Favorites April 19th 2022

Stanford California, January 2022

David Zipper @DavidZipper

New study from Rutgers Medical School concludes that noise pollution from transportation causes 5% of New Jersey heart attacks. "[The lead author] said other dense urban areas would likely see a similar pattern." fox5ny.com/news/1-in-20-n…

Unexpected upside of electric cars, but it makes the requirement that trains always blow their horn at every intersection seem really bad. This is on top of that study indicating noise pollution causes Dementia out of Denmark.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

It's not obvious Elon is hurting anyone when he pretends that Tesla is going to build a humanoid robot. People clearly enjoy talking about the idea, and Elon gets some free publicity for his real car company.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

When Elon Musk revealed the Tesla Bot last August it seemed so obviously fake that I didn't even mention it in my write-up of the event. But he's still talking about it and people are still covering it like it's a real thing. It's wild.

I guess this is what Tesla does instead of advertising?

Alan Cole @AlanMCole

In this @binarybits article: (1) A clear thesis about who is ahead in a logistics race between Walmart, Alphabet, and Amazon (2) Pics of awesome electric drones I will pretend, as I am an adult, that I was excited about this article for (1), not (2).

fullstackeconomics.comHow Walmart and Google’s Wing jumped ahead of Amazon in drone deliveryDrone delivery could be poised to take off in the United States.

The 30 foot drone operator tower was a surprise, I had never heard of such a silly thing. I also didn't realize that the other delivery drones are so much bigger than Google Wing's drones.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

We've all been asking whether young Americans' relative ambivalence on Russia is due to Trumpist rightism or to tankie leftism. But maybe it's just due to the sort of anti-patriotic history that has now become a dominant meme on social media.

He continues, saying at some point, a "lurid narrative that tells people their country is Great Satan probably just gives them a distorted worldview". Polling is from The Economist. And it could be TikTok, we don't have any way of knowing.

SF YIMBY @SFyimby

Housing won today in San Francisco. There was one candidate calling for more housing for all, calling for an end to exclusionary zoning. A progressive calling for progress on housing. Congratulations to all the YIMBYs who worked so hard for this victory!

Matt Haney @MattHaneySF

First results are out: We're up by over 27 points. We won. Thank you so much to San Francisco voters, & to all of our staff, volunteers, donors, endorsers, & everyone who worked so hard over the last 6 months. https://t.co/jypH670iCw

This is great news! And it looks like it wasn't even close. Campos blamed his loss on "big money", which is a bit silly, at some point you have an unpopular message. Further, if you're on the left, you should probably expect to be outspent, and aim to have a message that actually resonates with people.

sam @sam_d_1995

my favorite example of this is when a bunch of New York City NIMBYs protested a new building for being too tall and casting shadows but it was a hot day so all of the protesters stayed in a shady area

Brent Toderian @BrentToderian

In a world where cities are heating up, maximum sunlight access isn’t always good and shade/shadow-casting isn’t always bad. https://t.co/9RFVlc0K50

I'm amused to see this come up again, but the higher order point of 'maximum sunlight access isn't necessarily a good thing as cities heat up' is a point I'll try to remember to make in the future.

Threads

• Incredibly long thread about language and memes and war. The email ran late because of how long I was reading this thread.