Favorites November 16th 2023
The details of this story were just absolutely ridiculous. They required someone uninstall a wall-mounted toilet because it was too fancy.
Someone else quipped "Will no one rid me of this turbulent judge", which was a reference I had to look up.
Sadly, the four best selling vehicles in the US all have hoods over 50 inches in height! High grills kill! If, like Canada you work hard to protect pedestrians in street design but ignore hood height, you'll make no progress.
If it's useful to you, he made a live version of the diagram. More useful is this short thread he wrote, as well as his relatively short article on the subject. TL;DR pair a reduction in taxes on structures with an increase in inclusionary zoning percentage.
I guess I already knew that "R&D is a textbook positive externality", I just didn't take that to the logical conclusion that it means the government should be spending way more on R&D than the private sector, instead of getting outspent 4:1. Tabarrok argues that it's because the government is too short-term focused. Here's his full blog post on the subject.
Longer Reads
• Long post (image embed, unfortunately) arguing that TikTok is going to be a huge problem if China invades Taiwan, and that we can't wait to ban it then, we have to do it now. All the more important because the number of young peaple getting their news from TikTok has doubled in the last 3 years. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– We should change the default age groupings on surveys as the distribution of people by age changes over time (src)
– Physical altercation between former House Speaker McCarthy and another House Republican. Thread about why tension is so high. (src)
– You can't really reduce the size of government by firing half the federal employees, because it would just increase the (already massive) number of contractors the government uses. (src)
– Google lawyer 'visibly cringed' when ad revenue percent share with Apple revealed at trial. (src)
– More info came out about Paul Pelosi's attacker, who was radicalized by gamergate, and intended to do an interrogation in a unicorn costume (src)
– The Civil Rights movement wasn't that long ago: Ruby Bridges, who integrated the elementary school in New Orleans, has an instagram account. (src)
– As old NIMBY tools are removed, they're falling back now to using historic preservation on whole towns. (src)
– John Gruber, generally a critic of Google, discusses a Masnik peice that argues the search antitrust case against Google doesn't make sense. (src)
– Iran throwing Hamas under the bus (src)
– SF's North Beach neighborhood reduced parking and is thriving. (src)
– Tim Lee summarizes his excellent article on why we shouldn't be too worried about superintelligent AI. TL;DR: the real world isn't a chess board, no matter how smart you are no theoretical plan survives contact with reality. (src)
– Financial Times article by an economics journalist who previously thought we'd need a recession to lower inflation, now agrees that we've managed to stop inflation without a recession, and may even need to lower rates. (src)
– In a survey of Los Angeles charging stations, 40% were broken or had problems. (But this doesn't include the Tesla stations, which generally work well) (src)
– In depth investigation of OpenAI's new custom GPT system (src)
– Google has a new AI based weather forecast system that performs very well despite taking less resources than other, simulation based, models. And they're making it open-source. (src)
– The American Left wing is more and more driven by entertainers and influencers with no policy responsibilities. Just like the American Right wing already was. (src)
– Meta (Facebook) wants Google / Apple to handle age verification so they don't have to. (src)