THE SOLUTION TO POVERTY IS WEALTH:

$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people (Doug Smith, Dec. 19, 2023, LA Times)

The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.

Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.

“I felt there was enough interest and the initial findings were compelling enough that it was important to get those results out,” said Benjamin Henwood, director of the Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research at the Dworak-Peck School, who led the study.

THERE IS NO BEAR IN THE WOODS:

The Russian Air Force Is Dying a Slow and Painful Death in Ukraine (Peter Suciu, 12/18/23, National Interest)

Russia saw two of its jets lost in just 24 hours over the past weekend, including one that was reported to have been shot down by its own forces in the skies over Ukraine.

Since launching its unprovoked war against Ukraine nearly two years ago, the Russian military has seen a significant number of combat aircraft lost in the fighting. The most recent aircraft destroyed included a Sukhoi Su-34 fighter bomber that was targeted on the ground at a Russian air base in an early morning raid on Sunday. Later that same day, a Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jet was shot down over the Zaporizhia region in eastern Ukraine on Sunday per Business Insider.

Kyiv claimed it wasn’t responsible for the downing of the latter aircraft.

“I can confidently state that it was not the Ukrainian air defense that shot down the Russian Su-25 attack aircraft! These were clearly the coordinated actions of Russian anti-aircraft troops, for which the entire Ukrainian people sends them great thanks!,” Mykola Oleshchuk, Commander of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said in a post on the social messaging app Telegram.

“STOP ME, BEFORE I KILL AGAIN!”:

The Case for Dollarization in Argentina: A Path to Economic Stability (Nicolas Cachanosky, 12/19/23, Econ Lib)

The primary rationale lies in the necessity for a credible commitment device. This paper by Emilio Ocampo explains how dollarization can serve as such for Argentina. Drawing from the experience of Ecuador under Rafael Correa, we see that dollarization acts as a credible institutional constraint that diminishes the costs associated with a populist regime. In a country where political shifts are frequent, and the probability of populism returning to power is 100%, establishing a stable monetary system becomes indispensable for sustained economic success.

Dollarization is Cost-Effective and a Safer Solution:

In relative terms, dollarization is the most cost-effective and safest alternative. With an annual inflation rate hovering around 160% (and expected to go up in the coming weeks), the demand for Argentine pesos is practically nonexistent. Dollarization facilitates the redenomination of financial liabilities in pesos into US dollars, eliminating the risk of a run against the peso. This would not only stabilize the currency but also afford the government more time to enact necessary changes. Given the combination of high inflation and a lack of credibility in Argentine politics, the amount of US dollars required to sustain the peso exceeds the US dollars needed to implement dollarization. Those who argue that dollarization is not possible due to the lack of dollars at the central bank need to think seriously about where they intend to obtain the dollars to bring the peso back to life. Furthermore, as dollarization implies phasing out the peso, its success becomes more plausible than reviving the peso. […]

Argentina’s persistent struggle with inflation, which has averaged 60% annually since the mid-1940s, has impeded long-term planning and economic growth. The nation has exhausted every textbook solution to high inflation, all of which have proven futile.

ONE THING MAGA REMINDS US OF…:

PODCAST: Murder in Boston Podcast (HBO and The Boston Globe)

1989 Boston. The crack epidemic is raging, the murder rate soaring, and white flight has taken hold. Charles Stuart and his pregnant wife, Carol, are carjacked, drawn deep into a dangerous “inner city” neighborhood, and allegedly shot by a Black man. All of Boston – and the nation – is gripped by the hunt for the suspect. What follows will reveal truths about the city… and ourselves. Presented by The Boston Globe and HBO Documentary Films, Murder in Boston: The Untold Story of the Charles and Carol Stuart Shooting is hosted by Adrian Walker who, along with a team of Pulitzer-winning investigative reporters, unveils explosive new findings and change the narrative of a story long cemented in the city’s lore. The HBO Documentary Series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max starting December 4.

…we are still who Charles Stuart thought we were.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

You Know It’s a Placebo. So Why Does It Still Work? (Tom Vanderbilt, 12/19/23, Wired)

You might think that having a positive attitude about the nothing-pill is what transforms it into a something-pill. Perhaps OLPs are a sort of meta-placebo, a testament to how much we believe in our power of belief. But the real driving impulse for many patients who enroll in clinical trials isn’t positive expectation. It seems to be a more uncertain emotion: hope. As the 2017 study puts it, “Hope is a paradoxical combination of opposites, balancing despair and the counterfactual notion that things can improve—a kind of ‘tragic optimism.’” A patient who has suffered for years from some condition, taken drugs, undergone procedures, and gotten no relief may think: A sugar pill probably won’t help, but what the heck, let’s see what happens. As a 2016 paper in the journal Pain puts it, “Engendering hope when participants feel hopeless about their condition can be therapeutic.”

THANKS, VLAD!:

Renewables to exceed half of German electricity use in 2023 ((AFP, Dec 18, 2023)

According to preliminary figures, Germans will consume a total of around 517 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity this year, compared with 540 billion kWh in 2022.

Some 52 percent of that will come from renewables, compared to 47 percent in 2022, the agency said.

THE ANGLOSPHERE IS A BIT POORER:

J G A Pocock: the Antipodean’s view of Europe: John Pocock defended Britain in its broadest sense (Yuan Yi Zhu, 19 December, 2023, The Critic)

[H]e fell under the influence of Sir Herbert Butterfield, who steered him toward the history of historiography, or in other words the history of the history of history. Abstruse though it may seem to laymen, it is, as Pocock put it, nothing less than “the history of all the ways in which men have felt committed to their past”. The result was a brilliant dissertation, published as The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957), which examined late Elizabethan and early Stuart lawyers’ belief that there existed an “ancient” constitution of England, dating from time immemorial and therefore immune from interference by the king’s prerogative, not unlike how modern academic lawyers insist that judicial review can never be ousted by Parliament. […]

But it was not long before Pocock made his mark on America. In The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), he deftly chartered the influence of early modern republican thought of Florence, typified by Machiavelli, and of its preoccupation with how to maintain civic virtue against the inevitability of decay, on English republicans and American revolutionaries. The American Revolution and the framing of the republican constitution were, to Pollock, “the last act of the civic Renaissance”.

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

Digital algorithm shown to significantly reduce antibiotic prescription (Paul McClure, December 19, 2023, New Atlas)

A new study has found that using a digital support algorithm to guide diagnosis and treatment by healthcare providers significantly reduced the number of antibiotic prescriptions given to acutely sick children, without affecting treatment success or causing harm.

Optimally, AI can serve the purpose of “death committees”

THE CONTRADICTIONS HAVING BEEN FORCED:

Poll shows Gantz’s party soaring as Likud nosedives, Smotrich out of Knesset (Times of Israel)

The survey also showed that Gantz, who temporarily joined Netanyahu’s coalition to have a seat at the table running the war, would lead the largest party in the Knesset, while the far-right Religious Zionism party of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, which ran on a joint slate with Otzma Yehudit in the last election, would fail to make it back into the Knesset.