Favorites February 17th 2023

January 2023

Dilan Esper @dilanesper

The pushback Matt is getting points to another issue that is missed by the Walter Mittys of Anarchism on the Internet. A society where people routinely break the minor laws that keep order is going to be a low social trust, right wing society leftism requires high social trust

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

"Zero traffic deaths" is a difficult goal. But I firmly believe that if we: — Use cameras to ticket people who speed — Seize the cars of people who don't pay their tickets We will end up with less speeding and fewer deaths https://t.co/ROZD92PgCk

A lot of people are mad at Yglesias over his push for more traffic cameras. Some are concerned that if you impound a poor person's car, they will be unable to get to work and it could ruin their life. But for one thing, wealthier people are more likely to own a car, and for another poor people are more likely to be victims of traffic accidents.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

It’s interesting that by coincidence so much less speeding happens in NYC during the hours when automatic traffic enforcement cameras are allowed to operate.

NYC installed speed cameras near schools and it reduced speeding 90%, seems good, if it's not too fascist for you. Owens feels that it's important to try to actually change the shape of intersections to make speeding harder rather than going all in with cameras. Here's a rebuttal (major intersection changes are slow and expensive).

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

The new set of proposed standards from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) are a step in the right direction:

vox.comWhat should be kept off-limits in a virology lab?New rules around gain-of-function research make progress in striking a balance between reward — and catastrophic risk.

Without getting in to any COVID angles, comment yesterday pointed out that there really are lab leaks relatively often right now. We should be taking some reasonable steps to make that happen less.

Molly White @molly0xFFF

oh no

One amusing comment: this "increases China's belief that we are psychos on a hair trigger", because Dark Brandon is saying "stay tf out of our airspace and we don’t care how many hobbyist balloons we have to incinerate with million-dollar missiles to make the point"

Threads

• Short thread with the backstory of a major app that I had somehow never read before.

• Thread going through the calculations of how many years an EV battery can be expected to last. TL;DR: A phone battery only lasts a couple years, but they go through a full battery cycle every day, cars don't.