I made a mistake in the January 23rd newsletter, in the flotsam and jetsam: neither CEQA lawsuit was real, they were both jokes! We regret the error.
Nate Silver thinks can be thought of as a risk we took of telling everyone to not socialize for a year, suddenly folks got more anti-social, even behind the wheel.
It's sorta wild that Trump can run on this at all, during his time as President he didn't achive anything. No surprise Romney is not on board with the Republican plan here. Yglesias points out that the deal is so favorable to Republicans that if it passed, many Democrats would be mad, it's a great wedge issue that they're throwing away. In related news, the RNC is considering declaring Trump the presumptive nominee without any further primaries.
The Houthis may not understand Cold War II as well as previously thought. I bet Russia's mad about this one. We know China's mad, they are asking the Houthis to cool it with the bombings of shipping lanes. I guess they finally realized that closing that trade route is worse for them than any other single country.
He goes into more detail in the article, but this pair of pictures is very directly the point. And the photo on the right could be of single family homes in Palo Alto instead and it'd still be accurate.
Longer Reads
• A great thread on polling on Biden admin policies, 5 with broad support and 5 that are polarized. The highlight is this graph, a reminder of which policies poll well and which poll poorly. (src)(cached)
• Long thread summarizing the bad blood between developers and Apple, and how that's interfering with Apple's plans for the Vision Pro. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Scott Wiener has proposed that cars in California should use GPS to limit their speed based on the road they're on. Probably a good policy, honestly I'm mostly worried about blowback. Max Dubler proposes that we pair it with lots of public racing rings. (src)(cached)
– Popehat reminds us that the DoJ shouldn't be thought of as heros. (src)
– Polling indicates that people think Generative AI is always truthful. People who use it are more likely to think it's truthful. (src)
– GDP growing at 3% annualized and inflation is at 2%, seems pretty good, here are a few graphs. (src)(cached)
– Japan's "moon sniper" lander managed to successfully landed within 100 meters of it's target site. Unfortunately it landed upside down. (src)(cached)
– BART is going bring the max speed of their trains back up to 75 or possibly 80 mph. (src)
– BART working on getting the trains running at 80mph (src)(cached)
– Epic is not pleased with Apple's plan for DMA compliance, their proposal is so punitive that I'd be surprised if any developer uses it. (src)(cached)
– LLMs are no better at helping plan a bioweapon attack than an old fashioned Google search (src)(cached)
– A new technology for using RNA to modify genomes invented called 'bridge recombination'. I can't really tell what you'd use it for, but it seems cool! (src)(cached)
– Japan is trying to build homes in the US because of some arbitrage opportunities that it opens up. This seems good, although I'm not sure they'll be able to do much to get the cost of construction down. (src)(cached)
– A NIMBY criticizes the construction of large apartments in Vancouver by Native Americans, likening it to the historical injustices of European colonialism. (src)(cached)
– Looks like GPT3.5 is getting cheaper, and the laziness problem with GPT4 has been fixed (src)
– Interconnection is now the #1 cause of solar projects falling apart, surpassing land use / zoning issues (src)(cached)
– It's very easy to accidentally (or not accidentally) train LLMs on the test data sets, completely invalidating the tests. (src)(cached)
– China took money from state-owned enterprises to bail out their stock market, pretty strange form of Communism they've got over there. (src)(cached)
– The US should start buying military hardware from our close Allies, especially South Korea, whose Destroyer is probably better than ours, and also way cheaper to build. (src)(cached)
– Short thread examining the continued fall in inflation despite GDP growth. TL;DR: they're probably gonna lower rates. (src)(cached)
– You know why Democrats didn't codify Roe back when they had a filibuster-proof Senate marjority? It's because the tent was bigger back then. Also, the nation has become more pro-choice since then. (src)(cached)
– Central African Republic had a 6% death rate in 2022, that's absolutely horrific. The median age is 15. (src)(cached)
– Vending ban in San Francisco appears to have had a big effect on violence in the Mission, which appears to be way down. (src)(cached)
– Trump was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll 83 million dollars (src)(cached)