Favorites November 12th 2023
Trump is running around making very clear that in his second term he would do very bad things. Here's the NYTimes article reporting that he "would direct the Department of Homeland Security to construct mass arrest and deportation raids and put people in camps at the Texas border". Don't let anyone tell you that Biden and Trump are basically the same.
It's not like acid rain went away on it's own. We took action and fixed it! The ozone layer too! Did you know there are actually a ton of carbon cap and trade systems up and running as well? Carbon taxes work quite well also, see Sweden.
I tried out the demo, it seems pretty cool, my biggest issue is that it is set to always generate 15 seconds, from the middle of a song. I tried to generate a 4 note 'logo' and it wouldn't go for it.
Here's the article, nice to see coverage of land value taxes. The author of the article was very proud that he managed to get editors on board with covering Georgism.
Yes, I endorse this.
Longer Reads
• Thread detailing a study of using LLMs and Retrieval Augmented Generation to parse zoning and answer questions about it. Here's the paper. TL;DR: Their best so far is 80% correct on true/false questions, it does much worse on categorical questions, but it's still just zero-shot, there's lots of room for improvement.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Greenwald is surprised that Fox isn't actually in favor of free speech. (src)
– After yesterday's post about defense industry consolidation, here's an example of what a healthy industry looks like (src)
– Did you know that after WWII, the Allies forcibly expelled 14 million ethnic Germans, many of them children? Forcibly moving people pretty much is always horrific, this was no exception. (src)
– "The modern FedSoc judiciary practices a vibes-only originalism" here's the paper. (src)
– A top US general is saying he doesn't think China will invade Taiwan. I really hope he's right. (src)
– AI Art companion that embellishes your brush strokes live as you work. (src)
– China and the US discussing promising not to use AI for 1) autonomous weaponry or 2) control of nuclear weapons. Seems unlikely China would adhere to (1) (src)
– Praise for "Full Expensing", and an entire article about the concept, which I had not heard of previously. Allow corporations to write off large investments like they do labor and rent. (And then you can raise taxes a bit on the remaining portion) (src)
– Wegovy (the semaglutide approved for weight loss) appears to reduce heart attack and stroke by 20%, which seems like a lot. (src)
– ”How are you gonna watch Oppenheimer?”
”In Emacs”
”Don’t you mean IMAX?”
”No” [opens a video within emacs]
(src)
– Maybe don't worry so much about heavy metals in chocolate. (src)
– Impacts of lead poisoning on Flint Michigan (src)
– Worth noting that we have different names for different crimes against humanity, they're not just all 'genocide'. (src)
– Don't just throw in the Korean war with the Vietnam war. It's clear that millions of peoples lives are better because the US got involved in Korea. (src)
– Oh look, Eric Adams corruption in NYC was made possible by the lack of by-right permitting for construction! It's a bad system to have buildings sit vacant while we wait on forms. (src)
– "China is both the world champ at renewable deployment and also burning more coal" (src)