China doesn't need hypersonic missiles to fight a nuclear war that they wouldn't want to fight or win. Why destroy the chief market for your exports? Now half the planet is slag and you can't sell your stuff. I'm worried about the long-range anti-ship hypersonics they're playing with, though. There's some potential there to make carrier groups obsolescent, which would make an invasion of Taiwan without American intervention or a nuclear exchange feasible. As long as a couple of American carrier groups can act with impunity off the coast, then they can only saber rattle; but if they could take one out with a barrage of conventional hypersonics from over a thousand km, then Taiwan becomes impossible to defend.

We can pay 2000 now, and 15 when we reach Alderaan.

It's not insane. The long semester model just means we're going to find out the full impact to higher ed only in the fall. That long delay means some of those job losses are avoidable. Every university in the nation is prepping for drastic budget cuts, if they haven't made them already. The question is how big they have to be. For most, that won't be clear until later this summer when enrollment numbers start to solidify. Our university's yearly tuition is below 8k, so I hope some of the students that justifiably decide to take the fall off will be balanced by students transferring from more expensive universities, if everyone is going to be mostly online anyway. And yes, if they decline to enroll in sufficient numbers, we'll be another group of unemployed.

I'd add that the Ivy League might be able to eat the tuition of a semester. But the state schools can't, and the privates... well.

Ditto. I'm a tenured professor at a fiscally trim state university with no athletics or dorms, and with some knowledge of the budget process. The state schools are already facing budget cuts from the state in the fall. Cutting into any of the revenue of the rather lean enrollment they may have in the fall will mean furloughs and layoffs, impacting the quality of instruction for all the students that do choose to keep paying and attending. It might be a clever short-term strategy to sue, take the discount and transfer to a cheaper school. But long-term, it's bad for everyone, especially if you plan to sue and stay at the same university. I've been ordering extra takeout from all the restaurants I normally attend in person. I don't want them to disappear. I want to go there in person again at some point. Same reasoning applies.

The society and the people in it are two different things.

As I understand him, our society doe not foster a reasonable set of ethics, and thus people who could just as easily behave well instead do not, as they don't have a strong ethical sense to buttress any natural tendency toward honesty.

His worldview seems based on his view of himself - a good kid at heart who was never given a proper foundation in ethical behavior.

I wonder if he addresses the messy politics of teaching ethics in one of his books.