Favorites January 29th 2024
This seems like generally good news. 500 Wh/kg is around where regional airplanes would start to become viable on batteries. Don't look now, but EV range has tripled in the last decade.
The post goes on to claim that this technique was used in the Old West to rob trains, and is still used to this day to steal UPS Packages from trains.
He goes on: "If you were trying to design a bill to make the permitting process twice as bad, this is the bill you would write." This is based on an article in the Atlantic: Don’t San Francisco–ize Clean Energy. Someone else called it "subsidy program that funds the hecklers veto" another "State subsidized NIMBYism"
One commenter argued that in medieval europe, female rulers got in more and bloodier wars, but I think there’s an equilibrium problem.
Longer Reads
• Thread from Yglesias arguing that blocking new US LNG terminals is foolish. TL;DR: it's not clear that this will appreciably reduce worldwide CO2 emissions, but it is clear that it will damage US strategic objectives, especially with respect to Russia/Europe. (src)(cached)
• Tim Lee goes over the ways in which anthropomorphizing AI leads to obvious misunderstandings. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Reminder: immigrants pay taxes for social security which they don't get to use. (src)(cached)
– DC Metro saved a billion dollars in construction costs by not building such unnecessarily large underground stations. (along with some other stuff) (src)(cached)
– The French green party opposes new high speed rail, and wants to slow down existing rail. 🤪 (src)(cached)
– You'd think that, given Median Voter Theorem, the CA republican party would be relatively liberal. Nope. They're proposing tax breaks for living in wildfire zones, pretty stupid. (src)(cached)
– Wages up more for less educated workers up more for lower income americans, and employment is up more for non-white workers. The US Chamber of commerce is saying that the economy is bad though, because there's a worker shortage. Rich businessmen want lower taxes, and so they're trying to convince you that things are bad. (src)(cached)
– 9 months of design review was all it took to ruin this apartment complex. (src)(cached)
– Economists who I read all seemed to think that the higher interest rates would hit residential construction really hard. But no, construction job growth has continued despite high interest rates. (src)(cached)
– LA Times' owner "pushed out his [Editor-in-Chief] and gutted the paper bc his friend’s dog bit someone and he was apprehensive about a story" (src)
– The reason people are shown in profile on coins is that there are constraints on engraving depth. Straight-on faces on coins look weird. (src)
– A lot of folks were passing around this article about why newspapers are struggling. (src)
– If you saw recent charts of men and women's political views diverging, it seems like that's probably some sort of measurement error. Someone recreated the same query with a different dataset and found no such divergence. (src)(cached)
– Iranian drones managed to kill US forces in Jordan. I'm not sure what the right way to counter drone warfare is, but we should be doing something other than business as usual. Republicans are very excitedly proposing war with Iran. They are not the anti-war party. (src)(cached)
– Fun piece on the origins of human civilization and how writing is the first ever large language model. (src)(cached)
– Artificial spider silk (src)(cached)