Wednesday, May 8, 2024

Notes and Notable 4



Notes and Notable 4


A  personal injury attorney has died after being shot outside a McDonald's while trying to de-escalate an incident with a customer over his order.

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“I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.”-NYT interview

Putting homeschooling in a new light.


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Portugal

A least half of a population of ten million depend on the state in some way—35% are retirees, 10% government workers, and another 5% receive either unemployment benefits or integration benefits. They would see a country with less youth than they once saw; they would see what is in fact, after Italy, the second-oldest country in Europe, with 23% of the population being older than 65. And they would further see that like so many other democratic and less democratic countries, Portugal is having elections and that this election will, once again, pit the country’s aging population against its young people.

So-called “seniors” are reliable voters, while young people aren’t, and so this perverse incentive ensures that seniors vote, effectively, to extract rent for themselves from young people through the state. This is reflected in voting intentions: people over 54 are disproportionately likely to vote for the Socialist Party, while those who are under 25 are disproportionately unlikely to vote for it.


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Recent social movements stand out by their spontaneous nature and lack of stable leadership, raising doubts on their ability to generate political change. This article provides systematic evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes. Drawing on a database covering the quasi-universe of protests held in the United States, we identify 14 social movements that took place from 2017 to 2022, covering topics related to environmental protection, gender equality, gun control, immigration, national and international politics, and racial issues. We use Twitter data, Google search volumes, and high-frequency surveys to track the evolution of online interest, policy views, and vote intentions before and after the outset of each movement. Combining national-level event studies with difference-in-differences designs exploiting variation in local protest intensity, we find that protests generate substantial internet activity but have limited effects on political attitudes. Except for the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, which shifted views on racial discrimination and increased votes for the Democrats, we estimate precise null effects of protests on public opinion and electoral behavior.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Amory Gethin and Vincent Pons.

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Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump.--nyt

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When it launched its fully automated stores four years ago, Germany’s regional supermarket chain Tegut billed the experiment as a window into the future of shopping. But the Fulda-based retailer has since been embroiled in a legal fight over a centuries-old principle enshrined in the German constitution: Sunday rest. Be they robotic or staffed by humans, most shops in Germany are not allowed to open on the last day of the week — and courts have upheld that ban.

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