Favorite Rejects 2021-09-27

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Texas is sort of quietly Georgist

Kim-Mai Cutler @kimmaicutler

Some excerpts: “Property taxes as a share of the value of owner-occupied housing were recently estimated to be more than twice as high in Texas as in California (1.60 percent versus 0.70 percent).” https://t.co/GIVXVQwg2g

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Cultural essentialists need to grapple with the fact that the former Axis powers now generally have reasonable, moderate governments while the former Allies are generally going bonkers.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

At the top schools at least, education polarization starts *before* the students arrive on campus. slowboring.com/p/education-po…

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Me to a Wall Street guy: You guys should panic more about the debt ceiling. Guy: Eh, they’ll work it out Me: Yes, but only if you panic first. Guy: But they’ll work it out!

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

In 2020, criminals finally learned to prioritize experiences over stuff and focused on killing (and to an extent wounding) other people instead of stealing things. https://t.co/Df1s3QsScH

Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman

The top line on crime trends, from today's UCR release: https://t.co/ChZNtgKxUB

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This. When we've lived our lives under the benevolent rule of "innocent until proven guilty", we have little conception of how truly horrific a society of "guilty until proven innocent" becomes.

Antonio García Martínez @antoniogm

Many Americans have never experienced how the idealistic politics of a radical revolution are cravenly exploited by the shittiest members of society—falsely denouncing neighbors for personal advantage, say—and thus politics here remains naive in its credulity of accusers.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This is why the ACLU document warning about "unfairly favoring the accused" was such a huge blow to that organization's standing as a defender of civil liberties. In many ways, "innocent until proven guilty" is the ur-civil liberty.

DPRK News Service @DPRK_News

United States computer company Twitter “verifies” obvious satirical account.

ChineseEmbassyOttawa @ChinaEmbOttawa

China has never and will never invade or bully others, or seek hegemony. China is always a builder of world peace, contributor to global development, defender of the international order and provider of public goods.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Yeah but Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" series is 15,497 pages. Bow to the true master

Lucas Tomlinson @LucasFoxNews

The Bible is 1,200 pages. The $3.5 trillion bill is 2,400 pages.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Shut (and I cannot emphasize this enough here) up.

theinertia.comShould We Be Worried About the Batteries In E-Bikes? | The InertiaE-bikes are being touted as a path forward to eliminating fossil fuels. But are the batteries doing more harm than good? Should we be worried?

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Now that the public debate has begun to turn against them, the NIMBYs are focusing less on their bad policy arguments and more on attacking YIMBYs. It won't work.

Dave Id @DaveId

On a psychological level, YIMBYism gives YIMBYs a personal raison d'être. Largely affluent, apolitical, and white college graduates flooded into big cities and grew tired of being called techbros and blamed for gentrification. They desperately needed a way to flip the script.