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Academic publishing as a joint effort

The U.S. Department of Agriculture requires anyone with a garden to "register that with the government."

Three new-ish blogs (from the past year or so) that I figure are worth highlighting:(1) Cold Takes - Holden Karnofsky (of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy fame) writing on themes relating to "avant-garde effective altruism".  See especially his "Most Important Century" series, on why humanity needs to prepare for some wild changes.(2) Hands and Cities - by Oxford philosophy grad (and Open Philanthropy research analyst) Joe Carlsmith. I just discovered this blog a week or so ago, but have been digging through the archives a bit and really enjoying it. I especially recommend 'On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism', 'On the limits of idealized values' (exploring puzzles for subjectivists about how to select the appropriate idealization procedure), and 'Can you control the past?' (on decision theory).  He's clearly influenced by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but is actually good at philosophy, which makes for an interesting combination.(3) Astral Codex Ten - Scott Alexander's new blog.  Probably everyone already knows this?  But I mention it here in case there are any deprived souls out there who could still benefit from the pointer.  See, e.g., 'The Moral Costs of Chicken vs Beef', 'The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars', stuff on charter cities, schooling, and the FDA.Are there any other new blogs of note that you've been enjoying recently?  Share a link in the comments, if so...

One possible answer is that they're cheap. But we could never say that about Britain's most distinguished thespians and artists. Of course.The actual answer is also more interesting: It's not the first time that directors have bought the shop window. Quentin Tarantino owns two theatres in LA, including the Vista. And back in 1970, avant-garde maestro Jonas Mekas co-founded the Anthology Film Archives in New York, which is still electrifying the edges of movie culture.In the UK, some film-makers have had a go. Here in Scotland, for example, Jeremy Thomas, who produced Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and David Cronenberg's Crash, co-owned Edinburgh's Cameo Picturehouse for a while, and even Tilda Swinton and I got into the world of projectors and popcorn for a bit with our Brigadoon-like pop-up The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.But with cinemas struggling or closing in several cities – Bristol, Edinburgh, etc – why haven't UK-based directors bought some of them?We've already ruled out that obvious answer, they're cheap. So, what is it? Then there's the fact that part of the UK's cinema circuit isn't purely a private sector endeavour. Networks such as Picturehouse, Vue, Everyman and Curzon are all showing aesthetically bold movies like The Zone of Interest, but beyond them there are cinemas that receive some public funding – from the BFI via the National Lottery and the Film Audience Network or local councils, for example.These sums are small and not secure – council funding is particular is disappearing – and to access them cinemas and arts centres often become charities. You can donate to them but not invest because they don't exist to make a profit. They do specialist seasons and, at their best, film education, so are not purely commercial organisations. The result? The film exhibition scene in many UK cities is broader and richer than equivalent towns and cities in the US.There's another way to describe that and it's "crowding out".There are things that people would do, unaided and off their own bat. But which they don't do if government is already doing them. That is, government action crowds out those private actions.This idea is hotly contested of course - those in favour of government action on all sorts of things like to stoutly deny that crowding out can ever happen. Government is only ever additional to private efforts, it does not replace. For that argument makes government action look better, bolsters the arguments for government acting. Those less enamoured of bureaucrats like to point up the crowding out effects. But here we have it from the belly of the beast. The reason luvvies don't support little cinemas is because government already does it. So, if we stop the taxpayer having to support little cinemas then the luvvies will indeed support them instead. Rather a win/win there for everyone.It's also proof perfect that we can shut down the Arts Council entirely and save a £billion a year in the process. For that spending only crowds out what would happen privately anyway. We mean, sure, we should do that anyway, but nice to have another arrow of an argument in the quiver, no?

Burgum is the first candidate to launch a bonafide major party White House campaign from the Peace Garden State.
The post Doug Burgum and a Brief History of North Dakota Presidential Candidates appeared first on Smart Politics.

Robert Post (Yale Law School) has posted The Internet, Democracy and Misinformation (in A. Koltay, C. Garden, & R. Krotoszynski (eds), Disinformation, Misinformation and Democracy (Cambridge University Press Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This paper addresses the unique...

Celebrate 1842 Day: Tomorrow 1842 Day, Villanova's fifth annual day of giving, is Tuesday, Sept. 21. Celebrate all that makes Villanova great with special events at the Riley Ellipse throughout the day and a festival, free food and beer garden … Continue reading →

I thought I'd pass along this friend-of-the-court brief that I just filed a couple of days ago in the Ohio Court of Appeals (Doe v. Roe), with the help of invaluable local counsel Jeffrey M. Nye (Stagnaro, Saba & Patterson) and UCLA LL.M. student Bhavyata Kapoor. [* * *] This is a garden variety defamation…

Lots of people - some we like, some we don't - are getting very excited by this idea of a new planned suburb for Cambridge. We have to tell everyone that this is, sadly but predictably, a disaster of the usual planners' mistake. One description is that planners don't know enough to be able to plan. Another is that well, planning, eh? But the problem is summed up in the question of, well, great, but where are all the country cottages going to go?The background to this is that housing is a technology. A technology is just a way of doing things using a wide definition. So, how we do housing is a technology, it's a way of doing that thing. But the crucial thing about a technology is that you need all the moving bits to make it work. A steam engine that's just a pot of boiling water drains no mines, propels no trains. Our long funded cucumber house warming system won't work without the sunshine as an original input. We must have all the bits of the technology for it to work. Perhaps it's growing up in Bath that makes this obvious to this particular eye. But all those images and talks are about building townhouses and mansion flats. Lovely things both of them - but the difference between a townhouse and a house, in English English, is usually the provision of a garden or not. Townhouses don't need them - because the inhabitants have somewhere else, out in the country, which is their garden. That's rather why they're called townhouses, to distinguish them from those proper places out on the rolling acres.We are, after all, plains apes and like to have a stretch of turf to lay about in. Which is why that townhouse, without the garden, has always been rich man's housing in this country. Rich enough to have, or at least gain access to, another place out there with that garden. No, parks, communal areas, they're not the same. This also carries over to those Edwardian mansion flats in London and some other larger cities. Delightful things to live in, absolutely - but they're not for 100% of living time.This has been a long running problem with housing planning in Britain. At least 80 years, David Kynaston's books surrounding Mass Observation contain the same argument. The planners talking about how everyone should live in flats, the actual people asking for the des res with front and back garden, thank you very much. A detached would be nice, a semi is acceptable, a terrace if we must, but front and back please, a place for the roses and one for the kids' bouncy castle. To which the planners' claim has always been that Europeans live in flats, so why not the British. Which is where the painful ignorance comes in. The Europeans do not live in flats. They live in two places. In Russian it's a dacha, in Polish a dacza, Czech a chalupa. In Southern Europe - places which came off the land much more recently - perhaps a quarter or eighth share in Granny's cottage out in the boonies. No one observing the periphique on Tuesday is going to suggest that Parisians live only in Paris. Europeans might live, for much of the time, in a flat. But they near all have access, perhaps in the extended family but still, to that place in the country. There are those two technologies for housing, each with their own moving parts. Each technology only working if it is complete. The British one, that house with garden. The continental with a flat and that shack - if nothing better - out there in rurale profonde. Yes, even German cities are surrounded by a green belt (no, not Green Belt) of shacks and summer houses. This new thing in Cambridge. It's those planners all over again, not grasping the basic technology they're dealing with. If it's all going to be town houses and flats then where are those country cottages going to be? And if it's not flats and townhouses then where are the gardens? All of which is, of course, the problem with having planners doing this sort of thing. Given that they're ignorant of what they're trying to plan the plan isn't going to be very good, is it? The actual answer is simply to allow builders to build houses (or flats!) that Britons want to live in where Britons wish to live. This will shock, annoy and outrage the upper middle classes at The Guardian. But what's the point of a life without a little fun and enjoyment in it?

From Theodore Zeldin's "The French" (1983):Almost one in every six families has access to a second residenceTranslate that into British, we've some 25 million households, there should be 4.25 million second homes. According to George Monbiot we have rather fewer:Before the pandemic, government figures show, 772,000 households in England had second homes. Of these, 495,000 were in the UK. The actual number of second homes is higher, as some households have more than one; my rough estimate is a little over 550,000.We are, thus, short some 3.75 million second homes. If we wish to be like the French that is. This is more than just snark - tho' snark is always fun. The important thing to understand about housing across cultures is that each is a technology. A machine for living in. And those cultures, technologies, which have people living in dense urban cores, in apartments, also have the wide ring of summer places surrounding them. This is true - from personal experience of people here - for Germany, of the Czech lands, or Russia (to the point that one of us has endured a lecture from a Soviet car factory manager on the importance of providing dachas for the workers. And it was important, growing your own was the only way you'd get vitamins, let alone vegetables.) No, an allotment is not the same thing - it is illegal to even think about staying overnight on an allotment. All these country places will have at least a shack with bunks.The Southern European towns tend not to have gardens attached even to the houses, let alone the flats. But they have different inheritance practices (real property must, by law, be divided equally among all kids) and are also several generations closer to the land. At least a part share in Granny's hovel out in the country is near universally available.Those stack-a-prole worker flats that our UK urban planners think we should all live in are only part of that whole housing technology. By observation that works only with that addition of the second place in pulchra agris. The British solution to the same idea, that housing technology as a whole, has been the des res with front and back garden and on that quarter acre plot of land. Exactly the thing that is now illegal to build given required densities of up to 30 dwellings per hectare.They're technologies. Suburbs of housing with gardens, or flats with second houses. They're integrated technologies, things where you need both parts to make them work. Our British planners have decided to go off half-cocked with only half of either technology. They'll allow the house but not the garden, the flat but not the shack in the country.We might have mentioned before that we really don't like planners or planning. This is one of the reasons why - the planners we actually get are ignorant.

Kansas fans are still sad and a little bitter over the lost 2020 NCAA men's basketball tournament. KU was 28-3 and ranked #1 in both the AP and USAT coaches poll and in Ken Pomeroy's more sophisticated stats-based system. Indeed, in Pomeroy's system, the gap between #1 and #2 was about as large as the gap between #2 and #8. The team was riding a 16 game winning streak, last losing to Baylor -- a team that ended the season ranked #4 and #5 in the two polls and then won the 2021 championship. The Baylor loss was avenged (on the road) as the 12th game in the winning streak.The team also lost the very first game of the season by 2 points to Duke at Madison Square Garden, which ended the year ranked #8 and #11. Their third loss was on the road by 1 point to Villanova in December. 'Nova ended the year ranked #10 in both polls.It was a really good Kansas team and KU likely would have been the favorite in the tournament. Still, despite eagerly wanting another championship, I've likely taken the 2022 team too far in this bracket:
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Walter Russell Mead has a nice essay in Tablet on California. This excerpt struck me. You too were probably dragged through "Grapes of Wrath" at some point in school, or you've seen the movie. But what happens next? Mead's insight hadn't occurred to me. Spoiler: Ma Joad might have ended up as the "Little Old Lady From Pasadena," leaving her garden of white gardenias to become the terror of Colorado Boulevard in her ruby-red Dodge. Rose of Sharon would be a Phyllis Schlafly-loving Reagan activist reunited with her husband, now owner of a small chain of franchise fast-food outlets. A longer excerpt:    John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath chronicled the suffering of a group of bankrupt former farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma to arrive, desperate and penniless, in an unwelcoming California. In Steinbeck's novel—carefully crafted, one must note, to check all the boxes that censorious communist and far-left writers used at the time to evaluate whether a given novel was genuinely proletarian and progressive—the Joad clan heads west in a broken-down Hudson sedan. Tough matriarch Ma Joad holds the clan together. Her unmarried daughter Rose of Sharon endures unspeakable suffering and, in the redemptive if melodramatic climax to the novel, feeds a starving father with the breastmilk she had hoped to give to her stillborn baby. Rose's brother Tom becomes a fearless defender of the oppressed, supporting unionization drives and risking imprisonment and death to stand up for the common man.The left saw those migrants as the harbingers of the socialist future of the United States. But the Okies of the Central Valley and the Southland did not become the foundation of a new Democratic majority. Instead, they became the core of Ronald Reagan's electoral base. By the 1950s they were living the American dream, and they liked it.The Grapes of Wrath remains a landmark of American literature, but if Steinbeck had returned to his characters 30 or 40 years later, he'd have had a very different story to write. Ma Joad might have ended up as the "Little Old Lady From Pasadena," leaving her garden of white gardenias to become the terror of Colorado Boulevard in her ruby-red Dodge. Rose of Sharon would be a Phyllis Schlafly-loving Reagan activist reunited with her husband, now owner of a small chain of franchise fast-food outlets. Tom Joad, converted at one of Billy Graham's Southern California evangelistic crusades, would be pastoring a megachurch in the Orange County suburbs. All of them would be worried about the new waves of desperate, penniless immigrants coming over the Pacific Ocean and the Rio Grande.The transformation of the 1930s migrant wave from desperate climate refugees to surfing suburbanites was an economic and social miracle that changed the trajectory of American life. The larger point of the article: The great question hanging over California and the future of the United States today is whether and how the same kind of change can happen to the latest wave of immigrants. Will the dusty, desperate migrants scuffing over the border someday become affluent homeowners and staunchly patriotic defenders of the American way? Can California's promise be renewed for a new generation? The truth is that we already have everything we need to make California golden once again. The highway to wealth that transformed the horizons of the Okies is still open. The obstacles to growth are mostly in our heads."

A political party (shhh, no names!) is running a campaign based on how many babies the NHS has delivered. So, plugging my birth date into the calculator, something based upon census records, I find out that I'm the "10,723,296th BABY TO BE BORN ON THE NHS!" which is, I am sure we all agree, terribly exciting. Torbay General for the completists, out of Seaview in Strete.Something else I know about the NHS. The first hospital to be actually built by the NHS opened in July 1963, the QE II one in Welwyn Garden City. So while I was indeed the 10.7 millionth baby delivered by the NHS that all happened 4 months before the NHS actually added, at all, to the medical infrastructure of the country. For the creation of the NHS was simply the nationalisation, without compensation, of all medical facilities within the country. Which is, I think we can all agree, a little different from the idea generally put forward, which is that medical care only started with the NHS? Something that there is a familial memory of, given that the grandfather so interested in that first grandson was a GP, the grandmother equally interested a practice nurse.But it is still interesting, isn't it? These claims that the national debt was 200% of GDP when we started the NHS - so therefore we can achieve anything we want if we're prepared to want it. The idea that it only used to cost 1% of GDP in fact. Well, yes, but the problem with socialist medicine is that eventually you run out of other peoples' hospitals.

So an interesting archaelogical find: Scientists have discovered the remains of a sprawling network of mysterious ancient cities in the Amazon that may revolutionise our understanding of human civilisation in the world's largest tropical rainforest.A little-known culture built arrow-straight roads and canals through thick jungle to connect urban settlements where they ate sweet potatoes and drank beer, excavations have found.The settlements, resembling the Maya's "garden cities" and which date from around 500BC, are the largest and oldest of their type, suggesting the mysterious Upano people predated the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs in the pre-colonial Americas.We're aware of the technology used to find those ruins, giant space lasers measuring the height of the ground from orbit Buck Rogers stuff. Indeed, one of us has used it to find slag piles from medieval mining.However, the bit that surprises us. There have been a number of these finds of civilisational ruins inside what is now the Amazon jungle. Vast areas of land underlaid with biochar as well - effectively charcoal mixed into the soil.The implication of which is that the Amazon rainforest - or at least large patches of it - is not something that's been pristine these past 10,000 or 12,000 years. Rather, large parts of it have been cut down for framing, or burnt for that charcoal. Since when the forest has regrown.That the Amazon rainforest can regrow, our proof being that it has, seems to be a fairly important fact to us. So we're surprised that we've not seen a swathe of stories explaining this at the same time as we have seen that swathe about these latest archaeological finds.Hmm, what's that? If it turns out the Amazon is replaceable then that kills a certain set of environmental stories you say? Ah, perhaps we're not so surprised then.

We now have the Prime Minister stating that not everyone will be forced to have seven recycling bins, at least not immediately. At which point some are telling us that this was never going to happen at all. Ah, but yes, it was, as Tom Forth points out. It's right there in the law. To be extreme and absurd about it, think on what this means for the country building the smallest new housing in Europe. At 76 m2. If we think of a metre as the space for a bin (that's the absurd bit) we're trying to insist that 10% of the rabbit hutch be given over the recycling bins. And as modern planning permission doesn't allow anyone to have a garden any more (that's the extreme hyperbole bit) then that seems more than a bit of an imposition.But as we've pointed out before about the seven bins, it's possible to be entirely reasonable about this. Given that all recycling systems require subsidy they don't, in fact, save any economic resources, rather they expend them. So why are we doing that? And that's before we even think about the time required for each household to sort and collect in the right manner. We should, instead, have the one simple collection method from the one single bin. Which is then processed centrally. Let's take advantage of economies of scale after all. That which is valuable is extracted, that which is not gets burnt or landfilled.Do note that we've nothing against recycling - one of us lived off scrap metal recycling for years, we can't be against economic recycling. But we do insist that we should stop doing the recycling that loses money and costs resources. After all, isn't that the point? To save economic resources by recycling? So let's do that then.One bin, one factory, only recycle what makes money. We all know this makes sense so why aren't we doing it?