Sabine Hosselfelder explains the deterministic universe postulated by physicist Gerard t' Hooft, 14-minute video.
As I predicted, the University of Austin is having trouble navigating between being conservative and supporting academic freedom: "what I was observing was symptomatic of the larger ideological tension developing within UATX between two camps—those specifically championing an unabashedly “anti-woke” conservative agenda, and those (such as myself) prioritising academic freedom more generally."
Perun, the Australian defense economics YouTuber whose Ukraine content I have linked here several times, reveals in this Q&A video that he got into defense economics by working on the wiki for Civilization II.
Chelmsford Museum acquires the Great Badow Hoard, the largest known hoard of Iron Age gold coins in Britain.
The relationship between education level and church attendance in the US is the reverse of that in Europe.
Medical federalism in Montana: "The US state of Montana this week enacted a groundbreaking law that opens the door for clinics and physicians to provide experimental drugs and therapies that have not received approval from the US FDA." Via Marginal Revolution.
People have been using Russian death and population statistics to estimate war casualties. The government has responded by announcing that they will no longer publish these numbers. (Twitter/X)
Trump said the other day that "Kyiv would have fallen in five hours if Putin’s tanks hadn’t gotten stuck in the mud." Irritated Ukrainians keep posting pictures of their early war victories – Russian columns under attack, that vehicle-strewn road near Bucha, the hangars at Hostemel Airport – with the caption "Ukrainian mud."
To me, the best situation for Britain would be a spot outside the EU but with something close to free trade. They tried to get this after Brexit, but the irritated EU leadership was in no mood to make deals. New trade and defense deal announced today moves them a small distance in that direction. (NY Times, Reuters, BBC)
Freddie deBoer gets grouchy when progressives refuse to admit that progress has been made, for example, the number of LGBTQ characters on television, or the number of minority authors signed to book deals: "So to the people who both championed this change and now insist that it doesn’t matter, I can only ask - then why did you fight for it in the first place?"
A claim that AI is already eliminating entry-level office jobs: "Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple code and debugging — the ways junior developers gain experience. In law firms, junior paralegals and first-year associates who once cut their teeth on document review are handing weeks of work over to A.I. tools to complete in a matter of hours. And across retailers, A.I. chatbots and automated customer service tools are taking on duties once assigned to young associates." (NY Times)
Thread from Shashank Joshi summarizing what various European intelligence reports say about how quickly Russia could rebuild its military after the Ukraine War.
Thread detailing what went down in a 6/29/2023 meeting between Prigozhin and Putin, based on a new book about the Wagner Group. (Twitter/X, Threadreader)
On a Panamanian island, juvenile Capuchin monkeys keep abducting infants of another monkey species. Researcher: "Capuchins do such interesting, weird, quirky and sometimes dark things." Like other primates we could name. News story, original paper.
Italian archaeologists have restudied a paleolithic skeleton excavated in 1973 and concluded that he was killed by stone-tipped "projectiles", likely in an ambush.
NY Times piece on the most beautiful gardens they have featured lately.
The US mint announces that it will stop producing pennies as soon as their supply of existing blanks runs out. (NY Times, BBC) Hey, great, I've been advocating this for years, but without some kind of legislation, what happens when there's a penny shortage? What about the grouchy people who insist on exact change?
Spitalfields Life stumbles on a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings related to the Eagle Tavern in London, lots of 19th-century circus posters: the Giraffe Girl, the World's Smallest Man, etc.
Battle honors of Polish regiments, buried in WW II, are found in a Polish forest.
Alex Tabarrok defends letting the top foreign students stay in the US after graduation.
Most of Russia's military bases are virtually empty, as shown by satellite imagery, except for a few bordering Finland and Estonia. The bases around Moscow that used to house forces for defending the regime are deserted. Essentially, Russia's ground fighting power is all in Ukraine. 10-minute video from Covert Cabal.
3 comments:
The relationship between education level and church attendance in the US is the reverse of that in Europe.
"Church attendance" is sort of a weird metric to consider, given that different denominations place differing emphasis on the importance of attending church.
American Christians are predominantly Protestant, comprising about 49% of the faith. In contrast, Catholics only make up about 32% of American Christians.
But in Europe, Protestants are the smallest minority! The bulk of European Christians are Catholics - about 48%. This is then followed up by Orthodox Christians - a denomination that virtually doesn't exist in America, but which makes up a whopping 32% of Europeans! Only about 19% of European Christians are Protestants!
America represents 1/5th of the global protestant population! SURELY that's deeply relevant when considering churchgoing habits in the US vs the rest of the world?
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But beyond that, there are additional factors to consider.
Going to church is a time commitment.The less free time you have, the less likely you are to go to church. Similarly, if you have to work on Sundays (or on other days when alternate services are held), then you're again less likely to go to church.
Do poorly educated Americans have substantially less free time / substantially more scheduling conflicts than poorly educated Europeans? Worth looking into...
What about transit? Europe is known for its much greater degree of "walkability" in cities, as well as public transportation. Do poorly educated Americans have a harder time physically getting to church than their European counterparts?
What about looking at the relationship in the opposite direction? Could it be that the kind of people who attend church the most in America also prioritize education to a greater degree? Might it be that Americans are simply more zealous overall, and the subsets of the population that are MOST zealous also are the least accepting of people stopping their education earlier?
What about the role "religious education" plays in measuring things? How many colleges and universities in America are distinctly religious in their offerings, compared to how many in Europe?
Most of Russia's military bases are virtually empty, as shown by satellite imagery, except for a few bordering Finland and Estonia. The bases around Moscow that used to house forces for defending the regime are deserted. Essentially, Russia's ground fighting power is all in Ukraine.
I confess, before Finland joined NATO, I would sometimes catch myself wishing they would invade Russia from their essentially undefended northwestern flank, overrun St. Petersburg, and march from there on Moscow. They could have demanded the return of Karelia, in addition to forcing Russia to withdraw from Ukraine (and return Crimea).
Alas, the war could be over already if only a second front were opened somewhere and the Russians couldn't possibly respond.
The US mint announces that it will stop producing pennies as soon as their supply of existing blanks runs out. (NY Times, BBC) Hey, great, I've been advocating this for years, but without some kind of legislation, what happens when there's a penny shortage? What about the grouchy people who insist on exact change?
America increasingly doesn't bother with "legislation", and instead relies merely on whatever policy and interpretation are favored in the moment.
For example, we don't bother to formally declare wars anymore, we just send the troops to go kill people illegally, and no one else can do anything about it. You can't sue the military over waging undeclared wars, because there's no law on the books specifically disallowing it - so as long as Congress doesn't lift a finger to change that, or address the issue via some other means, the status quo remains, based on everyone just agreeing not to follow the rules.
In the same vein, there's no law requiring the treasury to produce pennies - it's up to their sole discretion, legally speaking. And if people don't like that, well... they can't exactly take them to court, so the only recourse would be Congress deciding to do something via other means, and Congress seemingly doesn't care one iota about the matter.
As for how people will address it? Rounding prices to the nearest nickel (with generally companies rounding in their favor overall, naturally).
The number of people who are going to demand exact change in such a way as to cause some kind of issue is going to be very small - and the solution of simply reducing their bill by 1 to 4 cents to satisfy them is so simple and virtually without cost that no one is realistically going to bother doing otherwise.
Most corporations already are willing to give people who seriously complain $5, $10, $20 off their bills to shut them up and get on with their day, no one is going to bat an eye at "losing" a few cents to the rare customer willing to raise a stink over it - especially when they can just plan ahead and fold that cost into their pricing, and make up MUCH more than the difference by rounding everything else UP to the nearest nickel for most transactions.
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