Favorites August 18th 2024
Tim Lee speculates that the highway rollout has been so slow because on a highway, you can't phone home for help in an emergency.
This is from a documentary about Micron. The idea of 100% automation is cool, although I wonder how repairs work. Maybe I should watch the documentary.
I mentioned this finding recently, but I actually mistated it, so here it is again. Extra process on the margin in the US is bad. That's it, that's the finding. Here's the paper. To put it another way, making it illegal to make bad decisions doesn't lead to good decisions. It just gives people something they can sue over to slow things down. (cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– The newspapers refusing to publish Trump campaign emails because they're not newsworthy thought that John Podesta's risotto recipe was a matter of public interest that should be published and critiqued. (src)(cached)
– New estimates indicate that the US is on track to manufacture a surprisingly large slice of worldwide leading edge chips by the end of the decade. Don't listen to the Financial Times whining that some projects are weeks behind schedule. Weeks behind schedule is pretty good! (src)(cached)
– Longish article in NYTimes about the rise of coaching as a sort of free-for-all unlicensed therapy. (src)(cached)
– Leftists say the two parties are the same, Democrats ask why they don't go protest at a Trump rally, and they say "Are you crazy, they'd beat us up". So maybe the parties *are* different after all? (src)(cached)
– Article reminding us how far AI models have come in the last two years. (src)(cached)
– The reason to pay rich people to buy EVs wasn't the direct reduction in CO2 emissions from those cars, it was to motivate companies to learn how to build EVs cheaper so we wouldn't have to subsidize them anymore. And it's working (src)(cached)
– US Real Wages are above the pre-pandemic trendline. (src)(cached)
– In 2014 Putin had 59% approval among Ukrainians, that's gone now. (src)(cached)
– One reason the Walz pick was a good one is that the Harris campaign already had the audio of Trump saying Walz is great before they picked him. (src)(cached)
– There were violent riots in London, 70% of those arrested had previous criminal convictions. But this isn't even unusual, it's actually the norm when protests turn violent. (src)(cached)
– Someone figured out a way to upcycle microplastics into graphene. Here's the paper (src)(cached)
– What moron decided to name Ventura County's bus system 'SCAT'? (src)(cached)
– SB 1047 is a bad law, even with the massive rewrite they did at the last minute. Gavin Newsom should veto, and Eshoo and Pelosi agree. (src)(cached)
– Heartwarming excerpt from an article about a man who lost the ability to speak because of ALS and has regained it via AI. (src)(cached)
– Idea for Inclusive Zoning: use property tax abatements to offset the cost of the requirement. (src)(cached)