Favorites October 20th 2023
I was looking into this book a bit, Kottke also linked to it, but I spent way too long reading about the various works of 'parallel literature' on Wikipedia. There are like four different authors who have all made parallel retellings of The Wizard of Oz!
He summarizes the upshot as: "we are not committed to long term ice sheet disintegration if we pass 2C, as long as we can bring temperatures back down afterwards"
Longer Reads
• Teriffic thread with the results of a CT scan of the USB-C / Thunderbolt connectors at various price points. TL;DR: Apple's cable is $130 for a reason
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Someone used a huge array of GoPros to create a radiance field of a scene. (src)
– Highlights about how Shortwave was able to develop their AI system so fast (src)
– Discussion of whether landlords should be required to offer longer leases, it's an interesting idea, but you probably don't want it to apply to all properties. (src)
– A bit unusual for Egypt to only accept refugees if they promise to leave someday, the US doesn't require that of refugees, and I don't think Poland required it of Ukrainian refugees. (src)
– Article in NYTimes about possible long COVID explanation: serotonin production being blocked by remnants of COVID in the gut. Here's the preprint. (src)
– Not a good sign that Israel appears to have no clear idea what end state they want from a conflict in Gaza. (src)
– List of incumbent heads-of-state by popularity, Biden only has 40%, but he’s still not that far from the top. (src)
– Best estimate of future energy mix is that solar is gonna take over, even without subsidies (src)
– Fed Chair Powell says we may need to tighten because the economy is doing so well, which isn't how this is supposed to work, you're supposed to tighten if there's too much inflation, too much growth isn’t a problem! (src)
– Looks like rain this winter in the bay area, good (src)
– China has increased their nuclear stockpile by 25% in the last year, and just to really worry people, they're also building non-nuclear ICBMs, which seem like an exceptionally bad idea, as they cannot be differentiated (src)
– Appears that all the really bad math education policy changes proposed for California have been shot down (src)
– Jon Stewart's Apple TV show was canceled, reportedly because they wouldn't let him talk about China (src)
– Trump's associate Powell has plead guilty in the Georgia case, will be required to write a letter of apology. Chesebro too (src)
– Yandex is spreading disinformation in Europe, it only has market share there because of the requirement that Android proved a search engine selection menu (src)
– If the Federal reserve keeps interest rates high, it could actually make rent inflation worse by cooling construction. (src)
The inability of Congress to control its spending and taxation policy makes inflation so much harder to tackle. With interest rates above GDP growth, it's a dangerous game of brinkmanship with the economy and inflation.
At some point we will realize that fed rates & QE/QT is too crude a tool to deal with inflation without causing broader problems. Hopefully that is sooner than when the economy crashes from these crazy rates.