Strange new mailbag

Strange new mailbag

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 13 minutes

Strange new mailbag

To boldly go where no podcast ad read, kid's history book recommendation, or YIMBY messaging advice has gone before

6:00 pm on Monday, June 13 at Tap 14 Rooftop Beer Garden, 1920 Blake Street

On to the questions.

Laszlo:

some

The YIMBY idea is to pry this apart by questioning the ideology, trying to reassure people about the risks, bringing the large minority of Americans who are renters into the conversation, but also ultimately mobilizing a broader array of stakeholders and identities. Housing abundance is good for teachers unions and firefighters who want solid pension funds rather than layoffs. It’s good for major employers who want to be able to recruit staff. It’s good for small business owners who want customers. Ultimately, any kind of supply restriction generates more financial losses than gains in the aggregate, so it should be possible to construct a winning coalition to unlock the huge economic upside to abundance.

Aaron:

This is a case where I think you do need to read the room to some extent. I used to work all the time at a coffee shop called Mocha Hut in my neighborhood that had both free wifi and electrical outlets by the seats. They were, pretty clearly, trying to entice a “sit here and work” clientele. Me and a few other writer friends would be in there basically every day. It was never crowded during business hours, so I’d order some breakfast and a couple of cups of coffee over a span of several hours, tip generously, and feel good about it. But I think it’s probably poor form to post up and work for an extended period of time at an establishment that doesn’t seem to be trying to be work-friendly.

More recently, a place near my house used to have a policy of free wifi on weekdays but no wifi on weekends, which again I think is a good signal of when they were and weren’t okay with you taking up their seats for prolonged spans of time. Now, post-pandemic, they’re busy seven days a week thanks to so many people working from home and they never have wifi on, so I like to go there to grab a cup or have a meeting, but I don’t sit around and work.

Harrison:

Guarding Against Pandemics’ very bipartisan list of endorsements

Brett Kushner:

What I think it signifies is how limited and ultimately self-defeating it is to try to adopt restrictions on trade and immigration as your wage-increasing strategy. We had this long, weak labor market, and during that time these populist approaches became very popular. But what we’re seeing today is that when you have robust macroeconomic policy (which you should) then openness to trade and migration are important drivers of growth and prosperity.

Carl Johnson:

TypingTest.com

Where typing fast comes in handy is if you find yourself needing to transcribe interviews, which I generally don’t do in my day-to-day work. But back in the summer of 2000 when I was an intern at Rolling Stone, that was a big part of my job.

Sam:

halted for housing policy reasons

I don’t think that fully explains Puerto Rico, but it does contextualize it a bit.

My sense is they are a little caught between brain drain of their most ambitious people to the mainland and the reality that the rest of the Caribbean has even lower wages, so Puerto Rico isn’t the most cost-effective location for whatever you might want to do. The Jones Act also puts some unique burdens on the island.

Greg S:

Hazardous TalesHistory Smashers

Chris:

I think I initially did them because I had the strongest convictions about the ethics of the situation, which is that the best thing you can do as a journalist is make your audience genuinely valuable on a per-audience-member basis and then deliver a product with integrity rather than find yourself scrambling to chase algorithmic trends.

In terms of the products themselves, I didn’t think any of them were morally dubious — it’s basically all consumer packaged goods — but I don’t personally find the “subscription box full of food” model to be an appealing product, yet I found myself doing a lot of reads for them. The one I feel bad about is Simplisafe, which is a product I am genuinely enthusiastic about and that advertises on a lot of podcasts but only bought one or two spots on the Weeds. My read must’ve been really bad, but I genuinely love their stuff.

JM:

too

Sean MacIsaac:

Here’s the thing about RCV. If you imagine an election where the Republican gets 45 percent, the Democrat gets 40 percent, and the Left Party gets 15 percent, then ranked-choice seems great. It lets leftists vote for the Left Party without being spoilers. The median voter is a Democrat, so the Democrats win.

But suppose it’s 25 percent for the Democrat and 30 percent for the Left Party. The median voter is still a Democrat. But the overall distribution of opinion is further-left in this scenario. Yet the outcome is likely a GOP win, thanks to securing the second-preference of a minority of Democrats. What you want is an actual proportional system.

Ben Mitchell

In the abstract, yes — if you had to choose between free mandatory schooling for 3- and 4-year-olds and free mandatory schooling for 17- and 18-year-olds, I would do preschool rather than high school. In a world of path dependency, I don’t know that I see a path to go from here to there.

Thomas L. Hutcheson:

Shoshana O’Keefe:

I buy organic food all the time because we live near a Whole Foods, and there’s a Yes! Organic Market between our office and our house. Now if they replaced that food with non-organic food, I would buy the regular food. So in what I assume was the intended spirit of the question, I don’t believe there is any reason to prefer organic. But I do buy a lot of organic stuff.

younger cohorts are more favorable to GMOs than older cohortsmore educated people are more supportive than less-educated onesvaccine realignment

James Schapiro:

So there are two issues here.

If you needed to cast a “cool guy young actor” type for a movie, I think there are plenty of young actors (Liam Hemsworth, Tom Hardy, Michael B. Jordan) who could play the part well. But would anyone go see the movie? Part of the historic institution of the Movie Star is that you would hear there’s a new [genre] movie starring [famous person] and want to go see the movie on that basis. The moviegoing public has shifted away from that form of behavior, which has changed what kind of movies get made, which has created a downward spiral in which we are not really minting new Movie Stars in the way that we used to.

Josh K:

I think this goes to show, again, that there is stuff happening here on an emotional level that doesn’t totally make sense. These mass shootings are horrifying, and the horror is provoking a desire for some form of catharsis that can’t really be met by Democratic-dominated legislatures in blue states passing laws. People want to “beat the NRA” in Congress. But it really should be possible for blue states to make significant public safety improvements all on their own through a mixture of regulation and enforcement.

Tom Whittington:

That said, you’ve always seemed kinda dismissive of the space industry and particularly the sort of deep space interests of Musk types. Is this because you don’t think Mars settlement is possible in any meaningful sense? Or more because you don’t think it would be a relevant hedge against existential risk? Or something else?

I’m not dismissive of going to space, but the idea of a Mars colony as an existential risk hedge doesn’t make sense to me. Like whatever happens with climate change, the weather here on Earth is not going to get more inhospitable than on Mars. There’s no oxygen on Mars! And while theoretically a Mars colony could be sealed off from the rest of humanity in a way that makes it impossible for a pandemic that kills everyone else to wipe it out, so could New Zealand. I tend to think that if humanity survives, we will expand — but expansion will be a consequence rather than a cause of survival.

Alex Newkirk:

See, this is a good reason to colonize Mars. As long as humanity survives and thrives, there will be pressure to boldly go where no one has gone before since you do ultimately run out of “stuff.”

egb:

I really like Strange New Worlds, which delivers TOS/TNG energy.