At least five interesting things to start your week (#51)

I haven’t done one of these roundups in a while, and I’m overdue! Once again, I’m going to steer clear of election-related stuff, since I’m writing so much about that in my regular posts.

I recently did a podcast with Brian Chau, one of the infamous young “Waterloo kids” from Canada, who now spends much of his time working to defeat AI regulation. He’s also a giant weeb. We had a very long and often goofy discussion about economics, AI, and Japan:

We’ve also got two episodes of Econ 102 with Erik Torenberg, on a variety of different topics, including international economics and the economic plans of the presidential candidates:

Here’s a big piece of good news. After rising relentlessly for decades, the obesity rate in America is finally falling. John Burn-Murdoch looked at the data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey — a very reliable data source that comes from doctors’ examinations — and found that obesity has fallen since 2020:

Note that there’s actually a problem with this chart (besides the fact that John still uses those misleading arrows at the end of time series). The actual NHANES data is collected over two-year periods. So the data that Burn-Murdoch labels as “2023” is actually data from August 2021 to August 2023. This slight mislabeling might lead us to make mistakes about the cause of the changing trend.

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