James Merriman

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

Jeff Bezos’s sense that he was damn good but so far away from really, really good is also going on here.

[Brad @BradleyKellard]

Malcolm Gladwell revealed why you shouldn't go to Harvard:

1. America does not have a shortage of students who want science and math degrees. It has a shortage of students who finish them. Half of all high school seniors who intend to study STEM drop out by the end of their second year. The problem is not interest. It is persistence.

2. The obvious assumption is that smarter students persist longer. So Gladwell tested it. At Hartwick College, a small liberal arts school in New York, the top third of math SAT scorers took the majority of STEM degrees. The bottom third dropped out in large numbers. The data seemed to confirm it. Smarter kids stick around longer.

3. Then he looked at Harvard. The bottom third of Harvard's math SAT scores are equal to the top third at Hartwick. By the logic above, everyone at Harvard should graduate with a STEM degree. They are all brilliant. Nobody should be dropping out.

4. Harvard showed the exact same pattern as Hartwick. Top students graduated. Bottom students dropped out like flies. Even though the bottom Harvard students were objectively brilliant by any global standard. Something else entirely was driving the dropout rate.

5. That something is called relative deprivation theory. Human beings do not measure themselves against the world. They measure themselves against the people immediately around them. A Harvard student in the bottom third does not think I am in the top one percent of all students globally. They think that kid next to me keeps getting everything right and I keep getting it wrong. So they quit.

6. The research from UCLA puts a specific number on it. Your odds of graduating with a STEM degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers. Choose Harvard over the University of Maryland and your chance of finishing a STEM degree drops by thirty percent. Thirty percent. Just to put a brand name on your resume.

7. Relative position matters more than absolute position when it comes to confidence, motivation, and self belief. The eightieth percentile student at Harvard looks up at the people above them and feels like they cannot compete. The number one student at a state school feels like they can conquer the world. That feeling drives everything.

8. The practical hiring implication is radical. Class rank matters more than institution name. Gladwell argues companies should have a don't ask don't tell policy for where someone went to college. Hiring only from top schools means missing the top students from every other school. That is not smart hiring. That is brand worship.

9. When choosing a college, never go to the best school you get into. Go to the school where you are guaranteed to be near the top of your class. Being a big fish in a smaller pond does not just feel better. It statistically produces better outcomes than being a small fish in the most prestigious pond available.

10. So why do we keep choosing Harvard over Maryland? Because we are flattered. Because the acceptance letter feels like validation. Because we make an irrational decision in a moment of enormous flattery and call it ambition. Gladwell's conclusion is simple and brutal. When we have the chance to join an elite institution we do things that are genuinely against our own interest and we feel great about it the whole time.

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

@RossBarkan Saying Bloomberg/Lasher about charter school policy is like saying Obama/assistant deputy assistant to the assistant undersecretary for external relations for HHS as to Obamacare. That said, he did his best to explain the policy to lawmakers honestly.

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

WHAT NEW YORK CITY GOT RIGHT ABOUT PUBLIC-SECTOR TECHNOLOGY — AND CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE - EMPIRE REPORT NEW YORK 2026® NEW YORK'S 24/7 NEWS SITE https://t.co/wEbKOakSvt

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

@PGATUOR When did they start filling the field at signature events with folks who weren’t in the top 50, nor in the Aon 10 or swing five (and aren’t on a sponsor exemption). E.g., Speith and others in the Truist?

[Robert Pondiscio @rpondiscio]

"Privilege populism" is an apt coinage to describe those "who were promised a particular kind of life by their degrees...furious it didn't arrive, and who have decided the people standing between them and that life are not the radicalized professors who sold them seductive fictions or the ideologically captured universities that took their money, but a hedge fund manager in Miami."

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

@Old_But_Gold50s Gorgeous, thank you. She has no peer; my favorite: Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen. Spotify has it on an album of Mahler songs.

[KC-10 Driver ✈️ 👨‍✈️ B-737 Wrangler @MCCCANM]

I’m happy w/ maybe 10% of my landings.

The other 90% aren’t bad, they could just be better. I went a little further down the runway than ideal, was a little off centerline, touched down a bit firmer than I’d like. None of these things are dangerous, but they aren’t perfect.

It’s both a science & an art. How soon do you cut the power to idle, where do you raise the nose ever so slightly to cut the descent rate, how much rudder do you kick at the last second to align the nose w/ centerline in a crosswind. Where was your aim-point & when did you shift it to the horizon? How far did you touch down? Did you go really far down the runway trying to grease it on?

Smooth is great when it works, but it’s pretty far down my list when it comes to judging the landing. On a short or contaminated (wet, snowy, icy, etc.) runway, smooth is a complete accident & can be counterproductive…I’m not thinking about smooth at all, I want the wheels down forcefully to break through the contamination or to ensure I’m not floating above runway that’s being wasted. Get the wheels down & let the brakes do their work.

It’s fun to try for smooth sometimes on long runways, but I tend to use those opportunities to practice my short field technique. Don’t want to got to Maui or Lihue in gusty winds & have not done short field in a while. So, at about 200’ I’ll change the aimpoint (if you do it much higher, you get off the Glideslope & the jet starts announcing that), see a third red PAPI & cross the runway threshold at 50’ or lower.

Anyway, 90% of my landings leave something for me to learn from & do better next time. I’ve found that to be helpful in other areas of life, too.

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

There’s simply no reason that a kindergartener needs or should be on a school-provided iPad or laptop

[KC-10 Driver ✈️ 👨‍✈️ B-737 Wrangler @MCCCANM]

I’ve done a few large formations of big jets.

Once, I had very little notice: your mission is to lead 8 KC-10s out of NJ to rendezvous w/ 8 KC-135s out of FL & take fuel from them, radio silent, simulated no electronic emissions, to see how ready we are to support bombers if they had to go to war tomorrow.

We hadn’t done it in a long time. Nobody who’d flown something like it was around anymore & while the book explains procedure, how you actually do it is different. It’s also something different to have people in the squadron who have a living memory of what flying such a thing is like, to share w/ others & we no longer had those resources.

It was dropped in my lap…”you are the Mission Commander” & “Make it happen”. Just leadership, talking to me, nobody beside me. Shit.

Leadership planned it this way & were wise to do so. How will our crews respond if we just task them w/ this kind of thing on short notice…like we may have to do someday? We’d gotten away from that & it hadn’t been done in a long time. A two ship formation was common, a four ship happened rarely, but an eight-ship meeting another eight ship…you couldn’t find people who’d done it still at the squadron or wing level.

I surmised there were no real rules beside the conditions we had to fly under, only an outcome. My initial reaction was to set about planning it all myself, then briefing crews…but after a first effort, I realized it was *way* too much.

Best decision I made.

I called in the best instructors I knew. Called in the crews. Whatever their additional duties were, it could wait. This mission owns you now. I’ll direct conversation, but you’ll plan it & I’ll approve it (the Wing Commander actually approved, but I approved what we’d brief him).

I felt like I should have been able to do it all on my own & this was cheating, or being lazy. In retrospect, it was the best thing I could have done.

Everyone who would fly the mission was now involved in planning it. They heard the disputes, the reasoning, the rules & were part of making the plan.

Nobody told me to bring them in. I just had a tasking…nobody told me I could call people in from their regular duties & give them new tasks, I just said the Wing Commander wants them to (he hadn’t said that, just that he wants this thing to happen, so I assumed some leeway to confiscate personnel).

It went…alright. Storms were a problem. Timing got messed up by skirting around them & ATC cancels your “ALTREV” if you deviate from the filed route (long story, didn’t know that beforehand, we had to break radio silence among ourselves to figure it out).

You can put a bunch of small fighters together in a formation & it’s not easy. Put a bunch of 500,000 lb jets together & it’s more difficult…4 million pounds of aluminum & fuel trying not to hit each other in clouds. I had to break the exercise rules a couple times to ensure safety.

Anyway, that’s me in the picture below, the lead jet turning toward the runway, nervous & internally hoping I don’t fuck this up while I make sure I sound confident to the crew. I made sure I sounded good on the radio, too, talking to ATC, because we weren’t talking to each other…the rest of the formation were to listen & take appropriate action based on the ATC conversation.

I’ve always loved this photo. A highlight of my career, but man I was nervous.

On return to base, we ran into storms again & it was a clusterfuck. Threw the rules out the window & just did what we needed to. At one point I was using the weather radar to try to figure out where others were (I had them land before me), thought I was clever, then realized I was just assuming random radar returns were other jets. Dumb.

Beside bringing the crews in to plan, the second best thing I did was write an account of the entire thing from start to finish, which I hope still survives today. It had all the ugly parts, the thinking, how it actually went & what I’d do differently next time.

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

@MCCCANM Thanks, as always, for the info/context.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Mamdani Orders Visiting Teams To Redistribute Some Of Their Runs To The Mets https://t.co/uQDijWsxV0

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

⁦@LIVGolfStrong⁩ Turning lemons into lemonade only as LIV can do. Favorable pairings . . . .

[Guitar Gods Unleashed @gguworld]

"Ramble On" is 56 years old and Robert Plant just walked onto The Late Show and made it sound like he wrote it this morning.

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

Preston Sturges’“Sullivan’s Travels” captures what he is saying. I’m surprised he didn’t reference it. Likely the questioner never saw it. “Their unremembering hearts and heads, base born products of base beds.”

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

In 1981, Orson Welles recorded a discussion with students at USC. When asked if he planned to make another film to “counter” the wave of purely commercial releases, this was his response…

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

@gpdejesuss Having cleaned up Janice’s mess and been up all night, comes home to Carmela taking off to Italy and giving him the list of duties he has to cover and then drops the Eurythmics “Hey, Hey, I Saved the World Today” (“Everybody’s happy now, the bad thing’s gone away.”)

[Emma Pettit @EmmaJanePettit]

UCLA prof who argued for @bariweiss's lecture to be cancelled wrote in an email:

"I think it is disappointing that we are platforming a woman who has helped drive the narrative that universities are not places of academic freedom..."

[Emma Pettit @EmmaJanePettit]

I spoke with the chancellor of @SUS_Florida about the vote today to cut sociology entirely from gen ed.

He told me: “I want to make sure I get this quote right, and I want to make sure you get it right. We didn’t murder sociology. Sociology committed suicide.”

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

@ClownWorld While every dealer will try to talk you down, the actual sale price of gold is the market price and dealers will pay the market price at least on 47th street. They make their money in selling it. That’s how the industry works.

[James Merriman @JamesMerriman6]

We charter school advocates need to get this guy on our side before the unions get to him.

[Leonardo Panetta @LeonardoPanetta]

Il filosofo inglese Roger Scruton spiegava di essere diventato conservatorismo dopo aver assistito alle proteste studentesche del maggio 1968 in Francia:

“Per cominciare, la cosa che mi ha colpito di più di quegli studenti per strada è stata la, sentimentalità, della loro rabbia.
Era tutto incentrato su loro stessi, non riguardava nulla di obiettivo.
Eh, eccoli qui, i figli viziati della classe media, i baby boomers che non avevano mai dovuto affrontare difficoltà reali, urlavano, a squarciagola per strada, bruciavano le auto appartenenti a comuni proletari che fingevano di difendere contro alcune immaginarie strutture oppressive erette dalla borghesia.
L'intera faccenda era una completa finzione basata sulle idee antiquate di Karl Marx, idee che erano già obsolete a metà del XIX secolo.
Stavano mettendo in scena, se vogliamo, un dramma auto-scritto in cui il personaggio centrale erano loro stessi”.