Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Lea Ypi @leaypi.bsky.social · 22h

no words

Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensive

www.theguardian.com

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Noam Ross @noamross.net · 1d

A month or two ago someone posted a link to their really amazing set of LLM system instructions for writing #rstats code with good tidy/NSE patterns. (They were also good for humans!) Does anyone recall who or where that was?

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 1d

per usual excellent explainer of the hell world we find ourselves in

Bobby Kogan @bbkogan.bsky.social · 1d

Are furloughed federal employees entitled to backpay?

The short answer is yes furloughed federal employees are entitled to backpay, but the mechanism a little complicated.

And, importantly, it means the House GOP CR is insufficient for reopening the govt & needs to be amended.

Thread explaining:

Scoop: White House memo says furloughed federal workers aren't entitled to backpay

A move to deny backpay to up to 750,000 furloughed workers would dramatically escalate Trump's pressure on Democrats to end the shutdown.

www.axios.com

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

One of the more incredible stories out of LA this year has been how a taco review blog became the best on-the-ground coverage of ICE raids in the city.

They do a dispatch every day, follow-up on the kidnapped people (which almost no media outlet has done), and fact-check government claims.

Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 2d

@lataco.bsky.social first began as a blog documenting local Mexican cuisine. Now, it’s an essential reporting powerhouse to the city as Trump’s mass deportation plot unfolds.

Check out the latest from our friends at Reveal: tinyurl.com/4cm2bsdr

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 1d

for those eligible to work in the UK

Richard Morton @accessibleweb.bsky.social · 1d

I am recruiting a Senior Accessibility Specialist to be part of the Government Digital Service accessibility and digital inclusion team. Applications open until Sunday 26th October. www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cg...

#a11y #Accessibility #AccessibilityRegulations

Quick Check Needed

www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk

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🕸️jess m. 🎃🍂 @jametc.bsky.social · 2d

if I'm not mistaken, this is the first UBI scheme where they aren't in some stupid endless "study" and finally have enough data to just simply DO it, and of course like all the studies showed, the result is a huge boost for the economy

Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 2d

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

Post from Threads user rodneyowl: "Ireland has declared the Basic Income for Artists scheme permanent. This will be officially announced in tomorrow’s budget. Details to follow. Congratulations to all who fought for it and the present and future artists of all sorts in Ireland. That includes me 👌We’re just comin to the end of a 3 year pilot scheme. It’s been a roaring success. For every €1 paid out to the 2000 participants, the government got €1.46 back. Can’t argue with that. Other countries are already taking note."

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 1d

normies will never know the number of lines this takes

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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 2d

The acting CDC director has finally signed off on the vaccine advisory panel's recommendations for the COVID vaccines.

While the CDC is trying to sell this as a win for antivaxxers, in reality this means that COVID vaccines will be more accessible than they have been in recent weeks.

CDC Immunization Schedule Adopts Individual-Based Decision-Making for COVID-19 and Standalone Vaccination for Chickenpox in Toddlers

ATLANTA—October 6, 2025— The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today updated its adult and child immunization schedules to apply individual-based decision-making to COVID-19 vaccination and recommend that toddlers receive protection from varicella (chickenpox) as a standalone immunization rather than in combination with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination.The immunization schedules adopt recent recommendations by the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which were approved last week by Acting Director of the CDC and Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill. The schedules will be updated on CDC.gov by October 7, 2025.

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Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 2d

god please god please god may i breathe the air of a free chicago in 2029

SE Gyges @segyges.bsky.social · 3d

curtis yarvin seems somewhat unhappy

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 2d

🙏

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 2d

ione of the first non-economist chairs right?

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 4d

Student protests are basically a necessary condition for any democracy movement

open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

Student-Led Pro-Democracy Protests and Their Impact Worldwide (1955-2025)
Outcome
• Successful Transition
• Long Term Impact|
• Partial Gains|
• No Immediate Gains
Hungary Uprising' °

1960
1970
Poland Protests' ® 'France May '68
° South Korea April Revolution
Mexico Movement, a, Yugoslavia Protests
Greece Polytechnic, o
1980
Poland Solidarity, O
" 'South Africa Soweto
Philippines People Power,®
Brazil Diretas Já
South Korea June Movement
Burma 8/8/88 China Tiananmen
1990
Vepal Jana Andolan|
Indonesia Reformasi, o
2000
zechoslovakia Velvet- & ,East Germany Participation
Taiwan Wild Lily
Serbia Otpor, & ran University Protests
o Ukraine Orange Revolution
Venezuela Movement, o
2010
long Kong Umbrella
Tunisia Participation
gypt Tahrir, & Chile Winter urkey Gezi Park, g, Ukraine Euremaidan
•,Ethiopia Protests
2020
Myanmar Protests' 8, Iran Life Freedom
Bangladesh July Revolution' & Serbia
Algeria Hirak' 8 Thailand Students
Note: This timeline illustrates major student-led protests from 1955 to 2025, highlighting their outcomes in terms of political and social change. Outcomes are categorized as 'Successful Transition' (leading directly to significant reforms or government changes), 'Long Term Impact' (initially limited but influential over time),
'Partial Gains' (achieving some concessions or moderate changes), and 'No Immediate Gains' (little to no short-term change despite protest efforts).

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Trevon Logan @trevondlogan.bsky.social · 4d

An important part of racial segregation in public accommodations (that economists and economic historians regularly miss) is that it was NOT about racial animus. It’s about dehumanization and debasement. It’s using the public sphere to tell people that they are is not fit to walk the Earth.

Mark G. Sheppard @markgsheppard.com · 5d

The Green Book Project is a fantastic resource for anyone trying to understand the full weight of the Jim Crow era, and how segregation —not of homes and where Black families could live— but the segregation of everything.
#EconSky #GreenBookProject

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John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 4d

You.
Are.
Allowed.
To.
Insult.
The.
Police.

It’s a core First Amendment principle. This is utterly lawless behavior, for which there will be no (short-term) consequences.

That he does it so casually, as they are walking away, in front of cameras.

Rightly confident in his impunity.

“[t]he freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 4d

they are sometimes hilariously available!

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 4d

i use instagram stories as a good barometer for normies, also talking to my guitar teacher

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 5d

😭 here::here()

Jenny Bryan @jennybryan.bsky.social · 5d

I bet the whole reason he's thinking about this is that I was complaining to him (to everyone, really) about the pain of using Windows full-time while my macbook's logic board gets replaced. And he brought out the house words "if it hurts, do it more often!"

Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 6d

Three phrases that capture some of the tidyverse team culture:

Everybody takes out the trash

We suffer so users don’t have to

If it hurts, do it more often

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e (they/them) @certificates.bsky.social · 5d

you should care about people and be a fucking adult.

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 6d

😵‍💫🫠💀

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 6d

WOW

fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 6d

wtffffff

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Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid @dcmigrantmutualaid.org · 7d

The @nytimes.com broke down how DC became a testing ground for ICE and their conclusions are exactly what organizers have been screaming about at the top of our lungs:

“One key to the strategy: ICE’s close partnership with both [MPD] and the U.S. Park Police.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/u...

How Washington Became a Testing Ground for ICE

www.nytimes.com

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Mark Andrew Price @pricelaborecon.bsky.social · 6d

Let us all resolve in our personal lives to be significantly less tolerant of people that deploy racialized rhetoric. Shun people that do this. Mock people that laugh at it. There is a proper way to conduct yourself in public office and if you can’t meet that standard you should resign.

Mark Andrew Price @pricelaborecon.bsky.social · 6d

The Trump base think this is funny. It’s straight up racism. There are millions of children in this country watching elected officials engage in this racism with no consequence, only pridefulness at their intolerance. Disgusting behavior.

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fbrady @fbrady.bsky.social · 7d

👀

John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · 7d

If any one reform DA defeat means "reform was wrong all along," which is The Centrist Pundit Way, then any one reform DA win must mean that "reform was right all along."

Otherwise the data-driven Centrist Pundits would seem to just be confirming their ideological priors.

Reposted by fbrady

Rafe Meager (they/them) @economeager.bsky.social · 7d

"Many people still have an elderly relative who survived a bout of severe childhood illness; not one of us has an elderly relative who did not."

This is the best and perhaps most important illustration of sample selection i have seen in a good long while.

Trevon Logan @trevondlogan.bsky.social · 9d

Good history helps us avoid nostalgia. The great article “Economic History and the Historians” (2020) by Anne McCants reminds me why nostalgia can get us in trouble. Two of her examples are very relevant to today: vaccinations and the popular narrative of some economic “good old days.”

Getting vaccinated is unpleasant. Dying of measles is worse. In the decade before the 1963 vaccine for measles emerged, an average of 475 Americans died from measles every year, most of them children. This (absolute) number had dropped to a low of 1 in 1981, despite a steadily increasing population that might have hypothetically contributed additional cases. Sadly, the number of measles cases in the United States has been steadily climbing upward again because we seem not to remember the ravages of the disease so much as the inconvenience of the shot—even without taking into account the absurd rejection of the solid scientific evidence in favor of vaccinations. Many people still have an elderly relative who survived a bout of severe childhood illness; not one of us has an elderly relative who did not. The blurring of the historical evidence for and against vaccination that arises from strangely incongruous historical narratives allows a seemingly inconsequential but nonetheless deadly nostalgia to run rampant.

Another example of dangerous reverence for the past concerns the flurry of popular enthusiasm lately (at least if the pundits of the 2016 American election are to be believed) for the “good old days” of the 1950s when a family could live securely on just one income (in these nostalgic accounts, that one income is usually a man’s). Lest we forget, these are the same good old days of poor air quality and measles. Maybe trivial in comparison but certainly indicative of the scope of the cognitive problem that nostalgia presents, the average size of a new home built in America in 1950 was 983 sq. ft.; by 2010, the average size had risen to 2,392 sq. ft. Given that families were larger on average in the 1950s than they were in 2010, per capita space allocation had risen even faster than total area. Although we might not need that much personal space, many of us have become used to it. Older furniture now looks tiny compared to what is now on offer in showrooms, whereas older television sets were behemoths with miniscule screens showing programs in glorious black and white.

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Zoe Neuberger @zoeneuberger.bsky.social · 8d

USDA’s shutdown plan says that #WIC “shall continue operations during a lapse in appropriations, subject to the availability of funding.”
www.usda.gov/sites/defaul...

www.usda.gov

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