Favorites November 28th 2022

San Diego, June 2022

Dina D. Pomeranz @DinaPomeranz

Pessimism bias: in every country, people underestimate the happiness of others. E.g. people in Germany think 45% of other people in Germany will say that, taking all things together, they are very happy or rather happy. In reality, it's over 80% of people.

I'm not sure what I would have guessed before seeing this, but it wouldn't have been 90%.

Armand Domalewski#2306 on discord @ArmandDoma

genuinely baffled by a regime that is willing to lock people into buildings and let them burn alive to contain COVID but isn’t willing to mandate vaccines

Maybe it's literally harder to get vaccines into arms than to keep people locked in buildings? But that doesn't seem particularly plausible to me.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

A post by @alon_levy reveals that Berlin Greens have decided that the CO2 emissions associated with construction projects are so high they should oppose even high-value U-Bahn extensions. It's bad analysis as Alon writes.

pedestrianobservations.comBerlin Greens Know the Price of Everything and Value of NothingWhile trying to hunt down some numbers on the costs of the three new U5 stations, I found media discourse in Berlin about the U-Bahn expansion plan that was, in effect, greenwashing austerity. This…

Yglesias gets into a more general point about how cities should consider the larger context when they attempt to hit emissions reduction goals. But from the Alon Levy article, I like the idea that this move to not build trains to avoid emissions is "greenwashing austerity".

Bess Kalb @bessbell

This is a great book for breaking up with your baby.

Threads

• Short thread from revolutions historian Mike Duncan about Saw and Luthen from Star Wars: Andor and how they fit into various revolutionary leader archetypes. It's a continuation from a thread forwarded to him by a fan.

• Very long thread discussing a new SF law to allow converting gas stations to homes and how it highlights the fact that San Francisco's proposal to the state for future housing growth is complete fiction.

• Very long thread with a story about complex derivatives called a corridor variance swaps, as an example of how this kind of investment vehicle can often get out of hand leading to speculative excess.