Favorites June 21st 2022

Salt Pond A8, San Jose, June 2022

I’ve never looked into the purpose of the salt ponds here. Do we actually harvest the salt? Could that possibly be valuable enough to be economical?

zanyfen🇺🇦 @zanyfen

MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP

I'm not sure if this design studio comes up with purposely bad ideas for clicks, if so, they got me, because this is horrible and hilarious.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

An unfakeable, robust, and objective way to see if two people have a connection: measure how fast they respond to each other in conversation. If the response time is under a quarter second (faster than conscious control allows), two people have clicked. pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…

Interesting idea for a study, although at the same time, seems obvious once the results are stated explicitly.

Liam Dillon @dillonliam

We found more than a half dozen low-income housing projects in California under construction or about to break ground that are costing more than $1 million per apartment to build. They're likely the most expensive in the country. latimes.com/homeless-housi…

And administrative costs can make up 14% of the cost to build! Local governments imposing high fees on building below-market-rate units! Ridiculous!

Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

I've made a map of commuting by car/transit/bike ect for every Census tract in California (Census ACS 2015-2019). You can toggle between buses, trains, cars, WFH, motorcycles ect and get statistics on the density of residential buildings of that tract. darrellowensrcd.github.io/infoTransit/mo…

Of course SF stands out for high mass transit use, but Palo Alto and Stanford have very high bike usage, which is cool.

Threads

• Short thread explaining why benefits of a gas tax would mostly go to producers rather than consumers. (Supply is not very responsive to price right now).

• Scary thread summarizing outcomes from covid reinfection. Short version is that it appears to have a cumulative impact, with omicron, there is definitely no long term benefit from overcoming an infection once.