Endorse every sentence of this from @ezraklein on US foreign policy & militarism:

"You can just give people money. You can give people vaccines. You can let people into our country who want to come here. There are a million things you could do for much less money than wars."
Excerpt is from his recent interview with Robin Wright talking about Afghanistan: nytimes.com/2021/08/27/opi…
Nope, we should just give visas to Hong Kong residents
Your occasional reminder that foreign aid is less than 1% of the federal budget

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More from @AlecStapp

16 Sep
Nate Silver is good at forecasting, actually ImageImage
You can see for yourself, they keep track of how their predictions perform here: projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-w…
Scorecard for 2016 election forecasts… Nate Silver wins hands down Image
Read 4 tweets
13 Sep
Still amazes me that we would never have allowed the Soviet Union to own CBS/NBC/ABC during the Cold War but we let the Chinese Communist Party control the black box algorithm for an app that’s used multiple hours per day by more than 100 million Americans.
The personal data stuff is a red herring (TikTok doesn’t collect any sensitive information). The risks are from the algorithm and content moderation: thedispatch.com/p/the-real-thr…
Me on 8/11/20:

“Even though President Trump may want to force a sale of TikTok for the wrong reasons… it is still the right thing to do given the threat to national security posed by the app’s algorithm and content moderation policies.”

thedispatch.com/p/the-real-thr…
Read 5 tweets
9 Sep
Everyone should read this excerpt from @mattyglesias's interview of @davidshor:

"There's a lot of damage that gets done by all of this propaganda that tells us that all of our stuff is extremely popular...When the reality is that people agree with Republicans on a lot of things" ImageImage
Recommend listening to the full interview too: vox.com/the-weeds
Some people in the replies asked for a full transcript of the interview. Here ya go: app.podscribe.ai/episode/759134…

(FYI that site has automated transcripts for millions of podcasts, if you're ever in need.)
Read 4 tweets
8 Sep
The four most important charts in science & technology

(note: all y-axes are log scale) ImageImageImageImage
There's no guarantee these trends will continue without massive public & private investment and smart regulation... but imagine if they do:

- compute power too cheap to meter
- clean energy too cheap to meter
- genomic sequencing too cheap to meter
- batteries too cheap to meter
Read 6 tweets
30 Aug
The government decided to let robocall scammers completely overwhelm our telephone system to the point where it’s basically unusable and no elected official seems to care
Proposed solution:

Have the FCC impose a 1 cent fee on every call that is made on telephone networks (and have the carriers collect it).

That would be a minimal burden on valid calls, but destroy the business model of spammers.

Could add the money to the Universal Service Fund
Read 4 tweets
26 Aug
What are the best lessons from COVID?

Should have done:

- Human Challenge Trials
- Serological surveillance
- First Doses First
- Fractional dosing
- Rapid tests
- Masks for all via USPS
- Sewage testing
- Earlier FDA vax approval
- Ventilation/HVAC
- Advance market commitments
This list is a collection/summation of replies to this earlier @albrgr tweet:

h/t @patrickc @ATabarrok @futurepundit @sebastian_oehm for suggestions
Read 5 tweets

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