Plus, markdowns on HP laptops.

Related: North Dakota produced 534884 barrels of oil per day in December 2011.

Plus: “Here we have all these companies obsessed, basically with keeping their stock prices up, and saying the best thing that they can do with their money is spend billions of dollars on stock. And my view of that is, any company that says that they have nothing to better do with their money, the CEO should be fired.”

(Via Jose Guardia, who offers much more background.)

So what does it mean now, when gas prices are predicted to spike 60 cents by May?

What the study found is not the least bit surprising. Students who learned little in college (as evidenced by scoring in the bottom quintile on the College Learning Assessment) were three times as likely to be unemployed as students who scored in the top quintile, twice as likely to be living at home, and somewhat more likely to have run up credit card debts.

Those findings throw cold water on the smiley face idea that going to college is necessarily a good “investment.” Even some of the top graduates were unemployed and living with their parents and a much higher number of low-performing graduates were. Unfortunately, the study did not seek to find out how many of those graduates were “underemployed” in jobs that high schoolers can do. (Perhaps no further evidence on that is necessary, though, in view of this study.)

Read the whole thing. More grist for the bursting of the higher education bubble.

This must be more of that “smart diplomacy” we were promised.

UPDATE: Roger Simon: The Santorum Surprise.

It’s as if all that international-law, humanitarian, have-you-no-decency crap was just . . . crap. And partisan crap at that.

No secret, but nice to make it clear. To all the people who were yammering about this in 2007-2008: Don’t waste my time in the future. Or yours.

Thiel argued that innovation in fields such as agriculture and transportation has become dangerously slow, leading to economic stagnation around the world.

“I think that we’ve seen progress in the virtual world, but not in the world of stuff,” Thiel said. “The U.S. has produced a ton of innovation in computers and finance over the past 30 years, but we have to ask if that implicitly twisted innovation in other areas.”

Thiel attributed this lack of innovation to structural defects in politics and education today.

Read the whole thing. My next Popular Mechanics column addresses a related theme.

UPDATE: Farmer-reader Bart Hall objects strenuously:

No innovation in agriculture? In my three decades as a farmer and agronomist the changes have been utterly remarkable and nearly all for the better. Take just a few examples … thirty years ago most agricultural pesticides persisted many years in the soil and required something like 3 or 4 pounds of the active material per acre. New pesticides are often effective at rates of an ounce per acre or less and are non-persistent. A number of new insecticides aren’t even poisons at all but hormones which disrupt the target pest’s life cycle.

Precision-guidance systems have led to a 6% increase in vegetable yields, simply by eliminating space previously wasted when growers worked just a bit wide to avoid overlaps. Other guidance systems allow close mechanical cultivation of vegetable rows, mostly eliminating the need for herbicides. Many new vegetable varieties have much more disease resistance, producing better yields with fewer pesticides. The Japanese developped greenhouse coverings which exclude the specific wavelengths of light needed by mildews to infect the crop.

Breeders produced high-Vitamin-A rice to reduce blindness in the developping world. They’re working on incorporating oral vaccines into specially-colored bananas; no refrigeration necessary. We’re now able to evaluate grassland health and productivity from space. New, tastier, and more nutritious varieties of fruit are being developped regularly around the world — remember the old pineapples? New machinery for no-stoop harvest of salad mixes at an affordable price.

The list could go on for a long time, but this ought to be enough to illustrate Thiel’s egregious ignorance of agriculture. Unfortunately I could do the same for at least three other important domains of “stuff” — minerals, energy, and forestry. What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of “stuff” except helping people pay for it.

Note: My forthcoming column says nothing about farms.

Related thoughts here.

Related.

The grand posture of writers in liberal democracies is that they are the moral equivalents of dissidents in repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists claim to ‘speak truth to power’. Novelists, artists, playwrights and comedians announce their willingness to transgress boundaries. Their publishers look for controversy like boozers look for brawls because they know that few marketing strategies beat the claim that a courageous iconoclast is challenging establishments and shattering taboos.

To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them – and their fellow citizens.

Although it is impossible to count the books authors have abandoned, radical Islam is probably the greatest cause of self-censorship in the West today. When Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, censorship took the form of outright bans. Frightened publishers would not touch David Caute’s novel satirising the Islamist reaction to The Satanic Verses, for instance. They ran away from histories and plays about the crisis as well because they did not want a repeat of the terror Rushdie and his publishers at Penguin had experienced.

Such overt censorship continues.

Read the whole thing. And note that when you cave to such threats, you encourage more of the same.

Related: Jim DeMint: Republicans must listen to libertarians.

ABOARD THE U.S.S. WASP — This 40,000-ton assault ship can launch deadly sea and air attacks against enemies ashore and afloat. Just don’t expect it to load a website in under three minutes.

The big-deck ship is a formidable floating base for sailors and Marines — who had better prefer to stay in limited contact with the outside world in their off-hours. The communications infrastructure onboard is a reminder that the Wasp began its service to the Navy in 1989: the flight control station has a big, black telephone with a big, black spiral cord attached. Marines temporarily stationed to the Wasp for this week’s giant Navy-Marine war game, known as Bold Alligator, sigh when they need to get online and say that the best way to get in touch with their comrades aboard is to walk the narrow metal halls until they physically find them.

But looks can be deceiving. The ship’s communications gear feels like a throwback to a pre-wired era, and it runs up against some serious bandwidth limits. But it’s also got advantages on civilian communications infrastructure: Iridium satellite hookups mean that the Wasp can sail around the globe and never encounter a dead zone.

The Wasp presents a microcosm of the strengths and the limitations of communications infrastructure aboard Navy ships. And to understand both, those serving aboard her say, it’s best to remember first what a ship is and isn’t.

Well, it’s not an Internet cafe, for one thing.