Favorites August 23rd 2023
We've massively reduced the occurences of famines by using technology to get more food from the same land. The good news is that we have technology for building more homes with the same land: elevators.
One commenter made the obvious reference to The Wire.
These are pretty great. He also did some with wind turbines that I thought were pretty good. I gave a shot to making some geothermal ones, I think they came out great:
Longer Reads
• Short list of ways industrialized countries could boost fertility: More homes, let kids play outside, lower education requirements for more jobs.
• The proposed UK surveillance law seems really bad, it seems clear they don't understand that if they pass it, Whatsapp, iMessage and Signal are going to all go away.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Strict Zoning and NEPA are neoliberalism (Reagan era anti-government reforms) (src)
– [Black, Bridge] * [rock, water, stone] are all real companies, mostly investment firms (src)
– Strong towns comes out in favor of LVT (src)
– Xi's inner circle doesn't have any technocrats, they don't actually know how to fix an economic slump. (src)
– Vonnegut worried TV was like lead pipes, but it turns out, we still had way too much lead (src)
– Deaths per billion passenger miles cars are ahead of everything besides motorcycles by a fair margin. I spent a while trying to find bike info in the underlying article, it’s just not there. (src)
– Thrilling to watch Musk make terrible decisions for Twitter. "Like watching a blackout drunk F1 driver" (src)
– Paris before / after the switch to bike focused development (src)
– A 4 year old kid was killed by a car in SF, city will take over a month to install a barrier to disuade future cars. Gurilla urbanists installed one in days. (src)
– Hawai'i Governor declares "YIMBY martial law", although it's only expected to get 50,000 over 'the next few years' (src)
– Liberty University banned dancing, "Footloose is real" (src)
– Extremely long post describing how you can use adverse selection to make a tax policy work better (src)
– Families of people who have fled Hong Kong being punished, unthinkable before China took over the city. (src)
– India successfully put a rover on the moon. Only the 4th country to land something there! (src)