From the desk of the 1 percent
I have been informed by one of my simpering, sycophantic servants that “the people,” as the serfs of this principality laughingly refer to themselves, have recently risen in protest. On every corner of New York City, it seems, one cannot so much as raise one’s head from the velvet embrace of a gilded palanquin without being accosted by the stench of these ne’er-do-wells and their grade-school Marxism, each clawing for a sip of the proverbial chocolate milk. Fie, I say, this is my milk, and no discount baseball card or pennywhistle shall convince me otherwise!
Did Fukushima kill the nuclear renaissance No, that renaissance died right here at home
In the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, many wondered what the event’s impact would be on the nuclear renaissance in the United States. Those who follow the nuclear industry didn’t need eight months of hindsight to give an answer: what nuclear renaissance?
It’s all Greek (economics) to me
Let’s start with something obvious: Greece is insolvent. What this means is that it is no longer financially capable of paying off its debts. Insolvency usually occurs in one of two ways: you are either incapable of paying your debts as they are due or you own net negative assets, meaning your liabilities exceed your assets. The former is true in the case of the Hellenic Republic, where the government simply no longer has the financial power to pay off its many debts.
$1 billion for a dictator
War is never a clean affair. The recent action in Libya is no exception — in victory, the rebels have taken to killing pro-Gaddafi forces in retribution, including, it appears, Gaddafi himself, who was captured while fleeing his final holdout in Sirte. But the final outcome is as pure and as cheap a victory as the United States can hope to force on the modern battlefield. The Department of Defense estimates that from March to September, the Libyan intervention cost the DOD a mere $1.1 billion, with no U.S. casualties.
CORRECTIONS
An article published last Friday on fifth week flags incorrectly reported that 215 freshmen received flags. We miscounted by one — 214 freshmen got flags.
GUEST COLUMN Education declared a crime
Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in an afternoon section of an 18.03 (Differential Equations) class. Your professor is explaining how to solve a differential equation, and is interrupted midsentence by two surprise guests who walk into the classroom: armed men wearing military uniforms. In the tense silence that follows, one of them whispers into the professor’s ear, and then the professor points at you. The men lead you out to another empty classroom and begin interrogating you. The topic of questioning turns to your religion, and you answer the questions truthfully. You are then told that you are being expelled from MIT and barred from ever attending any institution of higher learning in the country.
Elizabeth Warren and the firestorm
On Sept. 14, Elizabeth Warren announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Warren’s most recent contribution to U.S. public policy has been the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) last year. The bureau is tasked with promoting fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services. Warren believes that the CFPB should be an integral part of an effort to help middle-class American families, whom she believes have been “chipped at, hacked at, squeezed, and hammered for a generation.”
CORRECTIONS
The crossword puzzle in Tuesday’s issue of The Tech was not published with the correct clues or solutions. A new crossword puzzle — with correct clues and solutions — can be found in today’s issue on p. 7.
Debt and diplomacy
It’s challenging to get either Americans or policy wonks excited about the European debt crisis. Foreign countries are having problems to which there are no clever policy solutions? I’d rather listen to a panel discussion of Mitt Romney’s hair.
A nation’s son home safely
Last week, Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was finally allowed to return home after being kidnapped and held hostage for over five years by Hamas. Shalit’s release showed the immense value that Israel attributes to a single human life, and this value of life deserves praise and emulation.
Abolish the Electoral College
A new poll from Gallup confirms once again the widespread support for amending the Constitution to provide for presidential election by popular vote. For those unacquainted with the issue, in the United States, the president is not elected by direct popular vote. Rather, the framers of the Constitution saw fit to create a college of electors, appointed and regulated by their respective state legislatures, to choose the president by majority vote. While the procedure for the selection of electors has been modified in the intervening 200 years — for example, electors are now nominated by state political parties and elected on Election Day — the gist is largely the same. Currently, 48 states and Washington D.C. allocate their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis; only Maine and Nebraska delegate part of their votes on a district-by-district basis.
STATE OF THE RACE Romney will face Obama, Republicans might take Senate
With 70 days remaining until the Iowa caucus, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is the heavy favorite to become the Republican presidential nominee. Leading in the polls and viewed by many within the party as the sole remaining credible candidate, it is unsurprising that Romney is being given a 70 percent chance of taking the nomination by Intrade, a leading prediction market.
The road forward for American-Iranian diplomacy
When U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm agents decided to sell guns to Mexican drug cartels as part of some inscrutable scheme to battle the drug trade, it’s unlikely they were acting as conspirators in some grand Machiavellian plan to restrict U.S. gun rights or achieve some devious geopolitical goal in Mexico. They embarked foolishly on a doomed adventure of their own choosing, and little else should be read into the events that transpired.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED YouTuber go home
Between January 2008 and January 2010, the U.S. private sector shed 9.8 percent of its workforce, either through layoffs or reduction of employee hours. One might have expected the output of the private sector to have declined during the same period, but no — Real Gross Domestic Product remained essentially the same.
GETTING OUT OF THE RED Less red with more green
Earlier this year, the Inter-Agency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, a panel assembled for the purpose of estimating the harm that a ton of CO2 emissions causes to the world, concluded its efforts to put a price tag on greenhouse gas emissions. Using up-to-date scientific assessments and an appropriate time discounting of future harms, the working group concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bodies should use $21 as the baseline estimate of the damage caused by releasing a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere.
EDITORIAL How The Tech works
For many of our readers, The Tech might be something of an enigma. The paper we publish twice a week is readily and freely available on campus, of course, but rarely will our readers get a real sense of the process behind those issues just by reading them. Since The Tech is MIT’s only remaining newspaper, and because the community (and world) depends on our work to learn about MIT, we feel it is our obligation to explain what we do and why we do it.
Government is a crappy venture capitalist
Solyndra deserves more credit than the media is giving it. But not much.
How hot is the cup of tea? Tea Party thoughts at MIT
The Tea Party is a very hot topic in American politics nowadays. This is especially evident in our publication, as a number of my colleagues at The Tech have published articles discussing the position of the party regularly. Depending on with whom you bring up the issue, however, it seems that opinions vary largely between Democrats and Republicans. When you add major media outlets and the Tea Party themselves into the mix, you’re left with a huge number of diverse views.