Favorites August 9th 2022

July 2022, Mountain View

Quantian @quantian1

Militaries are built to accomplish specific goals, which dictates their cost- for instance, France's is "fuck around in Africa", China's is "take over Taiwan", Pakistan's is "fight India", etc. The US's is "win a war against anyone anytime anywhere in the world in under a month".

James Palmer @BeijingPalmer

the absolute havoc Ukraine is wrecking with 16 HIMARS - a quarter-century old piece of US tech that's been stripped of its most sophisticated software before being handed over - is a testimony to just how terrifyingly dominant the US military-technological machine can be.

Ukraine appears to have managed to hit a Russian airbase in Crimea. "Appears" because when asked, they suggested the Russians shouldn't be smoking near the explosives. To some extent, the US military of the last few decades was more powerful than we realized, we just trapped ourselves in the wrong kinds of wars.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick

I am literally speechless. Qualified immunity exists because of a CLERICAL ERROR?!

Alex Reinert @aar718

Just uploaded my recent article (forthcoming @CalifLRev) "Qualified Immunity's Flawed Foundation" arguing that QI doctrine was, you guessed it, flawed at its inception. You can find it here: https://t.co/9hUnhJj4MK 1/x

Here's more detail from the paper, what an unbelievably dumb situation we're in.

Threads

• Thread on the contents of the CHIPS and Science act that Biden just signed, I knew about the money for US made chips, but there's a bunch of other interesting stuff as well.

• Short thread summarizing research into 'green' jobs, apparently there's been many created, especially solar-related.

• Thread summarizing stats on Biden's federal judge appointments. He's appointing faster than any president since JFK.

• Thread summarizing California's response to San Francisco's housing element. And another that starts by summing the whole thing up as "tl;dr: It looks like America's second most expensive city is going to spend the next 8 years in de facto land-use receivership, courtesy of state law." Head of California YIMBY says "State action gets the goods!" There were ever multiple memes

• Thread explaining how Nebraska used a subpoena of Facebook Messenger data to prosecute a teen for getting an abortion and her mother for helping.