Favorites June 8th 2024
This interview was absolutely teriffic. If you're not a subscriber, let me know and I'll forward you the full article or the audio.
It's interesting how over time these buttons have gained discernable meanings. From left to right, they imply different functions: "Show side menu", "modify sort/filters", "Bring up app-switcher-like menu", "delicious morsels of meat, arranged vertically or horizontally".
They successfully got both halves of the thing back to the ground intact for the first time. Here's a good video of highlights from the livestream.
Longer Reads
• Interesting thread about how California housing laws has both 'carrots' and 'sticks' to get cities to cooperate. What's especially interesting is how they interact, in this case, the 'pro-housing city' designation. (src)(cached)
• Long thread of analysis of the outcome of the elections in India. TL;DR: there are still many who India's economic progress hasn't helped enough yet. (src)(cached)
• Article about a new analysis that calculated a much higher social cost of carbon than any before. Seems like motivated reasoning when they're saying a major upside of their research was to find something that aligned better with their priors. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Straightforward explanation of the Biden Israel/Hamas ceasefire announcement. He publicly announced the ceasefire agreement that both sides had agreed to privately already. But Netenyahu had only agreed to it under intense pressure, so he's now walking back his agreement, he will have a lot of political problems the moment there's a ceasefire. (src)(cached)
– People in Europe still aren't on board with spending much in apps, there are more Roblox users in Europe than the US, but Europe accounts for a quarter of US revenue. (src)cached
– You can live in downtown Tokyo in a studio apartment for $800 a month. Also, Tokyo added more homes in the last 50 years than the total number of homes in NYC. There's probably a connection between these two facts. (src)(cached)
– If you ask voters how to fix inflation, they say price controls. Risk to do what they want, risky to not do what they want. But also, this ties in with recent posts about how, depressingly, voters don't actually reward policymaking at all. (src)(cached)
– Turns out some Tankies (Greyzone, in this case) weren't being funded by Russia, they were being funded by Iran. (src)(cached)
– Argument that US Southeast Asia policy should be focused on Indonesia and Vietnam. (src)(cached)
– Chinese general makes it clear that their navy will continue to ram the Philippines' supply ships. (src)(cached)
– Drone Swarms are becoming more and more cost effective compared to their countermeasures (src)(cached)
– There are now three blocks of three SCOTUS justices, and Kavanaugh is the center of the center block, which also includes Barrett and Roberts (src)(cached)
– Anguilla gets 20% of their government revenue from DNS registrations. their TLD is ".ai" (src)(cached)
– "Dismal Science" as a name for economics was coined by pro-slavery people upset that economics was anti-slavery (src)(cached)
– Whales have an alphabet, and we're collecting a ton more whalesong to try to figure out if they have words and sentences using AI. Here's the full podcast episode on youtube and overcast. (src)
– There are now 7 million views of the 4 hour video about the failure of the Disney Starcruiser Hotel. Anil Dash points out that that may begin to compare to the watchtime of some of the new star wars tv series. (src)
– Saudis need oil to be 100/barrel to balance their books, the US is keeping prices lower than that. OPEC is over, and we're refilling the strategic petrolium reserve. (src)(cached)
– It's a good time to make the argument that Trump should drop out of the race due to his conviction. It's a good conflict to have, don't shy away from it. Half of americans think he should drop out, it's a perfect wedge issue. (src)
– Just as Josh Barro suggested years ago, Twitter may turn to porn as a source of revenue. (src)
– Interesting demographic policy preference data, the rich hold more extreme policy views. Rich Democrats are more left wing, rich Republicans are more right wing. Here's the study. (src)(cached)
– Big polling miss in India, Modi got just 240 seats, they were expected to get 400. Polling in India is very hard. (src)(cached)
– H5N1 outbreak continues to look a bit worrying, one person has now died. Metaculus forecasters still seem pretty certain it won't become a massive pandemic this year. (src)
– In three years India has gone from making 1% of all iPhones to making a quarter of them (src)(cached)
– The Newsbreak app appears to just be nothing but AI written made up stories. (src)(cached)