Trevor McKendrick - How to talk to your heroes

Good morning - nothing new to report - have a great week!

Trevor

How to DM your heroes when they follow you (tweets)

”1. Specific proof-of-work: “I’ve been a fan of your work and writing since the livejournal days”

2. Share sth specific about yourself, their influence on you: “your work shaped the way I now do X”

3. Ask easy-to-answer specific Q”

Lots more in the thread.

Scott Alexander on Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban (article)

Some quotes: “It suggests that during his last few weeks in office he raised everyone's salaries to an unsustainable level, just so the socialists would have to lower them again and look like the bad guys.”

And:

“At one point, Orban replaced the Constitution entirely with a new version, which according to rumor one of his college chums wrote on an iPad during a train ride”

See also Scott’s posts on Turkey’s Erdogan.

Cigarette sales rose last year for the first time in 2 decades (WSJ article)

Per a report from the FTC

Reasons to believe the China / US competition has escalated to a more dangerous phase (article)

An economist summarizes his recently Foreign Affairs reading that has persuaded him that competition between China with the West has risen materially.

Mobile Internet and political polarization

“I show that, after gaining access to 3G internet, Democratic voters became more liberal in their political views and increased their support for Democratic congressional candidates and policy priorities, while Republican voters shifted in the opposite direction. This increase in polarization largely did not take place among social media users.”

Scientific evidence that you should make that big life move you’re considering (article)

“In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were covered by lava. People living in these houses were much more likely to move away permanently. For the dependents in a household (children), our estimates suggest that being induced to move by the “lava shock” dramatically raised lifetime earnings and education.”

And Finally…

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See you next week!

Trevor