End of the Year Roundup

I know what you're thinking: It's not the "end of the year". The end of the year was almost a week ago!

But Blogger thinks you're wrong. If you look at the right-hand column of archived posts, it counts anything written from the week of December 30 through January 6 as being written in 2018.

And there's more: In both 2016 and 2017, I apparently wrote exactly 229 post. This post? This one right here? This should be post number ... 230.

That's right: an overtime victory for 2018's productivity.

* * *

Israel has officially announced it will seek $250 billion dollars in compensation from other Middle Eastern countries who expelled their Jewish populations in the wake of Israel's independence.

Good to see D.C. statehood get more traction in the House.

Five Jewish teenagers were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the stone-throwing death of a Palestinian woman. Cases of Jewish terrorism targeting Palestinians tripled in 2018.

This feels like something the Joker would do: colorful balloons carry explosives sent from Gaza into Israel (the bomb was safely defused with no injuries).

Meanwhile, here in Berkeley, a man has been arrested after bringing a fake bomb covered with antisemitic writing into our campus police department.

Tyler Cowen: speech regulation policies on private media platforms (like Facebook or Twitter) can be scalable, efficient, and consistent -- pick two. Put differently: a small website can efficiently manage a consistent moderation policy. But a large website (like Twitter) must either invest tremendous sums into moderation (far more than is cost-effective) or settle for a patchwork and inconsistently applied system that's largely ineffective and makes everyone angry.

UPDATE: Oh dang -- joke's on me! Apparently, today counts as the first day of 2019. Which means that 2018 -- like 2017 and 2016 -- will go down as having exactly 229 posts written.

That's kind of cool in its own right. I guess.