cab thoughts 10/29/11

If you have no capacity to self assess, no capacity for dissatisfaction with yourself, you cannot learn. The interview question "What would you improve about yourself" is always ducked as self incriminating or modified to be "veiled bragging" (I work too hard") but it is a crucial assessment.

Aaron Smith, the Steeler defensive end, has a neck injury and his career may be over. He is the best defensive end on the Steelers I can remember, better than Greenwood.

The U.S. public school system K-12 since 1970 increased employment 10X the increase in school enrollment. That is hard to explain.

Pinker's research (from Harvard) shows that battlefield deaths were 500 per 100,000 people before nations formed; 70 per 100,000 in 19th century France (Napoleon and more); 60 per 100,000 in the 20th century; and just 0.3 per 100,000 currently. There is some research stating IQs are up 30% since the turn of the century in 1900 (it sounds like a non sequiter to compare IQs of different ages) and Pinker thinks the decline in battlefield deaths is because we are smarter. Comparing IQs of different times seems inherently contradictory to me.

The U.S. spends more money per student K-12 than any developed country except Switzerland.
The notion that education money is inherently an investment in our future rings a bit false.

Leadership does not work on the insane, the wicked or the irremediably stupid.

Interesting thought from Frum on Bush:
"I once made the mistake of suggesting to Bush that he use the phrase cheap energy to describe the aims of his energy policy. He gave me a sharp, squinting look. Cheap energy, he answered, was how we got into this mess. Every year from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, American cars burned less and less oil per mile traveled. Then in about 1995 that progress stopped. Why? He answered his own question: Because of the gas-guzzling SUV. And what had made the SUV craze possible? This time I answered, “Um, cheap energy?” He nodded at me. Dismissed.
But if Bush was no energy free-marketeer, neither did he share the crusading zeal of the environmental Left. For Bush, the point of energy conservation was not for Americans to USE less, but for Americans to IMPORT less. For him, energy was first and foremost a national security issue. He had warned in 2000, “As a result of our foreign oil imports skyrocketing, America is at the mercy more than ever of foreign governments and cartels.”
Source: The Right Man, by David Frum, p. 65-66 Jun 1, 2003 "