
These pictures are powerful, and clearly forest management changes have happened, but it's not just the need for prescibed burns. I was convinced by one of the replies that there's good evidence that logging patterns are part of the problem as well.

I had seen the graph for both these points previously, but I had not quite realized that it implied point one as well. Silver isn't the first to notice this, the NYTimes covered it last year. So maybe this really is the conventional wisdom already? If you have some quibbles with his methodology, he has a follow-up where he does further regression analysis, but if you were already mad at him, this probably won't make you less mad. I also was amused by his speculation that this might be a situation where the median and modal opinions on NPIs and Vaccines are different.

Dubler continues: "Also as it turns out, jacking up the price of housing to the point where thousands of people sleep in tents on the sidewalk every night significantly degrades the quality of life in low density neighborhoods full of $3,000,000 houses." Another reply points to a quote from Feinsten back when she was mayor, commenting on the spike in homelessness in 1986, assuming it would be a 'passing phenomenon'
Longer Reads
• Great thread explaining the study of whether democracy is asociated with fewer wars, and whether democracy causes peace or peace causes democracy. TL;DR: it's very hard to show this kind of thing empirically with no way to run experiments, but it seems plausible.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Article about massive increase in lonliness since the pandemic. Beautiful graphics and interactive elements too. (src)
– RFK running independent, which is probably good for Biden, I believe he polls better with Republicans than Democrats at this point. (src)
– "The Central Park Zoo sea lion pool flooded — and one sea lion briefly swam to freedom." (src)
– Great quote from Matt Levine about people in tech who read his stuff even though they don't care about finance (that's me!) (src)
– Gas Stations operate on very thin margins, as EVs become more popular, gas stations could close surprisingly quickly. (src)
– Jess Fong, responding to the news that chatbots are poisoning search results, suggests maybe it's a good time to become a hermit. Gruber is a bit annoyed that Chatbots think he likes Fireball whiskey. (src)
– Raytheon has an anti-drone laser that's mounted to a truck, they say it works at ranges over 5 kilometers (src)
– China's NIMBYs caused them to tear down an awesome statue (src)
– The White House's social media snark game is A+ (src)
– Did you know the US developed a nuclear powered jet engine in the 1960s? It had 5 times the thrust of a 747 and could fly for weeks on fuel with the same weight as what the 747 burns in an hour. (src)
– Productive Procrastination (src)
– Republicans pretend to be upset, and that's expected, but then journalists publish articles pretending that the Republicans are actually upset, which seems obviously bad (src)