Favorites April 6th 2023
Programming note: Twitter appears to have (purposely?) broken Substack’s ability to embed Tweets, so I’ve switched to embedded images instead. They’re not as bad as I expected, but you have to click the little ‘src’ caption I added to each one if you want to see the original.
This is amazing news! We need more vaccines, and we need them sooner rather than later. Every day we push back the rollout of a vaccine is more people harmed or killed by a disease.
Newcomer goes on, pointing out that Jack Ma might disagree about China's system being fair and just, and asks why Youtube is banned in China. Although, to be clear, I think the proposed legislation to block TikTok is probably messier than it needs to be.
The actual article is great, but both this cover and the meme with a Starcraft reference also tickle me.
Threads
• ProPublica got a scoop that Clarence Thomas accepted tons of gifts from a billionaire Republican donor, but I think my favorite tidbit was from the twitter menswear guy who pointed out how the photos from the report really highlight the huge difference between how fashion magazines depict rich person fashion vs actual rich person fashion.
• Really interesting set of proposals for how Caltrain could stabilize their ballooning operating costs. Main takeaway for me was that the new electric locomotives are so much faster that we could get rid of the diesel ones and maintain nearly the same level of service.
• Short thread from Nate Silver arguing that if you ask Americans to rank their fear of AI apocalypse on a scale of one 1 to 5 (19% very worried), you're not going to get meaningful data, he proposes to instead look at polling that forces them to rank it against other worries (less than 1% rank it 'most important).