Favorites August 11th 2023
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This goes into a whole thread, but the main reason is that if you have these panels, you save on exterior cladding, which isn't cheap! Someone else pointed out that some solar panels are now cheaper than any exterior cladding. You could theoretically save without plugging in the panels!
Somehow I thought it would be NYC way up there on the chart for the US. SF is such a high performing city, imagine how much happier so many people would be if we would just allow more people to live there!
So, on the face of it, these poll numbers for 'not much progress' make no sense, but Ben Dreyfuss points out that people clearly aren't answering literally, they really mean "not enough progress has been made". Overall, the lesson here is that you have to be careful when interpreting poll results.
John Gruber's coverage of this story indicated he thinks this is really bad. And like, if folks are ruining the car that's bad. But it's not clear that's what's happening. I'm with Noah Smith on this.
Someone else went a step further and argued that Trump’s choice of Mnuchin was a turning point in American History
Longer Reads
• Wild story about a tortured WWII US pilot and the Japanese generals interpreting what he said. He had never heard of atom bombs before the Japanese told him about Hiroshima, but he made something plausible up to avoid being killed.
• Short Paul Krugman thread arguing that if we ever found space aliens, it's unlikely we'd be able to even comprehend them. See also: Blindsight
Flotsam and Jetsam
– You don't need more than 2 tablespoons of detergent for laundry, and that's for a very large load (src)
– We need more homes than 40 years ago even without population growth. Household sizes are smaller. (src)
– Tic Tacs say they have zero sugar despite being 95% sugar, because it's less that 0.5 grams. (src)
– There's some secret woman in England who can perceive 100x as many colors as the normal human. (src)
– Taiwan scares China because they transformed from Tyranny into a Democracy, and without a civil war. (src)
– Specific evidence that Minneapolis's increase in home construction was due to lifting parking requirements. (src)
– Some measures of US inflation are now down to pre-covid levels (src)
– Russian Ruble down despite oil prices being up, price cap seems to be working. (src)
– Property assessor went georgist in Albuquerque, raised valuations on empty land to stop speculation. (src)
– Map of Sulphur emissions from ships (that are now going away) (src)
– Difference between YIMBYs and Developers: YIMBYs aren't working to legalize tons of greenfield development. (src)
– Did you know there's an underground city in Turkey large enough for 20,000 people and their food/livestock, although I'm not sure they were able to all be underground for more than a few days. For comparison, that's 2x the number of people living in the silo in Silo. (src)
– Cruise adding 1 million driverless miles per month. (src)
– Canada is now blocking news on facebook properties, because unlike Australia they're too nice to do a proper shakedown. (src)
– Biden's staff has been slightly warmer to China the last few months, but not Biden himself. Today: “China was growing at 8% a year to maintain growth, now close to 2% a year,” Biden said, "That’s not good because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things.” (src)
– AOC going hard in favor of foreign sunscreen imports (src)