Favorites February 9th 2023

Computer History Museum, Mountain View, April 2022

Jeff Yang @originalspin

The inside of a cello looks like a place where something whimsically unspeakable happened in a Guillermo del Toro movie

If you like this 'musical architecture' check out the artist's site for more.

Joseph Zeballos-Roig @josephzeballos

New: The IRS says it picked the nonprofit @NewAmerica to help examine the feasibility of a “direct file” tax return system. That would allow taxpayers to sidestep tax prep companies like TurboTax + Intuit IRS on track to “deliver a direct file report to Congress in May 2023”

This is very exciting! He followed up with a link to an article about the tax system of the Danish Faroe Islands, which is apparently very efficient.

TheOmniZaddy 🌹🔰🏗 @TheOmniZaddy

Soviet central planning looks like a masterpiece in orthodox market economics compared to whatever the hell is going on with American transportation engineers https://t.co/gxIjT5VeW7

Michael Manville @MichaelManvill6

I opened to a random page--it was parking generation for adult cabarets (yes)--and found this. Two observations, a regression line with suppressed coefficients and diagnostics, but parking rates nevertheless predicted to two decimal places. https://t.co/BPkNgYIxhF

This is all discussion of the Institute of Traffic Engineers manual of Parking Generation which has been garbage for decades. from the thread: "So we're clear: this manual says you can use two observations and predict parking occupancy at an adult cabaret down to *one one-hundredth* of a parking space. Kids, don't let them tell you zoning isn't science. It doesn't have beakers, but it has precision!" OmniZaddy called this other graph a "human rights violation"

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Me and the boys changing fuses while and talking about politics while the ladies make jam and wrap presents. personality-project.org/revelle/public…

If I'm understanding the underlying paper correctly, this was based on self-assessed rating of how often they did each activity. I'm a bit surprised 'talking about problems at work' is so feminine.

Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 @JosephPolitano

Brigitte Gabriel @ACTBrigitte

What would the Founding Fathers say about the price of eggs today?

I really like this picture, it's from when Boris Yeltsin made a surprise stop at a Grocery store and realized that the material abundance in the United States was real. One follow-up "In Massachusetts in 1776, a dozen eggs cost 56 cents. A typical wage for a laborer was about 40 cents a day."

M. Nolan Gray @mnolangray

Resolved: You should not be allowed to incorporate a city that's completely surrounded by another city.

A good follow-up would be that if you manage to build up a city that completely surrounds another city, that's it, they're annexed. I agree with one commenter who said we have too many local governments that should just be HOAs.

Will McCrabb @mccrabb_will

This is such a cool cut.

Threads

• Have you heard anyone say that the Fed raising interest rates will actually increase inflation? Perhaps a well known and usually respected science fiction author? Here's a thread that actually takes the question seriously and explains clearly how we can be pretty sure such a view is backwards. TL;DR: High interest rates actually lower inflation and central banks have successfully controlled inflation using interest rates for decades.

• Tim Lee was particularly annoyed about articles saying that the quality of modern goods has gone down, which is just wrong. This desk history is a great example. Believe it or not, cars last much longer than they used to!

• Great thread from Joey Politano about how unexpectedly strong the US labor market is. TL;DR: Recession seeming ever less likely, also apparently residential construction employment was revised up significantly.