Favorites August 27th 2023
These are paper airplanes that can take out a tank, war is changing really fast.
Somewhat related, a study about how a big part of variation in worker's income comes from which city they live in, the miracle of the agglomeration effect. But then in the last sentence they undercut it all: landlords eat up all the extra income. Land Value Tax would solve all of this.
Here's the excellent article with the full explanation if you're interested.
Don't worry, it's not going to waste: the demolition contractor had already lined up a buyer.
Longer Reads
• Cool thread about how some economists managed to discover or confirm locations of a bunch of bronze age cities based on records from one family of merchants from 1895 to 1865 B.C. (cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– BART's crisis intervention specialists appear to be effective at reducing incidents on the trains. (src)
– EVs make up a quarter of cars sold in California, 15% in Washington and Oregon. (src)
– Canada does immigration, but forgot to do housing (src)
– Strange new worlds is doing pretty well according to Nielsen (src)
– English speaking world not doing so hot at building subways, but the US is doing the worst. (src)
– Many 'old' dishes are recent inventions, including uramaki sushi (the kind where the rice is on the outside) (src)
– People are upset about LLMs learning facts from websites then mostly bypassing those same sites. It's not clear that there's really anything that can be done under modern copyright law. (src)
– Twitter replacement contenders and where they stand on features (src)
– Dunking on Tucker Carlson, both Russia and Hungary are far less religious/churchgoing than any US state. (src)
– NYTimes article snuck some degrowth BS into a recent article. (src)
– One SF Neighborhood decided they liked parking so much that they didn't want to have street sweepers, now they regret it. (src)
– Standard farm technology looks pretty cool (src)
– Republicans favoring invading mexico is absolutely insane. (src)