WFH Links #11 - October 22, 2021
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Thread on the current shipping crisis and the Port of Los Angeles
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TIL that for the first 18 months of WW2, American torpedoes missed or failed to explode over 70% of the time.
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How Factories Were Made Safe by Jason Crawford - or, how incentives and culture changes reduced the human costs of the Industrial Revolution, largely against worker’s wills.
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How to Build a Town - I liked this very ‘first principles’ guide for how we might create and populate self-sustaining, meaningful towns again.
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“Longing that assails is the antithesis of the longing harbored by the prideful, for it originates not within but without.... To desire is always to risk wholesale reinvention because the potential for revolution is latent in the act of desiring itself. As long as we can want, we are not yet lost: wanting often wounds us, but it can also give us wings.” Pleasure and Justice by Becca Rothfeld
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“What’s radically new is not, at heart, how concerned or permissive we’ve become, but how fully we have given over to our children the job of defining “happiness.” For acceptance parents, neither instinct nor culture is a sufficient guide to what counts as acceptable behavior in a child. Instead of being able to draw on culture and tradition to set standards relative to which children are to be assessed, those standards now come from the people they are to be applied to—more specifically, from future, which is to say, not yet existent, versions of those people.” Acceptance Parenting by Agnes Callard
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“Tactical Urbanism” is a coy term for direct action and civic responsibility for local public spaces when cities and local politics move too slowly to keep neighborhoods and people safe.
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Wilson H joins the ‘stack game, writing about the history of financial technologies and markets.
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David Edgerton wrote about the British Left’s unholy attachment to the shoddy history of British Decline. I believe this can be generalized to show the peril tempted by arguing for modern political possibilities from faulty historical premisses.
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“At Yale we see the American predicament made concrete: an entrenched governing class that enjoys the privileges of elite status but refuses to prepare for the responsibilities of elite station.” I picked an inflammatory quote from the essay, but this is a really penetrating piece about the cross-purposes of having elite university programs like this Yale Grand Strategy one, if graduates aren’t materially better prepared to further the nation’s interests.
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Adam Tooze on the ugly energy economy of West Virginia (91% coal burning in 2020!), and David Roberts on Joe Manchin’s corrupt ties to that lobby.
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Cost Disease Socialism vs Supply Side Progressivism - this is such an interesting lens to view Democratic policy infighting through. Noah Smith is persuasive that attempts to socialize the outsized costs of social goods (eg. college tuition) instead of finding a way to increase the supply/quality of that good will keep us trapped in the status quo, arguing about distribution of entitlements instead of improving material conditions.
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(Just Trust Me) BUCKLE UP people, time for a THREAD 1/245
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Alex
Some of my other writing can be found here.
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