Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 3/23/2017


The reader survey now N > 300. I assume it will stabilize in the next few weeks in the 400s.

So far the biggest surprise that I’ve noticed is the ratio of married to divorced; 14o to 9. But, this aligns with research that college educated people do not get divorced at a high rate, and more than 50% of my readership has completed graduate educations, so the sample is probably even more biased.

In France it is Marcon vs. Le Pen for the second round it seems. It seems likely Marcon will win the second round…but I do wonder if some far Left voters will refuse to vote for a candidate is a pretty transparent avatar of the globalist elite.

I love California, but, In costly Bay Area, even six-figure salaries are considered ‘low income’:

San Francisco and San Mateo counties have the highest limits in the Bay Area — and among the highest such numbers in the country. A family of four with an income of $105,350 per year is considered “low income.” A $65,800 annual income is considered “very low” for a family the same size, and $39,500 is “extremely low.” The median income for those areas is $115,300.

The problem many, but not all, Lefties in this part of the country have is their rhetoric is always about making housing affordable, not making more housing (which would naturally lead to more affordability).

Stanford CS department updates introductory courses: Java is Gone.

I was a bit surprised how few readers had read Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. I’d highly recommend it.

A new wave of GSS data is out. Might start some GSS blogging again.

Maybe moderate drinking isn’t so good for you after all:

But our latest research challenges this view. We found while moderate drinkers are healthier than relatively heavy drinkers or non-drinkers, they are also wealthier. When we control for the influence of wealth, then alcohol’s apparent health benefit is much reduced in women aged 50 years or older, and disappears completely in men of similar age.

People I know had long warned these were observational studies. But perhaps I run with a strange crowd….

Why the Menace of Mosquitoes Will Only Get Worse: Climate change is altering the environment in ways that increase the potential for viruses like Zika.

11 thoughts on “Open Thread, 3/23/2017

  1. “Why the Menace of Mosquitoes Will Only Get Worse”

    It is not the climate. It is drainage. Russia suffered from endemic malaria in the 19th Century.

    The way to control tropical diseases is to drain ecologically important wetlands — the places men called malaria swamps in a more enlightened era.

    The NYTimes annoys me no end.

    [i did think this too; northeast had malaria. but the climate changes are not going to help. ppl in singapore do get tropical diseases now and then -Razib]

  2. RE: the survey. Next year you should include a question on reading comprehension. Driving home several hours after filling it out, I realized that I had read “… less … than 95% of males” as “… less than the 95th percentile of males”. Slightly different. Or perhaps offer a prize for correct answers (to provide an incentive for careful reading). Oh well.

  3. “… but I do wonder if some far Left voters will refuse to vote for a candidate is a pretty transparent avatar of the globalist elite.”

    I predict that they won’t care. Rebels for the Status Quo.

  4. Drainage. Drainage and insecticides. Malaria is a disease of bad government not warm weather.

  5. Can readers recommend any historical narratives or fiction that convey a sense of “what life was like”, living in one of the major civilizations of the Americas?

  6. I believe that alcohol really does lengthen life. I believe it for two reasons. One is that the observation is specific: it reduces heart disease, while increasing all other mortality. For wealth to be a confounder, wealth would have to have the same disease profile. If it does, and I believed this study, then that would explain away the effect (but I don’t believe this study’s correlational claims because I believe that lots of other studies have controlled for wealth, or at least similar things).

    The second reason is that there is a mechanism: alcohol is a blood thinner. Of course, you could take a baby aspirin instead of alcohol, so ultimately I don’t advocate it. (On the other hand, I think that there have been randomized experiments showing that alcohol lowers cholesterol.)

    [i believe the linked research mitigates its effect, but does not eliminate it, especially in women -Razib]

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