Favorites October 4th 2021

Oct 05, 2021

Emissions from Siberia’s fires are more than Germany’s total annual greenhouse gases.

“A report from Greenpeace, based on statistics from Russian fire services, estimates that 65,000 square miles have burned — more than six times the area burned in the United States so far this year.” https://t.co/1W9acvXaFI

Well that's depressing

Yaniv Erlich @erlichya

Long thread on how the new antiviral drug works.

From the thread, “Interm summary: Molnupiravir is a drug made of RNA. Unlike the vaccines, it isn't a long molecule that encodes a protein. It's just a single nucleotide that acts as a trojan.”

James Medlock @jdcmedlock

The theory that administrative burdens are efficient because the people who need help the most will try the hardest to overcome them may go down as one of the worst theories ever voxeu.org/article/eviden…

Noah Smith: "Economists wrote some crazy stuff back in the early 80s."

If there’s a reason to means-test a program, it’s that the American public is obsessed with doing it, not because it’s actually a good idea. Giving services to everyone has a very good hit rate.

Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart

🚨🚨 Remember: Longtime Biden advisor and current member of the CEA @econjared, in a 2015 blog post: "...if it really came to default, I’d mint the coin in a New-York minute." jaredbernsteinblog.com/dont-fool-arou…

jaredbernsteinblog.comDon’t even fool around with the debt ceiling | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy

I think they really might mint the coin this time, the Republicans have no reason to cave, and Democrats don’t want to vote to increase the limit without Republican votes.

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

Some real Neal Stephenson shit wired.com/story/malware-…

It’s strange to think this way, but it seems that the Cyberpunk period was relatively 'correct'.

VICE @VICE

Syniverse handles billions of text messages a year, and hackers had unauthorized access to its system for years.

trib.alCompany That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Says It Was HackedSyniverse handles billions of text messages a year, and hackers had unauthorized access to its system for years.

But don't worry, it's only *most* text messages since 2016. But also, it wasn’t even the biggest tech news today. That honor goes to Facebook’s outage: