Time for Operation Mindrot

Craig Newmark tells the youth of today that competition from earnest Asians will make their lives both mindnumbing and stressful.  He excerpts from Professor Walter Russell Mead, who says, in part

Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning.

Bummer!

Both Newmark and Mead think the solution is working even harder than the competition.

Double bummer!

But they ignore a better solution: bringing some joy to the lives of these grinding cubicle dwellers by moving them into our cultural economy more quickly.  Our greatest export products are titillation, distraction, and pointless pleasure. We should work harder only at getting those out across the world, hobbling our competition before it even gets out of bed.  I certainly try to produce as much of it as I can.  Who's with me?

This blog post has been a test of the Emergency Distraction System. If this had been an actual cultural catastrophe, you would have been asked to face the music, and dance.

We now return you to your partial differential equation problem set, already in progress.