I saved this for a slow day. So "ask Reddit" prompts get repetitive after a while - this isn't that unusual: "What's an "open secret" that doesn't have a documentary about it yet?"

However this was part of the thread was new to me:

simongurfinkel: The province of New Brunswick, Canada is basically the play toy of a small handful of wealthy families (Irving, McCain, Oland). The government is just there for show.

ssvserenity: Just wait til you hear about the mysterious brain disease in New Brunswick which the government is basically covering up

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/brain-disease-new-brunswick-michael-coulthart-email-1.7228096

https://www.canadaland.com/new-brunswick-mystery-illness-documents/

It goes on for awhile, with a bunch of semi-local people weighing in off-handedly. Could all be bullshit! Could all be legit!

NickS writes: This article is from 2021, but I saw it mentioned recently and it makes some important (and timely) methodological points [emphasis mine]:

A question battery initially developed by the political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Liliana Mason and replicated by other researchers (including Bright Line Watch) appears to show alarmingly high levels of support for aggressive and violent actions toward opposing partisans.

In spring 2020, 16% of Kalmoe and Mason's respondents said their own party using violence to advance its political goals would be at least a little justified, a figure that increased to 21% if the other party won the presidential election that year. According to data they provided to us from research they conducted for their forthcoming book, Kalmoe and Mason find slightly higher levels of potential support for violence in more recent surveys. Most recently, they found that 17-26% of respondents did not wholly reject threats, harassment, and violence in a June 2021 survey. . ... We investigated three ways in which the original question scale could lead to overestimation of support for aggressive actions per Westwood and his coauthors: (Response options, Respondent attentiveness, Differing interpretations of "violence").

We report three findings. First, fewer Americans endorse these actions when branching and specific terminology is provided. This pattern is consistent for each item, including threats and online harassment, where the only difference between groups is the set of response options (on those, we use identical wording to Kalmoe and Mason's original scale). Second, frequency of seeming endorsement of political threats, harassment, lawbreaking, and violence is much higher among inattentive respondents across items. However, the pattern of greater endorsements among inattentive respondents (who represent 19% of the sample) is greatly reduced among those who received the branching response options and specific examples or definitions.

These findings indicate that the interaction between inattention and a single response scale inflates estimates of support for threats, harassment, and violence (a problem that may affect many online surveys in which we are especially interested in responses that deviate from one end of a response scale). In contrast, our best estimates of public support for political violence, threats, and harassment are substantially lower than past research found. When we exclude inattentive respondents, first ask attentive respondents a binary question, and provide them with a specific definition or example where appropriate, reported support is 9% for threats, 8% for harassment, 6% for non-violent felonies, 4% for violent felonies, 4% for violence if the other party wins the 2024 election, 4% for violence on January 6, and 5% for violence to restore Trump to the presidency. These figures are much lower than we estimated using the original scale in October 2020.3

Heebie's take: Violence is never the answer but I still have wistful thoughts about last weekend.

What happened to Farhad Manjoo? They worked their way up to having a column at the Times, and even wrote some happy-to-see-it-in-the-Times columns, and now they're at Slate on a beat that you'd assign to an intern, filing dispatches from Reddit. Were they silently ushered out, or did they do something basically no journalist does, and voluntarily give up a column at the Times?

Mossy sends in this article about electric rickshaws in Bangladesh:

There are between 2 million and 4 million e-rickshaws in the country, which have operated without any regulations or monitoring.

For a long time, the government did stuff like this:

In 2014, the Bangladesh High Court rejected a plea to legalize e-rickshaws. More recently, in May, Minister of Road Transport and Bridges Obaidul Quader ordered authorities to remove all e-rickshaws from Dhaka.

Quader's order triggered protests by owners and drivers of the vehicles in the capital city, and, a day later, the government changed its stance.

Hooray!

Last month, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina decided that her government would introduce laws to govern e-rickshaws.

It's an interesting article.

I don't really know anything about Vance other than having read his fully lickspittle statements of support for Trump over the past couple of years, which, coming from a guy who went to Yale for law school, lived in San Francisco, and is married to the child of Indian immigrants, makes me wonder if Trump will finally meet his match in cravenness. I'm confident JD won't find himself in Mike Pence's position, anyway.

We're firmly into the season where there should always be one political thread and one non-political thread.

To that end, Colombia soccer fans are nuts:

The delays before kickoff began when, earlier in the day, video on social media showed fans breaking through the southwest gate at Hard Rock Stadium, with some being tackled or otherwise apprehended by police and security personnel...The stadium briefly went on lockdown, before Hard Rock Stadium issued the following statement: "In anticipation of tonight's Copa America Final, thousands of fans without tickets attempted to forcibly enter the stadium, putting other fans, security and law enforcement officers at extreme risk. Security has shut the gates in order to control the entry process at a much slower rate and ensure everyone is kept safe.

and

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