”In mid-1970s, DC activists pushed for a DC Voting Rights Amendment, to treat district ‘as though it were a state.’ It won support from staunch conservative senators like Goldwater of AZ and Thurmond of SC (under pressure from his Black constituents).” nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opi…
“‘Human rights begins at home, here in the nation’s capital,’ Strom Thurmond intoned as the Senate passed the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment in 1978.” nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opi…
“In the past 40 years the Republican Party has become unalterably opposed to D.C. statehood… Democrats, meanwhile, have wavered. Though many supported statehood in principle, they were unwilling to spend political capital to make it happen.” nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opi…
“DC, which has more people than Vermont or Wyoming and is gaining on Alaska, pays more in federal taxes than 21 states and its young people have served in every U.S. war of the past two centuries.” nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opi…
”For the more than 700,000 voteless residents of the District of Columbia, for Democrat’s own self-interest and for the sake of American democracy, they must make good on this promise if they secure the Senate and the White House in November.” nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opi…
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New study finds “strong evidence that BLM protests were associated with an increased likelihood of voting for the 2020 Democratic candidate.” Further, this effect was “concentrated among less contentious protest events (with arrests, injury, or violence).” tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Study of BLM also uses weather and commute times to address possible unobserved factors as protests more likely “when weather is good and built environment favors local gatherings… factors likely to impact variation in protests but not Democratic voting.” tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.108…
At both county- and individual-level, study finds “strong support for hypothesis BLM protest intensity was associated with greater support for Biden. Evidence on contentious protest is mixed, with a significant negative effect in county analysis but no relationship in survey.”
A strange and ahistorical op-ed on SF's ills that spends a precious paragraph on dangers of ranked choice voting but has nothing to say about what policy changes are needed to build more housing, an issue that long precedes current “one party rule.” nytimes.com/2023/02/26/opi…
A century ago, Bay Area was ground zero for the development of single family zoning as a method to enforce racial segregation in housing.
California’s housing crisis is the result of bad policy over decades on both left and right but counter-mobilization against integrated neighborhoods and fair housing laws was not championed by liberals.
Has any region offered a Pay-to-NIMBY option? Like a surtax for non-development?
“The privilege of vetoing virtually any housing in rich neighborhoods is so ingrained in American culture that many people believe it is one of their inalienable rights.” sfchronicle.com/opinion/openfo…
Idea is to shift NIMBYism debates from “rights” to privileges. Imagine upzoning a whole city but with option for any neighborhood to pay an ongoing lower-upzone surtax. Wealthier neighborhoods then pay price for NIMBYism in a way that might also subsidize more affordable housing.
Shifting from property taxes to land value tax would be simpler and more efficient than “NIMBYism surtax” but I’m trying to imagine what might reduce conflict within current system and between city-level pushes to upzone and neighborhood-level opposition. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_valu…
“It seemed absolutely crazy. The idea that an Iowa housewife, equipped with the cutting-edge medical tool known as Google Images, would make a medical discovery about a pro athlete who sees doctors and athletic trainers as part of her job?” propublica.org/article/muscul…
Also, if you liked this piece, I recommend following @DavidEpstein.
For more on sports and genetics, nature versus nurture and other hot debates on the science of performance (10,000 hours?), see @DavidEpstein’s book The Sports Gene. The Guardian called it “dazzling and illuminating.” amazon.com/Sports-Gene-Ma…
Our immune systems are not so much like armies as traffic cops. When we’re well, past infections often linger but are kept in check. As thread shows, chronic illnesses—like ME/CFS and Long Covid—are plausibly persistent, harmful infections that remain hard to detect and suppress.
Long term infections can also result in damage to tissues which may then be diagnosed as a new illness like cervical instability. @jenbrea notes “infection is actually one risk factor of cervical damage that has the most support in the medical literature.” jenbrea.medium.com/how-infection-…
“Compression, stretch, or deformation of nerve tissue can cause low blood flow to the brain and spinal cord that results in a host of downstream metabolic consequences like low oxygen, a switch to anaerobic metabolism, increased lactate, and inflammation.” jenbrea.medium.com/how-infection-…
Just successfully converted a pdf and OCR’d two paper book chapters to machine readable plain text. Then fed text to Amazon’s Polly service and now have good-enough “audiobooks.” Did it for myself but realize one day could be offered to class like podcast with weekly “episodes.”
Listen to Narrative in Political Science by Molly Patterson and Kristen Renwick Monroe as read by one of Amazon Polly’s British female voices (I’m not sure if British voices are actually better than US or if foreign dialectic just seems less robotic). dropbox.com/s/uwpikkyzz3cg…
Pre-processing pdf or OCR’d text is time consuming and doesn’t really save time. For text-to-voice reading to be pleasant, it’s helpful to clean things like hyphens vs m-dashes, remove footnote numbers, correct some garbled text, etc. Some of this can be automated but not all.