Favorites October 27th 2022

July 2022

Derek Pederson @DerekPederson3

I am impressed by the speed in which ranked-choice voting has basically eroded the two-party system in Alaska.

thehill.comMurkowski, Peltola buck parties to endorse each other in AlaskaSen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Rep. Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) have reached across the aisle to endorse each other, just two weeks ahead of the midterm elections. Murkowski reportedly prais…

Obviously I still prefer approval voting or star voting, but ranked choice appears to get the goods in terms of driving moderation.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

We had a quarter of good inflation-adjusted growth even as nominal growth slowed down — that's good news! Bad things might happen in the future, but the actual new information we received was positive.

Jason Furman @jasonfurman

A nice GDP report: The headline is 2.6% with consumers remaining strong (+1.4%). But it also shows moderation in key respects that should reduce some overheating, specifically nominal GDP growth slowed to 6.7% and the Fed is successfully cooling investment, especially housing. https://t.co/a1PlBAmcjv

It's easy to get into details about what the report says about next quarter, but the topline numbers really are good. This means the Fed is likely to continue to raise rates, Yglesias argues that the thing to do is to actually start taking deficit reduction seriously, because otherwise this is going to slow home construction. (And as a YIMBY, I don't like slowdowns in new homes!)

Welcoming Neighbors Network 🏗🏘👋 @WNNProHousing

Displacement is harmful. We can & should prevent it. "Gentrification" is vibes & so often a big red flag for bad faith housing arguments.

I'm happy to report that SB330 has been a huge success in reducing displacement in Mountain View.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Insane that we don’t let international students stay in the US after they graduate with advanced STEM degrees

Augh! Just staple a green card to the diploma, it's not complicated! How are we allowing the system to stay so broken?

David Roberts @drvolts

They are figuring out how to precisely measure CO2 emissions from individual facilities ... from space. Pretty soon no one, anywhere, will be able to keep their emissions a secret. Radical transparency is on the way.

frontiersin.orgTracking CO2 emission reductions from space: A case study at Europe’s largest fossil fuel power plantWe quantify CO2 emissions from Europe’s largest fossil fuel power plant, the Bełchatόw Power Station in Poland, using CO2 observations from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) 2 and 3 missions on 10 occasions from March 2017 to June 2022. The space-based CO2 emission estimates reveal emission c…

If I'm reading the article correctly, it's accurate to 5%, very impressive.

(((Howard Forman))) @thehowie

“CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust, and safety, were all fired, according to the people.” Sounds like changes are afoot!

washingtonpost.comElon Musk closes Twitter deal and fires top executivesElon Musk assumed ownership of the site late Thursday, marking a new era for the social media company.

Looks like the deal went through. Apparently it's still not entirely clear how he managed to get all the financing together. Some folks were being very dramatic about the change in ownership, others are less worried.

Scott Manley @DJSnM

I just completed an important space history video restoration project, there's an often shared video showing a Mac Portable ejecting a floppy disk in zero G, but it's painfully low quality, so I found a better source and cleaned it up.

Threads

• In honor of Twitter going private Merlin Mann shares a list of his all time favorite tweets.

• Eric Topol has a short thread describing a study of a nasal vaccine strategy in mice that worked against all variants. Maybe we should be putting some money in developing this faster?