When I sometimes say that I don't think 'intelligence' is not the most important thing, it's not that I don't think there's any inherent difference between individuals, it's that I think the ability to work hard is more important for outcomes.
One person responded "Environmental review is one of the biggest threats to the environment"
Now that we have experience with COVID, where the vaccines seem to lose some effectiveness after 6 or 12 months, it's nice to see something clearly working pretty well at 2 years.
Further, the 2023 was the worst fundraising round for the RNC in 20 years. Noah Smith thinks that folks tell pollsters they want to vote for Trump, but they don't like him anymore
Longer Reads
• Short thread on a recent study of breastfeeding vs bottle feeding. TL;DR: it's more clear than ever that formula is just as good as breastmilk, and we're causing people unnecessary stress by pushing women to breastfeed. (src)(cached)
• Highlights Nat Bullard's presentation on improvements in energy over the last year, all graphs. Battery prices down, US now a net energy exporter, and we've finally slowed down our foolish use of corn for ethanol. Another commenter highlighted the efficency of solar panels powering an EV vs corn powering an ICE car. Yet another highlighted that Solar Panel costs keep falling, they seemed unsustainably low two years ago at 25¢ per Watt, this year it's 10¢ per watt (src)(cached)
• Andrew Prokop has a short thread discussing how Trump is much less likely to be a felon on election day than it looked 6 months back. (src)(cached)
• Description of a study where they gathered data through the eyes of a child (they literally put a camera on the kid's forehead). Just 61 hours of data was enough to usefully train a language model. Here's example data. Here's some of the generalization results. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Explainer for people outside california for why our schools are underfunded. (It's prop 13) (src)(cached)
– When mainland Chinese people were polled about unifying with Taiwan, 40% said using force was unacceptable. So that's good. (src)(cached)
– Zuckerberg says that it should be the phonemaker's job to pass age info to apps, rather than the app's job to figure out the user's age. Honestly, I think he's right. (src)
– Proposed reintroduction of salt bill is bad and regressive (src)(cached)
– Reasonable deal passed to expand the child tax credit and increase R&D funding with some not too bad corporate tax cuts. If the GOP were in charge, this bill would have been quite different. (src)(cached)
– Green Day Breakthrough is now closer to The Beatles Breakthrough than the present day. But maybe the entire Rock genre is now a bit archeic. (src)(cached)
– Ukraine managed to hit Russian oil refineries, which has dropped their exports by like 30%. Downside of an oil-based economy is that it's really hard to hide. They also hit a missile corvette. (src)(cached)
– CA Judicial ruling says that a city's housing element isn't compliant until they've jumped through HCD's hoops. (src)(cached)
– Biden admin is going to create sanctions against Israeli settlers, which seems pretty good, it even creates a deterrence effect to try to stop future bad behavior. This will also be bad for Netanyaho. The state department is also considering how they might recognize a palestinian state. (src)(cached)
– "It's one bus station, Michael, how much can it cost — ten billion dollars?" (src)(cached)
– Everyone thinks that the Supreme Court will overturn the removal of Trump from state ballots, but here's a conservative Cato institute scholar saying he should be removed. (src)(cached)
– “Illegally studying the Quran” as a five year old is a crime punishable by 10 years in Xinjiang, China (src)(cached)