Favorites October 9th 2023
Haaretz newspaper is a well respected newspaper, and this article directly blames Netanyahu for failing to stop the attack, western media/politicians haven't fully picked up on this yet. There's another more specific claim: he ignored intelligence from Egypt that an attack was imminent. Overall, this is another example of the problem with security politics, a politician can gain approval by failing to stop an attack. See 9/11. Anyway, the joint statement from a US, UK, Germany, Italy and France has a surprising level of nuance to it. Finally, of course, the announced military response from the Israeli defense minister sounds a lot like war crimes.
There are so many examples of housing getting built and rents going down, but it's nice to see an example in California.
It seems like Newsom is trying really hard to publicly demonstrate that he's not beholden to the legislature in preparation for a run at national politics. Unfortunately, this means he's vetoing some good laws. He also vetoed decriminalizing riding bikes on the sidewalk when there's no bike lane as well as Amsterdam style cafes, psychedelic legalization, and a bunch of others. Maybe he just watches too much Fox News?
Longer Reads
• Great thread calculating precise Return On Investment figures for various possible US rail corridors. TL;DR: Because of network effects, all of the best possible projects are in the northeast.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A podcast episode detective story attempting to track the life of one of the first female oceanographers. (src)
– Thoughts about how we can make it cheaper and faster to develop new vaccines. TL;DR: Trial platforms and human challenge trials. (src)
– Don't forget that we're still without leadership in the house, and so far Republicans are turning down some entirely reasonable proposals. (src)
– If you want to stop shoplifting, you've gotta find the fence they're selling to (src)
– Guatemala situation seems bad: the president-elect's party has been suspended. Also, their period between election and swearing in is even longer than ours! He's not sworn in till January! (src)
– Claudia Goldin won the nobel for work on women's participation in the labor force. The U-shaped graph of labor force participation by time/gdp is very clear (src)
– Another item about Israel I was unaware of: like half of their population are descendents of victims of ethnic cleansing from the surrounding Islamic countries. (src)