Matthew Botos

Kudos to Harvard for announcing the end of early admissions. With skyrocketing tuition and applications making college applications into a real pressure-cooker for high school students, it’s about time someone took some of the stress out of it. While elite colleges may love filling 20-50% of their classes with more affluent students set on attending their schools, it rushes others to complete SATs and applications while giving up choice and flexibility to weigh financial aid offers.

Harvard and the other Ivies really have the impetus to start such a change; they’ll always have the reputation to draw plenty of applicants. Hopefully the idea will trickle down to more schools and give high school students back a bit of their time and sanity.

Forbes stirred the pot a bit this week with dueling articles on careers and marriage, a topic I’ve debated myself on occasion. In summary, Michael Noer argues that marriages in which a woman continues her career lead to more unhappiness an divorce, citing various studies. In the counterpoint, Elizabeth Corcoran rebuts that slacker husbands are equally to blame and that when both people put in the effort, a dual-career marriage does work.

I definitely agree with the latter; you get out of any relationship what you and your partner put into it. In geeky math terms, it’s the union of the effort that counts; both have to give for it to be successful. In a country with a 50% divorce rate and no shortage of disastrous relationship headlines and study results, it’s definitely a challenge to balance a career and a relationship, but far from impossible.

The latest oil news and price spikes surrounding BP’s shutdown of Alaskan oil fields that generate 8% of US production underscores just how delicate the balance between supply and demand has become for oil. It doesn’t take a war or conflict in the Middle East to send prices shooting skyward these days. Any hint of a shutdown, hurricane, or political instability is enough. Supply is barely keeping up with demand, and there’s no slack to absorb disruptions.

The US typically gets blamed for its overwhelming demand compared to production, but we are becoming just part of that side of the equation. Growing economies in China and India equally hungry for oil, and their demand will likely outstrip ours in the future.

On the supply side, oil companies continue to insist that they’ve yet to peak and are pouring their record profits into exploration of new supplies and techniques. Yet in the meantime, infrastructure is falling behind, as seen by the disruption to refineries concentrated on the Gulf of Mexico during last year’s hurricanes and the recent shutdown of corroded pipelines in Alaska.

In the face of such challenges, I think global market forces will prevail. Already, high gas prices have made miles per gallon a staple of new car ads and increased the demand for more efficient hybrids. With gas at $3 a gallon, alternatives such as biodiesel and even pure electric become economically feasible. It’ll be exciting to see the new market that arises when cheap, plentiful oil is no longer a given.

The documentary Why We Fight looks at the history of our country’s military-industrial complex and how it has shaped our current situation. It’s well done, not only because it covers many facets of the subject, but because it leaves you thinking at the end.

As a regular employee at a contractor in the military-industrial complex, I have mixed feelings. As an individual, my actions are far too regulated by rules, process, and policies to do anything nefarious. Yet at higher levels, the revolving door between government and industry is constantly turning. With the influence, contacts, and stock holdings some of these people have, it’s difficult to imagine they’re truly free from conflicts of interest.

An even more disturbing concern raised is that foriegn policy is increasingly influenced by think tanks and carried out with greater corporate involvement (such as outsourcing military food service to private contractors). Neither of these entities were elected or will be held accountable by the people, but will instead pursue their own interests.

History has already shown our natural tendency to engage in a major military conflict every decade without undue influence. Eisenhower saw the danger long ago; hopefully some of today’s elected officials are equally vigilant.

ER has a running plot involving the strife and genocide in Darfur, which Merle noted seemed to be the extent of its media coverage. The Wall Street Journal has run a few pieces on it, including their opinion of this week’s peace agreement. They acutely summarized the past international response, noting the limited efforts from African, Arab, and Eurpoean governments before addressing our own:

This leaves the United States, the only country in the world with the capability and, potentially, the will to aid Darfuris and every other group threatened with genocide or brutal oppression. President Bush has certainly been engaged with the crisis in Darfur, more so than any of his alleged moral betters in places such as France and Sweden. Yet having endured so much opprobrium and resistance to his last two acts of international hygiene — the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq — it’s no wonder he’s reluctant to carry another burden, particularly when American interests are not directly at stake.

There’s a lesson here for all of those liberal internationalists who now demand the Administration “do something” in Darfur: If you want to stop genocide, don’t shackle the world’s only policeman.

Blocking hotlinks from MySpace made me feel a bit like the old codger yelling, “Hey you damn kids, get off my lawn!” Copyright and intellectual property are complex issues on which I have a very strong opinion, so let me expand:

At a basic level, creators and authors decide how their works are used. With technology and the web making everyone a creator, more people get to make the choices that used to be limited to Big Media. You have an implicit copyright on anything you create, and can choose how to distribute, recieve credit, and/or charge for it. If your stated wishes aren’t followed, you have many of the same legal recourses the entertainment industry has abused to prop up their obsolete business model.

Sadly, their delays and resistance to viable legitimite entertainment downloads has led to a public attitude that everything should be free to take and use without limits. While that isn’t what many professional and amatuer authors choose, it does have amazing possibilities when an individual or community chooses to free their creation. Witness Wikipedia, a growing number of full online textbooks, and the increasing content under Creative Commons licenses instead of All Rights Reserved Copyright.

Academia and open source software have known this power for a long time: by building on the credited work of our predecessors and peers, we can achieve more in collaboration than we could in isolation. I believe in that ideal, but value my creations and have chosen to retain the control of full copyright over everything on this site. That said, I’m still happy to share when asked and credited. In other words, you’re welcome to lounge on my lawn if I come out and open the gate for you.