A landmark new study in JAMA Pediatrics shows the HPV vaccine is doing exactly what it promised & more. 17yrs after rollout, adolescent vaccination has slashed HPV infxns not only among those vaccinated but also those unvaccinated, showing powerful herd protection. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I just called. Couldn't be easier. 916-445-2841 You: "I'm a California voter and I'm calling to encourage the governor to sign SB 79." Staffer: "Ok, I've registered your support, thanks." If you're a CA voter and you think it should be legal to build homes near mass transit, call today.

That's where you come in: Call Gov. Newsom and tell him to sign SB 79! Get five friends to do the same. Post about and tag him! This is all trivially easy, but it could make a big difference. 916-445-2841 actionnetwork.org/letters/sign...

"He is sitting, standing, and lying down at the same time"

Evening rainbow walk on Bernal Hill.

Occurred to me on a walk: doesn't the argument for NGDP targeting get even stronger if things go well and AI induces a positive productivity shock leading to consistent (but salutary!) deflation? Inflation targeting seems ill-equipped to handle that scenario gracefully.

Bernal Hill ravens

Attention sick people (i.e. all of you). Your Instant Pot makes an excellent upper respiratory sauna, perfectly sized for a human skull. Add 2 cups of water and hit "saute." When boiling, turn off, cover head with dish towel, hover face over pot and inhale deeply for a while.

Here's a prediction: some appellate courts, and eventually the Supreme Court, will twist themselves into pretzels to give the Trump administration the expanded powers they're seeking, precisely to forestall the crisis situation in which their direct orders are ignored.

Just wrote about the UK Apple encryption mess. This is a BIG deal. It doesn't just apply to the UK. It would be an absolute disaster for online privacy and security. www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/u...

Happy ADUs-are-legal-in-Denver day to all who celebrate! denverite.com/2024/11/19/d... The city council voted to legalize them in November to comply with state law HB24-1152, and the new rules took effect today. A small but meaningful step forward for housing abundance in Colorado. 🎉

It’s widely accepted *that* less expensive housing markets see less homelessness, but this important piece shows *why*: family & friends have more space to spare worksinprogress.co/issue/why-ho...

Why do cheap market rents drive homelessness rates even among people with $0 income? Well, when the market is affordable, *family & friends* have spare beds! I use the vacant Baltimore ADU in The Wire to tell this story in outreach meetings Salim actually digs into the data to prove it 👇

If we want to stick it to the health insurance companies, rather than celebrating the murder of their CEOs, perhaps we might consider advocating repeal of the tax subsidy that diverts oceans of cash in their direction thanks to the unintended side effects of our WWII era wage controls?

A funny thing I’ve noticed is that when left-NIMBY groups get unworkable amendments into land use reform bills, the limited impact of those bills later becomes “proof” that land use reform doesn’t work

It is, simply, true.

Big news from Denver last month — ADUs now legal citywide, nice report here by @zialcita.bsky.social and Andrew Kenney: denverite.com/2024/11/18/d...

The price of housing is set by supply and demand; so the ONLY way to make housing broadly affordable for the middle class is to build enough homes to satisfy demand in the places people want to live.

By the way, we should repeal the Jones Act! @thezvi.bsky.social makes the case thoroughly here, illuminating the terrible consequences of this policy, the enormous potential benefits of repeal, and how we might actually accomplish that. Highly recommend reading: thezvi.substack.com/p/repeal-the...

Hello, new followers! Here's a photo of comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) I took on a trip to Tehipite Valley earlier this year.

So proud of the great work happening in Minneapolis, which shows that boosting housing supply helps make homes more affordable.

Bernal Hill corvids

Self-driving vehicles are happening, and they hold enormous promise, but they will cause demand for the use of scarce road space to skyrocket. To reap the benefits, we have to forestall traffic armageddon. The only answer is to price the roads. But how exactly? 1/5

If you want to type a first draft of something significantly faster, just bang away at your keyboard with no regard for errors and even the smallest ones will gladly decode your gibberish. sjforman.me/posts/type-f...

Shoupthought is a lifehack. Read The High Cost of Free Parking and become forever thereafter not just immune to the pain of paying but actively glad to feed the meter.

The fine people of Grant's Pass are fed up with homeless people sleeping in public, and are taking action to prevent it. Naturally, their first step must have been to repeal the laws making it illegal to build homes for such people. That would just be common sense, right?

Lake Merritt sporting some very fine spring textures at the moment.

I've been reading a lot about legislative efforts to address our ruinous housing scarcity problem and struggling to keep track of all the attempts. I figured some database of them all must exist. But evidently not. So I started one: yimbypedia.org.

Henry George was right.

Very illuminating piece by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social in the @financialtimes.com. www.ft.com/content/de34.... Excellent charts tell the story vividly. Saving to my "favorite charts and graphs" folder for public comment & constituent mail to elected officials.

I see YIMBY legislative wins reported and discussed here regularly. Awesome. Always love to see. But I wonder does anyone maintain a good national database of this stuff? Seems like it could be useful in many ways. I've looked and can't seem to find one. @cayimby.bsky.social?

Nice study out of Harvard JCHS, more evidence for "filtering": "While supply additions are largely at the high end of the market, the sheer influx of new apartments does seem to be slowing rents and raising vacancy rates across property classes." www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/rents-a...

My brother sent me this astounding Zillow listing. Check out the property tax history. Is this one of the most egregious Prop 13 injustices in the state? www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

Reading and thinking a lot about housing policy lately, I'm finding myself ever-increasingly YIMBY-pilled. The rent is too damn high, because homes are scarce, because we made it *literally illegal* to build enough of them! It's an absurd and outrageous state of affairs.

I really love this story. news.yahoo.com/nasa-solves-... I mean, he didn't eat the tomato! Happy for him that he's exonerated. But just imagine him doing it and try not to laugh. Impossible.

I've been wondering — former Federal appellate clerks please enlighten us! — do judges tend to be aware of these sorts of statements while deliberating & drafting opinions? Some judges surely, by chance or habit. But are there ever intra-office processes to inform the non-extremely-online ones?

Lake Merritt 🌈

Red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) Dora Canal, Mt. Dora, Florida December 24, 2023

Gene drives for mosquito control have been much discussed. And we should quit dithering and deploy them. A terrible story I heard about a friend in NYC recently got me wondering: is anyone working on similar systems for other arthropods? Because I would like to nominate Cimex lectularius.

Anyone interested in aging science should listen to peterattiamd.com/richardmiller2 for a deep discussion of a long-running (annual-for-decades!) suite of experiments testing a wide range of interventions to forestall mouse aging.

aeon.co/essays/the-m.... <- good essay. 🤯: "...simply imagining something bright like the Sun also causes (a smaller, but still measurable) constriction. Aphantasics show perfectly typical pupillary responses to actual changes in light. However, their pupils do not change to imagined light."

I learned this weekend that there's a spectacular Diego Rivera fresco at the City Club in San Francisco on the stairwell between the 10th and 11th floors. I love the whole thing, but especially the poppies.

mise en place for vegan mapo tofu (www.seriouseats.com/the-best-veg...). so good we forgot to take a picture of the end result, too busy devouring. the mushrooms really work beautifully. J. Kenji López-Alt is a treasure.

🌞🪞🌕

This is good, I'm glad it's happening. And also, let's go further. I'd like to see cities use similar technology to automatically ticket and fine drivers who fail to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks.

I increasingly think we should just repeal the laws allowing this. Remove the private cause of action to block any and every change. But if not repeal, could we at least have an anti-SLAPP mechanism putting complainants on the hook for defendant's legal costs when they lose these garbage lawsuits?

That's assistant TO the speaker

Overall I'm pretty happy with Google/Nest speakers. I do find one feature really annoying though. When the mic is off, four LED lights on the front turn on and they can't be dimmed or disabled in settings. Fortunately, there's an easy fix.

Pelecanus of Lake Merritt: Brown (Pelecanus occidentalis) acrobatically dive-bombs to catch fish. American white (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) paddles along taking big gulps under the surface. Also, today I learned: their peculiar necks are called "gular pouches."