3rdMoment 🏛️
@3rdMoment
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Skewed perspectives on random topics
West Coast
Joined February 2011
This is a story about how skin substitutes, materials used to improve healing of complex wounds, grew from a niche product in 2019 to scamming taxpayers and patients out of $10 bln/year, not because of a medical breakthrough, but from billing abuse. It’s a case study in how hard
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It always blows my mind that we still don't know how to explain many seemingly very simple phenomena everyone is familiar with like why ice is slippery. It really shows how the naive reductionist view I think most people hold intuitively, according to which the difficult part is
New researsh shows ice is slippery because of electrical charges — not pressure and friction. For almost 200 years, the prevailing explanation for ice’s slipperiness was that friction or pressure from a skate, boot, or tire melted a microscopic film of water on the surface,
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A sharp and steady decline in the GCT scores of Marine Corps officers occurred btw 1980 and 2014. 96% of this is explained by the widening (and weakening) of the applicant pool due to increased college participation. Affirmative action played no role. https://t.co/LNwiD9jchd
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School spending in some states is more than twice that in others, yet average per-pupil spending is only weakly related to test scores and graduation rates. So, does "money matter"? New research from @econsarahreber & Gabriella Goodman -> https://t.co/VJtUwJ1dZD
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In 1970, 10% of people had a bachelor’s degree. Now it’s about 40%. If education actually made you smarter, we would be living in an age of geniuses. Instead, all that happened is the signal value of a degree went down.
A sharp and steady decline in the GCT scores of Marine Corps officers occurred btw 1980 and 2014. 96% of this is explained by the widening (and weakening) of the applicant pool due to increased college participation. Affirmative action played no role. https://t.co/LNwiD9jchd
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I used to live in a condo with 140 virtually identical units. Every unit owner was a time capsule of the housing market at a specific time. You had waitresses who bought 30 years ago, mechanics who bought 15 years ago, and double-income lawyer couples buying recently.
In terms of wages, income, and wealth, Gen Z and Millennials are doing much better than previous generations. Corporate America is not failing the youth. It's only housing that's really broken.
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Around a year ago, I started work on a story investigating what was causing the drastic decline in American student achievement. I ended up trying to figure out the dysfunction inside one public school district--my own. My latest for @NYMag
nymag.com
Student achievement has fallen off a cliff. Neither Trump nor the pandemic is to blame.
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my families still do big christmas parties, but they're lowkey very sad because there are only four children at each of them, and three of those children are mine holidays generally are largely productions by adults for the children and no one's having kids, i guess
@callanable @ouranometrian2 Our big Christmas gatherings stopped as my grandparents' gen got too old to run them and nobody else stepped up to. I always hated having to go to them, and so didn't mourn at the time, but in retrospect I feel something valuable was lost. I suspect many things are like this
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Look at the decline in population for young children (under age 5) in major cities from 2005 to 2024 This is catastrophic Austin +98% Orlando +89% Raleigh +87% Charlotte +81% Dallas +81% Chicago -31% Boston -33% New York - 34% LA -36% San Francisco -38%
They left off Austin 🤔 2005 the metro was 1.2M & by end of 2024 it’s 2.5M. The +1.3M jump puts us 6th in absolute growth, & the 104% increase would rank 1st in percentage growth by 10+ points. Stop sleeping on the frontier city.
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I have flipped flopped about these things over time. I was recently talking to my son, who was then learning derivatives of trigonometric functions (on Math Academy). He could quickly, efficiently, and accurately compute all kinds of things, but when I asked him *why*, say, the
@Tzaidecar @AlexKontorovich I might know what 6+3 is, but can I define addition (this is not the same as knowing how to add)? Can I define a natural number? Could I answer why infinity + 1 = infinity? Most people cannot; because most people have not been taught to even ask these kinds of questions
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Charlie puts 26 presents in 100 boxes, labeled 1 to 100. Each second, Alice and Bob look in one box. Alice opens them in order (1,2,3,…), while Bob opens the odds first, then the evens (1,3,5,…,2,4,6,…). Who is more likely to see all 26 presents first?
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ppl have been observing this forever. @hsu_steve told me in 2008 over coffee in berkeley that ppl in places like taiwan are a bit mystified
IQ clearly “matters” but I’m struck that the United States is a lot richer than these higher scoring countries like Japan.
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I’m watching this at home, raising a lovely 13YO. Anyone watching her fawning over her dog would say she is maternal, and she’s also a snuggly people person. She says she’s not sure if she’ll get married and she’s certain she doesn’t want kids. I know better than to take a
Anti-nuptial turn among young women & adolescent girls is disastrous. New @pewresearch: HS girls' interest in marriage drops 20+ percentage pts in last 30 years.👇🏽
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Is there a term for the opposite of a Chesterton’s fence? Something people tore down for a reason but which the youth try to reinvent because they forget that it sucked, actually?
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One of them many problems with rent control is inequity
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Anti-nuptial turn among young women & adolescent girls is disastrous. New @pewresearch: HS girls' interest in marriage drops 20+ percentage pts in last 30 years.👇🏽
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Both of these are probably true: 1. Increasing school funding improves outcomes. 2. Funding differences explain hardly any of the variation we see in outcomes.
Sad to see people eagerly eat up this viral post that assumes correlation is causation. The causal effect of school funding on outcomes is heavily studied in economics. Giving poor schools more money improves learning & economic outcomes. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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One of the big changes in American life is that people eat out way more than they used to.
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Good property tax: residents fund services in proportion to the value of property they own. Bad property tax: residents pay a FIXED percentage of property market value to government. If house prices double, tax rate should go down.
@lymanstoneky It does suck when your house quadruples in value and you get taxed on that increase. Why do we hate capital gains taxes, but think property taxes are fine when they're the same principal based on a different asset? House prices aren't high because old people won't move.
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