Favorites November 5th 2023
It's nice we don't have many wildfires in California this year, but, yikes, Australia is a mess.
If you were wondering, Afghani refugees have lived in these countries for decades, since the soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. Also, Republicans in congress are proposing expelling all Palestinians from the US, which seems cartoonishly evil, even for Republicans.
Here's the whole article, but I think it's worth noting that there was a recent paper by Google arguing that LLMs cannot generalize beyond their training data. I don't think these can both be right.
Longer Reads
• California government managed to make a huge dent in license plate cover sales, that's cool. (src)
• Someone used Snapchat to contact random civilians living in Gaza to ask what things are like on the ground. TL;DR: Hamas sucks (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– GOP proposing to zero out the YIMBY Grant program, which hasn't even started yet. (src)
– We need to find a way to start paying for results in our military purchasing, instead of cost plus contracting. South Korea is building warships for half the cost of ours. Just buy the ships from them! It was good for an arsenal of democracy to exist, we shouldn't forget that. (src)
– NIMBYs will claim anything is overcrowded, including Canada. (src)
– Call it 'new Axis', saying 'new axis of evil' sounds hyperbolic. (src)
– Paul Poast suggests that any long-term workable solution to Israel-Palestine will require at least three states. (src)
– Krugman: "if Eric Adams ends up being skewered over illegal contributions from Turkey, will that turn him into a donor kebab" (src)
– modern construction made to look like adaptive reuse. (src)
– US Secretary of State meeting with Israeli opposition leader, definitely signals preparation for a future where Netanyahu is out of power. (src)
– 90% drop in Dengue after the introduction of mosquitos prevented from transmitting viruses. Paper in nature (src)
– Government employment numbers not even close to keeping up with private sector during Biden admin. (src)
– DSA membership peaked right before Russia invaded Ukraine (src)
– Bottomless soup bowl experiment, which shows people need visual cues to feel full, replicated successfully with a much larger group of people. (src)
– North Korea has nuclear weapons because China let them have it. Why is the US preventing Japan / South Korea / Poland from having them. (src)
– The precise sequence of events of the first use of purified insulin on a diabetic children ward, comatose kids on their deathbeds were injected and in minutes were joyously waking up. (src)
– HBO (now max) is such a bad deal now that it seems much easier to just buy episodes one-by-one. (src)