Paper by the Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ChenEtAl_web.pdf
Paper by the Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ChenEtAl_web.pdf
A great summary by Matthias Ott: https://matthiasott.com/articles/into-the-personal-website-verse
Discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156868
Although still dictatorships, these countries are slowly allowing more economic freedom than during the Cold War era.
Cuba: https://www.wola.org/analysis/cubas-new-constitution-explained/
North Korea: https://www.dailynk.com/english/assessing-north-korea-efforts-encourage-private-business/
Everyone’s familiar with this graph:

Scary, although it was actually down slightly in 2018. Looking at this, one would assume that huge numbers of Americans are now addicted to opioids. However, although the numbers are annoyingly tricky to find, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Opioid prescriptions per capita peaked in 2010, and have since been going down:

The dramatic spike in overdose deaths, therefore, seems to mainly come from drugs getting much more dangerous, rather than more people using them. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which have dangerously unknown doses and potencies, were initially used to make heroin stronger; they were then found in counterfeit prescription pills; and recently, they have appeared even in non-opioid drugs, like meth and cocaine. This suggests that one way to reduce the number of deaths would be distributing fentanyl test strips, which are widely available online.
Twitter has stopped publishing its monthly user numbers, because they kept going down. The total number of tweets is also down, so Twitter keeps trying to game the numbers. Maybe people are waking up to how most of Twitter is a toxic sludgefest dominated by angry partisans who, although a small fraction of the public, generate a huge fraction of the noise.
I’ve moved a bunch of links to other blogs (blogroll) from an earlier post to the right sidebar, to make them more visible.