Favorites July 5th 2023

Scarborough, Canada

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Maybe you already knew that Wikipedia was the absolute best thing ever, but this is a good reminder.

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Presumably Apple and Amazon are in there losing money as well, we just can't see it because they don't break those businesses out. And they're probably doing it as a loss leader anyway. But WTF is Warner (HBO/Discovery) even doing in this business? Derek Thompson did a short thread on this too, like couch potatoes formed a union and held firm on “we don’t want to have to go to theaters anymore”.

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Seems like a bargain, especially if we can combine it with a system to do faster mRNA vaccine rollout next time. Here’s the paper.

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I had recently heard someone suggest that COVID polarization over vaccines might have driven down overall vaccination rates, good to see this isn't the case, at least so far.

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The governor of Wisconsin is allowed to veto parts of a bill character by character. Look at the vetoed text. What an insane way to run things.

Threads

• Ethan Mollick discusses a paper that dissected the end of Friendster. Slowly, then all at once. Perhaps the same for Twitter? He hopes not. Not Noah Smith though, he wants Twitter to die, and will ride it all the way to the bottom.

For the next edition of this newsletter, I’m gonna have to think about renaming this section, since Meta has launched an entire product called “Threads”