Favorites: Engineering Progress and Economic Signals
The underlying experiment showed that you could recreate the same sort of 'irrational' human behavior around risk with completely deterministic situations that were simply hard to reason about. You can even make this clearer if you include deliberation as a cost of a option. People don't like having to think about stuff. Interestingly, this may also explain why people hate inflation so much
Everyone is angry!
Another example is single crystal turbine blades, which resist being bent at high temperatures.
Really feels like it's not just cleaned, they've also turned the lights up. But either way, it looks great.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– At the end of the day, maintaining public order means you may have to use coercive measures to stop people from smoking on the subway. (src)(cached)
– Sanders and Warren both underperformed Harris in the general election. Seems pretty clear Harris wouldn't have done better by going further left. Some folks try to argue that the best overperform, Osborn, ran a left-leaning campaign for a democrat, but he attacked the Republican he was running against for siding with Biden and says he wants to help Trump 'build the wall'. (src)(cached)
– LOTR meme (src)
– Will China push down the yuan against the dollar in anticipation of tariffs? It's the obvious move, but maybe they're worried about angering Trump. If they do it, it'll mean even more exports to Europe. (src)(cached)
– If Trump puts tariffs on Canada, the biggest impact will be higher fuel prices because we import and refine a lot of Canadian crude. (src)(cached)
– A bunch of people said the new Massachusetts clean energy law was bad, mostly because it seems to be paying people to sue the government. Chris Elmendorf argues it's a mixed bag. (src)(cached)
– Inflation coming in a bit high unexpectedly (src)(cached)
– Awesome looking 72 story residential tower getting built in SF. (src)(cached)
– Argument that new scaling estimation shows that we should expect much slower improvement in AI model performance going forward. (src)(cached)
– Argument that the introduction of EVs is a chance for Chinese cars like the 1970s oil crisis was a chance for Japanese cars. (src)(cached)
– Standard of living comparison in minutes of work to buy various goods. Things are a lot better now than in 1924! (src)(cached)
– There's a theory of thermostatic public opinion, that public opinion moves against whoever is in office. The simplest reason to imagine this would happen is that the party in power overreaches. But Yglesias points out that you can think about it the other way, enacting your most popular policies takes those off the table and they lose salience. (src)(cached)
– Trump created a fake crisis over migrants from Mexico and then settled in exchange for fake concessions. The next four years are going to be exhausting. (src)(cached)
– Good news: fentanyl deaths are falling (src)(cached)
– Voters had some incorrect notions about Harris' policies, you can't just not support unpopular policies, if the public thinks you have policy beliefs they hate, you need to repudiate those. Tracing Woodgrains comments that it's a sowing/reaping (cached) meme. (src)(cached)
– There's a site tracking Waymo pricing, they appear to have pretty good unit economics. (src)
– Contracts in Germany take a long time, because someone is required to read the whole thing aloud. Series A funding doc takes 12 hours, and everyone has to sit there the whole time. (src)(cached)