Favorite Rejects 2022-07-24

Shane Phillips @ShaneDPhillips

Santa Monica, ever the innovator, is breaking new ground in the field of blocking new homes by appropriating the language of social justice. This proposed initiative would require developers to pay up to 2.7 times the prevailing wage, which is of course completely infeasible.

YesterdayIsAHardWordForHat @Popehat

On the other hand, maybe the point is making people who want to be lawyers show they can navigate a cruel, irrational, dysfunctional system. https://t.co/e8W12yzkN4

Ari Cohn @AriCohn

I think the bar exam is useless, but what we really need to abolish is the bar *examiners*. What the hell is wrong with these people and why does anyone think we should be letting them gatekeep the profession ? No wonder it's in such bad shape. https://t.co/WpQQNenNCU

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

There has always been a tension between liberalism and democracy, which sensible liberals have reacted to with things like the welfare state to create a democratically viable form of market economy. And societies ordered that way have driven incredible progress and prosperity.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

The Thiel concept is that this settlement is unacceptable, and you need to wield populism as a mask with which to destroy democracy — and then it can be discarded in pursuit of a capitalism unbound by democratic regulation.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

To me this is a crazy bet — there are lots of successful variations on the theme of welfare state capitalism while the odds on “roll the dice and hope you end up with Singapore instead of North Korea” look awfully bad.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

SF is right out of a William Gibson novel...

Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) 🇺🇦 @antoniogm

One of the perpetual tragic ironies of SF is driving around late at night and watching as fleets of autonomous vehicles bristling with fancy sensors navigate themselves around ramshackle tent shanties. It’s this tableau vivant of our status quo.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Please do not rally around the CDC. The agency needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. It is a giant flaming Hindenburg of failure.

Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver

The CDC was supposed to have spent the last 2+ decades preparing for the specific scenario of "What if someone resurrects Smallpox and releases it as a bioweapon". Now, when faced with a virus that is literally "Story Mode Smallpox" they fail. Amazingly...

TheOmniZaddy 🇺🇦 @TheOmniZaddy

Housing consumption costs have been consistently rising for decades now. Blaming “AirBnB” and “private equity” for current-day housing woes is a very clear attempt by politicians to try to deflect blame for the housing shortages caused by their own governance.