Favorites July 31st 2024
The good news is that this is still before the convention, which can often give a further bump to popularity. Switching out the candidate has gone pretty well so far, although it would be nice for things to get even better! To be even more specific, Nate Silver gives Harris a 42% chance to win. This is a huge improvement over where the odds stood for Biden winning before he dropped out (26% chance to win).
That figure is absolutely wild! Here's a very short thread with a bit more detail, and here's Tabarrok's short writeup
It would be nice to see factory construction go even higher, or residential construction for that matter. After hearing about the boom in manufacturing construction due to the inflation reduction act, it's nice to see it put in context.
I honestly wonder whether legislators actually believe the AI doom angle, or whether they figure it's harmless to do what big AI doomer donors suggest. There's no way they've thought through how this will actually affect the AI space. Seems bad! Check out Tim's full article.
He goes on to offer a protip: "If you’re running for president, and you’re asked whether your running mate is ready to be president, any response other than 'absolutely' is the wrong answer". Josh Barrow says the best explanation for why he gave this answer was that he's "repeating what his confidantes tell him to calm him down when the complains to them about Vance". And this wasn't even the most insane thing Trump said in this interview, which went so far off the rails that his team seems to have ended it early.
This is a very old post, now gone from twitter, but Applebees did respond, they don't serve that either.
Longer Reads
• Short thread detailing once again how bad NEPA is, for example NEPA delays prescribed burns to prevent forest fires, including an image of what that looks like. It's a summary of this longer IFP article arguing that NEPA is a tax on clean energy. (src)(cached)
• Amazing thread covering all the improvements to Jet engines over the years to reach the point where planes use less fuel per person-mile than internal combustion cars. (src)(cached)
• A long thread covering a meta analysis of whether women perform as well as men as candidates in US elections. Believe it or not, they actually do just as well. But this sort of thing doesn't get talked about much in media, because it's good news (cached), and boring good news doesn't drive clicks. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Barr saying January 6th wasn't a big deal because Trump failed to overturn the election recalls Sideshow Bob's increduility at the concept of "attempted murder". (src)(cached)
– In response to a meme: virgin humanoid robot vs the chad mobile manipulator, an observation that the fewer degrees of freedom in an automation, the more effective it is. (src)(cached)
– When Biden's campaign staff became Harris' campaign staff, their tone in emails totally changed. It's the same people, but they used the opportunity to switch tone. (src)(cached)
– The interview with Tim Walz where he got the ball rolling on calling Republicans 'weird'. (src)(cached)
– Here's Whitmer delivering good pro-Harris points, sorta looks like Democrats have a deeper bench of potential leaders than we thought? (src)(cached)
– You could run a very effective campaign entirely on policies that already exist that people aren't aware of. (src)(cached)
– More than half of new California residential solar installations come with batteries now. (src)(cached)
– Some studies indicate that voters don't really care about politicians changing their views on policy. They just want the politician's current views to match their own. (src)(cached)
– Look at that, TikTok admits to the DoJ that they've already censored content in response to requests from the CCP. (src)(cached)
– Ben Thompson of Stratechery found the article explaining the explicit requirement that Microsoft not close the security hole that allowed Crowdstrike to accidentally crash millions of machines recently. Here's another article link. (src)