Favorites: Drone Deluge, Dimon Distractions
June 2nd 2025: Russia loses a fifth of its strategic bombers; drones can bypass any port security we have
Russia had around 50 of the type of strategic bomber that Ukraine destroyed today. These are the bombers that Russia uses to threaten North America. Perhaps Vance owes (cached) Zelinsky a thank you? Ukraine also hit sites on the other side of Russia (cached) and apparently Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet headquarters (cached) as well. If it wasn't obvious, the new precautions they're going to take in response address going to make a horrible mess of their logistics. Global logistics tend to assume that containers can be 'trusted' no country is set up with capacity to monitor all incoming containers to an extent that would have caught this. This could happen tomorrow in the US (cached). We're no better defended than Russia was. Russia is using drones as well of course, they broke their record for number of drones used in an attack the day before using almost 500 drones (cached)
Kicking out foreign students is bad! There’s historical precedent for why it's bad, the guy who developed China's ICBM program only did so after we kicked him out (cached). To make it dumber, Vance claimed space program didn’t need immigration, which is just transparently false. The other parallel is the Nazis chasing out Jewish physicists, but to some extent chasing out Chinese scientists right now is even stupider. Atomic power wasn't obviously world changing. AI is, and it's driven by immigrants (cached)
Super important that this isn't just observational. It's an RCT, so the effect is causal. Yet more evidence (did you need more?) that exercise is good (cached)
Before this moment I had never heard of laser welding, but that combination of graphic and outcome is incredible. If you want more, Sam linked a video on youtube with more details about laser welding.
J Jonah Jameson is a bastard, but canonically, he’s got some honor too. I’m sure there are other villains like this, but none come to mind immediately.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Here's Jaime Dimon out there focusing on wage stagnation in order to get his taxes lowered. He has the message discipline to avoid the topic he actually cares about: lower taxes for himself. Anyway, here’s a graph (cached) of what percent of the country makes various amounts of household income, three tranches, 0-30k-100k. Adjusted for inflation. Before opening, please visualize how the relative size of each group has changed over time. Which groups have expanded? Shrunk? Then look at the graph. Now that you’ve seen the graph, how do you think globalization has affected the American middle class (cached) in the last 50 years? (src)(cached)
– VC and hedge fund shadow each other. Hedge fund is way more organized, sound detailed deep analysis. (src)(cached)
– ACX and MR are still at war (src)(cached)
– Anti-YIMBY articles these days start with a section where they say they of course agree zoning should be reformed. We’ve come a long way. (src)(cached)
– There was polling of whether young people like or dislike various right-wing influencers. The real takeaway is that no one has ever heard of anyone. The last real celebrities are the pre-internet ones. (src)(cached)
– Trump is saying he won’t be taking Federalist Society’s judge recommendations anymore. If you didn’t like the Christian right wing republicans, you’re gonna really dislike the post-Christian right. (src)(cached)
– Trump’s approval numbers have improved, but it’s mostly because courts have forced him to improve his policy positions. As long as that keeps happening, democrats can’t just depend on his polling getting worse (src)(cached)
– DC is taking action against someone with tons of parking tickets, but as Yglesias points out, it would have been good if they'd taken action before the scofflaw had reached 200k worth of fines. (src)(cached)
Re: Ukraine's drone attack. Seems like a caper out of a Hollywood movie or a video game, but it actually worked. Reminds me of a plan to attack Japanese wooden structures with napalm-armed bats. In short, never underestimate your wife's dentist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
"Super important that this isn't just observational. It's an RCT, so the effect is causal. Yet more evidence (did you need more?) that exercise is good."
Fine, David, I'll go for a walk.
"J Jonah Jameson is a bastard, but canonically, he’s got some honor too. I’m sure there are other villains like this, but none come to mind immediately."
He generally does, but as time goes on the character has shifted in some iterations to reflect the modern conservative, as in Insomniac's Spider-Man games, where he more closely resembles Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh as a raving, conspiracy-spreading podcast host. In some respects it's interesting how comic book characters slide through time, reflecting our culture in a five to twenty year window. I'm still waiting for our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to declare himself a Democratic Socialist, as a young idealist New Yorker. Or at least grow a mustache.