Favorites December 7th 2012

Ezra Klein @ezraklein

This is like a parody of liberal governance. 60 pages of rules to keep parklets that the city encouraged restaurants to build. Every interest considered except the one that the law was supposed to achieve - letting a successful experiment continue.

sfchronicle.comS.F. made parklets permanent — but added so many rules that many restaurants plan to tear them downSan Francisco made parklets permanent earlier this year, part of the popular Shared...

This is such a shame, the restaurant parklets that I visited in SF were quite nice, it'll be a shame to see them go just because of poorly thought out policies that were supposed to make them permanent.

Randall Munroe @xkcd

Debunking xkcd.com/2551

Fact check all you want, I still refuse to believe Billie Eilish was born this century.

Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs

I have a new working paper out with Omer Solodoch. Using 3 survey experiments, we show that when people are made to think that their national borders are less secure they reduce their support for immigration. The good news: the opposite holds too! osf.io/wt74y/

Sorta wild, but as Noah Smith points out, this is a good reason not to raise the salience of "open boarders" if you favor immigration.

Don Moynihan @donmoyn

As vaccines have become more easily accessible, Republicans have become the largest group holdout group. As a result, deaths in the Trumpiest parts of the US are more than 5 times higher than in the bluest counties (h/t @charles_gaba) 3/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/fox-news-is-…

Later in the thread: "Even if you don't care about Fox viewers, the nature of the pandemic means we are all in the same boat. Its just that some people are trying to sink it."

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This message was brought to you by Exxon and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

NBC News @NBCNews

SPECIAL REPORT: To build electric cars, manufacturers need to mine nickel. To dig up more nickel, a mining company plans to bulldoze a section of pristine rainforest. The “ethical dilemma” of when promising tech results in environmental harm: https://t.co/l2oS8eqqE8

Some real 'best is the enemy of better' stuff going on here. It's not hard to predict where this kind of PR campaign is going.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Honestly would probably be better if this were true, but in reality they are largely siloed fields.

Paul Jimerson @pauljimerson

“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.” – Noam Chomsky

He goes on to point out that modern advertisements are just ridiculously good.

Dispatch Goods @DispatchGoods

Watch out, single-use packaging. We’re comin for ya. 💪💪💪 techcrunch.com/2021/12/06/dis…

techcrunch.comDispatch Goods takes in $3.7M for restaurant, food delivery container reuse – TechCrunchThe company takes on the heavy lifting of recapturing plastic containers, washing/sanitizing them and selling them back to restaurants for reuse.

It says they're already working with Doordash, it would be interesting if the delivery folks just picked up the previous container, but I could still imagine there being problems.

Chise 🧬🧫🦠💉 @sailorrooscout

MORE PRELIMINARY DATA. Another study that just came out shows only a mean 7-fold reduction in neutralizing antibody titers against Omicron. Again, immune escape is NOT COMPLETE- it’s partial! Get boosted! This is manageable. See: drive.google.com/file/d/1CuxmNY… https://t.co/Ui5BHGtMBX

Ben Murrell @BenjMurrell

Omicron antibody neutralization thread, with preliminary results, and substantial caveats. Most credit to @DannySheward. We’ve been racing to generate neutralization data as fast as possible, and our first results were read this afternoon (1/n).

The good news is that a booster helps, but we still need to be rushing ahead with improved vaccines.

Jon “Jon Baker” Baker @JonBaker

HERE COMES THE MOTHERFUCKING PERCUSSION SECTION

If you want more of the same, here's a video of a 10,000 person orchestra.

September 2018, Vaughan, Canada