Favorites November 11th 2024
Lead is really bad, and this is eminently fixable.
It was a good plan, and the fact is, the economy is currently in a good shape, if Trump just proclaims that he's already fixed it it will work well for him, 2021 stimulus worked perfectly, and everyone hated it so much (cached) they booted Democrats. Republicans will probably suddenly realize (cached) that the economy is good now very quickly.
Buildings too tall, in Manhattan, absolutely crazy!
Did you know that cooling towers don't really use any steam? it's like a giant cloud machine, here's a great new video about it from Practical Engineering.
Longer Reads
• Chris Elmendorf makes detailed arguments about why the winner of the SF mayoral election, Daniel Lurie, will be good. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Woah, Apple acquired Pixelmator. (src)
– It's amusing that the French national rail company gave up on deploying in California and went to North Africa, which was less dysfunctional. (src)(cached)
– While the national election didn't go so well, things went well in SF, where moderate YIMBY candidates beat the NIMBYs. (src)(cached)
– Operation Warp Speed was one of Trump's best accomplishments, hopefully he doesn't revert to saying it was actually bad. (src)(cached)
– The left is more ideological rigerous, and this is a serious problem (src)(cached)
– The new m4 Mac Mini has removable storage! awesome! (especially because apple really overcharges for extra storage). It's weird that the power button is on the "underside" but it works just fine in any orientation, so just put the foot side up (cached)! Plus, someone got four of them working in a mini cluster to run an LLM (cached). (src)(cached)
– A truly ridiculous number of kids get extra time on tests now, this seems like a bad outcome. (src)(cached)
– Theme in Biden then Harris campaign strategies: "excessive complacency and aversion to rocking the boat" (src)(cached)
– Governor of NY may actually allow congestion pricing to move forward after all, so that's good. (src)(cached)
– Trump is considering Mike Rogers for DoD, I don't know much about him, but he's the guy who had to be held back to stop him from hitting Matt Gaetz during the speaker vote. (src)(cached)
– Important that overall voter turnout in 2024 is not that different from 2020 (src)(cached)
– Congressman Seth Moulton made public statements post-election about trans athletes that 70% of voters agree with, and in response his campaign manager quit. Democrats need to be able to make statements that many people agree with if we want to win. Yglesias argues (cached) that folks who disagree quitting is probably the best outcome. (src)(cached)
– There really are popular progressive policies, focus on those! (src)(cached)