Favorites May 30th 2022

Toronto, March 2022

M.G. Siegler @mgsiegler

“Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States. And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”

nytimes.comOpinion | What America Needs Is a Liberalism That BuildsYou can’t transform the economy without first transforming the government.

A lot of people shared this over the last two days. One choice quote: "But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindsey’s argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isn’t intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right"

Kamil Galeev @kamilkazani

Native Siberians and North Caucasians* are hugely overrepresented among the Russian casualties in Ukraine. Consider these estimates of the Free Buryatia Foundation. It looks like Russia is ready to fight till the last indigenous person, solving two problems at once

Presumably these casualty numbers are proportional to enlistment numbers, but either way it looks bad.

Randall Munroe @xkcd

d65536 xkcd.com/2626

You probably can't just push it in one direction either, gotta get it properly bouncing around.

Steve Hou (“CONSUME LESS!”) @stevehouf

- Banks are awash with liquidity and interbank rates are near zero. - Households and businesses don’t want to borrow. - Govt and central bank desperately pushing financial institutions to lend more. That sounds familiar? It’s not 2012 U.S., it’s 2022 China https://t.co/IjATVWCWsZ

Sofia Horta e Costa @SofiaHCBBG

Chinese corporates and households are still very reluctant to borrow. Sentiment is a tricky thing to change, no matter how much stimulus you promise https://t.co/LgIdP8HGtr

Hard to improve consumer sentiment when whole cities are still locked down.

Threads

• Thread about the US Real Estate market. TL;DR: it's not quite on fire the way it was 6 months ago.

• Super interesting thread comparing the multiple launch rocket systems the US is likely to give Ukraine to the ones the Russians use.