Favorites June 15th 2024
There's been some talk about finding a way to override Hochul and move forward with congestion pricing, but I’m not sure how serious that is.
TFP (Total Factor Productivity) is essentially all the improvement in our ability to make things that’s not accounted for by Labor/Land/Capital, my understanding is that it’s often simplified to just mean ‘technology’. And a quarter of the improvement in technology came from government R&D, that seems... sorta wild? But also, I think there are good examples of times when companies became extraordinarily successful and started doing R&D which ended up helping everyone, like Unix and Bell labs. Maybe companies tend to do research when they've got so much money they don't know what to do with it all. Clearly a market failure that the government should step in to correct.
I absolutely sat there and physically reproduced each of these mouth movements. It's wild how much shorter actual spoken English is than how it's written out.
A fun new reason to ventilate spaces better, or like, install a CO2 scrubber or something. (Just kidding, 5 minutes of research indicate serious CO2 removal would be wildly expensive.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– NEPA doesn't just kill projects with direct costs, having a project sit in limbo for years gives more time for someone involved to get cold feet, like what happened with NY congestion pricing. (src)(cached)
– Republicans blocked a bill that would have protected contraception, Trump floated jailing his opponents, and polling indicates that 63% of swing voters have not heard that Trump was found guilty of a felony. All of that in one day. (src)(cached)
– Which cars would founding fathers drive (very silly) (src)
– It turns out GPT-4 doesn't perform quite as well as was originally thought on the bar exam, in part because it was compared to all takers of the test, instead of just first-time test takers, (who are much more likely to pass). (src)
– New AI Models can be more effective than physics based models for predicting short-term weather conditions, and they're much cheaper to run. (src)
– Taiwan seems to be assuming that a conflict with China would start with a blocade, this analyst thinks that this is wrong, if a blockade does happen, it'll be as part of a full invasion. (src)(cached)
– During the most recent SpaceX Starship test, a bunch of livestreams from fake SpaceX accounts went live all with deepfake video of Musk selling a cryptocurrency scam. (I actually saw the livestream myself, although I didn't spend long enough looking at it to notice that it was a scam, I just saw no rockets and closed it immediately) (src)
– Clarance Thomas is the Steph Curry of being given large gifts (src)(cached)
– Speculation about why Xi isn't doing anything to fix China's economic slump. (For instance, doing some basic Keynesian stimulus). The four possibilities proposed are: He doesn't know anything is wrong, he doesn't know what to do, he doesn't care, or that he believes what they're doing already will work. (src)(cached)
– In an interview, Trump is excited about declassifying everything they ask about, until they get to Epstein. (src)(cached)
– A short video explaining all the major types of bridges. (src)
– France and other European nations are going to commit actual troops to supporting Ukraine. (src)(cached)
– Giving people money, in the UBI sense, results on them spending less money on alcohol and tobacco. (src)(cached)
– The state department forecasting group is unusually good at what they do compared to other equivalent government agencies. Here's a Vox article about it. (src)(cached)
– Angela Merkel knew that Russia was artificially constraining gas supplies to try to get another pipeline built. Once again, "Angela Merkel Lucky the Bar for 'Worst German Leader' is Very High" (src)(cached)