Effective Altruism
From ~my husband~: foreign policy asks for the left; did Vasili Arkhipov really save the world?
Tips for inexpensive fun.
Preschools in Ghana have poor educational outcomes, in part because parents want good teaching and teachers believe that parents think lectures and tests are good pedagogy.
The EA Community and Long-Term Future Funds have failed to allocate over one and a half million dollars of donations.
Lessons about how to do cost-effectiveness analysis.
Politics
GOP criticism of Trump has very real effects even if it doesn’t lead to action, including consolidating Republican opposition to Trump’s policies, causing Trump not to do things that might lead him to oppose them, and getting Trump to implement a more normal Republican policy agenda. A very interesting contrarian take.
Strange political ads of the past.
It’s okay to have fairly extreme policies because voters don’t care about policy.
Four tech optimists attempt to explain the 2016 election.
Mayor has to apologize after attempting to fine a couple $10,000 for painting their home like Starry Night.
Social Justice
A deeply personal reflection on transition. “This is kind of a scary way of thinking about things because it means that trans people aren’t completely in control of our own genders. But isn’t that, in fact, the predicament we’re in? The reason misgendering feels so horrible is that, in that moment, the person misgendering you is effectively barring you from being your gender, at least socially. That’s the reason it feels oppressive. You’re literally being deprived of something important to you.”
Ronan Farrow takes down another powerful sexual harasser in entertainment.
Texas Forensic Science Commission finds that blood-spatter analysis is “not accurate or scientifically supported.”
Taxpayer-funded private schools teach that Satan created psychology, environmentalists hate people, and God used the American westward expansion to benefit the Indians.
Arrested Development’s disability humor is surprisingly progressive.
Environmentalism
How the Pentagon downplayed the threat from a family of toxic chemicals.
Environmental justice— protecting the poor from, for example, having toxic waste dumps in their backyard– is actually really important.
Luxury housing as yuppie fishtanks: explaining YIMBYism without supply and demand. (Okay, this link fits in poorly here, but it fits in worse everywhere else!)
Just Plain Neat
Eleven writers’ horniest pop culture moments.
Interviews with several actors who play ugly characters. I’m glad most of them seem to be happy to get the part!
A message from the Unitarian Jihad.
Thing of Things 
YIMBYism link seems clearly a politics thing to me?
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Re: environmental justice – there is a stereotype in Russia that all Moscow residents are rich overprivileged assholes who suck all the juices out of the rest of Russia and shit on it (and this stereotype can result in property damage and violence if someone from Moscow visits the rest of Russia, which I learned the hardest way possible – still healing after more than a decade), and the Moscow government is REALLY not helping to dissolve this stereotype with their solution to garbage: literally just dump it without any processing (do you think they at least have separate collection sites for sharps containers and other medical waste? Nope!) on poorer nearby towns, causing “wonderful” effects such as “local school closed and children are hospitalized due to hydrogen sulfide poisoning”: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/03/21/the-moscow-region-s-great-trash-upheaval
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This story about transmen experiences is also quite interesting. I considered it especially interesting how most of them only realized some major downsides to being a man after transitioning. I think that this speaks to how men are expected to play a stoic role, which makes many women perceive their life as more privileged than it is.
The person who transitioned from a black woman to a black man was logically shocked by his experiences with the police. Presumably, he was unaware, like most people, that the data suggests that black women don’t face more bias in the justice system than white women, while men face this very strongly and black men even more so.
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So the shocking conclusion of the Yuppie Fishtank post is that if a load of people suddenly arrive demanding a specific type of housing (near tech jobs) that’s probably cheaper to supply than the alternatives (smaller footprint, better scale), we should build that kind of housing, rather than other kinds of housing.
I think price theory can handle that concept just fine.
Specifically, you have two types of consumer (yuppies and non-yuppies), and three types of product (fishtanks, existing housing and affordable housing).
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Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
I.e., nobody except liberals was ever supposed to win again. Why did anyone think this? Were non-liberals not supposed to ever use the Internet? Or only passively consume content on it, rather than producing it? That would require quite a bit of censorship.
Uh, Cablegate, the DNC Leaks, and the Podesta leaks (including Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs transcripts) is exactly what citizens being privileged over countries looks like.
Consider counterfactuals. And see previous.
No. That interest’s lack of existence is definitely a big part of that hesitancy, though.
The people most likely to quit ICE due to such appeals are the very people making such appeals want in ICE.
There’s no use trying to conjure up something that disappeared around 2009. There is absolutely no such thing as the anti-imperialist left in Congress.
Hm; Blacks being amazingly conventional in regards to their preferred structures of authority is more than an American phenomenon.
Dog bites man story, sadly.
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Trying to get people on to sing on to YIMBYism by arguing that the new luxury condos are yuppie fish tanks will not work. First, YIMBYs make that article. The more economically leftist YIMBYs point out that you can’t stop wealthy people from moving into the city but if you build new luxury housing for wealthy, people they won’t buy existing pre-existing housing and remodel it to their tastes. This doesn’t work as an argument because the main driving force of the most activist NIMBYs are keeping property values up. They need less housing in order to keep their wealth in tact. Real estate is wealth, especially in desirable areas. It is still the most common form of wealth for most ordinary people.
The reasons why the yuppie fish tank does not work on the poorer tenant NIMBYs is that most of them are of the type that want cities to remain refuges for the marginalized outcasts of society like they were between 1945 until the end of the 1990s when cities began to rebound. They do not like yuppies and do not want them in their cities. Wealthy NIMBYs are often old hippies and manage to look the part of a counter-cultural rebel more than a younger YIMBY even if the YIMBY is a person of color or LGBT. YIMBYs suffer from being bourgeois and showing it.
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Blood spatter analysis link seems to say that a specific analysis is scientifically unsupported because the person doing it was unqualified and didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, not that blood spatter analysis in general is scientifically unsupported.
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