Favorites November 21st 2021

Tom Gauld @tomgauld

My cartoon for yesterday’s @GdnSaturday / @GuardianBooks #supplychainissues

Explains the saltwater damage to my copy of American Gods.

Aaron Freedman @freedaaron

wut nytimes.com/2021/11/20/us/…

What was Schumer doing? Clearly Manchin is powerful, clearly you should get an exact agreement on what he wants, but then like... communicate that to the house, otherwise we waste a bunch of time. Which is what happened!

Charlie Stross @cstross

Reintroducing wolves makes roads safer (by reducing deer/vehicle collisions)—economic benefits of wolves outweigh cost of livestock predation by 63:1

pnas.orgWolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservationMeasuring the economic benefits conveyed by predators is difficult—often, effects are indirect and operate through complex ecological changes. As a result, debates about the expansion of predators have pit salient costs against more speculative estimates of benefits that might be dismissed as unreli…

"In the average county, wolf entry reduced deer-vehicle collisions by 24%".

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Something none of the parenting books warn you about is that the nominal price of toys has *fallen* since we were kids so it requires surprisingly little money for today's youth to amass vast annoying collections of Bakugan.

Gotta keep the allowance low to avoid your house filling with plastic junk. Well, more than it already is.

Elizabeth Dwoskin @lizzadwoskin

EXCLUSIVE: FB knew its hate speech algorithms disproportionately harmed Blacks and other minorities - but kept that info from its own civil rights auditor, new docs show. At one point 90% of autodeletions were comments attacking whites and men.

washingtonpost.comFacebook’s race-blind practices around hate speech came at the expense of Black users, new documents showResearchers proposed a fix to the biased algorithm, but one internal document predicted pushback from “conservative partners.”

Facebook hiring Joel Kaplan continues to yield horrible outcomes.

Noah Smith 🐇 @Noahpinion

This is far and away the biggest threat to the U.S. right now.

Neoliberal 🌐 @ne0liberal

Very cool and democratic that the Arizona GOP is prepping a bill that allows a simple majority of the state legislature to de-certify the state's presidential electors and replace them as they choose. https://t.co/gqVw4TS9qY https://t.co/NzZc0kzPdF

This is really bad folks, worrying about access to voting turns out to be a side show.

Anna Fitzpatrick @bananafitz

Got owned by a romcom about cinephiles

It's apparently a French New Wave film, and I must not be a cinephile because this does not sound like something I want to see.

San Francisco, July 2021