Shared functionality is a really good point that I hadn't thought about. Good call.

Old style diners all over the US and even in a few other countries looked pretty similar. It doesn't take any special shared internet to have broad trends in style and organization. There are a lot of other things that cause this. If something has a lot of copies (say similar round diner seats) they will cost less to make, so there will be an incentive to buy the same seats. And people are often more comfortable with things that resemble what they are used, so the more same looking ones end up more economically successful at the margin. Put all this together and it shouldn't be surprising if the same thing happens for coffee shops today. This doesn't require anything involving the Internet. It is possible that anon's idea of what happened here also had some influence, but it isn't needed.

The title is a bit amusing, because it sounded like it was about all "science" journals rather than all Science journals until one read it. I'm reminded of how a few years ago there was a spammy vanity level journal called "Science and Nature" and someone pointed out that someone could publish it and then say "I've been published in Science and Nature."

But many many people in California want to have more housing and want to live there. The problem is that the current setup makes it possible for a tiny part of the population to functionally block everyone else from building things. And there's a vast gulf in density. Again, the supposedly dense areas have a density that is a quarter of that of Manhattan. Even if you don't want to live in Manhattan, there's a massive amount of room there.

No, the response is in regards to the specific issue of housing right now. That very long term infinite population growth is impossible is true but not remotely relevant at the population levels in places like California.

Completely wrong. The problem in California is that it is almost impossible to build new housing, which is drastically driving up the cost of housing and making other people not want to move there. I had a job offer in California a few years ago which would have paid about 150% of my then salary, but when we calculated the housing cost, it still didn't make sense. And yes, this really is about the lack of building housing. Take for example San Francisco. It has a population density of around 19,000 per a square mile. That's about a quarter of that of Manhattan. So there's massive room to build more, but NIMBYs and regulatory restrictions make it almost impossible to build new things. And this combines really badly with how California has required almost absolutely everything to require an environmental review, and everything counts as an environmental impact, to the point where universities cannot build new housing https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-24/court-ruling-halts-uc-berkeley-from-building-student-housing-at-peoples-park. See here https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol49/iss2/3/ for a good discussion of many of the issues.

Do we? Cell phone issues have been complicated and the Supreme Court has had multiple rulings in different directions. For example, in Riley v. California the court ruled that a warrant was needed to search a cell phone. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/573/373/. The court also ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government needed a warrant to access cell phone location data. Prior to Carpenter, the Supreme Court had ruled that one had no reasonable expectation of privacy in regard to information voluntarily turned over to telephone companies or the like (called the third party doctrine). But Riley also distinguished to some extent between flip phones and smart phones. In general, the current court's approach to phones and some other search issues are somewhat complicated and arguably in a state of flux. And there are a whole bunch of lower court rulings, somewhat contradictory. If there is any list of what high profile issues where how exactly the Supreme Court will come down on is hard to predict, 4th and 5th Amendment issues surrounding phones will probably be high on the list.

Up to a point. A major part of the issue here is the apparent double standard. Professors and students at universities have been disciplined for far less. One has things like Nicholas Christakis at Yale who was forced by the administration to resign for merely suggesting that the university shouldn't be in the business of policing Halloween costumes for cultural appropriation. We've had students forced to attend diversity training for using things that might be racial slurs even when they were clearly not intended as such. Etc. Etc. So then, when students are using a slogan where a large fraction of the people using that slogan are using it to mean literal genocide, for that case to not be treated the same way is a clear double standard. It is that sort of deep inconsistency that is a major part of the issue. Heck, even if they had tried to say that the earlier statements were not genocide, and had said that calls for genocide would be unacceptable, that would at least be halfway to being reasonable here. I don't think that Magill should have resigned over this, but there's some pretty relevant bits.

Yes, we have now repeatedly hit hottest year on record. This should be a pretty big warning sign.

Shorting doesn't by itself hurt a company. It just means one thinks the stock is going to go down. One doesn't need to have any problem with climate issues to short a company helping with climate change. Heck, if one makes money on the short and then uses that money to help with climate issues it could easily be overall good for climate issues.

I'm not sure why you think that. Smoke particles from a vape are typically around 0.1 to 0.3 microns, with many being on the order of 0.1 to 0.2 microns. See https://www.mdpi.com/2673-527X/3/1/3. Moreover, a typical vape is exhaling a massive number of particles, so that some get through given the massive density should not be surprising even if they were as large as you claim (which they are not).

Rural areas did less systematic testing, and areas which would opt out would also be less likely to implement testing even more. And in some locations, even when loved ones died, they tried to block covid from being recorded as a cause https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/12/22/covid-deaths-obscured-inaccurate-death-certificates/8899157002/. I agree that the Kansas data isn't the slam dunk the summary says, but these others complicating factor are also relevant here which strongly suggest that rural areas undercount cases.

1) It is true that cloth masks probably don't do that much, so most protection is coming from things like N-95s or KN-95s. 2) A single viral particle may be very small, but in general the vast majority of viruses are going to not be transmitted as single viruses but as clumps of viruses, cellular debris, water etc. The average covid particle is about a little under eight or nine times as large as your estimate. See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36331347/. 3) Masks are not trying to stop every single virus but to block a large fraction.

Masks exist to prevent transmission, not to prevent death once one has it. The fatality rate of a virus isn't relevant to that consideration. And calling covid the deadliest virus in history is a simple strawman. Covid is not as deadly as Ebola or the 1918 flu, and people have generally not asserted otherwise. A virus doesn't need to be the deadliest in history to be really bad.

A problem with the Kansas type argument is that people in counties which would be inclined to opt out are probably more likely to not take other precautions. And county governments themselves which opt out are also more likely to not take other covid precautions. There is similar data from Germany where different parts put in mask mandates at different times but the same basic problem is an issue (although in that case it really looks like that that wasn't what happened and masks really worked). See https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015954117. There's also some related data from the Boston area schools, which has the advantage that since they are demographically very similar, this sort of complicating factor is less likely to be an issue. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029. If one combines this with the one decent randomized trial in Bangladesh https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9036942/ it seems that the bottom line is that masks very likely work, but the Kansas data is not the slam dunk that the OP summary makes it sound like it is.