Favorites: Democracy, Density, and Data
December 4th 2024
There were a lot of memes about this, the haters said he couldn't do it, great call from the haters. It was a calculated risk, but he's bad at math. He found out that democracy got hands. The parliament voted against martial law unanimously and the military just immediately stopped because they were following rule of law. "Just vote out fascism" in action. Of the previous 12 presidents of South Korea, approximately 1 left office on good terms. Korean joke apparently: "There are only two types of Presidents in Korea. Those who are in jail and those headed to jail.
You could go a bit further and say this chart seems to indicate that people basically only understand the concept of 50%. Noah Smith argues that this is basically Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory in action. Hank Green pointed out that oncologists also have this problem in explaining treatment success rates to patients.
Voters, yea, I don't know.
This is an excerpt from an Ezra Klein column. One commenter described how they'd evade being forced to hire unqualified candidates when he worked for the US Government: "open requisitions in the middle of the night with a cap of 50 applicants; after tipping preferred candidates." That sounds really bad! I want the government to function.
This is wild! I spend a lot of time on here talking about YIMBY and land use regulation and I never would have guessed that land use regulation wasn't widespread in California till the 80s.
I think part of why this is possible is that you can just physically carry panels that once installed require essentially zero upkeep to any remote location where you need them. The article argues that this could destabilize their power grid, but good news for Pakistanis, battery prices are falling even faster than solar prices.
Longer Reads
• An interesting thread about new evidence indicates that life on earth was surprisingly complex very early, 4.2 billion years ago, and how this makes extraterrestrial life more likely. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– More breakdown of Trump winning with less engaged voters, indicating high now turnout hurts democrats. (src)(cached)
– Obama's decisions to moderate, especially on immigration, seem to have been pretty clearly vindicated. (src)(cached)
– Steve Mnuchin turned out to be very good at the position of Treasury Secretary. Trump's staffing decisions are so wild that we don't know up front who's going to turn out to be competent or effective. (src)(cached)
– Oh look, Russ Vought who had a major role in project 2025 will be leading the White House Budget office. (src)(cached)
– Trump has forced the GOP to be a bigger tent than it once was. (src)(cached)
– Argument that if a party wins a trifecta and then attempts to do sweeping legislation despite a narrow majority, things will go poorly for them electoral. (src)(cached)
– Most places didn't keep track of cause of death in the 1800s, but Massachusetts did, and it allows us to see the impact of vaccines very clearly. (src)(cached)
– Klein argues that his problem with "The Groups" isn't an anti-leftwing take, it's a pro-prioritization take. (src)(cached)
– John Oliver is going around saying the TikTok ban is xenophobia, which is dumb, but what's worse is that people see him as a representative for Democratic elites, despite the fact that it was Democrats who passed the law in question. (src)(cached)