Sad to admit, I can't resist a meme from The Good Place. Many people knew that trying to quickly and cleanly overthrow the government of Iran wasn't going to work, but new reporting indicates that even Tulsi Gabbard had this figured out and tried to convince Trump not to do it. (src)(cached)
With the passing of Dolly Parton, one final round of the best meme about her. There's also plenty of heartwarming stuff, Roger Ebert seems to have had a suspicion that she was a [literal angel]. (src)(cached)
Allowing construction is very good! (src)(cached)
Longer Reads
• Cool article about siRNA, a way of building a new class of drug capable of temporarily turning production of individual proteins on or off for months at a time. Interestingly, this exact technology appears in (cached) the Spider-Man movie that came out this summer. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Chinese oil demand appears to have peaked last year. Could this be related to the absolutely insane (cached) speed of their solar deployment? Who can say! (src)(cached)
– People tend to think of high levels of mobility within a country would be associated with less sense of community. But America has become lower trust and more atomized even though over the last half-century we've all become much more rooted in place. There's a whole book on the subject (cached) if you're interested, but I'm a bit skeptical, because obviously there's been a lot of other confounding factors over the same period. (src)(cached)
– Major US universities are only slowly bringing back test requirements, and it might be an interesting opportunity to compare cohort outcomes over time in some future research. (src)(cached)
– Sounds wild that after all this time someone would suddenly come up with true advancement in stove technology, but it has happened just in time to make ending natural gas service without a mandate possible. An Impulse stove can sous vide a steak dry. Very cool. (src)(cached)
– A recent WSJ opinion piece criticising Treasury Secretary Bessent was so obviously the output of an LLM that the opinion editor had to publicly state that their policy was to be fine with printing AI-written stuff if it reflects the author's actual opinion. Josh Barro (and many others) are not wild about this choice by WSJ, and I tend to agree. Barro argues that this particular piece is still newsworthy because Bessent actually cares what the 'author' of the piece in question thinks. (src)(cached)
– Bernie Sanders lists political mega donors to note that they’re almost all republicans. Donors are all listed as couples, most of them are married couples, but amusingly, Andreessen & Horowitz are also listed as a couple. (src)(cached)
– Some AI Safety advocates have argued that it would be a good idea to piggyback on anti-datacenter anxiety as a way to slow down AI progress. But Yudkowsky, the most famous advocate for AI safety points out that in polling, if you tell people how AI data centers actually use water, support swings by over 30 points! “One of several problems with trying to cleverly base your arguments on popular lies”. (src)(cached)
– In Europe, they have surprisingly high capital intensity and automation in some areas, despite the significantly lower average wages. About Gupta shares a photo of a worker cleaning sidewalks with a huge outdoor vacuum cleaner, he suggests this is because low-end wages are higher. Seems correct. (src)(cached)
– Dunkin' has new iced drinks with even more sugar than ever, it's not clear they're even meant to be consumed. But Josh Barro argues that "if people had stuck to drinking coffee the way God intended, -- hot -- there would be this creep into giant sugary icy pastel beverages". Seems correct. (src)(cached)
– ICE seems to have been working with the Iranian government in trying to deport Iranians back to Iran to be imprisoned, seems despicable. This doesn't amount to treason though, Congress never actually declared war on Iran, are they even an enemy? (src)(cached)
– Since 1965 all 6 of the fiscal years where federal spending fell vs the previous year were under Democratic presidents, LBJ, Obama, Biden. And bad news, Republicans have also cut revenue (cached) over and over again. (src)(cached)
– Karen Bass, Mayor of LA, wanted to seem like Mamdani by fixing potholes pointed out to her on social media. She went out to fix one and they found a parked car in the way, so instead of fixing the pothole, they put up a no parking sign. And then made a video where they seem really proud of doing that. I can't believe Bass is favored to win in November. (src)(cached)
– There's discussion of Anthropic IPO'ing at $2T. If that happens it'll be 4x the value of all previous San Francisco IPOs put together. (src)(cached)
– Trump is starting a trade war with Canada, again. This time one of the sticking points is that Trump wants Canada to stop funding French language content. But the Quebecois have been in Canada longer than the English speakers have. This demand is absolutely deranged, and even if it did help Hollywood, the dollar value would be minuscule. (src)(cached)
– Interesting idea for legislation to help get small commercial businesses off the ground. The CORNER Act proposes allowing 'accessory commercial units', spaces for small businesses to experiment without the high up-front commitment of a 2-year lease in a large commercial space. The document is a model bill that could be passed by any state, or even a city. I love it. (src)(cached)
– I wouldn't put too much credence into it, but a16z is sharing research that appears to show that hospitals that have adopted AI have simultaneously lowered patient mortality. (src)(cached)
– Don’t let a NIMBY tell you that they’d be OK with densification of housing if it happened slower. NIMBYs show up to protest slow infill in relatively dense parts of Manhattan! (src)(cached)