Favorites August 29th 2023
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Silicon valley has also slowed down in new apartment construction, my hope is that the newest state laws will take a while to have a significant effect. But either way, we should have passed SB 827.
She's got a long thread about why Greenpeace is in the wrong, and a petition.
It's good to see that they reduce speeding, but obviously the reduction in injuries is even more important. The ideal would be that you’re collecting no tickets and no one is speeding or getting injured.
Another win for microeconomics! I’ll have you know, I sold my previous car with a Vickrey auction. And yes, one of the bidders refused to participate because it was too complicated.
Longer Reads
• Study from 2019 shows that cynicism is associated with lower intelligence by multiple measures, despite study participants expecting the opposite.
• Thread summarizing new paper "Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness"
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Continued excitement about fracking for clean energy (src)
– The reduction in land use per person for agriculture has continued into the present in a way I had not realized. If we can get access to more energy, we can continue to reduce land use. (src)
– New trailer out for a film about Bayard Rustin, he also predicted in 1970 that localism and naive participatory democracy would have objectively conservative outcomes. (src)
– Russian Embassy approvingly posted a map in which Crimea isn't part of Russia and Taiwan isn't part of China. Whoopsie. (src)
– Estimate of the total cost of getting to all renewable energy for New York says that long term battery storage lowers total costs by almost 30% (src)
– GPAs inflation at Harvard is pretty average is now 3.8 (src)
– China approaching US per capita CO2 emissions, burns majority of all coal worldwide. (src)
– Sierra club blocking legislation that will help keep sequoia trees alive (by allowing controlled burns) (src)
– Fine Tuned versions of Code Llama are performing very well (src)
– Republicans think red states are successful because of low taxes, no it's because of lower housing costs due to less restrictions on building. (src)
– First ten drugs for medicare price negotiation announced (src)
– ADA is the only reason strollers work in so many places (src)
– Home prices are way up, classic COVID frying pan graph. (src)
– "When Italian bureaucrats get paid higher salaries they are less likely to take bribes, which makes them more likely to be murdered by the mafia." (src)
– China has some very large "cities" but it's all a question of how you draw municipal boundaries, the land area of some of these cities is massive. (src)
– Democrats need to internalize that we now benefit from money in politics, lower turnout, and to some extent, corporate influence in politics. It's very strange. (src)