Favorites July 21st 2024
Really impressive that he stepped aside. Ezra Klein stepped out of Twitter retirement to urge for this, and laid out the state of things on Friday, and now it's happened. Harris is very well positioned to be the nominee, Maya Rudolph must be quite pleased. Some claimed the debate was a mistake, but that's not true, it was right for the country and for Biden's legacy, they did it because they thought he'd win and he needed to consolidate the party somehow.
Your first thought, like mine, is probably "won't it stay on when I switch it off?". But no, it won't, it turns off when it detects that the switch is off. You can just use it as a normal bulb. I sorta want to get one just to experiment with it.
This is a very interesting fact that I was not aware of! Sorta makes it seem like it should be easier to pass gun regulations over time.
Longer Reads
• Great thread summarizing an an essay in the NYTimes about why elevators are more expensive in the US than Europe. Josh Barro summarizes even further, "Our building codes require elevators to be too big, with expensive, bespoke changes from European standards. And labor unions have fought for inefficient work rules.". No thought was put into these code requirements, the large size requirement was based on a random firefighter's request, he estimated the extra cost it'd impose was 'none'. (src)(cached)
• Thread summarizing an interesting study about income tax simplicity in France. TL;DR: people are willing to give up some pay to stay in an income group with simpler tax filing, but they also like that it's easier to evade taxes in the simpler filing system. (src)(cached)
• JD Vance says 40 year old fridges are better than modern ones. Probably not, and here's a very long analysis of that claim, and how it ties in with the complexities of calculating inflation. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– New Zealand just went from a center-left government to a center-right one, but the new government is promising to do even more land use reforms. (src)(cached)
– Trump is trying to disassociate with project 2025, but the MAGA super PAC is running ads highlighting it. (src)(cached)
– The Wire Season 2 made it seem like the Port of Baltimore was declining and automation was going to take jobs away from dock workers. But neither of those ended up happening. (src)(cached)
– Researchers trained an ML model to predict who would be involved in violent crimes in Chicago. It's out of sample accuracy was quite good, of the 500 highest risk people, 13% were shot within 18 months. Here's the paper (src)(cached)
– US and German intelligence agencies stopped Russia from assassinating the CEO of a German arms manufacturer. The new cold war won't go away if you just ignore it. And Trump would cut back on intel sharing with Europe (src)(cached)
– While a majority of Americans want less total immigration, a majority also still wants more skilled immigration. (src)(cached)
– It's weird that quadcopters and cheap long-range guided missiles are both called 'drones' in military situations (src)(cached)
– Taiwan has been removed from the Republican platform for 2024. In 2016 they removed Ukraine. (src)(cached)
– Water situation in China is not looking good, a lot of droughts recently due to warming (src)(cached)
– Tight labor markets are the thing that raises wages for Americans with the least income (src)(cached)
– The Secret Service let Trump go on stage to give his speech minutes after they noticed Crooks atop a nearby rooftop. What a colossal mistake (src)(cached)
– New study seems to indicate that covid doesn't impact cognition. It also seems to indicate that previous studies have a problem with reverse causation, which just seems like hitting folks while they're down: "Being stupid leads to people catching COVID" (src)(cached)