Favorite Rejects 2021-10-16

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This is true, and I wish more people would recognize this. What American education needs more of is NOT more talent-finding, but more BROAD-BASED uplift for the AVERAGE student.

lichunan @lichunan

@Noahpinion Absolutely. Our top students are as good or better as top students anywhere in the world. It is our average students that are not as good as those in China or India

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Finding talent is important but we already do that very well. Helping the disadvantaged is important but we already know that's important. What we ignore is how the AVERAGE American student is being under-educated.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Bully: *lifts my head out of the toilet* Me: ...Old buildings only look nice because they're different than the buildings around them! Good architecture is about variety!! If you had a row of 12 that all looked like that, it would-- Bully: *dunks my head back in the toilet*

Michael Wara @MichaelWWara

I read this and wonder why Biden is not saying “ok, that’s cool, but if you don’t vote for this, you can bet that I will be bringing an aggressive Sec 111(b) rule for both new CCGT and coal. And an existing source rule that is conservative and defensible.

nytimes.comKey to Biden’s Climate Agenda Likely to Be Cut Because of Manchin OppositionThe West Virginia Democrat told the White House he is firmly against a clean electricity program that is the muscle behind the president’s plan to battle climate change.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

@Noahpinion At or near the highest per capita income of any large nation in world history.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

No, because what NIMBYs really hate isn't any architectural style, it's the idea of the wrong people living in their neighborhood

Bloomberg CityLab @CityLab

Can architects design affordable housing that NIMBYs and YIMBYs approve of? #citylabarchive https://t.co/ecjDXJDQqU

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

This is meant to be ironic, but it seems totally correct to me that in every given congressional fight over major legislation, the press does a poor job of conveying the policy stakes relative to the political process stuff.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Fireside chats were FDR's specialty! Biden could release a weekly podcast in which he explains what he's doing to achieve his vision for America. Why hasn't he done this? Why hasn't ANYONE done this?

MushuWeasel @mushuweasel

@Noahpinion Is available fora part of the problem here? During campaigns we get stump speeches, during terms we get ... States of the Union? Socratic dialogue doesn't make for popular TV, but I'd watch the hell out of it.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

It's good to see NIMBYs forced to retreat from "building new housing raises rents" to "goddammit I just don't like how new buildings look". Keep pushing, friends.

Patrick T. Brown @PTBwrites

This is a common, and lazy, slur of those skeptical of having their neighborhood turned into a cookie-cutter forest of five-over-ones. Actually taking aesthetic concerns seriously won’t get you all the way to YIMBY nirvana, but it can move the needle https://t.co/e402p7OMxV https://t.co/RLeEaSIVEe

Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

Pathetic. Golden age Superman would've sunk the oil tankers, freed the livestock and made public Manchin and Sinema's bribery

Screen Rant @screenrant

Jon Kent's Superman will fight climate change in support of #climatestrike, #fridaysforfuture, and this week's #schoolstrike4climate in an upcoming issue of his ongoing series. https://t.co/cjR8kqQ6XW https://t.co/5SZ0tmDNOc

Ben Dreyfuss @bendreyfuss

“How dare you insult breadlines! I met my wife at a breadline!”

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

Xi Jinping channeling Reagan here:

Eli Friedman @EliDFriedman

Xi on social protection: "Even if our level of development is higher in the future and finances are more abundant, we cannot set too high a goal and have excessive guarantees. We must resolutely guard against falling into the trap of supporting lazy people through 'welfarism.'" https://t.co/5f8AavhnUF

edmundogs💚 @edmundogs

A farewell to R: time-series models for tracking and forecasting epidemics @RSocPublishing royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs… @plenque @wsosaescudero @pgroisma

royalsocietypublishing.orgA farewell to R: time-series models for tracking and forecasting epidemics | Journal of The Royal Society InterfaceThe time-dependent reproduction number, Rt, is a key metric used by epidemiologists to assess the current state of an outbreak of an infectious disease. This quantity is usually estimated using time-series observations on new infections combined with ...

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

My “not a gallows” t-shirt…. https://t.co/sy9WVFhfXQ

Byron York @ByronYork

Some of you point to the 'gallows' at the Capitol riot as evidence the riot was an armed insurrection. Call it a threat, call it an ugly symbol, call it a prop, call it what you like. But it wasn't a real gallows. https://t.co/JKZuLjVacl https://t.co/1cBZq9XacO https://t.co/EN08epVxJi