Favorites December 14th 2021

Rory Not Sorry @rorynotsorry

The ratio of Gauteng hospitalized patients requiring intensive care and ventilation continues to remain significantly low compared to prior Covid waves. Case's rose again yesterday as did hospitalizations. New cases near Delta wave peak. Omicron Hospitalizations much lower.

The second graph has the most interesting news, percentage of patients requiring ventilation dropped a ton, the most hopeful possibility is that Omicron might act as a kind of variolation. It's still too soon to say for sure, but more signs seem to be pointing to Omicron being milder.

Peter Landers @LandersWSJ

So much for Toyota the EV skeptic -- car maker now plans to sell 3.5 million EVs a year by 2030 and Lexus will be 100% EV.

wsj.comToyota, in Reversal, Says It Will Shift More Rapidly to EVsThe Japanese car maker plans global sales of 3.5 million electric vehicles by 2030 and intends to make Lexus brand 100% electric

Yes! Finally!!

Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver

I was today years old that I learned when you hash a URL in Java it does a DNS lookup to get the IP address associated with the hostname as part of the hash function.

Pete Hunt 🚁 @floydophone

If you're surprised about the log4j vulnerability, just wait until you hear what happens when you put a https://t.co/RHWvUGoI0c.URL into a hashtable

The big industry-wide red alert recently was a bug in Java's log4j, but this ridiculous behavior for hashing URLs was not something I'd heard about. It's also a blocking operation, this is the kind of thing that could drive someone to substance abuse.

𝙈. 𝙉𝙤𝙡𝙖𝙣 𝙂𝙧𝙖𝙮 @mnolangray

"[O]ver half the difference between levels of segregation in the stringently zoned Boston and lightly zoned Houston metro areas can be explained by zoning regulation alone." scholar.harvard.edu/files/resseger…

"particularly the permitting of dense multi-family housing"

The Washington Post @washingtonpost

What Fox News hosts said privately vs. publicly on Jan. 6

Follow-up on yesterday

Caleb Watney @calebwatney

Obviously, the Paxlovid news is great. But I'm surprised that the approval bottleneck is getting so much more attention than the manufacturing bottleneck. Pfizer says they'll only be able to manufacture 80M courses in 2022 which is... not nearly enough.

We need guaranteed purchase agreements for ridiculously large numbers of doses. We need to build the capacity, to go with our teriffic research capability. Supply-side liberalism.

Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney

Don't think this one has fully sunk in yet: A member of Congress suggested that GOP-controlled states anoint Trump electors **before those states were even called.** This wasn't overturning the election. This was scrapping democracy before the votes were even counted.

Yet more fall-out from congressional investigation of Mark Meadows. If you're interested, there's also comparisons of Fox Hosts' private vs public statements on January 6th.

San Francisco, November 2021