Coase’s "Net effect?" Ghost 🏴🕊️

The exaggerated issue of retributivism: retributivist legal philosopher Douglas Husak raises further issues on how the bare theory, per se, does not state *any* imprisonment is justified, other forms of punishment could be, and certainly not a particular imprisonment rate.

One issue for @DouthatNYT’s account here is that both the sexual revolution and rock 'n' roll began during the Baby Boom years. From 1940 to 1945, the rate of single motherhood increased by 44 percent. One cause was the independence enjoyed by young women working jobs and living away from home due to the lack of men in the workforce. “The plant and town were just full of working girls who were on the make…,” one male factory worker later recalled. “It was a sex paradise.” Another element was the increased availability of penicillin, which tumbled from a price of $20 per vial in 1943 to under $1 by 1945. Surveying these changes, the historian Alan Petigny concluded that the sexual revolution began not in the 1960s, but with World War II. And it continued into the ’50s. In 1956, a mother in the midwest said talking about rock 'n' roll said, “It looks like a Roman orgy when those kids get together.” x.com/DouthatNYT/sta…

🔪"Shame has been viewed as maladaptive... In contrast, data from six countries and two US regions suggest that shame is everywhere organized to protect individuals against reputational damage, supporting its status as an adaptation" pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

"Likewise, 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex." nber.org/system/files/w…

"we find little evidence of near-term aggregate employment declines due to AI" nber.org/papers/w34984

Charles Darwin suspected that humans and animals share similar aesthetic tastes. A new citizen science experiment supports this hypothesis, showing that people strongly prefer the exact same acoustic patterns that attract female animals. dlvr.it/TRft9f

A simple measure of energy security among the G20 Ratio of energy production to energy consumption

@Benthamsbulldog It has the most impressive set of endorsements of any book I have come across.

Long plane ride--what book should I get?

@GuiveAssadi That's not true, he essentially blames Russia for both the Armenian genocide and World War I.

@GhostCoase McMeekin is an exception to this trend, he is extremely anti-Soviet but not very anti-Russian.

"90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024...".

Roughly concurrent with the rise of non-hunting, non-target shooting, defensive gun culture in America after the 1950s, the gun stock shifted away from revolvers and domestic rifles to semiautomatic handguns and foreign, "military-style" center-fire long guns.

Low-information Eastern Canadian voters, special interests versus, well, reality: "[O]ne of the talking points that the government has used to justify this ban is that, well, this is something police want, yet we see police forces across the country refusing to participate."

The Canadian gun debate as not only urban v. rural areas, but also Western (pro-gun rights) and Eastern Canada (anti-gun rights) at odds and over issues of identity.

@UnfreeBurger The average gun homicide is shot fewer than 5 times, reloading is fast and mass shooters generally have slow rates of fire and/or multiple firearms (Kleck, 2016), so the common proposal to limit magazine capacity to 10 rounds is illogical.

@GhostCoase What do you think magazine-capacity restrictions have on homicide rates?

"Of the 1 billion or so magazines that have been sold in the United States since 1990, according to a 2024 report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), about three-quarters hold more than 10 rounds, while nearly half hold 30 or more."

@kharisborloff 6/ @jekavanagh calls for overhauling America's Taiwan policy. She argues US level of interests in Taiwan doesn't justify conflict with China. She urges US to accelerate arms transfers to Taiwan and turn over responsibility for defense of Taiwan by 2030. brookings.edu/articles/a-str…

The important thing to understand about (rapid) Soviet industrialization and economic growth 1928-40 was that it was driven by sectoral reallocation from agriculture to industry, not rising productivity within these groups (agriculture in particular badly suffered).

NEW: As Trump sends 1000s more troops toward Iran, service members report disillusionment+panic - Troops arguing "We do not want to die for Israel" - Uptick in conscientious objector + dissent talk - Evacuees from region describe huge danger/vulnerability huffpost.com/entry/trump-tr…

1/ Gas prices are surging.⛽️ In the three weeks since the conflict in Iran began, fuel prices in the US and Australia have jumped by more than 25%. While the whole world is impacted, the #StateStreetPriceStats data shows that developed countries are seeing the largest price increases so far🧵

At least one of 6 Ukrainians arrested in India on terrorism charges was in far-right Right Sector-led Aratta Battalion: "Ukrainian, US nationals accused of ‘conspiring to carry out terror activities’ using ‘drones from Europe.”

"After more than two weeks of consistent bombing, new US intelligence suggests Iran’s regime is now consolidating power, unlikely to collapse, and led by a cadre more extreme than before." 😬 cato.org/blog/strategic…

What's interesting is that Adolf Hitler was an ethical vegetarian in his final years, in fact there are eyewitness accounts of him bothering guests with gruesome details of how animals are slaughtered.