First, Happy Bastille Day.

Now to some highlights.

Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record

Tracing Woodgrains, July 10, 2024.

Excerpt:

Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s slash-and-burn, no-questions-asked policy has led to more than a few conflicts on Wikipedia. Editors who object to his indiscriminate removals have raised the issue multiple times to Wikipedia administrators, on talk pages, and elsewhere around the site. Each time, Gerard defends the approach of indiscriminately removing everything from Unreliable Sources, generally carrying on with removals as the disputes carry on. Each time, the arguments peter out with nothing in particular changing. In one case, another Wikipedia administrator, Sandstein, pushed to ban a user for repeatedly criticizing Gerard’s judgment on the matter.

In other words, whatever Wikipedia’s written policy, the practical day-to-day reality is that Gerard will remove Unreliable Sources en masse with terse explanations and with little consideration for actual content, digging in with elaborate justification when pressed. Given that, it’s worth examining the reliability battles Gerard picks.

The article is very long, very detailed, and  very persuasive.

Childcare Regulations May Be Stifling Fertility, New Paper Finds

by Peter Jacobsen, Foundation for Economic Education, July 12, 2024.

Excerpt:

In other words, states with more childcare regulations tend to have larger fertility gaps—women are less able to have as many children as they’d like. The fascinating implication, of course, is that reducing or eliminating childcare regulations could help facilitate higher birth rates.

One of the persistent drawbacks associated with pronatal policies is that they tend to be high-cost. But the implication of this new paper is that they need not be. By allowing parents to regulate childcare with their purchasing decisions, rather than relying on politician-assigned standards, it seems possible to lower the cost of childcare and, as a result, support parents in having larger families.

 

A Foreign-Born Terrorist Could Cross the Southwest Border

by Alex Nowrasteh, Alex Nowrasteh’s Deep Dives, July 9, 2024.

Excerpt:

Since 2016, my research on foreign-born terrorism has shown that the threat is relatively minor. During the 1975-2023 period, foreign-born terrorists murdered 3,046 people on U.S. soil in attacks committed by a total of 230 terrorists, which includes attackers, those who planned attacks, or who were convicted of terrorism offenses where they plotted an attack. The annual chance of being murdered in an attack carried out by a foreign-born terrorist during that time is about 1 in 4.5 million a year. By comparison, the annual chance of being murdered by a common criminal in the United States was about 1 in 13,767. In other words, the annual chance of being murdered in an ordinary homicide was about 323 times as great as dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist on U.S. soil.

Alex, as usual, brings some nice numeracy to the discussion.

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