Favorites January 7th 2024
I wonder if they normally carry enough fuel to reroute like that. Is there just a network of refueling ships? Do they just make unscheduled stops at ports along the way? Either way, this seems like it's going to be a real mess for logistics.
Congressional pay also hasn't kept up with inflation. We don't want them to see becoming a lobbyist as their retirement plan, we want them to want to keep doing things that get people to vote for them!
I started laughing out loud at 50,000°C
Longer Reads
– Teardown reveals that Huawei's new laptop uses a TSMC chip, because export controls appear to have succeeded in stopping China's progress in chipmaking technology. (src)
– Bernie Sanders is opposed to funding the the incentive program for funding new vaccines that ended in October. He's worried it's a handout to pharma? Seems shortsighted... (src)
– Because the US changed how we measure maternal death in childbirth, it looks like it shot up in the US over the last decade, but it's entirely an artifact of changed measurement systems (src)
– The first sodium-ion battery cars are being delivered this month, 300 mile range, from Volkswagen (src)
– I had no idea that the CCP supported independence for Taiwan until 1935 and recognized it as a country until at least 1949. From a longer article in FT. Bill Bishop also discussed the article and the connection to Taiwanese identity. (src)
– Once Deng Xiaoping's handpicked successors finished their terms, suddenly the CCP succession mechanism broke down. Relatedly "There is a joke in the Chinese diaspora. Deng planted the seeds, Jiang watered the plants, Hu reaped the harvest and Xi set the fields on fire. 🤣🤣🤣" (src)
– The patterns of anti-semitic attitudes in the US population are.. uncomfortable. (src)
– SFMTA's experiment with center bike lanes was an abject failure, normal bike lanes increase ridership by 50%, center ones increased it by 3% (src)
– I'm still upset about the NYC teacher's union opposing congestion pricing. They're saying that too few of their members will ride public transit, so why should they pay. That's the same foolish thing people say about funding schools! "I don't have children, so why should favor funding schools?" (src)
– Just because an investigation was driven by partisain intent, doesn't mean you should ignore findings of bad behavior. I'm talking, of course, of Clarence Thomas. (src)
– Israel is calling for the US to send a peacekeeping force to Gaza as a long term solution. Which... no, let's not do that. (src)
– An outpouring of positive statements in response to a guy who just became a US citizen, including this quote, which I had read before, but didn't realize was from Reagan: "You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American." (src)
– Krugman really hit the nail on the head regarding the exact upcoming sequence of events for inflation back in February 2022 (src)
– Due to inflation, Fight for 15 is now really fight for 11. We're going to need to raise minimum wages further. (src)
– Looks like some cancer drugs may actually be effective at much lower doses than we've been using. Unfortunately the study didn't say anything about it reducing side-effects, so this seems like it's just a way to stretch limited doses. (src)
– Don't listen to crazy people who say that Puerto Rico shouldn't become a state. (src)
– Bill proposed in NYC to pilot a Land Value Tax. (src)
– It's weird that "Epstein was murdered" is a Republican-coded conspiracy theory, given that the implications seem pretty bad for Trump et al. (src)
– People are mad at BlackStone for buying single family homes, and now BlackRock needs to go around telling people that they're an entirely unrelated entity. And I guess BlackWater already renamed themselves "Academi" back 2011. (src)