Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼

Finally finished How China Works by Xiaohuan Lan. It was my second book about China after Dan Wang’s Breakneck. I found it to be a great follow up because it goes it gives a high level overview of how the Chinese state is organised and goes into detail of how it raises taxes and allocates capital. Both in my view were missing from Breakneck, which is engagingly written but leans heavily on anecdotes. It is must read for anyone wishing to understand China, but beware that the prose is rather dry and academic.

It’s amazing that the argument is: “We built this building that everyone thought was horrible, but now it’s beloved—so we definitely shouldn’t build the new building next door that everyone thinks is horrible.”

And we have a trifecta. Speech in Brussels that didn’t mention Russia. Speech in Seoul that didn’t mention North Korea. And now speech in Manila that didn’t mention China. Quite a feat.

The heavy lifting was recent human work - Baluyot, Goldston, Suriajaya & Turnage-Butterbaugh, plus a Bombieri paper from 2000. Claude’s contribution was seeing they fit together. Goldston himself looked over the paper. Proof is formalized in Lean.

the solution to all of your life's problems exists in a substack written by an asian girl living in SF

At Stanford, students were required to recite a land acknowledgment before partying https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-rise-of-the-fraud-economy/

There’s perennially too little interest in what is actually driving superior results for kids in “gifted” education programs given that the different possibilities (pure selection, peer effects, actual better programming) have different implications.

It's insane that Hasan profiles perpetuate the narrative that it's purely his Middle East takes that are controversial when this exists: "What do you call Crimea? I call it a part of Russian territory, bitch. That's what I call Crimea. I call it cry me a river. A Russian river."

DSA opposing NATO and calling on the US to withdraw from it is a massive black mark against the org, for me.

🇬🇧【完全に狂った英国警察】 「未開封のバットを買って店から出ただけで、警察に即拘束？」英国で警察の暴走映像が拡散中🤣😱 スポーツ用品店で新品のバットを購入し、未開封のまま歩いていた英国白人男性を、警察官が顔色を変えて拘束しはじめて、ついには大勢の警察官が駆けつけて取り囲み逮捕。 男性は、「見ろよ、まだプラスチックの包装に入ったままだ！店で買ったレシートだって持ってるんだぞ！」 周囲の市民からも「パッケージに入ったままだぞ！」「レシートもあると言ってる！」「俺が車を盗まれた時は来なかったくせに！」と激しい怒りの声が上がっています。 移民のナイフ犯罪や盗難は放置する一方、買い物をした一般の白人男性を即犯罪者扱いするイギリス警察の「二重基準（Two-tier policing）」と過剰制圧の実態動画。 👉️英国市民の警察不信は完全に限界突破です。