Favorites December 13th 2023
This seems absolutely wild. Considering the way these drugs have been discussed as primarily being about weight loss, it seems so strange to imagine taking them to prevent colon cancer.
One commenter points out that while we often make fun of Florida, their tax system is much more stable because it mostly relies on property taxes. Until we repeal Prop 13, we'll always have these wild swings, which don't really seem like a good part of a well-functioning government. And states can't print money, so this will mean actual austerity measures in California.
I had imagined that this would literally change the DNA of the patient throughout their body, but of course it doesn't work that way, it's just their bone marrow, and they have to use chemotherapy to remove their existing bone marrow first, the process takes over a month. Of the 100,000 people in the US who could benefit from this treatment, it's expected only about 20,000 will be able to get the treatment, it is quite expensive and very few places have been authorized to even perform the treatment. Here's the NYTimes article.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– You don't need deepfakes to get videos of celebrities saying arbitrary things, you can just pay them to do it on Cameo. (src)
– The way to make trains zero-emission is with overhead power lines, not batteries. Why is Caltrans even considering trains with batteries? (src)
– There are now 2 million more employed people in the US than were predicted pre-pandemic. Unemployment is near the 50-year low, and has been below 4% for 22 months, the longest since the 60s. Even Job Satisfaction is up. (src)
– CNN: "America is becoming a country of YIMBYs" Aww yea! (src)
– Even Republicans are happy about inflation coming down (src)
– Poll indicates that 20% of 18-29yo americans think the Holocaust is a myth, hopefully it was just strange question wording. (src)
– US Solar power installations up 50% year over year (src)
– Don't use discretionary approval for construction because it's a really obvious place for graft to happen (src)
– Meta got real-time rendering of a 3d avatar of of a person from live video using gaussian splatting. (src)
– Displaced Lahaina Fire Victims are being evicted. Hawaiian governor tried to move quickly to build new homes for them, but for some dumb reason the ACLU and Sierra Club stepped in to stop that. (src)
– Wow, the number one globe for kids on Amazon includes the Chinese propaganda nine dash line. (src)
– Hong Kong's Hang Seng index is below it's pre-asian-crisis peak. (src)
– Austin's tech hub status is fading surprisingly quickly (src)
– 2022 RCT showed that twitter's Community Notes feature really does work. (src)
– Ben Thompson seems to have guessed correctly about how Epic's trials vs Apple and Google would go (src)
– Noah Smith: "all land is stolen land" (src)