Favorites: Growth, Zones, and Flows

London, November 2024

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Traditions have to start somewhere I guess, I believe this is at least the second year of a Poptart wanting to be cooked. Can you imagine year 30 of this though 😆.

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This is especially impressive compared with the national rate, which is down (cached)

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I watched a ‘Huge if True’ episode recently that highlighted how our thinking on dinosaur body shapes has changed over time, and it’s basically this!

Longer Reads

• Thread about whether crude oil saved the whales. TL;DR: whale oil was still useful as a lubricant long, most whaling occurred after we stopped burning it. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Tyler Cowen is worried Musk shouldn’t be arguing in public with republicans about immigration because Musk’s correct position is unpopular. But his stated position (cached) is closer to democrats, they should just get some Democrats to vote for a bill. Although, Trump was clearly talking about H2-B workers (cached), but no one is correcting him. (src)(cached)
– Trick Trump into defending Greenland by promising him he’s doing a colonialism. Here's the underlying thread (cached) where someone's trying it. (src)(cached)
– It’s gonna take two years to get approval to build apartments on an empty lot in San Jose. (src)(cached)
– China’s cumulative contribution to Global Warming is now more than Europe’s (src)(cached)
– Alcohol sales at restaurants in SF are falling measurably, like 5% or so. (src)(cached)
– Maybe Florida residents just don’t understand railroad crossing arms? A fire truck was hit, you would think emergency personnel would know better. (src)
– Surgical robots are being trained based on footage of real surgeries, pretty cool! WaPo article. (src)
– China has built 200 new detention centers all over the country for use in interrogation and intimidation. The official reason is to reduce graft, but they’re also being used against those disloyal to Xi. (src)(cached)
– We still don’t really treat cyberattacks as acts of war, but China has been relentlessly attacking our telecom infrastructure. This time they got call audio and locations for millions of Americans. (src)(cached)
– It used to be that you could say ‘the plural of anecdote isn’t data’ but these days the situation is worse, because people find ‘anecdotes’ through algorithmic recommendations, so now there isn’t even a hint of random sampling. If you read a feed that’s biased to show you bad news, you’ll think everything is bad. On the other hand, network news coverage pushed some very stupid stories, (cached) although they’re chasing clicks like everyone else (src)(cached)
– A whole article full of stats about NEPA! (src)(cached)
– Chinese urban design as an example of James Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ (src)(cached)
– US treasury hacked by China (src)(cached)
– China as our opposite on building stuff (src)(cached)
– Wiesenthal thinks Yglesias and Klein are talking past each other with different definitions of “left” in discussions about who it is that's being obstructionist in blue cities. Here's the thread where (cached) they're arguing. Another option: maybe it's just that everything is being ruined by lawyers (cached). Here's the thread that started the argument (cached). (src)(cached)
– The “underserved community” requirements for building federally funded EV chargers were probably misguided (src)(cached)