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The real reason the mob faded, and law enforcement won (Kroger argues) is that the business environment changed. State lotteries and an end to prohibition undermined numbers rackets and bootleg liquor. The decline of unions meant the decline of labor racketeering. And so on. Eventually there just wasn’t as much money to be made in the mafia’s traditional sectors. And when it came to drugs, they couldn’t compete with the Latin American cartels.

https://chrisblattman.com/2022/01/10/best-nonfiction-i-read-this-year-part-i/

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Unless this is sampling bias, some signs that the Awokening has stalled--particularly among white independents. For instance, the share of white indeps that 'agreed' with the statement below *doubled* (33%->66%) between May and June (vs 59%->73% for white Reps).

https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1454202676611256321

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The "reason we purport to hate novelty records", he argued, "is because we continue to romanticise the creative process. We feel that our intelligence is insulted by novelty.”

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Pages 144-235 of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order Volume One: The Phenomenon of Life contain a theory of beauty as perceived by humans, conveyed in fifteen “fundamental properties.”

https://carcinisation.com/2015/04/01/the-fifteen-fundamental-properties/

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Blackrock’s average fee on an equity index fund is only 0.04% but the average fee over its equity ETFs is 0.22% – that’s roughly halfway to the 0.53% it secures on active equity funds.

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Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717455

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One of Rideout's 2021 studies on teens, unlike Facebook's internal findings, used a nationally representative sample and used a recognized scale to measure depression. In her study, 43% of respondents said using social media usually makes them feel better — not worse — when they're depressed, stressed or anxious. Less than half as many, 17%, said it usually makes them feel worse. The rest said it makes no difference either way.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram-teens-mental-health

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If a media outlet cares about its reputation for accuracy, it will be reluctant to report anything that counters the audiences’ existing beliefs because such stories will tend to erode the company’s standing.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/04/i-agree-with-you-completely-just-read-my-piece.html

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Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot even see.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Although musicians reported the strong belief that strivers will achieve over naturals, their preferences and beliefs showed the reverse pattern: they judged the natural performer to be more talented, more likely to succeed, and more hirable than the striver.

https://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/research/publications/articles/2011_Tsay_JESP.pdf

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Finance can be viewed as a set of patterns that naturally emerge in many kinds of systems that do not attempt to prevent collusion.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/09/26/limits.html

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Balk’s First Law: Everything you hate about the Internet is actually everything you hate about people. Balk’s Second Law: The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything. Balk’s Third Law: If you think the Internet is terrible now, just wait a while.

https://www.theawl.com/2016/11/the-spirit-of-the-internet/

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The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w29250

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We conduct a meta-analysis of the relationship of financial literacy and of financial education to financial behaviors in 168 papers covering 201 prior studies. We find that interventions to improve financial literacy explain only 0.1% of the variance in financial behaviors studied, with weaker effects in low-income samples.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1849

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Even though Microsoft tells us that its programmers were just as productive, overall, new hires for programmers were down 42 percent between November 2019 and November 2020. Firms were clearly unwilling to take the same kind of risks of hiring new workers that they couldn’t inculcate in their corporate culture or screen them properly, or do any of those other things.

https://www.burning-glass.com/research-project/covid-19/

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Overall, this incident is a great synecdoche of modern politics. You hide whatever you wanted to do, for whatever cynical reasons, inside the taboos of our age.

House of Strauss

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Universalists donate less money locally, but more globally, and are less likely to exhibit home bias in equity and educational investments. In terms of social networks, universalists have fewer friends, spend less time with them, and feel more lonely.

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4086