Favorites January 4th 2023

December 2022, Google Crittenden Campus

Hannah Ritchie @_HannahRitchie

Looking at the question of whether the world has enough lithium for the electric vehicle transition. Hunted down figures of global lithium reserves, back to 2007. Reserves are increasing because we keep discovering more. We're good at finding stuff when we need it.

Known global resources are 88 million tonnes. (reserves are resources that are economically feasible to extract). A quick search indicates that global production is 100k tonnes in 2021.

Sam D'Amico @sdamico

seems bad!

Joseph Allen @j_g_allen

New research on gas stoves and childhood asthma --> 12% of current US childhood asthma attributed to gas stove use --> comparable to children’s risk of being exposed to secondhand smoke --> IL = 21.1%; CA = 20.1%; NY = 18.8%; MA = 15.4%; PA = 13.5% https://t.co/DesN2I7Eja

I've shared previous studies on gas stoves before, but this comparison to secondhand smoke has gotta be the most alarming I've seen yet.

Aaron Carr @aaronAcarr

Yet another data point showing Trump's waning influence:

They're up to six failed votes today. kylo_ren_more.gif. Nate Silver and others believe that the holdout Republicans don't actually want policy concessions, they want a scalp just to prove they can do it.

The Alex Nowrasteh @AlexNowrasteh

We're at a low immigration period in American history.

Immigration rates only seem high because of our low birthrate.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

New paper shows how powerful left-digit bias in prices is: for example, we unconsciously think of a product priced at $4.99 as $.20 cheaper than one priced at $5.00. Retailers underestimate how well the trick works, losing up to 4% of profits by not ending every price with .99!

Retailers need to do *more* X.99 pricing? What?

Threads

• Thread on the XBB.1.5 covid variant. TL;DR definitely get a bivalent vaccine if you haven't already.

• While there's a lot of rain in California today, the Colorado river is still drying up, here's a thread of 8 ideas to do something about it. The highlight is that most of the water goes to agriculture, which isn't incentivised to use it efficiently.

• Thread about how many 'traditional' foods are very recent inventions. Thread draws from this article, which in turn is an excerpt of this paper