One more reason to defund PBS: Their reporters and researchers have no respect or understanding of libertarianism or libertarian voices (except on issues when libertarian ideology happens to match their own). Just see how PBS has covered Argentina’s president Javier Milei, whose free-market reforms since taking office in December 2023 have already borne fruit, as the country's notorious inflation, running rampant when Milei won office, has cooled drastically, while the unemployment rate remains steady and things in general have stabilized. Yet PBS ignores his undeniable success in favor of bashing him with any tool at hand, no matter how old. Most recently, PBS News Weekend on Saturday devoted a segment to “The Disappeared,” the political prisoners murdered by the military juntas in charge of Argentina from 1976-1983, during the country’s “Dirty War.”  ANCHOR JOHN YANG: This week, a human rights group in Argentina said it had identified a man who had been taken from his mother at a secret detention site more than 40 years ago during the country`s so called dirty war under the rule of a military dictatorship. He was reunited with his sister who had searched for him for years. But there are concerns that the government of Argentine President Javier Milei is reversing longstanding policy to continue the search for the tens of thousands of citizens who were abducted, never to be seen again, ‘The Disappeared.’ Special correspondent Kira Kay reports from Buenos Aires. Kay had nothing to say about Milei having actually successfully conquered the "economic chaos" she referenced. KIRA KAY: But activists say all this progress is now at risk through actions by Argentina`s new government. In November 2023, Argentina elected President Javier Milei, a libertarian economist who promised to address the country`s economic chaos. Facundo Robles managed the Wilson Center`s Latin America program. FACUNDO ROBLES, Former Latin American Program Coordinator, Wilson Center: In the period that goes from February 2017 to February 2025, inflation was 7800 percent. Milei, he`s drastically decreasing the size of the state. He fired 40,000 people out of the public sector. At PBS, firing government workers is a very bad thing. Stopping runaway inflation, not so much. After Kay reported Milei has “questioned the number of 30,000 junta victims” she returned to Robles, who made a petulant point that “as long as Milei controls inflation, people will be like, say whatever you want.” That was one of the few scattered clues from PBS that yes, Argentina’s notorious runaway inflation is being controlled under Milei. On April 17, economics reporter Paul Solman got on Milei’s case regarding the $Libra meme coin, which “shot up from pennies to dollars when endorsed by Argentina`s President Javier Milei, then crashed back down to pennies within hours. Milei is now under investigation because investors suspect a rug pull.” On November 20, 2023, Nawaz described Milei’s recent election victory as “thanks to an exhausted and angry electorate.” Inevitably, she compared him to Trump (being anything like Trump is bad at PBS) and noted he was a “self-described anarcho-capitalist” who had “pledged to shut down Argentina`s Central Bank, adopt the U.S. dollar as national currency, and make deep economic cuts….” She gave out a warning about Milei's far-right threat in the form of a question to her guest expert, Oliver Stuenkel. NAWAZ: ….Milei is close to the former far-right Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro. He`s also a supporter of former U.S. President Donald Trump. What does Milei`s election mean for the relationship between Argentina and the U.S., led by President Biden, who has warned consistently about the rise of far-right authoritarian leaders? On the November 19, 2023 PBS News Weekend, before Milei's victory was announced, anchor John Yang’s coverage was already being ridiculously biased, a harbinger of the slanted coverage to come from PBS. YANG: In Argentina polls have closed and the tightly contested and closely watched presidential runoff election. Much of the attention is on far-right Libertarian candidate Javier Milei, whose brash style and embrace of conspiracy theories have drawn comparisons to Donald Trump.

The second use is more resource-saving  than the third.

At my cottage in Canada, I have running water from a pump in the lake but not safe water. So in what we call the “bath hut” I have a bottle of clean water from which I pour a little into a Dixie cup when I brush my teeth. After I’ve finished brushing, I swirl the toothbrush around in the Dixie cup water and then empty the water.

I used to throw away the Dixie cup immediately after, but when I had a friend visiting last week, I noticed that he reused his. So I started doing the same.

What I found, though, is that the cup lost a lot of resilience after the second use. So I started throwing the cups away after the second use.

Then my numerate mind went to work. I realized that getting the second use was more important than getting the third use. Why?

Here’s why. Imagine that I’m at my cottage for 18 days, which is approximately right. If I use each Dixie cup once, I use 36 (one in the morning and one in the evening.) If I use each cup twice, I use 18 of them, saving 18 Dixie cups. If I use each cup 3 times, I use 12 of them, saving an additional 6.

 

So the saving in resources from a second use is triple the saving in resources from a third use.

The point generalizes. What if I went for a fourth use? Then I would use 9 cups. The saving from the fourth use would be only 3 cups. And so on.

What’s the point?

There are really two points.

The first is the power of thinking on the margin. The next use, in going from 2 to 3 uses, is less resource-saving than in going from 1 to 2 uses.

The second relates to an issue I worked on when I was the senior economist for energy with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers: the CAFE mandate. CAFE is short for Corporate Average Fuel Economy. The mandate was part of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, a law that President Ford signed in 1975. It was an indirect result of the price controls on gasoline, imposed by Nixon and kept by Ford. People were facing an artificially low price of gasoline and, OMG, were acting as if they were facing an artificially low price of gasoline. They weren’t switching to fuel-saving cars as quickly or extensively as many government energy planners thought they should.

So rather than get rid of the price controls, Congress and the president came up with a requirement that each auto manufacturer, for a given model year, reach an average fuel economy of x miles per gallon, where x steadily ratcheted up over the years.

I had 2 bosses at the CEA, chairman Martin Feldstein and member William Niskanen. Bill and I would have liked to repeal CAFE but that wasn’t going to happen. So we argued against further increases and in favor of relaxing the standards.

We were unsuccessful.

But here’s an argument that I didn’t emphasize but should have. The fuel economy saving from moving from a mandate of, say, 20 mpg to a mandate of 22 mpg is greater than the fuel economy saving of moving from 22 to 24. Imagine that in the United States, people drive their 100 million cars an average of 10,000 miles, for a total of 1 trillion miles. With an average mpg of 20, they use 50 billion gallons of gas. If the mandate is raised to 22, they use 45.5 billion gallons, for a saving of 4.5 billion gallons. But if the mandate is raised from 22 to 24, they use 41.7 billion gallons, for an extra saving of 3.8 billion gallons. If the mandate is raised from 24 to 26, they use 38.5 billion gallons, for an extra saving of 3.2 billion gallons. Notice that, just as with Dixie cups, each increment of required mph saves less gasoline than the previous increment.

I’m assuming away behavioral effects. The so-called rebound effect is that with higher mandate fuel economy, the price of an extra mile falls, and so people will drive more miles. But this assumption doesn’t hurt my reasoning because with each increment of mandate mpg, the rebound effect attenuates also.

So this is one of the things a microeconomist who studies regulation does on his vacation. Oops. I’m in Canada. Not vacation, but holiday.

The post Dixie Cups, CAFE Standards, and Numeracy appeared first on Econlib.

AI cheating is endemic in high schools and colleges. Stories proliferate showing just how many students unashamedly use AI programs like ChatGPT and Gemini to do their academic work for them, whether that's completing math homework or writing entire essays. But why is this happening? Here's one underrated factor: many students may be turning to AI because they can't handle the academic rigors of college, and are turning to large language models like ChatGPT to hide their deficiencies. That, mixed with old-fashioned laziness, could be driving the proliferation of AI cheating. For both situations, the solution may be less college education, not more.

What does laziness mean? Well, plenty of students who are clearly capable of handling college-level work still use ChatGPT and other AI models to do their school work. In one recent article, Hua Hsu, a staff writer for The New Yorker, interviewed several NYU students who openly admitted they use AI to cheat on assignments. 

"We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class," one student told Hsu, (Wedderburn was a 19th-century Jamaican abolitionist). "But, obviously, I wasn't tryin' to read that." Instead, the student told Claude, a large language model developed by Anthropic, to turn the reading into "concise bullet points."

Another student told Hsu about an art history class, saying, "I'm trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I'm not hella fucking with."

Like many young people, these students aren't so much interested in obtaining a college education as a college degree. They don't believe higher education has much to offer them, and are cynical credentialists, jumping through the necessary hoops in order to get a diploma that will open doors to the work they actually want to be doing.

For the lazy credentialists, they may actually be right that college has little to offer them. There are plenty of fields for which college is a pointless credentialing exercise. If someone has the coding chops to start a job in tech or finance at 18—or the writing skills and curiosity to become a journalist—forcing them to suffer through four years of additional, costly education only wastes time and money.

On the other hand, there are the students who don't have the academic skills to succeed in a four-year university without serious help. These students are likely a significant portion of the young people enrolled in college, and many of them will ultimately drop out, considering one in three college students fail to graduate after six years. In 2022, for example, just 22 percent of students who took the ACT college entrance exam scored high enough to be deemed college-ready, yet 45 percent of graduating high school seniors immediately enrolled in a four-year college. 

How serious is the situation? A 2024 study found that 58 percent of English majors at two Midwestern universities could not understand the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens' Bleak House well enough to read the book on their own. And again, these were students who specifically chose to major in English. According to the study, incoming students at both schools had an average ACT reading score of 22.4 out of 36 points, which is actually above the college readiness benchmark of 18. 

In the study, participants frequently indicated that they could not read complex texts without outside help, such as SparkNotes, which goes to show that AI is only the latest and most effective crutch for struggling students.

"If I was to read this [Bleak House] by itself and didn't use anything like that [SparkNotes], I don't think I would actually understand what's going on 100% of the time," one student told researchers. Another said that she would read Bleak House by "skim[ming] through most of the novel and read[ing] only certain passages in detail."

These students are harmed by colleges—especially dying liberal arts colleges and second-tier public universities—desperate to fill seats in order to stay open. These schools happily take students' tuition dollars (often in the form of loans), despite ample evidence that they need serious academic remediation. Some of these students would surely have been academically prepared to attend college had they received a better high school education, but at any rate, remediation ought to be done in low-cost community colleges, not four-year universities.

For these students, it's hard to imagine that they could successfully complete their degrees without help from a tool that can summarize and simplify texts for them. But while sites like SparkNotes have existed for years, AI is able to actually write essays for these students as well as explain texts.

The students who won't use ChatGPT, though, are the ones who believe they actually need to be educated and who are drawn to genuine intellectual inquiry. These students get something out of a college degree, both because it confers skills they did not already have and because they have the academic aptitude and interest to seriously grapple with complex text or high-level math. For these students, writing the essay or working on the practice problems is the point—not a useless hurdle to what they really want to be doing.

Fundamentally, though, just about anyone can be tempted by laziness. Instituting serious punishments for cheating would also go a long way to deterring AI cheating. Even so, the dominance of ChatGPT in college life is no more inevitable than college student mediocrity is inevitable. AI cheating is just another symptom of declining educational rigor—coupled with grade inflation and test-optional admissions.

In order to get rid of AI cheating in college, universities would need to shift from credentialing machines to places of genuine inquiry. To do that, capable young people need access to good-paying jobs without a college degree. And for those who stay, college needs to get a lot more difficult.

The post Why Are Students Using AI To Cheat? Maybe Because They Shouldn't Be In College At All appeared first on Reason.com.

Superman has always been about politics. The superhero's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, originally wrote the character as a rebuke to Nazi racial ideology. The Kryptonian boy emigrated from his homeland in a way that paralleled the Jewish experience and became the greatest defender of "truth, justice, and the American way."

So it's no surprise that audiences have been trying to figure out the political message in the latest Superman movie. After all, the backdrop of the film is a war between the fictional nations of Boravia and Jarhanpur that Superman is trying to stop. Boravia has a clear Eastern European aesthetic, and Jarhanpur has a clear Middle Eastern aesthetic. (Everything past here is a spoiler, by the way.)

Left-wing online streamer Hasan Piker said that the movie was clearly an "analog for Israel and Palestine," while a Jerusalem Post column argued that the movie was written with "obvious metaphors about Russia vs. Ukraine" with some Middle Eastern references thrown in. Of course, all of these things can be true at the same time. The movie is a pastiche of everything going on in international news, and trying to read a specific reference to a specific foreign crisis is a mistake.

But perhaps the lack of specific references lets the movie tell a more general story about foreign policy: Fighting terrorism or tyranny has become a pretext for the U.S. government to support war overseas, often against the sympathies of the American people. The fact that a campy comic book takes this attitude is a sign that American political culture has really shifted, given the war on terror politics of superhero movies in the past couple of decades.

Superman director James Gunn insists that he didn't have any real-world conflict in mind for the movie. More likely, he had several. Boravia, the aggressor country, has leaders who speak a vaguely Slavic language and live in a capital with Russian architecture. Unlike Russia, but like Israel, it is a cherished U.S. ally that uses American-made weaponry. Jarhanpur, the victim country, is an oil-rich desert nation with a tyrannical yet weak government, which reads like any recent U.S. regime change target in the Middle East.

Lex Luthor, the American supervillain, is a more straightforward metaphor. He manufactures creepy surveillance technology, is gunning for U.S. military contracts, and thinks he's smarter than everyone on Earth. In other words, he's an on-the-nose parody of modern-day Silicon Valley.

Just compare Superman to Iron Man, the first movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Tony Stark, a genius defense contractor, is the hero. The story revolves around Stark's fight against an Afghan terrorist group. Although Stark has a moral crisis about manufacturing weapons, it is because those weapons fall into the hands of U.S. enemies. In the end, he offers his services to a U.S. government agency, SHIELD.

In Iron Man 3, the villain is an anti-American caricature named The Mandarin, who rants about the genocide of Native Americans as he blows up U.S. bases in the Middle East. He turns out to be in league with a subversive conspiracy within the U.S. government. The villain of Black Panther is Killmonger, an African nationalist revolutionary who fights against the CIA. The world is filled with people who hate America for incoherent, hypocritical reasons and must be stopped by well-funded, globetrotting government operatives.

It is possible to read Superman as a parable for global intervention, in its own way. "Ultimately, Superman is about a guy raised to do the right thing and act decently by a nice married couple from Kansas whose belief in his own righteousness turns him into the world's policeman," writes Sonny Bunch in The Bulwark, the standard bearer of neoconservatism. "And if that ain't American Greatness, well, what is?"

But Superman does not make the case that the U.S. government itself can or should be that policeman. Boravia, again, is emboldened to do evil because it is a U.S. ally. Superman is offended at the idea that he should act as a representative of the White House, and Pentagon officials are suspicious that superheroes operate outside their control. Planet Watch, the Superman equivalent to Marvel's SHIELD, turns out to be a front for Luthor to seize more power for himself.

At the same time, Superman is not an anti-American movie. America regains its innocence from within. Enterprising journalists expose Luthor's plot. The Pentagon gives up trying to stop Superman and the Justice Gang from saving the Jarhanpurian resistance. In the end, Superman renounces the megalomaniac plans of his Kryptonian parents and embraces his humble, adoptive Kansas family.

What's really interesting is the fact that Superman's moderate, upbeat message of reform caused more of a pop culture stir than other, potentially more subversive blockbuster films. The Avatar series has viewers cheer for native insurgents as they kill and smash symbols of imperial military power. The Dune series is based on a novel about the victory of galactic jihad.

On the other hand, those stories are pure fantasy. American audiences can put some distance, as Avatar director James Cameron did, between themselves and the spacefaring megacorporation attacking Pandora. The war on terror will not end like Dune 2, with a Bedouin horde breaking into the imperial palace with nuclear missiles and giant worms.

Superman, as goofy as it is, is set against the backdrop of real-life America with its real-life problems and dilemmas. And the surface-level, comic book understanding of the U.S. government is no longer that it is a protector against a world of sinister enemies. The problems, and the solutions, are right at home.

The post <i>Superman</i> Is About the Anti-War Vibe Shift appeared first on Reason.com.

But since October 7, 2023, it feels as if the entire informational ecosystem has collapsed under a tidal wave of noise. I’ve never seen so many people scream and tweet and chant and repost without any regard for logic, facts, or history. Emotion has not just trumped reason, it has obliterated it.

The tragedy is not that people are choosing sides; it’s that they’re doing so blindly, ferociously, and with such utter detachment from fact. The battle isn’t just on the ground anymore, it’s for the mind. And most people are losing that battle without even realizing they’ve been drafted into it.

What used to be propaganda is now performance art. What used to be journalism is now tribalism. What used to be analysis is now algorithm.

– Almen Dean

Never ever trust the French and I am not saying this to be mean or edgy.

Many seem to have fallen for Macron and France’s theatrics and rhetoric in recent years.

France has always seen itself as a superpower and always will, and it wants to wield influence and play a dominant role in European and global affairs.

It is not going on endlessly about Ukraine and Europe out of a sense of charity or a desire to do the right thing, but rather because it wants to exploit recent developments in order to take the lead and exert greater influence.

France wants a stronger European security architecture precisely because it believes it can exert influence over it to serve its own interests.

Historically, France has always been reserved about its NATO membership and American dominance in the alliance because it wants to do things its own way and, ideally, maintain its influence.

– ‘Terrorism Guy‘ – National Security Adviser to the Internet