Favorites January 25th 2024
The duck curve definitely makes it a bit harder to manage energy requirements, but it's also a sign of the success of our solar rollout. Impulse labs wants to remind us that this is a great opportunity to deploy more home batteries. I just wish power costs during the bottom of that duck curve got lower.
This is the beginning of a long therad if you're interested, but you can immediately see the politics of it. Hopefully some Republican congresspeople can be convinced that they're going to look bad voting against border security. Meanwhile, the Texas Governor is defying the Supreme Court, and seems to be looking to get State and Federal forces to shoot at each other.
Noah Smith went ahead and wrote an article based on this meme. It would be bad to elect Trump! Chaos is bad, don't listen to people who think Littlefinger's "chaos is a ladder" is a good goal.
I'm really excited to see what happens with Detroit's land value tax.
Clearly our modern advertisements aren't a great representation of what life is like, but I sorta think the difference is smaller? Not sure. I guess I haven't watched that many 50s commercials.
Longer Reads
• The IEA's energy report is out and very long. Here's a thread summarizing the most interesting graphs. Two highlights: China has passed their peak coal power generation, and global power emissions have peaked. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Tyler Cowen argues that countries with falling fertility should be subsidizing younger women to have kids. I'm a bit suspicious about whether this is a good idea. (src)
– Ireland stopped building homes in 2007, that's why home prices are up. Yglesias mentions that a big reason to build market-rate homes is that it's hard to get voters to want to pay for social housing for immigrants. If people want to come to your country, politically, you need to have market rate homes for them to live in. Ireland has lots of space. (src)(cached)
– While there's disagreement about whether China and the US are separating on trade, it's clear that we are decoupling financially. (src)(cached)
– "There are ZERO examples of cities rolling out inclusionary zoning policies and then seeing housing become broadly more affordable. The purpose of IZ is not to make housing more affordable, but to allow NIMBY politicians to pretend that they care" (src)(cached)
– New Very Low Earth Orbit commercial satalites on the way, they'll be orbiting at just 250 to 400 km, Low earth orbit is 2000 km. (src)(cached)
– Students talking to the GPT-3 based Replika reported that it reduced their suicidal ideation. Here's the paper. (src)(cached)
– A Cartel drone attack in Mexico killed 30 people. Drones with grenades are terrifying! (src)(cached)
– Hayley is finally going after Trump for seeming like he has dementia. (src)
– Good news, property crime in San Francisco decreased 7% year-over-year, near a 10 year low. (src)(cached)
– Google demoed Lumiere, a text-to-video diffusion model. Looks pretty good. (src)
– Two thirds of Republican primary voters oppose banning abortion! (src)(cached)
– Gene therapy used to allow an 11-year-old deaf from birth to hear for the first time. (src)
– Jon Stewart coming back to The Daily Show. In honor of that, here's his amazing tirade against deep dish pizza. (src)