Favorite Rejects 2022-08-06

Oliver Jia (オリバー・ジア) @OliverJia1014

The amount of influence the Communist Party of China has on the West is truly frightening, made only worse by the cowards who bow down to them. Remember, these corporations are not your friends and whatever progressive virtue signaling they do is completely performative.

Reuters @Reuters

Snickers maker apologises for advert suggesting Taiwan is a country https://t.co/w93JyFriZT https://t.co/Bo9dA5b7gM

Charlie Stross @cstross

Fuel (even 5000 tons of fuel) is a small proportion of launch price—maybe $5M? Pad and high bay are amortized over multiple launches. I suspect expendable Starship launches could fly for under $50M with 100 tonne payload, compared to Falcon 9's $30M(?) for 16 tonnes. /2

Charlie Stross @cstross

Upshot: if Starship makes it to orbit this year AT ALL, even as a pure expendable, I expect SpaceX will announce the end of Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy far sooner than anyone now expects, and start shovelling payloads onto expendable Starship. It's so much cheaper! /3 (end)

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I think single-family neighborhoods are so great that people should be allowed to build more housing in them if they want to and they can find willing buyers or renters.

Brett Glass - WY7BG @brettglass

@slucy @elmkast @ebwhamilton @mattyglesias Single family zoning limits density, congestion, and traffic. All of which make neighborhoods safer places for kids to play and grow up. Crime and blight are also reduced. Attempts to eliminate single family zoning are motivated by spite.

Brad Ewing 🚰 @BradleyEwing

AB2053 was killed *because* it was exempt from local zoning ordinances. In effect, it was an infinite upzoning *only* for social housing!

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Mankiw's Sticky Information model observed in the wild:

Paul Krugman @paulkrugman

Conversation overheard at supermarket meat counter: Customer:"Meat just keeps getting more expensive" Butcher: "Actually, prices have been coming down"

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Or you could do the veil of ignorance from the standpoint of an unfertilized egg and generate some genuinely wild conclusions.

Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo

A few months back, I saw someone suggest that we analyze abortion through Rawls' veil of ignorance, and I've thought about it a lot since. Ex-ante, would you rather be conceived in a country where abortion is illegal, or where one in five pregnancies ends in abortion?

Ilya Lozovsky @ichbinilya

@mattyglesias or a sperm! we should all be 500% blissed out all of the time, weeping in gratitude at the fact that each of us is the only survivor of a massacre that destroyed hundreds of millions...

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Lab leak theory is back folks

Bill Bishop @niubi

Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic  ❧ Current Affairs- “Prof. Jeffrey Sachs says he is “pretty convinced [COVID-19] came out of US lab biotechnology” “ https://t.co/hJAS6zUA6r

Michael Ron Bowling @mrbcyber

US-funded breakthrough battery tech simply handed over to China theregister.com/2022/08/04/doe… via @TheRegister

theregister.comUS-funded breakthrough battery tech was handed over to ChinaLicencing snafu sends American invention overseas

Bloomberg Next China @next_china

There will be an escalation of tensions for a while, but Pelosi's visit has the look of a success, writes @mbrookerhk trib.al/TrZVE9F via @opinion

trib.alBloomberg - Are you a robot?