Favorites August 1st 2023

David Watson

Aug 2, 2023

See new Tweets Conversation Drew Tuma @DrewTumaABC7 Our ocean temp is a chilly 53° along the San Francisco coast but things are likely about to change. Just 350 miles away is warm water in excess of 70° (due to El Nino) and it is moving in our direction. Over the next month I would expect to see our local waters start to warm. — (src)

Here's an animation of the warm water getting closer over the last month.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits Good ideas in this Manhattan Institute report on autonomous vehicles: (1) More curb spaces for loading/unloading ride-hail vehicles (2) Congestion pricing (3) Giving NTSB more funding to investigate AV crashes and recommend areas for improvement manhattan.institute Autonomous Now: Why We Need Self-Driving Technology and How We Can Get It Faster Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are poised to improve roadway safety and lower transportation costs, yet policy barriers are delaying their adoption. This report focuses on the two AV applications—autono... — (src)

I think that self driving car adoption is a good opportunity to implement congestion pricing, perhaps starting just with autonomous vehicles, since they already can easily report their location at all times. Also, autonomous cars could pay for parking for extremely short periods without any transaction friction, so it’s a good opportunity to set that up as well.

Patrick Collison @patrickc I also hadn't known that California's grid now reaches 85% renewable generation (even in winter), and spends much of almost every day >50%. (63% at time of writing this tweet.) — (src)

Pretty cool, although we need to actually be way over 100% renewable during the day to charge batteries for the night, so we need to keep going, or build more geothermal/nuclear to get the nighttime coverage.

Andrew Prokop @awprokop With Tanya Chutkan as the judge and a DC jury it seems very likely Trump will go to prison unless (1) He wins the presidency, or (2) SCOTUS saves him on appeal https://apnews.com/article/capitol-siege-only-on-ap-donald-trump-government-and-politics-sentencing-de394dd56b3251aac5a50014f4d6afa7 — (src)

Trump got lucky on the judge for the Mar-a-lago documents case, but that's not gonna work for the DC case.

Threads

• NASA engineer enumerates all the false alarms that the shuttle's radar would pick up, and how it makes him doubt the recent UFO stuff.

• Thread about recent Chinese economic data. TL;DR: it's looking pretty ugly