Encountered a paper from a decade ago with the same findings as my thesis, but it’s fine because it’s a history paper with no formal model

Is it the phones? A new paper uses AT&T's 2007–2011 iPhone monopoly as a natural experiment and finds that iPhone access sharply reduced births, especially among younger women. Smartphones may explain 33–52% of the post-2007 decline in U.S. fertility.

This needs to be posted from time to time. Bottom line, the more you build the more housing costs. Correlation is not causation but my god!

Once again: Broke Artists need to PICK A TOWN in the middle of nowhere and flock to it. Preferably a town that is: 1. Actively dying / hopeless 2. Chock full of DIRT CHEAP housing 3. In a high-minimum-wage state 4. Has some kind of public transit Ogdensburg NY comes to mind. As does Herkimer, Tupper Lake, Malone, Binghamton, and Massena NY. Each has some kind of a local bus, some kind of connection to coach bus or Amtrak, low rent, and crazy cheap property. Literally anyone who wants to live a low-rent lifestyle, making art, writing novels, hanging around in warehouses and cafes, etc can show up in one of these towns and make it work. $16/hr minimum wage, houses for as little as $40,000 (Ogdensburg and Massena) or, on the higher end, $100k (Tupper Lake). STOP being fixated on NYC / Philly / MTL. Just make the leap. I'm already up here. I already paved the way. And if you want it even cheaper come to a village like mine, my house was $33,000. There's a cabin down the road from here for $17,000. You do not need to work a job here, period.

A UChicago student group is currently handing out onions at the Northwestern Arch to protest to the Onion Futures Act of 1958

NEW: Match Group Inc. to invest $100 million in Grindr competitor "Sniffies"

Democratic representatives fighting against unelected central bankers: The Colombian government is stepping in to defend workers’ incomes against the crushing pressure of rate hikes to levels unimaginable in today’s rich countries.

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

Be brutally honest, what's one thing Americans are simply better at than the rest of the world??

You have become Roman Emperor in 180 AD. This is your empire. What do you do differently to avoid the upcoming crisis?