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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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25 Feb, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Wow, deforestation is heavily concentrated in Latin America. Did not know that.
Here's the article where the chart came from:

ourworldindata.org/what-are-drive…
Interestingly, most Latin American deforestation goes to Latin American consumption. The same is true of Africa and Asia.

ourworldindata.org/deforestation#…
Here are the commodities that the deforestation produces.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
25 Feb
1/Today's Substack post is about a neat idea I had:

Tie minimum wage to local rent.

I think it would help make sure minimum wage is a living wage, AND provide an incentive to build more housing.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-not-tie-…
2/The minimum wage debate has brought attention to the fact that the minimum wage that's appropriate for small-town Oklahoma isn't the same as the minimum wage that's appropriate for New York City.

Regional differences matter!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-minimum-…
3/One idea is to tie minimum wage increases to changes in PRODUCTIVITY, since many people believe that productivity differences are the source of local cost and wage differences, and because making wage=productivity feels fair.

But there are big problems with that approach. Image
Read 15 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
24 Feb
1/Today's @bopinion post is about the "strong dollar policy", and how it might give way to a balanced (i.e. more competitive) dollar policy.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/"Strong dollar" is actually a misnomer, since it actually makes U.S. exporters weaker. The trade deficit, which has returned to historic highs, is almost certainly a reason people are worrying that the dollar is too uncompetitive.
3/Janet Yellen has wisely refused to back a "strong dollar" policy (Mnuchin sort of did the same, but it was hard to tell).

bloomberg.com/quicktake/almi…
Read 9 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
23 Feb
1/Here's a Substack post about the Ivy Leagues, and our unhealthy obsession with them, and what that says about our society.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-ab…
2/Americans are OBSESSED with the Ivies and a few other small elite private schools.

The bribery scandal.

The Asian discrimination lawsuit.

Cornell changing the name of its English department.

Every story about the Ivies is Big News.
3/@mattyglesias writes that Ivies should let in more poor kids. He's right, of course...BUT, they won't.

slowboring.com/p/fancy-colleg…
Read 19 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
22 Feb
Yup.

I'm afraid that the "believe the experts" people are going to be super strident about telling people that being vaccinated doesn't change anything (which is wrong), and as a result the "don't believe the experts" people are going to think the vaccines are worthless.
The other day I had someone scold me for saying "vaccines work", saying actually it's VACCINATION that works.

That's nuts of course. VACCINES WORK.
Of course these are the same people who were yelling at us not to wear cloth masks in April 2020, because there was "no evidence that masks work" (wrong!), and wearing a cloth mask might motivate some stranger to use an N95 that could have gone to a hospital.

Remember that?
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
21 Feb
Clubhouse has unbundled the "discussion" part of Twitter from the "news" part. That's good. People who just want to talk now have a place to talk without being subject to constant dunking, reply-guying, etc.
Substack, meanwhile, has unbundled the "long-form writing" part of Twitter. It's just a better place to lay out your thoughts. Of course other blogging services like Medium help with this too. But Substack's email list integration helps broadcast to a large-ish audience.
The smallish number of people who denounce Clubhouse and Substack are going to fail. Their denunciations might keep a few people off the platforms for a while, but eventually people will realize these are good platforms, and will simply migrate there.
Read 5 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
19 Feb
1/OK, here's a thread about my beloved home state of Texas.

I strongly believe that Texas CAN be The Future if it wants to. But not if it clings to dying technologies.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/texas-vs-the…
2/Texas governor Greg Abbott is going on TV and lying through his teeth about the causes of the blackouts!

3/And this is providing fuel for culture-warrior liars like Tucker Carlson to go on a crusade against renewable energy:

Read 13 tweets

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