shield? I think that was about LAPD, not LA County Sheriff.
* Do nonprofits drive social change? Not according to this analysis, but nonprofits of a certain kind maintain a certain high status among certain persons.
* The efforts of geothermal power startup Fervo. We’ve worked on lots of geothermal energy projects.
* “Global Supply of Cocaine Hits Record Level, U.N. Says: Coca cultivation rose 35% from 2020 to 2021, new report says.” At what point does one decide that prohibition has failed, and it’s time to try a new strategy? Imagine that coffee were under the same sanctions as coca leaves.
* Oregon botches the decriminalization of drugs.
* “Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen.” Another take on the book we previously wrote about, and which is germane to behavioral and mental health. Those of you who work in mental health will likely recognize some of the issues they face (excuse the length of this quote, but you’ll understand why by the end):
“The best minds” of the title refers to Laudor, who’s brilliant by wide affirmation and whose intelligence and intensity are now inextricable from his illness, at least in the popular understanding. But it also refers to the people who created the medical and social context in which the murder occurred – the mental health advocates who fought (and fight) against the effort to hospitalize patients who are psychotic or otherwise dangerous, the anti-psychiatry movement that has demonized treatment of debilitating medical conditions, the media that wanted to see Laudor in nothing but facile storybook terms and so of course could see nothing else, the various authority figures and community members who had enabled Laudor’s uninterrupted descent into madness because they thought it was the right thing to do, and the family members and friends who were unable to see how obviously, cripplingly sick he had become near the end.
Consider also this controversial take:
The biggest problem in American mental healthcare is not people getting stuck in the system but those who need to get in and can’t.