Favorites December 11th 2022

Filoli Historic House, December 2022

I didn’t notice when I took the picture, but that’s an electric light with candles as backup! Maybe it’s something you’d want if you’re having frequent power failures!

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

I love this idea: tax all patents a percentage of the patent holder's self-assessed value. Then use the revenue to buy out some patents and put them in the public domain. Simultaneously discourages patent trolling and helps make inventions more accessible.

arpitrage.substack.comA Harberger Tax on PatentsSelf-assessing innovation taxes for fun and profit

I've read of ways of trying to cheaply get good assessments of the value of land (or other property), but I had never before seen this idea of using the tax to buy some of the properties at their assessed value. I really like it, especially for patents, where folks aren't gonna be as sentimental.

Alice Evans @_alice_evans

In ancient Mesopotamian villages, men and women both made pottery at home. With the rise of the state from mid-third millennium BCE, pottery production became large-scale, state-organised & exclusively male! Evidence from finger prints!! 🤯 leilan.yale.edu/sites/default/…

Did you know men and women had different densities of fingerprint ridges? I certainly didn't!

Tom Wilson @thomas_m_wilson

SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday

on.ft.comSubscribe to read | Financial TimesNews, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

I included a thread about Fusion power breakthroughs yesterday, it's already out of date! A major highlight was that someone reached 70% of breakeven, and now we're at 100%! Still generates mostly neutrons though, so that's an issue.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

"Early access to the vaccine was preferentially awarded based on proximity to power and to the professional-managerial class." Some 🔥 from @patio11 worksinprogress.co/issue/the-stor…

This is an excerpt from an extremely long article about VaccinateCA that I have not personally read in full. I have, however, read the other excerpts Tim screenshotted, and they were equally hot stuff.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

If you look at actual electricity GENERATION, not capacity, you can see the story clearly. Here's a graph just for the U.S. You can see that: * coal+gas is falling steadily * nuclear is stagnant * renewables are rising and have surpassed nuclear * overall generation is flat

That switch between coal and natural gas is a good sign, coal pollutes a lot more, but even better, the newest estimates expect that Renewables will actually grow even faster over the next decade than the last: energy shortage from the war in Ukraine has spooked everyone into moving even faster.

Threads

• Thread arguing that blocking fossil fuel projects has a net bad impact. Summarized by Yglesias: "like imposing a small, regressive carbon tax and allocating the proceeds to fossil fuel incumbents"