Notices by Alon (alon@mastodon.social)

@skinnylatte P.S. I ate at Hakka Yu from the food blog you sent me and it was well worth running to Jewel when it was less than an hour before my intercontinental flight left (I still made it before my group was called to board, Changi is fast).

@skinnylatte Honestly, if I'd grown up eating American vegetables - iceberg lettuce and sliced tomatoes - I would never have eaten raw vegetables either. (I grew up on finely sliced bell peppers and, for a while, cucumbers, and then discovered arugula shortly after moving to New York, during the brief moment it was in vogue among yuppies before they switched to kale.)

@pony >Or because they are headed by a poop (you know which one).

The guy who spent years as a missionary in Peru advocating against LGBTQ rights? Title is also similar to the word "poop."

Pedestrian Observations: The Invention of the Traditional System of Project Delivery https://pedestrianobservations.com/2025/09/30/the-invention-of-the-traditional-system-of-project-delivery/

Trickles of the IDF investigation into the failures on 7.10 are starting to appear. Those failures are massive, showing rank amateurism: weapons were locked in armories, troops were not moved in even while the attack was happening, troops had difficulty entering a kibbutz because the electricity powering the gate was damaged. And this is Nahal Oz, the least badly hit of the Gaza Envelope kibbutzes; Kfar Aza, Beeri, and Nir Oz fared far worse. https://www.timesofisrael.com/civilians-police-stopped-1st-wave-of-terrorists-at-nahal-oz-idf-arrived-7-hours-later/

1. 🧵 about trust and extremism, mirrored from Bluesky. It's often said that extremist voting and behavior (like anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing) is the result of low trust; see for example https://bibliothek.wzb.eu/pdf/2024/zz24-603.pdf and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1016/j.soscij.2019.03.004. But what's missing from this analysis is how *high*-trust societies can produce racist attitudes that are then weaponized by extremists - for example, in the Nordic countries, but also the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, etc.

1. 🧵 about Germany and normalization of nationalism here. It's well-known in English-language discourse that romantic nationalism is unacceptable in the mainstream here and that there's a baseline expectation of Holocaust guilt. But what's less remarked on is that Germans crave outside affirmation, on AfD, WW1 guilt, colonialism, etc.

6. I think the average citizen, here and in North America, still hates low-skill immigrants more than high-skill ones; sensationalist media focuses on the crimes of low-skill immigrants the most. But the core nativists flip this - they believe in the same myths of immigrant criminality and welfare collection as your average Bild or New York Post reader, but they are even more offended by the idea that any immigrant can be more successful than them. /end

5. We race the natives to the top, not the bottom.

And this is what pisses off the nativists the most: it inverts the hierarchy.

A few years ago, an Indian immigrant in Singapore posted on Facebook she was looking for a maid, but only a citizen or PR because of difficulties sponsoring a foreigner. This went viral as Singaporean nativists complained, "we let immigrants in and now we're reduced to being maids in our own country." The hierarchy inversion was more offensive than the job creation.

4. Germany's immigration profile is lower-skill - we let in way more refugees and have open borders with most of Eastern Europe - but among the tech workers, the same pattern as in the US occurs. The firms that hire in English, hiring disproportionately an immigrant workforce, pay better than the ones in German; for one, a Polish immigrant, let alone an Indian one, has much less willingness to work at reduced German wages compared with UK ones (or US if that's available) than a native German.

3. Tech firms, same - it's a chore to deal with immigration paperwork and so it's usually the big firms with high profitability per worker that are most willing to hire H-1B workers. Again, you can cherrypick lower-end firms that do this, or tell stories about Ph.D. immigrant taxi drivers in Canada, but the higher-end firms on net have more immigrants than the rest of the industry.

2. The math departments at elite universities have grad student bodies that are almost entirely foreign. My year at Columbia had 13 students, with only three Americans. This only changed during years with citizenship-restricted grants (RTG). Less prestigious universities tend to have more natives and fewer immigrants. It's easy to cherrypick one scam university that only takes in India, but on average immigrants go to the top much more than to the bottom.

1. Thread about immigration, inspired by Bernie Sanders' latest bout of nativism and by what @skinnylatte keeps getting in her mentions.

The starting point is that immigration in the US and Canada is fairly high-skill these days (e.g. post-2000 immigrants have higher education levels than natives), and that it especially lands at the highest- rather than lowest-end places - the most elite universities, the richest cities, the highest-paying tech firms.

An Israel that had a geopolitical strategy, rather than just tactics about how to keep Netanyahu out of prison for corruption, would know that it could negotiate with Abbas to end the Occupation and secure enduring friendship and normalization with a post-Assad Syria.

A counterfactual Israel, if you will.

@otte_homan @mekkaokereke @14mission Yeah, there are a bunch of companies of various levels of seriousness trying to build this, but they focus on solving the easiest bit (the capsule) and not the hardest bit (the civil engineering).

@mekkaokereke @14mission Or why the tunnel boring is the most solved part of urban infrastructure tunnel construction. The US has a huge cost premium, but little of it is the tunnel boring (except in San Jose, which is doing stupid things with the BART subway) - the premium is mostly in everything else, like ancillary structures, systems, junctions, subway stations, etc.

@mekkaokereke I want to be a hipster and say I was in the hatedom starting 2013, but it was specific to Hyperloop and then the Boring Company and I don't expect everyone to be enough of a public transport nerd to have known how he was blowing smoke even back then.

Ann Selzer has Harris up 3 in Iowa. She only polls Iowa, her track record over decades is very strong, and she doesn't herd to what other pollsters are saying. If it's right - see above on why it likely is - it's going to be a blowout. https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2024/11/02/iowa-poll-kamala-harris-leads-donald-trump-2024-presidential-race/75354033007/

@Radaghaz @mekkaokereke This is an exit poll, so pollsters ask voters randomly and separately. (And, because people asked on Bluesky: the gap between married women and men in 2022 was the same three points - it's unmarried women who blueshifted. https://edition.cnn.com/election/2022/exit-polls/national-results/general/us-house/0)

@Colinvparker @mavu @Radaghaz @mekkaokereke There's a poll by YouGov on it that finds some people vote differently from their partners without telling them, but the net gender impact is low (1 man in 10, 1 woman in 8, for a net of 1 in 40). https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/01/women-voting-secret-choice/