@scottsantens @aaronfhamlin @StevenHill1776 I think this piece is off about a couple of things. At a normative level, it presumes that it’s wrong somehow if a 55% 1st preference doesn’t win. But what if the other 45% detest that candidate, and there’s a third candidate 80% would be okay with? 1/ @scottsantens @aaronfhamlin @StevenHill1776 I’d argue the health of our polity is better served (in single winner elections) by the voting system that chooses the consensus candidate rather than a polarizer who can command a small majority. 2/

I see a lot of blame of Russians for complicity—they should have checked their vicious ruler long ago. Maybe, though in a complicity olympics we all have a very great deal to answer for. 1/

https://twitter.com/nachristakis/status/1499051939375595521

But going forward, we want Russians NOT to rally behind Putin as their country collapses out of modernity. We want to them to know there is a world community that would welcome them under a political order that lives in peace with its neighbors. 2/

A way to understand it is that, under US antitrust, it’s dangerous for participants in concentrated industries to restrict “ordinary” supply, but nothing prevents them from designing *inflexible* supply. i/

re @glastris washingtonmonthly.com/2022/01/12/pre… Inflexible supply has two desirable characteristics:

(1) it’s cheaper and narrowly more “efficient” to arrange, reducing costs and increasing profit in ordinary times; and

(2) it offers firms a convenience yield in the form of pricing power during spikes in demand. ii/

.@MattBruenig suggests a very direct form of competition policy: when an industry is concentrated, have the state buy and manage one of the oligopolists in the public interest. peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/01/04/why…

i/ Two concerns immediately spring to mind:

(1) How do you set the price of the acquisition? (The premium demanded over prior-to-government-interest market cap will be very high if you just let the sellers name their price.)

ii/

When demand increases, two things typically both happen: quantities supplied increase and price increases. There is a name in economics for the quantitive relationship between these two effects: "price elasticity of supply". 1/ A good "infinitely" elastically supplied would see no price change at all in response to an increase in demand. All of the effect would be absorbed by an increase in quantity supplied. 2/

there’s a sense in which Donald Trump’s administration was the best thing that could happen to the professional-managerial class that most loathed him. he drew all kinds of fire that otherwise would turn towards them. 1/ i just listened to @LRCkcrw, and (on COVID stuff) it might have been Rush Limbaugh talking, the way all three of (“left”) @ebruenig (“right”) @DouthatNYT and (“center”) @jbarro used the term “bureaucrats”. castro.fm/episode/4N02rT 2/

This essay by @VitalikButerin, in dialog with @nathanairplane, is very good. I'll highlight two points I already agreed with, and a third which is new to me, interesting and creative. vitalik.ca/general/2021/0… via @KlingBlog 1/ So often people tell me that, sigh, the root of human suffering is coordination problems, that if only we could overcome our prisoners' dilemmas, what a better world we'd have of it. This misses a crucial point @VitalikButerin makes. 2/

@rplzzz nothing to apologize for! i don't think you'll be surprised i see it differently. if we're in a game with two sides, they are better characterized as "activists" and "everyone else" than left vs right or trumpist antivaxxers vs the rest of us or all of that. 1/ @rplzzz most of the unvaccinated are not diehard (they die too easily) political intransigents. yet most are either attached to minority communities or trumpish political communities. but most of the unvaccinated attached to trumpist political communities are not politically motivated 2/

polio vaccination is often performed sequentially, first with a very safe inactivated virus vaccine, then with a riskier attenuated live virus. the first vaccination renders the second one much less dangerous. cochrane.org/CD011260/BEHAV… 1/ given the extraordinary transmissibility of delta and frequent reports of usually mild “breakthrough infections”, i wonder if the end game here is that we’ll be dragged involuntarily through an analogous protocol. 2/

i agree very much with @jp_koning, fiat money is not a meme. but i don't think characterizing it as a conventional debt instrument quite works either. 1/ jpkoning.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-do… suppose Bill Gates were to issue a perpetual, never redeemable, non-interest-bearing Gatescoin. Bill Gates' solvency, on its own, would tell us little about its value. 2/

this idea that an institutionally legal but morally stolen election (say legislatures in key states overrule voters, citing “irregularities”) will be prevented on the streets risks a first time as farce, second time as tragedy catastrophe. 1/

https://twitter.com/wertwhile/status/1406993347789656069

every stern denouncement of the 1/6 “insurrection”, every demand on Rachel Maddow that a tough, militarized response should have crushed the insurgents to spare our legislators their traumas, will be hauled out. 2/

so often we treat normative problems as positive problems. pre-ACA one might have done all kinds of modeling of the causes of health care uninsuredness, but the meaningful cause was absence of policy. (and it still is!) 1/ positive, empirical work is what most social scientists do. data is “receipts”, authority, publications. “surely we need to understand the problem if we are going to solve it.” 2/

This by @mattyglesias is very good. But as he hints in the concluding sentence, it’s no good blaming a mass audience, because a mass audience isn’t a locus that can be held accountable. 1/ slowboring.com/p/media-negati… The institutions through which mass audiences exert effects can be held accountable, and are malleable. 2/

can we please unbundle redistricting reform from the For The People Act and see who wants to go on record in favor of redistricting? 1/ these very aggregated bills destroy Congressional accountability. you can always find cover to support or not yo somewhere in the thing. 2/

some “investments” are “scams” in the sense that the entrepreneur has no intention of doing anything but take the money and run. but most “scam” investments are not that. 1/ most scam investments are scammy because the issuer provides themselves a free option. they DO intend to try to do something or another with the proceeds. but they structure the use of proceeds such that they get rich regardless of whether that something or another works out. 2/

stimulus is a bad metaphor. it is much too “one and done”, invites comparisons with speed (“stimulants”) and therefore suggestions of hangover, withdrawal morbidities, pathological dependence. 1/ it is better to establish a simple principle: at all times, there should be a very ample flow of real purchasing power to all humans willing to contribute to current production. 2/

This is an extraordinary document in a bunch of ways. 1/

https://twitter.com/justinhendrix/status/1386749711755980801

One way to understand it is that Facebook didn’t do a good enough job of identifying and suppressing a dangerous, harmful movement. Events lend some urgency to this point of view. 2/

Last week I lamented the disappearance of voice memos from my wife's iPhone, somewhere over the course of iOS upgrades + phone transfers via iCloud. @ElcomSoft saw my frustration that most tools were unable to scrounge iOS 14 iCloud backups + took pity. Thank you @ElcomSoft! 1/ The @ElcomSoft "Phone Breaker" application was able to download iCloud backups, including from a phone we lost several months ago, that she stopped actively using in 2017. Thanks to that backup, we were able to recover lost memos from 2012-2017 as plain sound files. 2/

this by @lymanstoneky is worth a read, but i think he’s wrong to be so sanguine things are within historical norms. it’s not mere “left” sour grapes but the ideological sorting of the parties and winner-take-all governance that has raised the stakes of representational skew. 1/

https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1369027698668998661

we’d be better off with an electoral system that rewarded multiple parties and fluid coalitions. 2/

Usually the YIMBY proposal is to take zoning decisions out of local hands, on the theory that at the municipal, regional, or state level addressing housing crisis can outweigh idiosyncratic NIMBY resistance. 1/

https://twitter.com/CityLab/status/1363401737231564802

This proposal by @johnrmyers and @michael_hendrix flips that intuition on its head, arguing that at a sufficiently hyperlocal level, there are plenty of city blocks that would not object, that might for their own idiosyncratic reasons desire, “upzoning” of one form or another. 2/

the powerful have always had to self-censor. it’s a prerequisite of wielding power nondestructively. if you’re Fed chair, you don’t get to say what you think candidly in any context it might leak. presidents must be careful not to insult a wide range of delicate sensibilities. 1/ much of “cancel culture” comes from the fact power has become more divorced from formal public roles, so people who don’t understand that their institutional position demands self-censorship, who don’t think they’ve “signed up for this”, face the actual requirement of it. 2/