Cool Links

The COVID-19 pandemic, and in some sense responses to the COVID-19 pandemic(1), have hurt the worldwide economy - and that will impact poorer nations most.

India is cutting its agriculture 26 percent, to 44.6 billion, this fiscal year, and that has risks. This is not solar power or something else that is a luxury that only helps a few, food is a strategic resource. You wouldn't outsource your military to China or Russia(2) for the same reason that a month after Democrats were yelling at oil companies that they needed to cut oil production or else they were telling oil companies to increase production or else - a strategic resource, like energy or defense, is too important to risk handing to competitors.
In the current climate, you can't lie about being a native American if you are an academic but you can get away with a lot. Yet even those options are dwindling. Professor Tyrone Hayes of Berkeley once engaged in threats and bullying of women and it was rationalized by his allies but such cock-fixated megalomaniac behavior would get calls for his dismissal now.
Despite what conspiracy theorists opposed to science want to believe, career bureaucrats are mostly not political appointees - but their ranks are politically lopsided. If you know politics you know that in the United States a career in government will be a lot more appealing to one political party than another.
A decade ago there was controversy over allowing oil drilling in the gigantic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The people living there all wanted it because they knew what the area the drilling would occur was like - the moon more than the earth we love. Activists nonetheless showed pictures of caribou munching on grass far below where the actual drilling was.

It wasn't even explored until the 1950s, that is how remote much of it is. There are no roads into it. It's been a political football since the 1970s. A Senate bill forced President Trump to approve two leases while President Biden issued an executive order halting development - and then a few months later was criticizing oil companies for not producing enough oil during the Russian-Ukraine War.
You may not drive 250 miles back and forth to work but you may drive 125 on a trip, and that could be all you are getting in an electric vehicle when it is cold. Electric car efficiency plummets below moderate temperature, 40 percent or more, but just like government will go after conventional fuel companies who get their emissions wrong, now electric isn't without scrutiny. And they are getting penalties for not being more truthful about their limits.
In 1066, Duke William of Normandy left France on a fleet of ships to fight his cousin and competitor for the vacant English throne, Harold Godwinson, and at the Battle of Hastings, the matter was settled. Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon claimant, was dead, and a new age for England began.(1)

Had the EU existed then, he'd have never had the chance. Given current EU red tape, efforts to make a replica of La Mora, the ship Williams used to become The Conqueror, mean it may still not be ready for the 1,000 year anniversary. Unless Great Britain, having shucked off their two-decade experiment in the EU, build it for them.
Neither CNN nor ABC will have hosts like Ryan Seacrest and Anderson Cooper firing up cigarettes during this year's New Years Eve broadcasts, watched by millions across the U.S. 

Wait, they did that last year? Of course not(1) but another class 1 carcinogen - determined when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was still a legitimate epidemiology group and not the modern grift for ban-everything trial lawyers - was on the air last year.

That carcinogen is alcohol. 

It makes no sense that we fear cigarettes and the impact on young people if they even appear in movies but the next greatest lifestyle killer is promoted on CNN, basically being endorsed by news personalities like Anderson Cooper.
An account going by the name of Andy Hsieh, there is a lot of astroturf in the anti-science community so it's hard to know if it's even a real blogger, wrote one of those predictable screeds endorsing their political allies, this time against agriculture.

It could have been cell phones or vaccines or nuclear energy - 84% of the time if you see any of those you know every political and scientific position they hold(1) - and the conspiracy tale would be the same.

'Chestnuts roasting on an open fire' is in a popular Christmas song, but a lot less common now than when it was written. That is due to an invasive species from Asia. It was once common for environmentally woke people to introduce species from Asia in their opposition to chemicals, because they believed all nature is better than any science, but from California (Bradford pear) to Vermont (the American chestnut) what the science community warned them about doing came to pass. Devastation.
The pandemic must be over because activists are back to complaining about Christmas trees, which means they will also be back to being anti-vaccine as soon as Republicans stop being idiots and it is once again a safe space for progressives to own. Just like every year from 1998 to 2020.
In the mid-term elections, political pundits noted that if demographic shifts continue, minorities and the young will be less of a factor for Democrats while rural areas will decline for Republicans.

Maybe candidates need to start embracing Playstation culture. An analysis of search results by coupon site Rakuten reveals that Florida, California, and Texas can't agree on much except a Playstation 5 at Christmas (Since we are a nonprofit, Amazon Smile gives us a nickel or something if you use the links from here.) 

That's right, it is the top most searched for Christmas gift this year, from Pelosi-land to DeSantis-ville.
The California state legislature mostly exists to pass new regulations, but does very little for the public they claim to serve. Anything important instead has to go around government by way of voter referendum.
France is soon going to be asking for a bailout from coal power plants in England. You may be wondering why they need it, since energy is the only scientific area where France shows leadership. They continued to embrace nuclear energy after the U.S. and Germany caved in to progressive activists and ran it into the ground.

The problem is it's a government union, and just like government unions in the US use taxpayer money to hire lobbyists to get themselves raises from other people in government paid by taxes on the poor, French government workers knew with Russia causing high competition and a cold snap during winter, it was the perfect time to strike. Literally and figuratively.
You wouldn't know it by deceptive marketing practices but it takes far more chemicals per calorie using "organic" certified pesticides than it does using modern ones. 

The reason is simple; organic industry lobbyists picked an artificial point in time and declared anything before it was organic. Mutagenesis, for example, is a literal radiation and chemical bath to force mutations randomly, but thousands and thousands of products are not only on the market without protest, they are certified organic while far more precise modern genetic modification is not. 
Microtransactions in games don't really bother me. If it's taking away something tedious or just letting game players do something faster, no big deal. 

Yet imagine you paid a small fortune, probably at a premium since flag-waving capitalists running car companies make sure government won't let you buy a car without a dealer (car dealers love socialism when it makes them rich) only to find out your fancy electric car has features - like acceleration - that some grifter didn't tell you would cost another $1,200 per year. 

Welcome to Mercedes Microtransactions.
NASA is really excited they can fly a spacecraft near the moon. This seems odd, since they did a flyby nearly 60 years ago, as preparation for the moon landing in 1969.

Now, some people think the moon landing never happened, just like some people believe organic red wine is good for you or that solar power is a viable option source of energy for more than 0.6% of us.


In all cases they can point to strange government writings as circumstantial proof, and the moon hoax fringe has to be as giddy as NASA is about Artemis. 
Welcome to modern colonialism. Literally, the parents of a wealthy cryptocurrency grifter got handed an expensive residence in the Bahamas once inhabited by plantation owners. And now the two Stanford law professors are going to have to try to hide behind age and confusion as to why they didn't see anything wrong with that.

Like the guy who ran WeWork, Sam Bankman-Fried used all the right buzzwords when raising money, and there is no more effective term to make wealthy elites squee in 2022 than "effective altruism." Like "smurf", it can mean anything you want it to mean. Like $300 million in homes for friends and family while $10 billion in customer assets are in some fantasy universe.
A new study finds cholesterol makes no meaningful difference in your health. Who knew?
Well, everyone. Because it lacked a biological explanation, it was instead looking at a statistical risk factor for a risk factor and telling people to stop eating meat, butter, and eggs.

And yet government and doctors have abdicated critical thinking to epidemiology to such an extent they'll believe anything if someone declares statistical significance. Which they did here, and cost consumers a trillion dollars while doing...nothing.
It's no secret that California is having a crisis of confidence. Water is too expensive and too scarce but politicians jammed through the implosion of four more dams anyway, while energy costs are high due to solar and wind subsidies. The state refused to pay for schooling for poor kids but is saying that college graduates who get their student loans waived won't have to pay taxes. While the state has a $25 billion deficit this year. It turns out that people selling stocks in a bad economy and paying capital gains taxes is not a business mode.
The worst-kept secret in student loans is not that the same party now wanting to force the rest of us to pay them off put unlimited student loans into law in the first place, nor that wiping out loans will never survive court challenges and was always a political stunt, but that the biggest beneficiaries, proponents, and defenders are and have always been universities.

With loans unlimited, so are salaries and buildings and administrators. And grifts.