Favorites June 14th 2022

Mountain View, June 2022

Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 @JosephPolitano

Refinery spreads—the difference between crude oil prices and the prices of refined products like gasoline and diesel fuel—have increased dramatically over the past few months. The world is experiencing an acute shortage of refinery capacity right now.

There were other graphs about this today, but this one reminded me of Factorio.

Maya Sen @maya_sen

⬆️ lawyers in the national assembly, ⬆️ more legal liability costs as share of GDP

I'm not saying lawyers in government are all bad, but, there are probably some downsides.

Sammy Roth @Sammy_Roth

Oppenents of forest thinning are suing the National Park Service to try to stop a wildfire safety project in Yosemite. The Park Service should have done an environmental analysis first, critics say:

latimes.comYosemite undergoes forest thinning due to wildfire risk; environmentalists want it stoppedForest thinning is now being conducted at Yosemite National Park. Environmentalists want it to stop, saying the work was never fully vetted.

It's wild that environmental review laws have become one of the biggest impediments to actions needed to protect the environment. Related to the previous item?

Michael Zelenko @mvzelenks

Fascinating piece on the collapse of the Great Salt Lake. Owens Lake, or the Aral Sea, are clear parallels, but I think there's another vanishing lake that offers an even more immediate, nightmarish vision of how this could all play out: the Salton Sea

nytimes.comAs the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces An ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb’Climate change and rapid population growth are shrinking the lake, creating a bowl of toxic dust that could poison the air around Salt Lake City.

"The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents." I suspect this is not good for Salt Lake City property values.

Randall Munroe @xkcd

Thank you to @suzyjstyles for helping me answer this @NYTScience reader’s question!

nytimes.comHow Many Languages Could a Child Speak?In theory, a young person could master a broad array of tongues. But there are some inherent limits.

Cool to see Munroe writing for the NYT, I suspect it's because he has a book coming out soon. Sorta annoying that the images don't have alt text with hidden jokes.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Oh no, this is me!

Digiconomist @DigiEconomist

As the Bitcoin/Ethereum crash continues, the combined reduction in energy consumption of these networks now equals that of a country like Austria The reduction in global carbon emissions could be 110,000 metric tons of CO2 per day - almost as much as global CO2 reductions by EVs

See, it's ok to feel schadenfreude about the crypto crash!

Threads

• Completely wild thread about a newly discovered side-channel attack on CPUs depending on modern variable cpu clock speeds to extract information.