Favorites October 27th 2021

David Roberts @drvolts

Lord I wish every Democrat in Congress would read this piece by @ddayen. Big, dumb, universal programs are the only ones with a chance of breaking through the polluted information environment & moving voters.

nytimes.comOpinion | Democrats, It’s Time to Focus on Big WinsThe party has to do a few things well, rather than a bunch of things poorly.

The previous theory was that helping people was the key, but the CTC wasn't simple enough for people to understand. We have to go simpler

Joshua Benton @jbenton

In the Pfizer vaccine trial for 5- to 12-year-olds, there were 4,647 participants and only 5 "severe adverse events," none of them related to the vaccine. The best of them, BY FAR: "Ingestion of a penny (1 person in the vaccine group)" yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/vaccines-for…

(The FDA Endorsed Pfizer for kids 5-11 years old)

Seema Jayachandran @seema_econ

Neat paper that uses a dominance argument to show that carbon offsets often go to projects that would have been pursued anyway. If Project A received offsets, yet a similar but less profitable Project B was pursued w/o offsets, the offsets to Project A were inframarginal...

Robert Metcalfe @RDMetcalfe

Do Carbon Offsets Offset Carbon? A new super interesting paper suggests no. Many Clean Development Mechanism projects are inframarginal and offsets end up increasing CO2 emissions! By Calel, @JonathanColmer, Dechezleprêtre, & Glachant. https://t.co/UC3JcxkhWl https://t.co/0imGy6fCqs

This makes me wonder if Stripe's plan of doing carbon capture is actually better. Or just buying a coal mine.

the monstrous & abhorred Necrotomicon @tjl

This is great. Opening up the mRNA platforms was complicated across several dimensions. Opening up a small molecule therapeutic is not

nytimes.comMerck Will Share Formula for Its Covid Pill With Poor CountriesThe company announced a licensing deal that will allow the drug, molnupiravir, to be made and sold cheaply in 105 developing nations.

"the drug halved the rate of hospitalizations and deaths in high-risk Covid patients who took it soon after infection in a large clinical trial"

Mark Hogan @markasaurus

This is a ridiculous abuse of the appeal process- poorly "reasoned" arguments about the "gentrification" of Nordstrom's parking lot are not a legitimate CEQA issue

Matt Haney @MattHaneySF

Tonight the Board voted down a 495 unit housing project in my district on a parking lot on Stevenson/6th. It was approximately 24% affordable with 100+ affordable units, near transit, w ground floor community space, & extensive neighborhood support from residents & leaders.

This is really too bad. Especially if it's true that it was done to punish a proponent of the project for running for the State Assembly

Task & Purpose @TaskandPurpose

Air Force vs Navy pilot landing styles. We spoke with pilots of these respective services to go into detail on why the big difference > taskandpurpose.com/mandatory-fun/…

I mean, it's because they've gotta land on aircraft carriers, but there’s more to it if you want to read the full article.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Two papers on the value of mixed gender teams for innovation: 🥼Analysis of 6 million medical papers shows mixed gender teams do more impactful & cited work 📈Randomized teams with different gender breakdowns ran a startup for a year. Teams close to 50/50 male-female did best.

I'm surprised there was such a significant difference, although there's no doubt that there could be a ton of confounding factors.

Creepy Crawlrath @crawlrath

@Noahpinion

Santa Cruz, March 2021