Spring Training is a fun, free outdoor party we throw every year to get ready for a summer full of good weather. This is one of our favorites because it’s super low-hassle. We show up with djs and sound equipment, play, and then leave. This was the third annual iteration:

(Thanks, Ben, for making the video)

HASA (Harvard Alumni for Social Action) was started by a bunch of ‘81 alums to advocate the use of the university’s enormous endowment (estimated to go from $35 to $100 billion in the next ten years) for social good. From the site:

Harvard Alumni for Social Action (HASA) is an independent organization open to all Harvard alumni who seek to encourage the University to use donations for social good. HASA members believe that Harvard’s prominence and wealth make it uniquely able to support educational and research institutions in developing countries. HASA therefore works to fund scholarships for African graduate students at Harvard and also to fund infrastructure improvements at needy African universities.

At the moment, the mission sounds like it’s limited to educational grants. I hope they think bigger as more people take interest in the idea and join the org (I just did.) Harvard is a university which presumably has a huge number of innovative ideas around development. Example: the Kennedy School alone probably has half a dozen graduate students thinking about how unhealthy political structures cause the “resource curse” in developing countries (see this TED talk for an interesting discussion on that topic.) Now, imagine if there were huge grants for those graduate students to do research abroad. “Business plan” competitions for social ventures. New departments, even.

I hope HASA expands into a general-use fund directed globally at fixing the social problems that current markets can’t fix on their own. If such things already exist at Harvard and at other schools, I hope HASA finds ways to support them. This is a topic of such enormous interest (academically, politically, and meathook-future realistically.) If they aim higher, perhaps they can draw many orders of magnitude of funding more than they’re currently raising.

And by RIP, I mean “rot in historical ignominy.” It turns out that consumer demand for fuel is more elastic than we all feared. With gas prices going through the roof, people are finally starting to buy more reasonable cars.

GM saw a 28% drop in light-vehicle sales in May. Ford’s sales fell 16%. The Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the United States almost every year for the past three decades, was knocked off its perch by both the Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla.

Hummer sales fell by 60%!

GM has announced the closure of its Janesville assembly plant, and the discontinuation of the plus-sized Tahoe, Suburban and Yukon lines as early as 2009. No word on the Hummer, but the buzzards are circling. GM will add additional shifts to plants that produce more fuel-efficient cars, and the company hopes to have the electric Chevy Volt in showrooms by 2010.

As a side note, the H2 hummer was not only an obnoxious and wasteful “fuck you” to everyone whose visual field it polluted, it was also a shitty car, engineering-wise: