As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?
15 March 2020
The New Yorker: The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics
Every plague must have its point. That’s been more or less the universal human response to sudden or unexpected bursts of pestilence, of the kind that seem to put not just individuals but entire societies at risk, for as long as we have kept records, literary and narrative, of what happens when these things happen. The truth that there is a constant, unending, and unpredictable warfare between human and bug, which takes place in a state of moral indifference, at least on the bug’s side, is somehow profoundly counterintuitive. This war, of course, takes place not just between human and microbe but engages all life on earth, with each living thing in a constant state of unequal warfare with microscopic bugs of all kinds, parasites and bacteria and viruses. [...]
Again and again, in the history of illness, we find the same desire to attach a moral to a microbe. Even as late as the nineteenth century, when scientific medicine was just beyond the toddler stage, the idea that a “miasma” was responsible for cholera was widespread among even educated people, and with it came a moralizing: the poor and the immigrants died because they were always in sickness, or brought it with them, or kept it inside them. [...]
One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness.
SciShow: How Green Energy Could Bring More Rain to Africa
Africa’s Sahara desert is a prime location, some say, to build arrays of solar panels and wind turbines. But scientists are aware that building these structures can potentially have large-scale effects on the surrounding environment that are worth studying first.
Notes from Poland: Most Poles religious but few “strongly committed” to their faith, new data show
Just over 60% of Poles display “religious commitment”, according to new data released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a government agency. But just 5.5% of them are “strongly committed” to their faith, while 23% are “moderately committed” and 33% are “weakly committed”. Meanwhile, some 34% of people are “uncommitted” (meaning that they have a religion, but are not religiously active), while the remainder, 5%, are outside of any religion, reports Onet. [...]
Katarzyna Zielińska, a sociologist at the Jagiellonian University, told Notes from Poland that, although the new figures do not directly indicate any change in religiosity, the wider trend observed in recent years – shown in data from the CBOS polling institute – has shown a decline in terms of declarations of practices as well as religious belonging. [...]
The new Statistics Poland data also show significant differences between age groups, Onet notes. The 25-34 age group is the least religious – more than half of respondents in this group (51%) are either religiously uncommitted or outside of any religion, and just 17% are either strongly or moderately committed. [...]
This has been confirmed by CBOS’s data – which show that the proportion of school leavers declaring themselves believers has dropped from 81% to 63% in a decade – and also by the Pew Research Center, which has found Poland to have the biggest decline in religiosity between the oldest and youngest generations.
Engadget: EU plans to introduce sweeping 'right to repair' legislation for electronics
If the European Parliament were to pass legislation, it would extend its eco-design law to cover phones, tablets and computers, and likely force tech companies to completely rethink the designs of their products. The legislation would also require those same companies to provide easy to access information related to the repairability and durability of their products. At the moment, most consumers have to turn to websites like iFixit to find information on how to fix their devices. "Single-use will be restricted, premature obsolescence tackled and the destruction of unsold durable goods banned," the Commission said. [...]
The plan is one part of the European Green Deal, a policy initiative the EU announced last year. Like the Green New Deal advocated by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the goal of the European Green Deal is to transform the continent's economy in light of the climate crisis. [...]
The plan is the latest attempt by the EU to tackle electronic waste. In January, European Union lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation to push to device manufacturers to adopt a shared charging cable standard. The new legislation is likely to face stiff resistance from manufacturers. Ahead of the charger vote, Apple said any regulation would "stifle innovation" and ultimately hurt consumers more than it would help them.
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