Jamelle Bouie again does a nice job in the NYT demolishing the inconsistencies in the right’s professed disdain for “woke capitalism.” An excerpt:

“I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “The entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.”

A study by Cowger and colleagues appearing in the Nov. 9 issue of the NEJM provides new evidence that the removal of universal school masking policies in Massachusetts was associated with an increased incidence of Covid-19.

From the accompanying editorial by Raifman and Green:

“The study used difference-in-differences methods, a rigorous form of causal inference for policies that are infeasible or unethical to assess in a randomized trial. During a 15-week period (March to June 2022), Covid-19 cases in school districts that had ended universal school masking policies (70 districts for most of the 15-week period) were compared with cases in school districts that sustained universal masking policies (2 districts for most of the 15-week period). The removal of universal school masking was associated with an additional 2882 Covid-19 cases among 46,530 staff (an estimated 81.7 cases per 1000 staff) and an additional 9168 Covid-19 cases among 294,084 students (an estimated 39.9 cases per 1000 students) during the 15 weeks. In school districts that had ended universal masking, approximately 40% of 7127 staff cases and 32% of 28,524 student cases were associated with the removal of universal masking policies.”

I thought this iteration of a robotic grasper for delicate objects was rather ingenious:

Good commentary by Matt Yglesias, describing how Elon Musk is quite selective when advocating for his libertarian principles. He’s all for free speech on Twitter, but very quiet when it comes to suppression of free speech in China.  He complained bitterly about pandemic-related protocols in Cali, but trumpets China’s “no new domestic corona cases” (no Covid restrictions there, eh Elon?).  And he publicly advocated for Taiwan to become “a special administrative zone” of China a day before Tesla was granted a Chinese purchase tax exemption for its Model X and S EVs.  It seems that profits take precedence over principle for Elon.  Guess he does need the Benjamins for his Twitter purchase…