2022-06-12

Worthy

We won the war on infectious diseases, but now we need to learn from it

there seems to be a single intervention that might have been almost as important as all the others combined in bringing about change: cleaner water sources. The implementation of these improved water management systems might be the most impressive work ever carried out by this country’s city governments.

Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I
Mass frog burial baffles experts at iron age site near Cambridge
Found: The ‘how to draw’ books Pablo Picasso created for his daughter
Corruption is logical or why all state and private partnerships will fail.
Toyota win Le Mans 2022 with the GR010 Hybrid – 5th consecutive win
Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money

The broader problem with budget culture is its emphasis on individual responsibility and insistence on ignoring the varying levels of access and privilege in our world. It vilifies and oppresses anyone who doesn’t live up to the ideal, regardless of their circumstances. And that ideal is, unsurprisingly, rooted in maleness and whiteness in the way many of our cultural ideals are. Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things like power at work, freedom from domestic labor, well-rounded education, debt elimination, homeownership, credit, and other things moneyed, straight white men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else.

School police chief Arredondo speaks

One of the many things you’ll learn if you read the whole thing is that one of the teachers who was murdered, Irma Garcia, was married to Arredondo’s second cousin Joe Garcia (who died two days later of what appears to have been a heart attack), a man with whom he’d grown up. That’s typical of the sort of intertwining of police and victims that you had in Uvalde, and still another reason why the “callous cowardly police” narrative didn’t seem likely to me and doesn’t seem likely to me.

Low economic growth is a slow-burning crisis for Britain
Lou's Credit News

The CPI news this morning was so awful that it changed the bond market’s view of Fed trajectory, and the weakest sector broke. In bond jargon, MBS went “no-bid.” No buyers for MBS. Then a few posted prices beyond borrower demand, not wanting to buy except at penalty prices. Overnight the retail consequence has been a leap from roughly 5.50% to 6.00% for low-fee 30-fixed loans. The physics of collisions... the second one does the harm. When your car hits a telephone pole, no problem. Then, after a slight lag, trouble comes when you hit the inside of your car. Same thing in football: helmet on helmet is all-okay... until your brain hits the inside of your skull.
How Far Can ‘Shrinkflation’ Go?
Startup Cerebral Soared on Easy Adderall Prescriptions. That Was Its Undoing
Why meat is so expensive
How the housing market is yanking the ‘American dream’ increasingly out of reach
Ask HN: Is it the “worst” time to buy a house?
The economy is pretty terrible, but some people are still winning