Random links

The future of war is bizarre and terrifying
"In the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan used drones — purchased cheaply and easily from Turkey and Israel — to crush the vaunted Armenian army in a short space of time. Armenian troops were renowned as masters of infantry warfare and heavy weaponry, but their tanks, missile launchers, artillery, and transport vehicles were sitting ducks for their foes’ cheap disposable drones." There are things you know that are coming - even previews of the future as you can see above. Still I expect there'll be a lot of surprise when this happens in a more-broadly-focused context.
Claire Berlinski. on Twitter
"The aftermath of a pandemic that systematically killed the overweight seems a particularly bad time to make the argument that the relationship between weight and health is "a myth.""
Shift Lant on Twitter
On Transgender exclusion from the world of dating: Patterns of acceptance and rejection of hypothetical trans dating partners as a function of sexual and gender identity: "This study suggests that 98% of heterosexual women and 97% of heterosexual men do not include trans people in their dating prospects. The authors view this as a great calamity." Are people attracted to a sex or to gender?
Inequality and social unrest in Latin America: The Tocqueville Paradox revisited
"The first hypothesis is that the popular uprisings in these countries represented a social response to rising income inequality. This view was particularly popular among a social media contingent who seem to believe, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that inequality is always rising everywhere. The trouble with this hypothesis is that income inequality, as captured by household surveys, has actually been declining in Latin America for the last twenty years. ... In countries that did experience mass protests (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia) on the other hand, inequality was either constant or continued to decline in the last few years for which data is available."