Favorites September 5th 2023
There's been a lot of discussion of the idea of a park behind the homes shared communally. Yglesias has an article yesterday about this on a smaller scale: courtyard apartments.
This is very good news, and the NYTimes article sort of glosses over the most obvious answer: The Affordable Care Act, which was intended to help reduce Medicare costs.
Regarding Exoplanets, this is absolutely the first thing you wonder about: would we be able to detect ourselves? Now with JWST, we definitively could. Ezra Klein shared an article about how it's raising other new questions about our understanding of the universe.
As you can imagine, satalite imagery tells a clear story. Although it's still not as stark as North Korea.
Longer Reads
• Fun article explaining why poor decisions by the W3C about HTML will lead to the fall of Western civilization. via mastodon.
• Long thread going through details of this summer's Ukrainian Offensive, arguing it'll be at a critical juncture in the coming days.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– France is going to push forward with more nuclear power as Germany foolishly shuts theirs down. (src)
– People move to the suburbs to get away from all the noise caused by the cars of people who move to the suburbs (src)
– For the first time, more money will be invested in solar than oil this year. (src)
– China looks to be about to dump cheap batteries on the world, seems good actually. (src)
– Thread about how China is pressing their citizens into attempting to probe us military base security. Despite the trend, a society of laws can't charge them with anything more that trespassing. (src)
– Increased ethnic diversity does not lead to increases in violence, easy to see in data from Europe. (src)
– "Empty nest men with kid(s) are happier than childless men but for women it’s the opposite" (src)
– Shoplifting is mostly done by rings of criminals, and it causes neighborhood blight (src)
– Massive Utility scale solar+battery installations becoming more common in the US, but it's getting harder to do in some red states (src)
– Getting lead out of spices in Bangladesh appears to be an unusually effective way to save lives. less than a dollar per year of life, usually $10 per year of life saved is considered a very good deal. (src)
– Investigation of causes of fewer insects hitting car windshields these days. (src)
– Table of battery chemistries (src)
– Thread outlining how it's possible for climate change to have serious negative consequences, but for humanity to continue to be better off despite that. (src)
– Downsides of moving from California to Texas (src)
– AirBnB is being completely removed from NYC, and Los Angeles may not be far behind. It's not going to help the cost of housing much, but it'll make it harder for families to travel. (src)
– The key to taxes in Europe is that taxes on the middle class are much mich higher than in the US. (src)
– Elevators are just another kind of clean transit. Vertical EVs. (src)
– iOS customers now worth 10x what Android customers are worth (src)
– Georgism meme (src)
