Favorites: Progress, Plants, and Policy
Seriously though, Black Friday has spread worldwide since 2005 (cached), even Iran and Venezuala have it. This short article argues that it's a coordination game situation, and likens it to Moore's law in that respect.
Someone tried to come in and argue that it's just a bunch of ANDs and ORs, but "Runes are literally just a lot of lines and angles"
It's an interesting article, but the short version is that a massive part of global trade is in intermediate goods, meaning that a tariff also acts as a tax on domestic manufacturers who use imported materials.
Here's the quoted article. There's an NYTimes piece about how an H5N1 epedemic seems like a very likely future pandemic, and a great quote in response from Alex Tabarrok: "Strong civilizations don’t pray for mercy from microbes; they crush them. Each new outbreak should leave us not relieved, but better armed, better trained and better prepared for nature’s next assault."
Sorta seems like Munroe has been playing KSP some more recently. It's a shame the studio shuttered.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Apparently fine-tuned LLMs can outperform humans on predicting the results of neuroscience experiments. Here's the paper, I was a bit suspicious that there's contamination, that the results were already learned by the model, their way of testing for that was very interesting but I'm still not entirely convinced. (src)(cached)
– More than a third of americans entirely reject evolution still. But the number is very slowly falling. (src)(cached)
– Discussion of the prospect of the US Government just buying the entire remaining coal industry for 36 billion. The main problem is that people's identities are tied up in their work. (src)(cached)
– Modern drone batteries have a higher density per kwh than a helicopter engine without the fuel! It seems clear that military vehicles will be hybrid at a minimum very soon, there are a ton of advantages. (src)(cached)
– The John Le Carré Advent Calendar (src)(cached)
– Explanation of how polling error in 2020 was what pushed the Biden admin to the left (src)(cached)
– Why didn't Russia just deploy their Airmobile forces to help Syria? Oh right, they got blown up in Ukraine. (src)(cached)
– German exports to "Kyrgyzstan" are way up over the last couple years. (src)
– Fracking saved around 12k people from death due to cold weather in the US, to say nothing of the lives saved due to reduced coal demand pushing particulate emissions down. (src)(cached)
– Observation that solar is ridiculously simple to use compared to other tech. The game Factorio has to have a bunch of free impossible technologies to make Coal even close to competitive with Solar. (src)(cached)
– NEPA doesn't even have exemptions for national security (unlike the clean air and clean water regulations) (src)(cached)
– Summary of a longer article about how situations where we rebuild after disaster give a view of how much faster we can build things when we really want to. The bridge in baltimore, for instance, which is moving along quickly, even as the governor of Maryland blocks new power transmission lines for lack of community engagement. (src)(cached)
– As bad as US housing policy is, somehow other english-speaking countries do worse. (src)(cached)
– New studies indicate that for approximately every 300k the US spends on supporting families, we get one additional birth. That's expensive, but it's more than worth it. (src)(cached)
– "Since the last plane crash by a US airline, they have transported passengers for more than two *light-years*" (src)(cached)
– Wild that we can see drone videos of real tank-to-tank battles now. (src)(cached)
– A city in Columbia, Medellin, managed to lower local temperatures by 2°C over three years, and expect another 4 or 5 degrees of cooling over the coming decades, almost entirely through 'greening', adding tons of plants. (src)(cached)