Profile avatar
poli.sisti.ca
Posts on public policy (in 🇨🇦 or abroad), humanities, classical music, altruism effective and ineffective. Many silly posts. Toronto-adjacent.
312 posts 551 followers 563 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 23 Comments 27

The price of this book is an assault on freedom

submitted 9 hours ago • 0 comments

Of course. If you want to fight right-wing populism I don't think compulsory voting is the solution you're looking for!

submitted 10 hours ago • 2 comments

Ok, where’s that asteroid?

submitted 13 hours ago • 2 comments

The arc of history is long, but bends towards medical progress. All we need to do is not screw things up and actually do what works for public health. TB is a vaccine-*eliminatable* disease - if we vaccinate well enough, humanity could eliminate another disease entirely. (Measles and HIV, too!)

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

In Toronto, organist Thierry Escaich, one of four organists at Notre-Dame in Paris, is giving a concert tomorrow (Friday) night. It's at St Basil's Parish on the U of T campus

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

today I, a non-Brit, learnt that "Milton Keynes" is not some kind of composite economist

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Getting some important research done tonight muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Items_o...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

the masculine urge to create the world's tallest pile of snow

submitted 12 days ago • 2 comments

mere mortals can't think up a contrapuntal move like JSB

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Ppl are talking about "picking up" scholars leaving the US bc of cutbacks, but that's not the right way to think about talent flows. Few USians will leave US; rather US will cease to be the unrivalled academic destination point. The play is for intl scholars who otherwise would have gone to US.

submitted 18 days ago • 7 comments

when the editor's note is too real

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

David Hume famously refused to give up his gas stove — an episode recounted in his writings on the problem of induction

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Related: 70 percent of the reason why I don't initiate emails to probable-Francophone-Canadians in French is that I'm not sure whether I'd use tu or vous and don't want to look stupid. The other 30 percent is that I don't want to look stupid generally 😅

submitted 24 days ago • 3 comments

A fun thing about being into something as niche as organ music is that when you're looking for scores of music by a dead Canadian organist, the answer is sometimes "email the composer's now-85-year-old student in Québec". Elle a posté les partitions, so this time it's all worked out!

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

A slice of Canadian policy wonks has been arguing for decades for Canada to reduce its trade barriers to the US, especially in energy, telecoms, air travel, and agriculture. Now we look like idiots. Trump has set back our efforts to do things *he would like* by 20 years

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

It’s NOT the economy! US Gen Z are doing superbly well!! Better than their parents, better than European peers. So the lurch to the right seems more like vibes - possibly fuelled by ideological persuasion on social media

submitted 35 days ago • 10 comments

A memoir title ripe for the picking: "Taming the Bistro: Confessions of a Restaurant Entrepreneur"

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

Extremely disappointing — city again refuses to internalize externalities www.thestar.com/news/gta/two...

submitted 37 days ago • 0 comments

was looking up Environment Canada's "Extreme Cold Warning" criteria and noticed that they (correctly) surmise that we Torontonians are wimps

submitted 37 days ago • 1 comment

Am currently hanging out at the mall and reading. I was both too warm and tired of holding up my book, when I realized I could solve both problems at the same time 😊

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

Using an LLM has only a modest environmental impact. The Substack post linked to in this thread explains this very well, comparing LLMs to other things we do all the time

submitted 44 days ago • 4 comments

Wrote a long rambling post about why individual AI use isn't bad for the environment substack.com/home/post/p-...

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

Who would have won the 'Simon-Ehrlich bet' over different decades — and what do long-term prices tell us about resource scarcity? The new Our World in Data article by my colleague Hannah Ritchie. ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlic...

submitted 51 days ago • 2 comments