Makes sense. Ads that mislead people about whether medicine will cure illness or harm them further are no worse than telling them their skin will be fairer after using soap. Overcoming colonial mindset includes the right to poison oneself. #sarcasm

Proudly noting that Jon was one of my advisors. And was surprisingly willing to be on my committee though I wasn't in the Econ PhD and walked into his room to tell him I was in the engineering school and thought economics was mostly saying simple things in complicated ways.

Indian media not only conducting pointless opinion polls, but reporting them as 'live' broadcasts mimicking real results. This poll, with no information on attrition or sampling strategy or standard errors uses an average of 82 respondents per seat (best I could tell).

Another instance when researchers are allowed - even encouraged - to be mindless about empirical methods

Really surprising how many people think you need calculus to teach stats. You absolutely don't, with computers and simulations you can teach whatever you please without ever drawing an integral sign. It's not only more accessible, I think it's better on many dimensions.

We should still blame STATA. A rank deficient matrix should throw an error -you're asking for something ill defined. But this is (paid) software that even autocompletes variable/function names, runs mergesort if asked to merge, and until recently couldn't count above 1 dataframe

Does Netflix do anything right? Let's make a TV show of the 3-body problem, a book which spans everything from the heat death of the universe to high dimensional life forms, but let's not set it in (an ascendant) China because it's too unfamiliar for viewers. 🙄

When Surjit Bhalla etc advocate for income surveys, they are ignored.

When they say Piketty et al make dubious assumptions(because we publish no data) they get cheers for uncovering 'agenda' of foreign academics.

But come 2025, we will still collect no data.

Levy was fired for tweeting to David Cameron: “I hope you are also aware there are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment into Gaza, and in fact the crossings have EXCESS capacity”

The lie was too big even for his bosses.
thejc.com/news/israel/st…

This is a well meaning idea but the issue with diversity is some people and ideas not getting *heard*. So what the profession needs is a diversity of people presenting, not just listening. It isn't the airfare that is the truly scarce resource, it's the speaker slot.

graph annual average temperature with a y axis that goes from 0 °C to 1000 °C, and suddenly the climate crisis looks like a joke

The US is already working hard to undermine the UN ceasefire resolution that just passed, with them abstaining.

The US ambassador to the UN called it 'non-binding': it isn't, it's a 'demand' by the UN Security Council, that's binding!

And they also say the ceasefire is linked…

How very brave of the US to stand up to it's client and ask it to investigate itself. We can all be sure the proceedings will be completely impartial

Complete shocker, putting into law the concept that the Palestinians are not allowed to have human rights, only Israelis, and that the Palestinians will be punished if they have the temerity to ask for their human rights to be upheld. Why isn't every American journalist…