Favorites January 12th 2024
The linked article has a great explanation of the program, which seems pretty good. Honestly, I don't run in to many people complaining about student debt in person, but it's something I see online, so there must be folks out there who are upset.
This is the beginning of a short thread, but the upshot is that by allowing small lots they've allowed 80,000 homes to be built in Houston. Other cities should look at allowing small-lot development. M Nolan Gray argues that it is one of the most effective citywide housing reforms to have happened in the last few decades.
In a follow-up he points out that 25 news organizations have a larger partisain trust split than the highest one among UK news outlets, and that no one news outlet is consumed by more than a quarter of people. Yglesias points out that more Republicans trust Infowars than Bloomberg, insane. Finally, Darek Thompson argues that the takeaway is that one party simply trusts no one, a number of decidedly right-wing outlets have more trust from Democrats than Republicans
So, is this an unusually... solid? bog? Or are they all like this? Is this a bog standard bog?
Longer Reads
• Very long thread about a study of DNA in European people that showed zoonotic diseases in steppe peoples lead to genetic changes associated in modern day humans with MS.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– The CA YIMBY endorsed bill to allow homes to be built on church grounds has allowed an apartment to be bulit in San Diego for $260k/unit, which is unusually low (src)
– College tuition has been falling for three years now (src)
– Clinical trials have gone from costing 10k per patient to 500k per patient. (src)
– The IEA remains absolutely terrible at predicting the growth of solar power installations. (src)
– Noah Smith argues that the best way to create societal equality is by providing tons of Public Goods, trains especially (src)
– A benefit of social insurance programs is that they make up for the fact that lots of people are bad with money. (src)
– Zipline drone delivery has been announced for Dallas-Fort Worth, partnered with Walmart (src)
– Study of the quality of teachers granted emergency teaching licenses with reduced requirements during the pandemic showed that the kids didn't have measurably different outcomes. (src)
– A very long Vox article explaining a ridiculous sequence of events in Conservative media called 'calendargate'. None of it is important, but what it does bring to the fore is that there are some crosspressured conservative male votes who democrats should be targeting in the 2024 election. (src)