June 2022
Thursday, 30 June 2022
You scheduled an abortion. Planned Parenthood’s website could tell Facebook.
Tatum Hunter: “… Planned Parenthood’s web scheduler … share information with a variety of third parties, including Google, Facebook, TikTok and Hotjar …”
Tuesday, 28 June 2022
How 2020 set the stage for the 2021 bitcoin bubble
Amy Castor and David Gerard: “With that bitcoin number achieved, the press would cover the number going up — because ‘number go up’ is the most interesting possible story in finance.”
Monday, 27 June 2022
Alito’s Plan to Repeal the 20th Century
Adam Serwer: “Aside from rights specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution, Alito argues, only those rights ‘deeply rooted in the nation’s history in tradition’ deserve its protections. This is as arbitrary as it is lawless.”
“In the Worst Case, It Could Take a Few More Winters”
Der Spiegel: “It isn’t possible for enough people to get infected in the summer to keep the corona numbers down in the winter. That was evident last year in Britain: The measures were relaxed there in the summer because of the European football championship, and there was a huge number of infections – but in the following autumn and winter, the number of severe cases and deaths was even higher than in Germany, and this despite better vaccination coverage among the population. The summer infections had no preparatory effect for the winter.”
The Biden administration has dropped the ball on vaccine development
Noah Smith: “This brings me to my fourth candidate explanation: Simple inertia and distraction. The percent of Americans naming the coronavirus as the country’s top problem has faded into insignificance, replaced by concerns like inflation and crime (and, after this week, possibly abortion rights). Even though many Americans are still dying or being afflicted with long Covid, the Biden administration may have simply concluded that the disease is no longer an issue worth spending political capital or attention on …”
Saturday, 25 June 2022
We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse
Jia Tolentino: “Both abortion and miscarriage currently occur more than a million times each year in America, and the two events are often clinically indistinguishable. Because of this, prohibition states will have a profoundly invasive interest in differentiating between them.”
Friday, 24 June 2022
18th-Century Infallibility Theory
Robert Tracinski: “What Blass is arguing—and what I think the Dobbs opinion clearly implies—is that Alito has collapsed those two tests into one test. A right will only be recognized as implicit in liberty if it is also recognized in tradition. It replaces liberty as a standard with tradition as a standard, as I have argued elsewhere.”
Saturday, 18 June 2022
Record-Breaking Voyager Spacecraft Begin to Power Down - Scientific American
Tim Folger: “‘In those days we always launched two spacecraft’ because the failure rate was so high, said Donald Gurnett, only partly in jest.”
Friday, 10 June 2022
The COVID Event Horizon
jenka: “All of which begs the question: how many SARS-CoV-2 infections can an organism sustain? People don’t get the flu 2 or 3 times a year, and if they did that would probably *also* be bad. But getting a thing that kills your T cells seems not infinitely scalable, right? […] Population-level immune dysfunction may go a ways to explaining the emergence of the sudden new characters in our viral cinematic universe — Monkeypox, Pediatric Hepatitis, et al.”
It All Came Together Against Chesa Boudin
Patrick Redford: “If it seems strange to blame the DA and only the DA for problems so obviously outside of his purview, it is because it is in fact very strange to do that. But it is not hard to know why it happened: a good deal of the anger towards Boudin is the product of a well-funded and highly coordinated media campaign that, like any successful campaign of that kind, didn’t just push a narrative but create its own emotional reality.”