Favorites November 13th 2024
I really enjoyed this video, especially considering it may actually save me some time in the future when cooking meat.
And if you think that's impressive, the day before the 1995 election, they had a clue "Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper (!), with 43A" which had valid answers for both CLINTON ELECTED and BOBDOLE ELECTED
Longer Reads
• Thread about how door knocking where you have long conversations with low-propensity voters simply doesn't work. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A scientist injected her own tumor with a lab grown virus which seems to have had a positive effect. (although it was surgically removed afterward). Previous successful self-treatments have won nobel prizes when they worked. Seems like it's worth being thankful for people who are willing to try things. (src)(cached)
– Short thread argues that democrats will be able to win in 2026 and 2028, hopefully yes, but I'm quite worried about the damage between now and then. Further, it's clear from the massive amount of undervoting (cached) that Trump's appeal isn't easily transferrable to other Republicans. (src)
– Look at Trump's victory in 2024 vs Biden's in 2020 with states shaded by vote share. It's more purple than you might expect, and very hard to tell apart. (src)(cached)
– Adoption of AI seems to have had a measurable positive impact on progress in materials science. (src)(cached)
– Coverage whose tone is positive is not the same as coverage that's good for a candidate! It's easy to see why: imagine if Fox spent months talking about how great it would be that Trump will ban abortion. (src)(cached)
– A single company's license plate readers are used to solve 10% of crimes in the US. (src)(cached)
– Everyone blamed Biden for inflation, even Democrats (src)(cached)
– The world installs one nuclear power plant's worth of solar panels every day now. Further, California's Natural Gas usage for electricity has fallen 25% (src)(cached)
– Waymo is trying to study safety of pedestrians and cyclists, but there's very little data on these accidents, so they're setting out to gather some (src)(cached)
– GiveWell has done a new analysis of the effectiveness of GiveDirectly, and they now believe it's 3-4 times more effective than they had previously believed. (src)(cached)
– Pete Buttigieg says that we should be looking at fixing housing in the US, with approaches suggested by Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. (src)(cached)
– A Graveyard of bad election narratives aims to use data to answer questions about why Trump won. The thread has a summary, he argues it wasn't sexism, racism, third parties or low turnout, among others. (src)(cached)
– The council on environmental quality may have never had authority to make rules around NEPA. But this doesn't actually fix NEPA of course, it just throws it to the courts even more. Elmendorf has a thread with even more detail (cached). (src)(cached)
– Spain keeps rail construction prices down by asking for local suggestions, and ignoring any that would raise the price or delay the project. (src)(cached)