The Exchange

I have a new favorite bar the next time I visit NYC.  Then again, I rarely get to visit bars anymore, so maybe I just enjoy the idea of going to any bar.

I Would Only Protest If They Cut Off Beer Sales

I'm personally of the opinion that college students who protest anything are wasting the most valuable years of their lives doing something useless, when they should be spending their time drinking beer and doing other things (the phrase "doing other things" is designed as cover for when my daughter reads this).  You're only young once, but having so much free time is a gift that you should not discard for the silly goal of screaming about budget cuts. Megan McArdle expounds nicely on this...

But while I'm sympathetic to students finding it harder to attend college, I'm not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There's no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good--everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress. When administrators point this out, the students reiterate how hard it all is, as if doing so will spur the administration to shake the money tree harder until extra cash falls from the skies.


I mean, they might protest the core business model, in which so many employees are effectively unfireable, meaning that everyone else has to take a disproportionate share of the cuts. But other than that, what is all this protesting going to accomplish?

I'm fine with protesting the core business model, although I think it's probably a waste of time. What I think these folks are missing is that the universities, even the public ones, have to operate on a budget. Particularly when I read quotes like this from a Maryland student...

Last night I talked with student organizer Bob Hayes, who said students are upset that they are paying more in tuition but getting less from the university and having trouble finding a job. "We feel disconnected from our education," Hayes said. "We're being run by a Fortune 500 company instead of by a university."

I think Hayes is missing a point -- the university isn't your Mom and Dad. It's a legitimate complaint that you're getting less bang for your buck as a consumer of an education -- the point of getting a college education is to get a better job as a result of all of your investment of time and money. If your complaint is that you're not getting an adeqquate bargain, you should want the school to run more like a successful business. Successful businesses aim to make profits, but they do so by satisfying their customers.  I realize Maryland is a public university with an educational mission, but the nature of the university's business structure may be part of the problem.  They don't have the same freedom to cut costs for certain things (like tenured faculty) that other businesses do, so they may have to focus their cuts in areas where the pain is felt by students instead.

What Hayes and others who are dissatisfied with the budget cuts to services they need should do is spend time illustrating why these cuts imperil the university's customers, and at the same time suggest ways the university can deal with the constraints of having less revenue (or public funding, as the case may be). Protesting does little to accomplish that -- it's not like most taxpayers who are struggling to pay their bills give a rat's ass about college students dealing with higher tuition or lesser services.

Meanwhile, Instapundit gives us the image at the right. Is our children learning?

Maybe He Should Have More Beer Summits

Allahpundit explains why the President shouldn't moderate his alcohol intake, whatever the doctors might say...

Four hackish thoughts off the top of my head about the president imbibing. (1) It’s probably the only way he can understand Biden. (2) Now we know where that famous mellow temperament comes from. (3) If I had to deal with Reid and Pelosi every day, I’d go straight to heroin. (4) They should put the intervention on C-SPAN.

Unfortunately, the President probably needed to cut back on the hard stuff, after cutting a deal with Ben Nelson to only drink wine from Nebraska.

I actually feel for the President on this stuff. The focus on his inability to quit smoking is pretty much ridiculous -- did we really expect a guy who was still trying to quit the habit to do so when he got dropped into one of the most pressure-packed jobs on the planet?

Canadian Women Are Awesome

This is getting silly...

The women of the Canadian hockey team politely accepted their gold medals and waved to an adoring crowd. And then the real celebration began.

More than half an hour after they beat the United States 2-0 on Thursday, the players came back from the locker room and staged a party on ice - swigging from bottles of champagne, guzzling beer and smoking cigars.

...Meghan Agosta and Marie-Philip Poulin posed wearing goofy grins. Rebecca Johnston actually tried to drive the ice-resurfacing machine. Haley Irwin poured champagne into the mouth of Tessa Bonhomme, gold medals swinging from both their necks.

The celebration raised eyebrows at the IOC, which said it would look into the matter. Informed of the antics by The Associated Press, Gilbert Felli, the IOC's executive director of the Olympic Games, said it was "not what we want to see."

"I don't think it's a good promotion of sport values," he said. "If they celebrate in the changing room, that's one thing, but not in public. We will investigate what happened."

Poulin, who scored both goals, doesn't turn 19 - legal drinking age in British Columbia - until next month. The drinking age in Alberta, where the Canadian team trains, is 18. Photos showed Poulin on the ice with a beer in her hand.

I'm sure Poulin is the first underage Canadian ever to drink a beer, assuming we limit our sample to the ice surface itself at that point in time. As to the IOC, I believe the appropriate response from the Canadians would be, "F you, eh!"

Absolut Sponsored This Study

Science, bringing you the information you really need...

A new study may help drinkers pick their poison. In a head-to-head comparison, bourbon gave drinkers a more severe hangover than vodka, report Damaris Rohsenow of Brown University and colleagues in an upcoming issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

But vodka drinkers aren’t off the hook: Drinkers’ sleep suffered equally with both drinks, as did their performance on tasks requiring attention and quick responses. Understanding the lingering effects of alcohol after a night of heavy drinking is important for people who engage in safety-sensitive tasks, such as driving, while hung over Rohsenow says.

The researchers recruited 95 healthy young adults, ages 21 to 33, and gave them caffeine-free cola mixed with bourbon, vodka or tonic water. The drinking ended when participants’ breath-alcohol concentrations hit an average of 0.11, well over the legal intoxication limit. Participants were then hooked up to sleep monitors, which record brain activity, and allowed to sleep it off. At 7 a.m. the next day, the researchers roused the subjects from bed (a wake-up that did not include coffee or aspirin) and asked them to rate the severity of their hangovers.

Overall, bourbon drinkers reported feeling worse than vodka drinkers, rating higher on scales that measure the severity of hangover malaise, including headache, nausea, loss of appetite and thirst. It should come as no surprise that alcohol drinkers said they felt much worse than those who had drunk only tonic water.

One reason for the different effects of vodka and bourbon, Rohsenow says, could be that bourbon contains 37 times more toxic compounds than vodka does, including nasty organic molecules such as acetone, acetaldehyde, tannins and furfural. A good rule of thumb for liquors, she says, is that the clearer they are, the less of these substances they contain.

The important question is, where was this study when I was in college? Or law school?