December 2021
Wednesday, 29 December 2021
Christmas Omicron update
Noah Smith: “This is probably the last Omicron update post I’m going to do, because in the next few weeks, it’ll be a bit moot”
Tuesday, 28 December 2021
A tale of two epidemiologists: It was the worst of times.
Andrew Gelman: “When forecasting the death toll from a pandemic, there are literally orders of magnitude of uncertainty.”
Friday, 17 December 2021
Is Inflation “Non-Transitory”?
Brad DeLong: “This is, as I say over and over again, not a 1970s like inflationary spiral—not melting the engine—but rather leaving rubber on the road as you rejoin the highway traffic at speed. Rejoining the highway traffic at speed is a good thing to do. Leaving rubber on the road is a necessary consequence of doing that. It’s stupid to complain about it. […] You have to incentivize movement into the sectors that need to expand by creating price differentials vis-a-vis the contracting sectors. And with their wages (and some of their prices) downward-sticky, that is a transitory burst of inflation.”
Thursday, 16 December 2021
When The Free Market Chooses Slaughter
Jared Yates Sexton: “The culture war we are embroiled in is stupid. There’s really no other way to put it. “
NASA Enters the Solar Atmosphere for the First Time
NASA: “Parker’s spiral trajectory brings it slowly closer to the Sun and during the last few passes, the spacecraft was consistently below 20 solar radii (91 percent of Earth’s distance from the Sun), putting it in the position to cross the boundary – if the estimates were correct.”
Friday, 10 December 2021
Bros., Lecce: We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever
Geraldine DeRuiter: “On the rare occasion where they did offer an explanation for a dish, it did not help.”
Thursday, 2 December 2021
Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering
Matt Simon: “It doesn’t seem like [for] individual humans, when you put them in behavioral experiments, that a moral hazard around geoengineering exists. Telling people about geoengineering in a controlled way tends to make people want to mitigate greenhouse gases more, because people think geoengineering is kind of nuts and scary.”