"What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong": "Almost all of the litter that escapes into nature, especially the sea, comes from fishing ships or poorer riverine countries with bad rubbish collection practices... Rich countries like the UK or US have rubbish collection rates approaching 100%". Throwing stuff away is probably fine most of the time. We're just taking stuff out of the ground, making use of it, then putting it back in the ground.
"An investor-led building boom has almost doubled the size of the Sydney apartment rental market in two years, forcing landlords to drop rents more than $100 a week in some areas to secure tenants" (link). It almost makes you wonder if restrictions on increasing housing supply, happening in cities all over, are bad and increasing our cost of living!
"I’m begging you: Stop donating canned goods to food banks". Canned food drives are maybe the best example of ineffective altruism. Among other things: "that $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee".
A government policy passed today will affect younger people more, because they will live longer. So wouldn't it be more fair to make votes count more the younger you are? The case for age-weighted voting.
Tax preparers are capturing 13-22% of the value of the EITC (link). So if the government did pre-filled tax returns, people would get much more out of the EITC without us having to spend an extra penny on it (link).
Comparing states that accepted the ACA Medicaid expansions to those that did not finds a "reduction in disease-related deaths" which "grows over time" in states that did the Medicaid expansion (link).
Replacement of manned toll booths with electronic ones greatly reduce vehicle emissions in the area. And a study of one example of making that transition in a populated area found that it "reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers of a toll plaza by 10.8 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively, relative to mothers 2-10 km from a toll plaza" (link).
Related: schools downwind of a highway have "decreases in test scores, more behavioral incidents, and more absences" than ones upwind. To help control for other variables, this is comparing students who move campuses from one side of the highway to the other (link).
Related again: when Volkswagen cheated on emission tests, they were selling cars "which secretly polluted up to 150 times as much as gasoline cars". That's a lot! So a study tracked where these vehicles were used as a natural experiment on the effects of sudden and randomly dispersed increases in air pollution from cars. And it found "a 10 percent cheating-induced increase in car exhaust increases rates of low birth weight and acute asthma attacks among children by 1.9 and 8.0 percent" (link).
A Dallas-born teenage citizen was mistakenly arrested under suspicion of being an illegal immigrant and kept in one of our special detention centers for asylum-seekers. He was not given basic rights like a phone call, because those rights do not apply to people who are not believed to be citizens. In the 23 days it took before the error was recognized and he was released, he apparently lost 26 pounds (link). In contrast, read this excerpt on how well we treated Nazi prisoners. Were we wrong to not treat them worse? Or is being a brown person seeking asylum a worse crime than Nazism?
Trump is now telling non-white women in Congress, who were born in America, to go back to the countries they came from (link). In a follow-on rally, his supporters chanted "send her back" about a Somali-born American citizen (link). I wonder what David Duke saw in him.
