Category: Current Events

A Conversation with Galbraith

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Harry Kreisler:

Welcome to a conversation with UC Berkeley’s 1986 Alumnus of the Year, John Kenneth Galbraith: Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics in 1934; Professor of Economics at Harvard for more than fifty years; writer and author of more than 20 books, including The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society, and one novel, The Triumph; price czar during World War II; Project Director in the strategic bombing studies after World War II; editor at Fortune magazine; advisor to President Kennedy; U.S. Ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration; a leader in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War; past president of the American Economics Association.

I met Galbraith ever so briefly years ago.

William Gibson on the NSA Domestic Wiretapping

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Cory Doctorow:

I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some…

The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why we do any of this stuff. A couple hundred years down the road, when people look back at what the NSA has done, the significance of it won’t be about terrorism or Iraq or the Bush administration or the American Constitution, it will be about how we’re driven by emerging technologies and how we struggle to keep up with them…

The Price Opens at the Madison Rep

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Kenneth Burns:

But Corley says the play is both personal and political, and that the current political climate makes The Price as relevant as ever.

In The Price, one of the brothers, Victor (played by Roderick Peeples), is a retired policeman who gave up a budding scientific career to care for his ailing father. The other brother, Walter (Richard Henzel), is a wealthy surgeon who has given their father only token support.

The play’s political themes emerge, Corley says, as the brothers try to make sense of their past and of their choices — and of the prices they have paid. “When Miller wrote the play, he wanted to write about the ideology that created the Vietnam War,” Corley says, “and the belief that the end of war could make things better. Both fallacies are based on a misunderstanding of the past.”

Microjets: Eclipse 500 Certification

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Joseph Anselmo:

an a former copy machine repairman who happens to be friends with Bill Gates reinvigorate the general aviation industry by adopting the low-cost, mass production model used for personal computers? The world is about to find out.

Not long ago, it appeared the answer was a resounding “no.” Eclipse Aviation founder Vern Raburn gathered his team on a dismal Saturday morning in November 2002 to figure out whether the company had a future. Raburn, a pioneer in the personal computer revolution, was aiming to develop a six-seat jet that would sell for less than $1 million, bringing jet ownership within reach of thousands of new customers. But his penchant for risk had put Eclipse in big trouble.

The Albuquerque company, with funding support from NASA, had bet big on the development of an advanced, radically cheaper turbine engine. The technology wasn’t panning out in time, however, and there was no Plan B. Investors, lured by Raburn’s earlier successes at Microsoft, Lotus and Symantec, were running out of patience. Eclipse had two options: stick with the balky engine and pray for a miracle, or delay launch of the aircraft by several years and try to hang on while it found a new engine.

Richard Davis’s Birthday Party: Audio / Video

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Often in life, the best things are free. Thanks, Richard and friends!

 Richard Davis’s Friday night Birthday Bash (Richard mentioned that his birthday is actually tax day, April 15) seemed an appropriate way to wrap up a beautiful Madison week, with temperatures reaching into the 70’s. The bash was held Friday night at Mills Hall and included participants from the Bass Conference Faculty.

Audio / Video:

Conference pictures are available here.

More on Richard: Wikipedia | Clusty | Google | Yahoo

The Mishap at Mammoth

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Bob Lefsetz:

My inbox and voice mail are filling up with questions/concerns re the tragic accident at Mammoth Mountain today.

With 79″ of new snow, the ski patrol had to do a great deal of maintenance work to make the hill safe for skiing. In clearing up the Face of 3, a group of ski patrollers went to adjust a fence around a volcano vent on the far side of the slope. The ground collapsed and they were trapped and the latest report is three people died. It is not clear whether the fall killed them or the lack of oxygen or the volcanic gases.

It was very strange. One started to hear whispering. And then the upper lifts were running but they wouldn’t let anybody board. And then they stopped the upper lifts completely.

Different stories were circulated. One, that the snow just collapsed. Two, that by covering up the vent previously, the gases found a new exit and a larger area was rendered unstable.

Usha Lee McFarling notes the risks for those who work and play atop one of the nations largest active volcanic systems. Steve Hymon and Amanda Covarrubias have more.

Mammoth has had 638 inches (!) of snow this year. The lifts will be open until July 4th!

Mammoth Mountain

Pricing Politicians

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Alex Tabarrok:

Prosecutors call it a corruption case with no parallel in the long history of the U.S. Congress. And it keeps getting worse. Convicted Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham actually priced the illegal services he provided.

Prices came in the form of a “bribe menu” that detailed how much it would cost contractors to essentially order multimillion-dollar government contracts…the California Republican’s “bribery menu”… shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.