Thanks, David!

Thanks, Elizabeth!

Thanks, Michael!

But Nickelson voters have a profitable deviation.

The proper way of pre-registering your annoyance with the NYT is to write something up NYT Pitchbot-style.

My Thanksgiving Day plans: go to the dentist.

Did he not have a comb handy?

There is the whole behavioral economics literature on hyperbolic discounting. Relatedly, you should check out that on commitment devices.

Not sure why you are interested in this though. Don't you have a constant discount factor and complete and transitive preferences across all time and space?

Your organization probably set up special exemptions to their users' mail filters for certain specific sets of addresses. So someone deemed Shasta to be critically important.

"State capacity" is quite hard to define. Sounds like Louisiana could clean up litter if it wanted to. But maybe the preferences of bureaucrats are part of capacity. Vaguely reminiscent of the concept of X-inefficiency from economics, which was similarly squishy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ineff...

Sometimes it's better to forget.