December 2022
Saturday, 24 December 2022
You’re Being Lied to About Electric Cars
Jonny Lieberman, Motor Trend: “And I’m not even going to get into the hypocrisy of posting anti-EV rhetoric from a lithium-ion-battery-powered phone or laptop.”
Wednesday, 21 December 2022
Am I a Warmonger?
Michael McFaul: “Calling for the end of U.S. military aid to Ukraine as a way to pressure Zelenskyy to negotiate is also inhumane. Ukrainians have a right to self-defense. Enabling Putin to kill more Ukrainian soldiers and civilians as a strategy to end this war is immoral.”
Tuesday, 20 December 2022
Immune systems seriously weakened by COVID
Terry Pender, The Waterloo Region Record: “To be clear, nobody is equating COVID’s impact on T-cells to what HIV did to immune systems before effective retroviral treatments were developed. But COVID-19 does eliminate a significant number of T-cells, enough to make large numbers of sick people overwhelm emergency wards with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), pneumonia, strep infections and other ailments.”
Thursday, 15 December 2022
DeSantis launches a strike against lifesaving science
Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board: “And it casts anyone who lines up behind him, up to and including the state’s Supreme Court, as supporting players who are eager to burn their own careers and credibility on the altar of his ambition.”
Friday, 9 December 2022
The End of Vaccines at ‘Warp Speed’
Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times: “scientists aiming to develop nasal vaccines as boosters have discovered that they are barred from using leftover Pfizer or Moderna doses in their studies, despite tens of millions of unused doses having been thrown away”
Thursday, 8 December 2022
The Freight Rail Labor Dispute Was Never About ‘Sick Days’
Aaron Gordon, Vice: “At the time I watched it in February 2021, the video had nine views. Between then and when my first article on the subject was published a month later, there were six main line freight train derailments reported by local media across the country, and many more that went unreported.”
Wednesday, 7 December 2022
My cyberpunk city, my cyberpunk world
Noah Smith: “People will point you to Neuromancer, or Snow Crash, or Ghost in the Shell, or even The Matrix, but none of these, or any other seminal works, fully captured the gestalt in the way that, say, Lord of the Rings defined epic fantasy. Cyberpunk assembled itself in our minds, a vision composed half of a technological and social future we felt was coming, and half of the adventures we imagined ourselves having in that future. […] We felt this future coming; we didn’t need prophets to tell us about it. […] The canonical work of cyberpunk, the most perfect aggregation of the genre’s memes, is not even a single work; it’s a fictional universe that began as a tabletop role-playing game created by the American Mike Pondsmith in the 80s, became a Polish-made video game in 2020, and then became a joint Japanese-Polish animated TV series in 2022.”
Brad DeLong: “This is the world of unbelievable and strange information technologies and extraordinary, unequal wealth, coupled with social dysfunction, and with a great many people straining their every nerve and muscle to figure out how to misinformed people and hack their brains. I do confess I did not think a major reason for the bad actors to do what they do would be ‘to sell ads’.”
The Last 747 Ever Built Has Rolled Off Boeing’s Production Line
Thomas Newdick, The Drive: “The 747 program began life in the late 1960s when a Boeing team dubbed ‘the Incredibles’ were responsible for developing what was then the largest civilian aircraft in the world in a space of only around 16 months.”
Sunday, 4 December 2022
How A Swiss Cheese Cartel Made Fondue Popular
Robert Smith, NPR: “Dominik says if I wanted to see the kind of power they had, I should really go and visit the cheese rebel. He lives in the hills south of Zurich.”
Did Lockdowns Cause Cancer?
Jonathan Howard, Science-Based Medicine: “However, it’s important to seriously consider the counterfactual … What actually would have happened if politicians had allowed hospitals to remain open for cancer screening in the spring of 2020?
I can answer that question for New York City. Exactly zero people would have been screened for cancer at the start of the pandemic.”