July 2022
Tuesday, 26 July 2022
Red states are building a nation within a nation
Ronald Brownstein, CNN: “Podhorzer calculated that the gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25% greater in the blue section than in the red.”
Sunday, 24 July 2022
It’s the virus, stupid.
Eric Topol: “That has been accompanied by the most reinfections seen to date, and, in places like Japan, with excellent vaccination uptake but relatively low levels of prior infection, a monstrous wave of infections that already exceeds Omicron BA.1.”
Wednesday, 20 July 2022
Watching American Democracy Melt
Kate Aronoff: “Yet Manchin’s ever-evolving wish list may never have been intended to do anything other than drag negotiations out for as long as possible. As The New York Times reported, he was able to extract some key wins for donors in the fossil fuel industry along the way, including the Interior Department’s recent plan to offer up new federal lands for oil and gas drilling. And Manchin, recall, is himself a coal baron—a living embodiment of U.S. democracy’s inability to tackle conflicts of interest in lawmaking.”
Build Back Better, Dead Again
Adam Tooze: “What it means is that the US energy transition will be slowed down. It will proceed without support and at a considerable disadvantage. It places Detroit, for instance, in an invidious position. The risk is that in the not too distant future the US becomes collateral damage as eurasian transition proceeds. That is bad news for US capital. American business misses out on the profits to be made from green modernization.”
Sunday, 17 July 2022
Debt: The First Five Thousand Years
David Graeber: “For much of human history, systems of virtual money were designed and regulated to ensure that nothing like capitalism could ever emerge to begin with – at least not as it appears in its present form, with most of the world’s population placed in a condition that would in many other periods of history be considered tantamount to slavery.”
Do corporate tax cuts boost economic growth?
Sebastian Gechert, Philipp Heimberger: “There is evidence for publication selectivity in favour of reporting growth-enhancing effects of corporate tax cuts. Correcting for this bias, we cannot reject the hypothesis of a zero effect of corporate taxes on growth.”
Tuesday, 12 July 2022
Post-Roe, many autoimmune patients lose access to ‘gold standard’ drug
Sonja Sharp: “In one case, a pharmacist initially refused to dispense methotrexate to an 8-year-old girl in Texas. In a note the child’s doctor shared with Edens, the pharmacist wrote, ‘Females of possible child bearing potential have to have diagnosis on hard copy with state abortion laws.’”
Sunday, 10 July 2022
Crypto collapse: 3AC, Voyager, Celsius, and other DeFi casualties
Amy Castor and David Gerard: “People are finally realizing that most of the money they thought they had in crypto was imaginary. You didn’t lose money in the crash — you lost your money when you bought crypto.”
Friday, 8 July 2022
It’s the National Security, Stupid
Minna Ålander: “Finland shares a 830-mile-long border with its eastern neighbor—a geopolitical fact that many international observers have only recently found out.”
Thursday, 7 July 2022
We’re Going Into Fossil Fuel Withdrawal
Indi Samarajiva: “People have long asked why don’t governments ‘do something’ about climate collapse, and this is why. Because doing something sucks.”