Favorites May 29th 2022

December 2021

RustyBertrand @RustyBertrand

The event and the insect are spelled the same, after all.

Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova

China's cabinet held an emergency meeting with more than 100,000 officials, as top leaders urged new measures to stabilize the economy battered by the country's stringent zero-Covid restrictions which put more than 220 million Chinese under lockdown.

cnn.com100,000 Chinese officials attend emergency meeting to revive Covid-hit economyChina’s cabinet held an emergency meeting with more than 100,000 participants on Wednesday, according to state media, as top leaders urged new measures to stabilize an economy battered by the country’s stringent Covid-19 restrictions.

Noah Smith: That's too many people in a meeting.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Both vote-switching and changes in turnout happen, and both matter, but vote-switching matters about three times as much on average across many elections in many countries. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

The study's use of multiple different countries is interesting. Presumably the fact that the main outliers are *recent* US elections mean that we're likely to 'regress to the mean', but who knows?

James Pethokoukis @JimPethokoukis

"Or­ders for work­place robots in the U.S. in­creased by a record 40% dur­ing the first quar­ter versus the same pe­riod in 2021 ... Ro­bot or­ders, worth $1.6 bil­lion, climbed 22% in 2021, fol­low­ing years of stag­nant or de­clin­ing or­der vol­umes" wsj.com/articles/robot…

Sudden spikes in pay drive innovation in automation, hopefully jolting us to permanently higher productivity. Plus, they're reportedly "be­com­ing eas­ier to use", so I guess both costs and improving technology are driving this.

matt. @biorhythmist

I am FUMING at how good this piece by @theillustrious is

mcsweeneys.netWe Must Defend Thanos’s Constitutional Right to Snap His Fingers and Make Half of the Universe DisappearLike you, I am devastated by the latest act of senseless violence committed by Thanos, brother of Eros and son of Eternals A’lars and Sui-San. And ...

Thanos is pretty clearly bearing the infinity gauntlet on his arm, seems cut and dry from a legal perspective. BTW, it's quite out of date, but I've never forgotten this 1995 article on the Second Amendment.

Threads

• Thread regarding Russia's recent offensive in the Donbas, which appears to have stalled again.