Catching up with the FITs, No. 5
September 2, 2021
I think I can give a practical answer to why one should fight CRT. Because if they get control of the schools, they'll ruin an entire generation, and there are real things that are at stake here. Or if they so undermine the basis of political cooperation between people of different racial groups in the United States that the republic itself is weakened and unable to govern itself. That's worth fighting about.
Emily Oster is back to talking about baby sleep issues, in this case the question of whether white noise machines are too loud. She does her usual job of trying to evaluate the issue scientifically.
Speaking of doing a usual thorough analysis, Scott Alexander evaluates the risks, particularly for young adults, of getting long-term adverse effects from COVID. If you want to skip to the bottom line, he writes
Your chance of really bad debilitating lifelong Long COVID, conditional on getting COVID, is probably somewhere between a few tenths of a percent, and a few percent. Your chance per year of getting it by living a normal lifestyle depends on what you consider a normal lifestyle and on the future course of the pandemic. For me, under reasonable assumptions, it’s probably well below one percent.
But the best part of the essay isn’t the conclusions that he reaches. It’s the thought process that goes into them.
Bari Weiss hosts Vivek Ramaswamy, who sees through so-called stakeholder capitalism. Ramaswamy writes,
According to The Wall Street Journal, Joyce quit because he was concerned that Airbnb was secretly sharing data on millions of guests and hosts — who, presumably, are among Airbnb’s most important “stakeholders” — with Chinese officials. This data included phone numbers, email addresses and the content of messages between users and the company. After authorities in Beijing asked Airbnb for even more “real-time data” — which, Joyce feared, would enhance the regime’s surveillance of minority ethnic groups — Joyce took his concerns to Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky, among other senior executives. Nathan Blecharczyk, the company’s chief strategy officer, reportedly told Joyce: “We’re not here to promote American values.”
Three months later, Airbnb announced, with great fanfare, that it had embraced a new philosophy of doing business. “Serving all stakeholders is the best way to build a highly valuable business and it’s the right thing to do for society,”
His point is that embracing stakeholder capitalism is a symbolic gesture used by corporations to distract us from their wrongdoing.