Astral Codex Ten

Reason

5 min read

Reason

Article

Reason is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 21, 2021 and June 29, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “articles about me in Reason”; “the Reason article is from 2021”. It most often appears alongside California, 7500 people signed a petition, A History Of Mankind.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: January 21, 2021
  • Last seen: June 29, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast. I wanted to protect my anonymity, but I Streisand-Effected myself, and a bunch of trolls went around posting my real name everywhere they could find. I wanted to avoid losing my day job, but ended up quitting so they wouldn't be affected by the fallout. I lost a five-digit sum in advertising and Patreon fees. I accidentally sent about three hundred emails to each of five thousand people in the process of trying to put my blog back up.
Inline links: deleted my blog
But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
In 2010, a corrupt policewoman demanded a bribe from impoverished pushcart vendor Mohammed Bouazizi. He couldn't afford it. She confiscated his goods, insulted him, and (according to some sources) slapped him. He was humiliated and destitute and had no hope of ever getting back at a police officer. So he made the very reasonable decision to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in the public square. One thing led to another, and eventually a mostly-peaceful revolution ousted the government of Tunisia. I am very sorry for Mr. Bouazizi and his family. But he did find a way to make the offending policewoman remember the day she harassed him as something other than Tuesday. As the saying goes, "sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation".
Inline links: ousted the government of Tunisia
Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko
June 29, 2022 · Original source
“That will definitely happen,” said Berg. “And it’s not ‘What if,’ it’s ‘That will definitely happen.’ If you don’t deal with the reasons people are losing their housing then the system will never be able to keep up. Communities did really well getting people off the streets but they haven’t really thought about the inflow of people.”
Hi Scott. You write: "The researchers do not use the terms “local policy” or “social attitudes” in the paper itself." But in the paper it states: "To account for these unobserved local covariates, we include a CoC-level dynamic latent factor F 0 iβi,t, allowing for small departures from the cluster-level regression that may be due to local policies, cultural attitudes toward homelessness, affordable housing initiatives, and many other difficult to observe local factors." Doesn't take away from your main point, but they do mention local policy, and "cultural" attitudes seems like a reasonable proxy for "social" attitudes.
I think the ~400 discrepancy might be that the *Reason* article is from 2021, and the comptroller's report from 2022.