“Contrast that with this world (all numbers in real terms):
Time period 1: A makes $1, B makes $6, C makes $10.
Time period 2: A makes $10, B makes $5, C makes $9.
The median change in income is negative, two out of three people saw their wages decline. Do you think this means the economy got worse?”
I’m not sure I’m following your overall points in this section, but I’d certainly expect people to vote like they believed the economy got worse in such a situation.
Eschew seats with cupholders and you can definitely get 3 car seats in any normal car. I’ve done rear facing + forward facing + high backed booster in an older prius and a number of rental cars (the forward facing one goes in the middle).
Re Tariffs, the results from that paper seem surprising to me (that a US trade war would make almost all other countries better off then the status quo). Since export tariffs are a thing, If we invert the agency here, this says that if we were to solve the coordination problem (and Coase says there’s a deal to be made, even for Canada) export+import tariffs of 10% applied universally on goods destined to/sourced from the United States (+60% for Chinese goods) would be a net win for everyone ex-US and raise substantial tax money that could be used to offset other taxes further increasing the benefits. That would seem to be a rational choice, EU/BRICS etc. should perhaps get on that.
At least in this model, universal sanctions of this type targeting the US would make the sanctioning countries better off; not a usual argument I hear around the economic impacts of sanctions. Is the US somehow unusual here or are sanctions against say Iran or Russia potentially making the rest of the world richer (at the cost of even greater harm to those countries [win-win from a sanctions perspective])?
Given the usual arguments around the benefits of free trade, this is a really surprising result. Assuming there’s any actual legitimacy to this model I have many questions on the optimal game theory implications.
I’m a bit more worried that it’s yet another step towards atomization. With churches and general community organizations already dying work remained one of the few places where people met a set of, at least relatively speaking, non-selected other people.
W/respect to booster shot side effects being less than 2nd shot side effects, I wonder if there’s a selection effect at play. Anecdotally, I know of a few people who would I have otherwise would have expected to get booster shots, who are holding off from now because their reaction to the second shot was on the worse end (e.g. multiple days of fatigue etc.). Presuming a correlation between 2nd dose side effects and booster side effects it may be that the population most prone to getting side effects from the vaccination is less likely to get the booster. Would be curious if that study was looking at a particular cohort of people (or is such a study will be conducted in the future) to avoid that sort of confounding.
“QC: the water usage argument against LLMs is extremely bad faith...”
Rule of thumb, if you’re reading some article and the water usage is measured in gallons, it’s bullsh*t. This isn’t even that, ml, seriously?! My very normal suburban house water bill doesn’t even measure in gallons, it measures in hundreds of cubic feet (at about $5/per hundred cubic feet). People do not realize how vast the quantities of water humans regularly divert and move around are (and how very little of it is required to directly sustain human life).