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Grant Writing Links: Prosperity Despite Heroin, Bedrooms, Drug War Danger, Google Fiber, Real Prosperity, DuckDuckGo and More

* “Despite Heroin Epidemic, Vermont Is Prospering.” The heroin story may be a bogus trend story, but it’s also possible that many people can enjoy drugs responsibly and be otherwise functional.

* Are Bedrooms Superfluous? The next-generation Murphy bed.

* “How the Drug War Disappeared the Jury Trial,” which everyone needs to read and which should also scare everyone who does read it; at what point did the “War on Drugs” become more dangerous than drugs themselves?

* Fight poverty by giving poor people money.

* Why Google Fiber will never come to Seattle; this is both important and depressing.

* “Why Does A Good Kettle Cost $90+?” Since I started drinking tea I have wondered about this and now have an answer. The Hacker News discussion is also good, except for the top comment.

* “The federal government has spent nearly a billion dollars to help poor couples stay together—with almost nothing to show for it. So why aren’t we pulling the plug?” One could ask the same question and give the same answers for any number of federal (and state, and local) programs that fail the same test.

* Divorce Corp: A Movie Review, which is really a society review that should scare you.

* Real Prosperity:

Munk points out that it’s easy to help people have more stuff than they otherwise would have. That’s called charity. The much harder challenge–and the one Sachs tackled–is creating growth, the possibility of future improvement.

* “Fight Over Effective Teachers Shifts to Courtroom.” Brilliant.

* “How the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration;” file under “unintended consequences.”

* The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield.

* “High cost of ‘affordable’,” or in the words of Tyler Cowen, “How to build truly cheap housing for the poor.” We have the technologically necessary to lower housing costs in many places like Portland, Seattle, New York, and L.A.—we just choose, politically, not to deploy it, per Matt Yglesias’s recent article “How Bill de Blasio Can Fix NYC Housing: He needs to build more of it—a lot more.”

* Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor, which I use as my primary search engine:

How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we’re living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn’t seem so crazy. [. . .] Simply put, they’re hardcore about privacy.

* “A Star in a Bottle: An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.”

* Wisconsin tires of public-sector union rent-seeking and offers a model for other states.

* “What good are children?

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