Favorites: Obesity Drugs, Rocket Wreckage, and Spanish Sprawl

June 30, 2026 — Josh Barro pivots to defending the automatic transmission, Germans back restarting up to 18.7 gigawatts of idled reactors, UCSD STEM faculty push to reinstate the SAT.

June 2026, Amsterdam

To get things started, here's an article from Heatmap trying to establish some basic facts about Air Conditioning (cached), you can get into the details (cached) if you like. The UK government will argue that they don't actually ban Air Conditioning, you just need a permit. But the process for getting a permit is quite burdensome, and includes proving you have tried all other possible methods for cooling your house first. There's a real separation between elites and the general population though, it's a culture war (cached). 8 out of 10 French people (cached) want widespread deployment of Air Conditioning. The German government is going the furthest I've seen, distributing straight-up misinformation (cached), to some extent it's working, you can find crazies parroting these absurd claims (cached). (although I guess you can find crazies saying anything on Twitter). Noah Smith argues (cached) European elites needs to get more comfortable with new technology. Further, in France, at least, when elites go against the people for too long, results can be disastrous (cached) Many people spent a lot of time talking about this over the last week, Josh Barro offered to stop, but proposed to next discuss the magic of the automatic transmission (cached) (src)(cached)

If you want to learn more, Scott Manley has a video of course, he argues the knock-on effects of this explosion will also be very bad. (src)(cached)

This analysis is really interesting, and I recommend you check out the full details because it's fascinating. The big grain of salt to take with this is that we don't really know what's going on inside the weights of the model, but Weisenthal's impression here seems quite plausible to me. (src)(cached)

I'm not sure I ever made this argument that pharmaceutical companies would never be willing to release a cure when treating the disease would be more profitable. But I'll admit that I probably would have said I think the claim is more likely than not. I'm pleasantly surprised. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• SB79 will go into effect on Wednesday, here's a thread detailing which parts of Los Angeles will be affected, and what kinds of building will now become buildable. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Fluid Voice is an open-source speech transcription system running on macOS. Probably cheaper than some other options, worth looking into. (src)(cached)

– Everyone knows that America has some of the most insane levels of suburban sprawl in the world. Acres of parking lots, highways everywhere, tract housing coming out of our ears. But one person compared it to Barcelona to see what the alternative is. But one thing I didn't realize is that Spain is also an outlier, other European cities actually do have a fair bit of US-style suburbs. But Spain basically doesn't, the edges of many of their cities transition from 6 story apartments directly to empty land. (src)(cached)

– A ton of “common knowledge” about Japan is super out of date. Their suicide rate is no longer high, they work fewer hours per year than the OECD average (fewer hours than Canadians!), and they live in larger homes than British or German people. (src)(cached)

– More than 60% of Germans support restarting their nuclear reactors, and it is definitely cheaper than their other options for getting more electricity. They should do it! (src)(cached)

– OpenAI says that GPT-5.6 is also so powerful that it must be released to the government first. But their phrasing is a bit sneaky, it’s possible they asked the government to say they can’t release it in order to imply it’s as powerful as Mythos. (src)(cached)

– Activists dislike Josh Shapiro because they’ve heard that some Republicans like him. But that’s what it takes to win elections! Crossover appeal is good actually. (src)(cached)

– Wirecutter review for the Impulse stove is out, they like it. (src)(cached)

– Talarico vs Crockett is not an example of moderate vs progressive, it's a question of how partisan they were. Crockett was much more partisan than Talarico is. Talarico clearly wants to create a permission structure for conservatives to vote for him, he got famous initially by going on Joe Rogan (cached)! On the other hand, Platner is extremely progressive, but also not particularly partisan, at least that's Nate Silver's impression of him (cached). (src)(cached)

– The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (the villains who created Prop 13, blocking CA from having an efficient tax code) were using a classic ballot prop hostage in order to get concessions from the legislature. They wanted limits on transfer taxes (probably good, depends on details) and a requirement for a 2/3 vote to increase local taxes (very bad). Newsom has successfully negotiated them down to just the bad part. Not really sure what the point of that was, what a bummer. (src)(cached)

– Looks like STEM faculty at UCSD are all getting together and publicly arguing that the SAT needs to be reinstated. (src)(cached)

– As the years go by, there continues to be more data that upzoning results in more units, here's a very clear chart for Auckland. (src)(cached)