Favorites September 22nd 2024
Sam D'Amico points out that companies are going to have to start doing precise weighing of products for safety, which seems absolutely terrifying.
One interesting tidbit is that fire fighting planes like this don't use every interior inch for carrying fire retardant, that's all in the bay on the bottom. As far as I can tell, they're mostly empty otherwise.
I had absolutely heard people say that EV sales had stalled, so it's good to see that things are back on track.
Longer Reads
• Thread in which someone looks into West Nile Virus in the United States, and... it's not good news. Mosquitos are horrible, and this is yet another vaccine we should be fast-tracking development for.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Someone realized you can use Siri shortcuts to automatically delete spam. Here's an even more comprehensive version. (src)
– CCP retaliated against family of ByteDance employee who said the wrong things about TikTok's censorship. (src)(cached)
– Interesting arguments about whether listening to people before arguing with them helps convince them of things. Study says it doesn't help, but that's almost certainly misleading. (src)(cached)
– The most insane wireless charging mat I've ever seen. (src)
– I couldn't find the drunk Don Draper meme mocking conspiracies regarding the previous assassination attempt, but here it is again. Good that the secret service seems to have actually stopped this one earlier. (src)
– Trump got 5 things wrong in 8 seconds, and not obviously malicious lies, he's just old and forgetful. (src)(cached)
– Texas can't keep bussing migrants out of state, since Biden successfully curbed illegal border crossings. (src)(cached)
– Looks like Democratic voters are going to harshly punish Sinema for dropping out of the Democratic party in the Arizona Senate race. Sinema is polling at a pretty distant third place. (src)(cached)
– Jordan Grimes tweeted through a long Redwood City Council meeting and the main takeaway is that if you give people free parking, they will begin to believe that they own it. (src)(cached)
– Wild demo of Suno.ai's ability to create entire songs from just a couple of seconds of singing. (src)
– SF Buses should have cameras that automatically cite people for driving in the bus lane. Interestingly, they already have the cameras, but they're only allowed to auto-cite people for *parking* in the bus lanes, not driving in them. (src)(cached)
– A joke that what was once neoliberal has now been integrated into modern progressivism. But also, I didn't realize that modern Keynesianism is the result of monetarists winning the argument and agreeing to be called Keynesians. (src)(cached)
– More about Keynes, (I'm sorry), but Germany's industrial decline is continuing to worsten, and it's very clear that they need government spending to get out of this spiral, but they just refuse to do it. (src)(cached)
– Chernobyl caused far more deaths by halting the build-out of nuclear power right as it was getting going. The alternative was coal, which pollutes more and kills more. today solar+batteries outperform nuclear, but the 50 years of pollution didn't need to happen. (src)(cached)
– Harris is now outperforming 'generic democrat' in polling. (src)(cached)
– John Gruber wrote a long article about the new iPhone 16. The main takeaway is that Apple stopped making design mistakes over the last 10 years, but that also means they're less adventurous. No more fat iPod nanos. (src)
– US overdose deaths are rapidly falling, in part because of actions by the White House regarding fentanyl. (src)(cached)