Favorites January 20th 2024
This was a great post, I wish I had written down what I thought the dots were for before I read the article, because it makes so much sense now that I've read it.
Trillions of dollars! That's value *beyond the boosters we already have and expect to develop in the future* There's so much value there that it really seems like we should find a way to fund this development, no matter the cost. I think prizes and purchase guarantees are the way to go (rather than patents), but whatever it takes! Here's the paper.
Bill Kristol was a Republican, but has been negatively polarized into a soc-dem. Medlock claims some credit for this. But they're discussing 'capitalists' throwing in with trump because now that it's clear that the Romney GOP isn't coming back, rich businessmen are ready to go all-in for Trump. Here's a second thread again arguing that the Davos set is preparing to defect to Trump. The only good news is that I think there's a game-theory element to it: they know that if Trump wins the election, he'll punish them if they spoke against him, but if he loses, a Democratic president won't punish Trump-supporting rich people.
Electricity in California is super expensive, but filling a car with gasoline is still almost 2x as expensive. And in the rest of the US the ratio is generally even better.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Details about how the Geneva conventions around war in cities work in the context of Gaza, although 'we didn't technically violate the geneva conventions' is not an argument you want to see. (src)
– Some constants of all Sudoku puzzles that I had never seen before, here's the video (src)
– The Mississippi river and its tributaries are absolutely huge. One commenter claimed it's a longer navigable river system than the rest of the world combined, but I couldn't find hard proof of that. Either way, it's really big. (src)
– No, the number of administrators in the US didn't go up 100x in the mid 90s, a graph about it is making the rounds again, here's the debunking. (src)
– Saying that your aims are similar to the US seizing Mexico in the 1800s doesn't make you look like the good guys. (src)
– The CCP has created a combo bluetooth speaker / portable battery. It's loaded with 72 essays of Xi Jinping Thought, and they think it'll be a hit with kids. But seriously, the light of Taiwanese democracy really is continuing to inspire people on the mainland to hope for something better than single party rule. (src)
– EU Regulators say they think Spotify should modify it's algorithms to play more locally made music. (src)
– Facebook says they're training Llama 3, and that by the end of the year they'll have 350,000 Nvidia H100. Each H100 costs about $30,000, so this is like 10 billion dollars on new GPUs in 2 years. (src)
– American's beliefs about the economy are finally catching up to the fact that the economy is doing well. Victory for Will Stancil (src)
– A recent article argues that fertility fell in east asia because of the amount of resources that suddenly went into raising kids. Noah Smith points out that this also explains why Japan's fertility didn't fall as much, he thinks Japanese parenting is actually less intensive. (src)
– The US navy says they're 400 months behind on submarine manufacutring. WWII was 73 months! Get your shit together folks, go talk to BART's program manager or something. (src)
– Things are actually going quite well for poorer people in the United States right now. As one commenter joked, it sorta takes the wind out of the sails of leftists who larp as revolutionaries (src)
– European ambassador says that the US is a 'fat buffalo taking a nap' despite Russia being at the gates. But like, maybe Europe could take defending itself a bit more seriously. We're already dealing with the Red Sea and trying to make sure Taiwan doesn't get invaded. (src)
– Trump confused Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley (src)
– Sorta wild, but housing construction hasn't slowed down despite high interest rates. It's maybe gone up? A bunch of graphs at the link. (src)
– "A long time ago Jean-Louis Gassée said he could sell 10k of anything just to people in Silicon Valley who wanted to be able to say they'd owned one." Relatedly, the Rabbit R1 has sold out all 10,000 units in it's initial production run. (src)