The state’s energy policy went off the rails last decade, when Albany set unreachable climate goals, then forced electric utilities to implement them. //

Mamdani has fiercely defended that 2019 climate law at every turn, even as the negative consequences have piled up.

When Mamdani entered the Assembly in early 2021, Con Edison and others were tearing up a century-old playbook that had successfully balanced reliability and cost.

Suddenly the utility companies had to pull double-duty as climate crusaders — and as Albany’s bagmen to pay for their multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle.

That distracted utilities from their near-term maintenance obligations on the geriatric grid, as they spent ratepayer cash and untold attention on an abstract push toward economy-wide electrification. //

Assemblyman Mamdani was among the most extreme voices pressing energy policy even further in the wrong direction, particularly when it came to the actual generation of electricity.

He fiercely opposed allowing private companies to upgrade their power plants — something that could have reduced greenhouse emissions and trimmed electricity costs, if Albany hadn’t blocked the way.

Instead, the air in New York City is dirtier, electricity prices are higher and the grid is more fragile because of green policies Mamdani himself championed.

In theory, a civilian power reactor could be used to provide weapons grade plutonium; but this is such a difficult and expensive route, that with almost no exceptions the current weapons states have elected to use special purpose reactors to do this.

The 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) recognized the problem; but, unlike current anti-proliferation activists, the NPT took a constructive attitude. The deal was simple: in return for full access to the wonders of nuclear power, you will forego making a bomb and allow our inspectors full access to all your nuclear facilities. Unfortunately, the weapons states, led by the USA, have violated the letter and spirit of this treaty over and over, and in process they have gutted the treaty and made it much more difficult for nuclear power to solve the Gordian Knot. We have turned Eisenhower's solemn pledge into a grotesque lie. Maybe we should take a look at the Non-Proliferation Treaty. //

In 1977, the Carter administration threatened to stop fuel shipments to any nation that undertook reprocessing.\cite{cohen-1990}[p 235-236] Hard to imagine a more flagrant violation of the NPT. Nor a more counter productive one. Overnight, countries that thought they had a treaty, which said they could rely on the US to be their nuclear fuel supplier, knew this was not the case. They now had a strong incentive to become self-sufficient.

Any country who is a signatory to the NPT should invoke her inalienable rights. Buy or build enrichment facilities. Recycle fuel if she wants. Just forego a nuclear weapons program and let the IAEA inspect whatever they want. This is not only her inalienable right, but the NPT shows that the USA and all the other signatories recognize that it is her inalienable right.

Prepare to be befuddled and bamboozled – and probably bewitched //

There are no fewer than 22 winning entries this year, including a hat-trick of hat-tricks: three entrants, Yusuke Endoh, Nick Craig-Wood, and Don Yang, all had three winning entries each. We have room for only a few of our personal highlights, but we highly recommend reading all the winners – they are well worth your time.

Fatesrider Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
25,622
Subscriptor
KilenWoods said:
“We cannot choose to become idiots.”

Anecdotally, I've noticed that people can indeed choose to become idiots, and prefer being comfortably wrong to uncomfortable curiosity. GenAI just makes this choice easier.
Can't upvote this enough.

One thing stands out in this, though not at all mentioned in the article: The average college student is still physiologically immature.

The human animal does not fully mature until between 23 and 27 years old. That's when the part of the brain - the higher reasoning and critical thinking part - finishes maturing.

If society would acknowledge this fact instead of using that immaturity to exploit younger "adults", or attempting to teach them how to be mature humans when they are physiologically incapable of grasping the nuances of that state, then things might be different, because they'd then have the reasoning skills necessary to UNDERSTAND why cheating on exams and not actually learning the subject matter is important.

In college, it's all about GPA's and that's also the wrong metric to evaluate someone on, mostly because it's easy to game that with a lot of fluff classes to bolster the GPA when the core classes are bringing it down. After all, It's one thing to graduate with a GPA of say 3.4 in Engineering, but only a 2.1 in the core classes with the electives being what brought it up. But few employers ever see the core class grades.

If you ever wondered why you started thinking you were getting "old" when you were in your mid-20's, it's because your brain was finally in an adult configuration for the first time, and you realize that a lot of the "fun" things you used to do were actually pretty stupid to be doing at all.

In college, that would be cheating on exams, of course. Just do the fucking work. I was in my 40's running a business when I went to college and graduated with a degree in computer science and a 3.8 GPA (calculus and an exam on 9/11/01 kicked my ass or it'd have been higher).

AND if they understood that what your GPA was in college means jack shit (unless you're heading for post-grad) to an employer, and that they only care that you graduated, cheating becomes even more of a stupid thing to be doing. //

clewis Ars Tribunus Militum
10y
1,903
Subscriptor++
Aurich said:
<snip>

Why do people pick the jewels when it takes away from playing the game? I think because it's human nature to take the advantage, the shortcut, the skip to the goal. We're wired to find it hard to resist.

These students are facing the same kind of choice. Yes, the shortcuts are ultimately taking away from their experience. But it's so optimal, it makes things so much easier, they can't pass it up.

I honestly believe any solution that relies on pitting long-term self interest vs short-term gain is on the whole going to lose to the short-term option. It's human to choose that.
Click to expand...

Conversely, most people hate to exercise, but do it anyway. And it's got the same downsides that doing assignments have. It consumes limited time and energy.

I don't know why exercise seems to be winning. If I had to guess, I'd guess it's because exercise has a really good advertising team: Nike, the NBA, MLB, the Olympics, etc. Learning doesn't have a good ad team. I'm kind of the opinion that Not Learning has a better ad team than Learning does.

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A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

The professor was horrified by what appeared to be massive cheating in his course—cheating that was preventing most of the students from learning the material. //

“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.

“We cannot choose to become idiots.”