Favorites September 1st 2023
You can go a step further and think about how this contradicts the ideas that cabals of big businesses are able to reliably stop progress that would help people. Before the LED, it there just weren't any better options secretly being hidden away.
These bills all made it out of the Appropriations committee today. Awesome! Here's more details about CA YIMBY's sponsored bills this year. Appropriations is a hard committee, bills die there regularly.
An example of Simpson's Paradox, which I don't think I had heard of before this. This is from an interesting thread about how married people are happier and how that fact interacts with a bunch of other statistics.
Another good example in the replies is the Eiffel Tower, which was hated when it was first built.
Longer Reads
• I enjoyed this in depth investigation of why a random pedestrian bridge was built, it's long, but has a satisfying conclusion. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Center for new liberalism outlines policy platform, including YIMBY, Immigration, child tax credit. (src)
– Private train companies succeed in japan by owning real estate next to the train lines. (src)
– Thread summarizing the jobs report: TL;DR: things are cooling off a bit, but it's definitely relatively good news. (src)
– A ranking of the top 25 episodes of television from the last 25 years. I've only seen 5 of them. (src)
– Trying to make a neighborhood have a single consistent look is bad, actually. (src)
– China's newly announced map claimed territory from all their neighbors, they all complained, except Russia. (src)
– Yikes, the basic income pilot in Canada published recently was sort of hiding the fact that there was no impact on the measures they pre-specified. (src)
– If we're ok with companies owning/running apartments, we should be ok with them owning/renting out single family homes. Otherwise you're saying that only people rich enough to buy a SFH outright can live in SFH areas. (src)
– Sure there's a replication crisis in social sciences, but good news: some of the older famous papers can totally be replicated. (src)
– Georgism explained for economists: "Because the quantity of land is fixed, you occupying a given plot of land harms every other person, by pushing them to slightly worse locations. Exclusive land use thus imposes a negative externality on society, which is solved with a Pigouvian tax: land value tax." (src)