One year later, Iran obeying nuclear deal, despite early doubts →

Iran moved swiftly to dismantle its nuclear program after the deal was signed July 14, 2015, to speed sanctions relief, which would not come until the International Atomic Energy Agency certified Tehran had fully complied with the requirements.
Those also included reducing its stockpile of enriched uranium from 12,000 kilograms to 300 kilograms, filling the core of its Arak heavy-water reactor with cement, removing nuclear material from its Fordow facility and dismantling two-thirds of its 19,000 centrifuges from Natanz.
Opponents of the landmark deal, reached between Tehran and the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia and the U.K, asserted that Iran was sure to cheat given its past illicit nuclear activity. But IAEA monitors have found the country so far has complied, including shipping the bulk of its enriched uranium to Russia.
Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, which supported the deal, said that given the technical complexity of what was required, it is a major accomplishment that Iran has stuck to its obligations.

The Invisible Danger Donald Trump Poses to Our Democracy →

But Trump has completely upended the platonic notion of elections as tools to settle public policy debates. His agenda, such as it is, either can’t or won’t be implemented, even if he wins. Mexico is not going to pay for a wall along the border, and the U.S. government is not going to expel 11 million unauthorized immigrants, much less ban Muslims from entering the country. It is altogether more likely that were he to win, the movement conservatives who still control Congress would present him the kind of plutocrat-friendly legislation that alienated their voters and drove them to Trump in the first place. His supporters would be rewarded for their triumph with a vision of change they don’t share and didn’t vote for.

In the likelier event that Clinton wins, but does not secure majorities in both the House and Senate, the public will have rejected Trump’s ugly vision of a resentful, bigoted America, but will not see that verdict translated into any policy changes that reflect Clinton’s vision of a more inclusive, cosmopolitan society.

At a time when trust in government is at a historic low, this is a worrying outlook. One of the key feedback mechanisms of our democracy has been malfunctioning for many years now. Next year it is likely to fail altogether.

On the recent study which reports showing no racial bias in police shootings →

There's a new study that's made the rounds of major papers over the last week, because it seems to show that there's racial bias in policing outcomes in departments across America,  *except* in shootings. However, as the author of this blog post points out (someone who actually read the paper, unlike most of the journalists who seem to have reported on it), the shooting data was not nationally representative (having been taken only from Houston), unlike the data used for the rest of the study. (And even then, as Sethi notes, the Houston data seems to be a little weird.)

And it's worth pointing out (whatever one's assumptions) that this is just a single study. Real knowledge is gained bit by bit over time, with a lot of different eyeballs and brains looking at and pondering an issue (blog articles included, as it may give someone else an idea for another study which at looks at better/different data).

Update: another, more in-depth look: [50] Teenagers in Bikinis: Interpreting Police-Shooting Data

The Roads to Decoupling: 21 Countries Are Reducing Carbon Emissions While Growing GDP →

The United States is the largest country to experience multiple consecutive years in which economic growth has been “decoupled” from growth in carbon dioxide emissions. From 2010 to 2012, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions declined by 6 percent (from 5.58 to 5.23 billion metric tons), while GDP grew by 4 percent (from $14.8 to $15.4 trillion).

Neil Irwin Is Far Too Generous to Economists: They Only Care About Efficiency When the Policy Redistributes Income Upward →

Neil Irwin raises the question of whether economists have been too single-minded in pushing efficiency, while ignoring issues of distribution. This is way, way too generous to economists. In fact, economists have been totally happy to ignore efficiency considerations when the inefficiencies redistribute income upward. This situation pops up all the time.
As I frequently point out in comments here and elsewhere, we protect doctors, dentists and other highly paid professionals from competition with their lower paid counterparts in the developing world or even other wealthy countries. We have maintained these protections even while our trade negotiators did everything they could to make steel workers and textile workers compete against their low-paid counterparts in Mexico, China, and other developing countries.
This protectionism is obviously inefficient and cost U.S. consumers more than $100 billion a year in higher medical bills and other costs...
The same story applies to patent and copyright protection. These are forms of protection that can be equivalent to a tariff of 1,000 percent or even 10,000 percent. The worst abuses are in the prescription drug industry where we spend around $430 billion a year on drugs that would cost around $40 billion in a free market. This is throwing $390 billion a year into the toilet and worsening people's health. Where is there concern for efficiency in this case?
...
It is worth noting that the gains from the TPP projected by Peterson Institute study are more than twice as large as the gains projected by the non-partisan International Trade Commission (ITC). The ITC study projected that when most of the deal's benefits are fully realized in 2032, the benefits will be a bit larger than a typical month of GDP growth. This study also did not account for the costs associated with stronger and longer patent and copyright rules.

Home Computers Connected to the Internet Aren't Private, Court Rules →

An odd definition of privacy... Homes can be broken into, but they're rightly considered private.

A federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled that the user of any computer that connects to the Internet should not have an expectation of privacy because computer security is ineffectual at stopping hackers.

This robot-powered burger joint could put fast food workers out of a job →

In 2012, secretive robotics startup Momentum Machines debuted a machine that could crank out 400 made-to-order hamburgers in an hour. It's fully autonomous, meaning the robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, and assemble and bag the burger without any help from humans. The internet flipped out.
Years of relative silence ensued, but in January, Hoodline's Brittany Hopkins learned that the San Francisco-based startup had applied for a building permit to convert a ground-floor retail space in the SoMa neighborhood into a restaurant.
Now it looks like the restaurant is actually happening. A job posting on Craigslist from early June gives us our first glimpse into how the company's future flagship, presumably opening soon, might work.