Favorites October 19th 2022
People have been talking about this article by Tyler Cowen in the last day. Nate Silver compared the distrust of experts with education polarization. Noah Smith wrote an entire follow-up article about the same subject. Yglesias connects this to Haley Byrd Wilt's article about opposition to the Jones act. All these takes attempt to address the 'New Right' as if there is some underlying set of values there, but Eric Newcomer suggests, it's all just empty reasoning cloaking fascism.
Obesity rates in healthy states now are worse than in the least healthy states in the 80s.
Domalewski continues, it's the caution "you’d expect while testing a nuclear reactor"! Someone else found that SF's documents say to expect 500 hours of staff time to handle changing a curb to add a small pedestrian safety measure called a bulb-out. Jerusalem Demsas has an article about this trend of Fake Democracy slowing down progress. Someone else mentioned how this kind of thing reminds them of the CIA manual for how do disrupt organizations. (Here's a short video about it)
I really want to see how anti-vaxers react to this argument in the wild, but it's so insane that I don't think I could credibly make the argument. If you decide to make this argument to the target audience (and I'm not sure I recommend it) let me know how that goes. Worth noting that the article notes that this argument doesn't work when the shoe is on the other foot.
I haven't talked much about UK politics recently, but things things are not going so good for Liz Truss' administration. Wikipedia is having trouble keeping track of the crises. Also, Kai Ryssdal points out that it would be nice if American politicians were as frank as this guy is.
I’m really bad at CSS.
Threads
• Thread arguing that in terms of competing with the West, Xi Jinping has made China weaker.