Hive mind:Is this fixable or do I just get a new backpack?

I come across this all the time in retirement debates. Someone makes a claim about this or that and I'm like, 'You know, there's data you can actually check on this.'

Of course, the same holds today. Very little of the 'Great Awokening' was truly driven by 'Gen Z' or 'Kids these days.' As I explained for Times Higher Education, if we want to understand the actual institutional dynamics, we must look to 'adults these days: timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-youre-…

In 2008, DC refused to grant me a driver’s license or register the car I’d just bought until I served a three month suspension.

For an underaged drinking offense I committed in a different state.

In 1992.

When I didn’t have a driver’s license Pennsylvania could suspend.

Addiction, homelessness, mental health and low level crime aren't 4 separate issues. It's one big, vicious cycle with few easy answers. But one straightforward step probably would help: automatic enrollment of the incarcerated into Medicaid just before release.

There's a robust…

In a maximally productive economy, literally everyone would be an economist. No need for e.g. the arts—instead we can simply admire the beauty of the Cobb-Douglas production function.

One thing I've learned from MMT leaders is that every economic variable movement in every possible direction is clear proof that MMT was right.

That's a perk of promoting a Calvinball economic theory that has no accompanying economic model that can be tested. Can't be disproven.

So many people advocate for divisive policies like student loan forgiveness instead of commonsense, equally affordable policies like forgiving student debt and also lending me a billion dollars and forgiving that, too.

So rate hikes add to inflation by increasing deficits by hundreds of billions of dollars. But adding trillions of dollars to the deficit in 2021 didn’t cause inflation….

I think conservatives' concern is that lab grown meat will get 'good enough' to justify a ban on real meat, but still won't be as good. This has happened many times - eg, with fluorescent bulbs, heat pumps, EVs, artificial sweeteners, eco hoovers.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

'schooling years turn out to be almost linearly predictive of low fertility, whether within a country over time, or across countries. That graph shows women’s educational attainment, but if you looked at men’s instead the graph isn’t actually radically different. The reason…

So many law students at so many elite law schools (Berkeley, Yale, Stanford, Harvard) don’t understand how the first amendment works. I wonder how this has come to pass?

I have worked for decades as a calligrapher and bicycle messenger, and it pains me to see the Teamsters sell out by using computers to transmit messages for free—callously destroying my middle-class livelihood in the process.

Though Americans were able to finish a transcontinental railroad more than 150 years ago, California is so incompetent at building new rail that I expect to be able to take a self-driving car from Los Angeles to San Francisco before I can take a high speed train.

Academic economists are not conservative as a group. The typical academic economist is a Democrat.

Academic economists are just not as left leaning as other academics on average.

There is a kind of cliche about economics that I just don’t think matches reality.

Would love a good urban econ paper on these systems, now all over LatAm. La Paz one amazed me. ~$20m/km to build, wait time of literally 5 seconds + can run down blvd median (as in El Alto) + hills no problem = solves mass transit issues of transfer time, speed and cost, no?

Really enjoyable Reddit thread on why manual labor wears the body out but going to the gym doesn't. reddit.com/r/explainlikei…

agree.

part of our culture being stuck is pop stars etc. continuously rebelling against the stodgy christian types from footloose who haven't actually been in charge of anything in like 40 years.

Just noting that 6 out of the top 10 entries on this list are not the anti-woke accounts which Substack allegedly caters to, but instead are hard-core #resistance types.

Wow, this was super edgy. In, like, 1982.