Favorites February 6th 2023

Balboa Park, San Diego, June 2022

Barzan Sadiq @BarzanSadiq

Magnitude 7.7 earthquake strikes in #Nurdagi, #Gaziantep southeastern #Turkey. Affected #Cyprus, #Turkey, #Greece, #Jordan, #Lebanon, #Syria, United Kingdom, #Iraq, #Georgia, and #Armenia.

As of this writing, the casualties are at 4300. This thread has lots of photos and videos, although it's all pretty grim. A 2000 year old castle collapsed, which should give some indication of how big this quake was.

James Pethokoukis @JimPethokoukis

↗ GOLDMAN SACHS (Hatzius)): "We have cut our subjective probability that the US economy will enter a recession in the next 12 months from 35% to 25%, less than half the 65% consensus estimate in the latest Wall Street Journal survey."

Predicting recessions is hard, but it's good to see the likelyhood going down I suppose.

Erik Engheim @erikengheim

Second myth about #Germany is that the embrace of #wind and #solar power caused a big increase in coal usage. No, the overall picture over the last 20 years is a significant reduction in coal usage. Growth in wind power has been substantial.

It'd be nice if they han't cut their nuclear power so much, but this is definitely good. Also, their solar policies over the last few decades are what lead to the massive fall in photovoltaic prices that everyone is now benefitting from.

Blake Allen @Blake_Allen13

Russia’s budget situation is becoming increasingly unstable post-introduction of western price caps on Russian energy exports (that are set to expand this month). Deficit: ⬆️ $25B in January Energy revenue: -46% y2y Expenditure: ⬆️ 60% y2y

ft.comSubscribe to read | Financial TimesNews, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Plus, it looks like the US and Europe are going to continue to increase the scope of sanctions. Now that it's clear Europe will make it through this winter without Russian gas, western leverage has increased significantly.

Threads

• I had no idea Stanford was required to keep their total commute traffic at 1989 levels, but they have, despite the Bay Area's generally poor transit options.

• Thread announcing that Google's Large Language Model will be available for external use soon.

• While we're at it, a long thread on the state of the Ukraine war. A TL;DR that I'm borrowing: "Russia added a bunch of guys, but they're not great at fighting, so Ukraine should probably sit there and kill them as they attack, but Ukraine feels political pressure to attack soon, so Ukraine will probably attack"