Favorites August 2nd 2023
This particular graph was the most striking part of today's construction physics, but the whole thing was interesting.
It's really weird to find out that the National Archives is kinda badass. Also amusing from the indictment: literally using the words "consider one more relatively minor violation" of the electoral count act.
Threads
• Short thread arguing that prediction markets are not able to reliably predict the LK-99 superconductor research outcome. TL;DR: there are bad selection effects, well informed people will not want to participate in the market.
Flotsam and Jetsam
For years, I’ve had a separate email containing rejected tweets, in part because the email would literally be too long and I have to cut some. But ever since Twitter blocked substack embeds, the rejects email has instead contained my own summaries of the posts that I’m rejecting. But they’re short enough that I’m going experiment with including them in a ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ section. If they have really interesting images, I’ll embed those as well, but for the most part it’ll just be single sentence summaries.
– We should allow more small scale commercial should be allowed in more places. Everywhere ideally. (src)
– Trump and his co conspirators were planning to depend on the military to aid their coup, simultaneously the US military was preparing a potential counter-coup. (src)
– Tracking YIMBY wins nationwide, a whole thread of details. (src)
– The homestead act was Georgist? sorta? (src)
– Survey of US mayors, they say they need more homes but there's no empty land, somehow they're not sure what to do about that. (src)
– Rental return lot in the bay area, 250 cars returned, 27 of them broken into. Yikes. (src)
– Public transit usage continues to rise in London, so that's good (src)
– Permitting reform needed for Geothermal (src)
– New Biden admin plan to reward cities for upzoning (src)
– Mongolia doesn't like how things are looking for Taiwan, is trying to form closer ties with the US (src)
– Kids with married birth parents more likely to go to college, but no causation without an RCT (no one is committed enough to do that) (src)
– In polling, renewable energy is very important, as is economic growth. But voters don't care about ‘climate change’, precise wording matters. (src)
– China's military drills around Taiwan are getting more specific, preparing for a blockade (src)
– Apple is letting Twitter (now X) break a ton of App Store rules (src)
– ADUs are good, but don't do enough to reduce rents (src)