Favorites April 21st 2024

May 2023, Costanoa California

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To be clear, 2.1 and 2.7 would both be quite bad, but this is quite an improvement.

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So, I had certainly been entirely blaming the California Insurance comissioner until I found out about Prop 103. Commissioner Lara probably deserves some blame still. Repeal of prop 103 may or may not be necessary, they essentially had to be able to point to real disasters to be able to raise rates, and now they can. Any solution that integrates modern wildfire risk is going to make rural-suburban interface development quite expensive.

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Real questions at Disneyland

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One thing I liked about this was that it included three-dimensional pareto analysis, which I had never seen before.

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That's a really big wave!

Longer Reads

• Alex Lee proposed CA AB 362, which allows the state to *study* an LVT, and a bunch of groups are angry. Here's a thread where a Georgist goes through and examines the various arguments against studying an LVT, which are all ridiculous. (src)(cached)
• The percentage of US tech jobs in California has been falling since 2020, from 19% down to 16% now. Here's a thread examining this from all angles. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Stated while Iran's missiles were in the air "so the nature of Israeli air defense is that if you want to get anything through you have to send a lot, which means that if you’re Iran and you miscalibrate one direction you look pathetic and if you miss calibrate the other direction it’s WWIII". I think this turned out to be an accurate assessment. (src)
– "'Saying something controversial but incontestably true' is a reliable way of getting your message out, as people fight over it but your side is likely to eventually win" (src)(cached)
– Article with a discussion of Albert O Hirschman and his connection to the credibility revolution. (src)(cached)
– It turned out that existing anti-missile defenses can actually take on ICBM-class threats, immediately afterwards, a contract was awarded to build a lot more interceptor missiles. (src)(cached)
– Sadly, americans have very pro suburb views. (src)(cached)
– Factory candle making, no voiceover, no music. (src)
– The US has really been on a roll for macroeconomic policy, when compared to Europe, it's not a tradeoff, it's just better decisions (src)(cached)
– The reason Tesla is in a bit of trouble now is that their core development was how to pack lots of cylindrical batteries together with water cooling. Now LFP batteries, which pack easier, have high enough energy density to compete in EVs. (src)(cached)
– Facebook says the 400 billion parameter model they plan to release has already surpassed Claude, Anthropic's best model. (src)(cached)
– Early NYTimes review of 'Pizza' (src)(cached)
– Batteries have gone from being a rounding error in California's energy mix in 2021 to being the single largest source of power in the evenings. (src)(cached)
– About half of Texas' daily electricity requirements are met by renewable energy. (src)(cached)
– A great video of the level of automation in modern solar panel manufacturing. It's all robots, that's how we've gotten the price down. (src)(cached)