Favorites January 26th 2022

Ben Collins @oneunderscore__

Blown away anew every time I hear another dimension of @shrimpJAJ's Trump impersonation.

He's a new cast member on SNL, and is now responsible for playing both Biden and Trump. This made me think of Drew Gooden's commentary that SNL does better at politics when they don't bring in a special star to play politicians. I went and watched the full interview and I was really impressed by the demonstration of an impression of Trump today vs a how he sounded a few decades back.

Quantian @quantian1

China has not approved either the Pfizer/BioNTech nor the Moderna shot for domestic use, despite Fosun holding a license and a factory to make 1bn doses/yr of the former in China, because doing so would be admitting that the American vaccines are better: cnn.com/2021/12/13/chi…

Dr Ellie Murray, ScD 🇨🇦 @EpiEllie

The main claim here👇🏼 is China’s vaccines don’t work well & it’s presented as China’s fault. But is it really? Or is America controlling who gets the better vaccines? Reframe: America’s vaccine patent protections are a pandemic that’s already happening. https://t.co/svOLazokzp

Even more strange, Fosun does distribute their mRNA vaccine in Hong Kong and Macau.

Ezra Klein @ezraklein

It's such an indictment of lifetime terms on the Court that this was both a) entirely up to Breyer and his ego and b) the question now turns to which credible legal mind has the absolute best longterm actuarial outlook

If you didn't hear, Breyer is doing the right thing and retiring, don't let folks fool you, it's a nice job to have, and there's impact even if you often fall in the minority.

Sylvain Catherine @sc_cath

My research assistant found this nice website if you need to recover data from a graph: apps.automeris.io/wpd/

I haven't found a use for this yet, but I could imagine it being a life saver.

Chris Anderson @chr1sa

Not all electric airtaxis are equally green. Their size, where they can land, and whether they have wings or not can make a big difference in the amount of energy they consume per mile. I break down the factors here: kittyhawk.aero/news/why-auton…

If you want to skip the article: the key to high efficiency for electric planes is: "be small, have a wing, don’t have an onboard pilot and land anywhere." (Which is the proposed business model for Kittyhawk).

Bob Wachter @Bob_Wachter

Looking at the variations in these curves, I'm not quite as confident as I was that this Omicron wave will be fast up/fast down. And I heard no convincing explanation for the differences. (Vax or booster rates? Masks? Weather? Behavior change? Rapid tests?). Seems kinda random.

Well that's a bummer.

San Francisco, November 2021