Favorites May 13 2021

Weirdly large amount of lottery content today.

Dr. Tara C. Smith @aetiology

Ohio announced they will have a 1 million dollar lottery for people who have been vaccinated. I really want to know how well this works, but I think it's too early still.

Patrick Traughber @ptraughber

One of the reasons the Bay Area has so much car congestion and high per capita car miles driven (higher than LA!) is that government agencies charge people more to ride transit than to drive a car. Our pricing encourages car driving and discourages transit use. An overview:

Looking at the math for taking caltrain to the city for us vs driving+parking. No matter how much the parking is, it's still cheaper than the train.

Jason Snell @jsnell

In which Jeff Bezos gets his home state senator to fund his failed lunar lander bid...

Eric Berger @SciGuySpace

I spent 5 hours watching a Senate committee hearing Wednesday. It was not a happy day for NASA or the Artemis Program. Here's why: https://t.co/My527Y1RAA

Cantwell, of Washington State, added an amendment to unrelated legislation that will force Nasa to delay the manned moon landing mission so that Blue Origin can have time to catch up with SpaceX, and requires Nasa to fund development of both landers.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

A long time ago someone had to decide what should be the default way for communities to send representatives to the legislature and they hit upon “elections” when the right answer is “a random lottery” and it’s all downhill from there.

Yea, I think I basically agree with this. Should be like jury service.

Arieh Kovler @ariehkovler

If the conflict hadn't erupted, Naftali Bennett would probably be replacing Netanyahu as Prime Minister today. If this report pans out, Netanyahu will survive to fight a fifth election.

Lahav Harkov @LahavHarkov

Bennett is no longer willing to negotiate a "change coalition" relying on Ra'am and is back in talks with Netanyahu, @yaircherki reports. He says Bennett says a coalition relying on Raam won't be able to bring back law and order.

I mentioned it yesterday, but it looks like Netanyahu has successfully used the recent unrest to stay in power.

Youyang Gu @youyanggu

Are we still in a pandemic? I put together a model this week to estimate current excess deaths. Here's what I concluded: For 32 US states, the answer is YES. For the remaining states, current all-cause deaths are likely below the upper bound threshold for excess deaths. 🧵

If you're wondering about the relative safety of various states. Although if you're vaccinated, you should be fine. Also, you can read the rest of Youyang’s thread to see the details on how he’s calculated this.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

theguardian.comDelay in giving second jabs of Pfizer vaccine improves immunityStudy finds antibodies against Sars-CoV-2 three-and-a-half times higher in people vaccinated again after 12 weeks rather than three

Looks like the UK and Canadian strategy was the way to go