Favorites March 15th 2022

Randall Munroe @xkcd

Deviled Eggs xkcd.com/2593

Seeing this dragged me into rereading the events around the demon core.

Conor Sen @conorsen

Gasoline futures have now retraced 75% of the invasion surge:

Wow, and this is without a deal with Iran or the Saudis. Perhaps the expected recession in China? They're up to like 6 cities shut down. But Chinese leadership still sure the US is the country that's currently in a bad spot.

Aaron Chalfin @AaronChalfin

In Louisiana, murder is a leading cause of death among pregnant women. 14% of deaths during pregnancy were homicides, more than any other single cause of death and 1/3 as frequent as all pregnancy-related causes combined: jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…

So, that's ridiculously high, and 12/100k is above the national average of 6/100k. The only good news is that we have pushed down deaths due to pregnancy complications so far that now other things are more common.

Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin

it's worth being specific about what happened: republicans didn't want to spend more on covid, democratic leadership came up with a plan to take unused state aid to cover the spending, and governors and backbenchers freaked out and killed it nytimes.com/2022/03/09/us/…

If you haven't heard, congress failed to come up with more money to cover COVID programs.

Andrew Desiderio @AndrewDesiderio

Holy shit. The Senate just unanimously passed a bill making daylight savings time permanent. If this clears the House, no more changing the clocks twice a year.

Senate Cloakroom @SenateCloakroom

Passed by Unanimous Consent, S.623: Sunshine Protection Act, as amended (to make Daylight Saving Time permanent) @SenRubioPress / @SenWhitehouse / others

Sarah Rumpf: "Changing clocks is stupid and literally kills people". The single thing that the parties can agree on.

Catherine Rampell @crampell

👀

In the same article, China is arguing that any rumors that they're supporting Russia are disinformation. No doubt there are differences vs Taiwan of course, including in China's preferred strategy.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

If Russia has 6k-8k killed so far, then by the typical rule of "wounded = 3x killed", that's 24k-32k total casualties out of an invasion force of 190k. Desertions and POWs would be on top of that, I guess. So maybe 15% of the Russian invasion force out of action so far?

Seth G. Jones @SethGJones

Russian casualties continue to mount, with roughly 6,000-8,000 Russian military fatalities thus far. To put that into perspective, there have been more Russian combat deaths in barely 2 weeks in Ukraine than U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq combined in two decades

Because I know you were wondering where the numbers come from it's this paper. Russia's ratio in more recent conflicts has been more like 5x, here's the graph with comparables.

Plus:

• A thread arguing that tech workers should be less opposed to military applications. I'm not sure I agree, but it's not an argument I've seen many times.

Stanford, August 2020