Favorites September 7th 2023
What an amazing graph. Further, Noah Smith points out that indeed, that's basically what's happening, everyone's getting jobs installing solar panels.
The increase in housing approvals is great, but even better: median rents have been falling for a few years now! I do recommend the whole article.
They also appear to be developing a drone with a jet engine, the UJ-23 Topaz. Manned helicopters may not be viable for military operations much longer. India is planning to buy drones from the US, but maybe they'll be buying from Ukraine soon enough.
He shared a link to an article with details. TL;DR: since 2020, 40km of new bike lanes, a bunch of designated low/no car traffic neighborhoods, and a 30kph citywide speed limit (which also helps reduce noise levels).
Longer Reads
• Very long thread by a climate scientist about his new research on warming causing wildfires in California. Climate change is certainly causing more fires, but to be published, he has to focus entirely on that, even though human factors appear to be a larger component of the increase in incidence of wildfires. (src)
• Thread speculating that neural networks may be able to effectively learn from a single example. Or, if you prefer, here's the full article. (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Gorgeous 5 story apartment built in just 10 days in Paris, no setbacks either. (src)
– Thread about early investors in Google, including Shaq (src)
– Require every American to do a year of military service, then boom, universal healthcare via department of Veterans Affairs. Thank you for your service. (src)
– In general, depending on residuals seems like a bad deal for actors vs guaranteed money up front. (src)
– Study in Helsinki finds that prioritizing pedestrians in street design so they walk 5% faster results in 2.3% more revenue from public transit. (src)
– Car insurance costs are up, could it be caused by the danger caused by other cars being physically larger? (src)
– By refusing to build homes in the bay area, we're locking people out of one of the more climate safe locations in the country. (src)
– No one would say Biden is too old if he'd just have a sex scandal! (src)
– The US is helping european countries convert their coal plants to nuclear. Good. (src)
– Vietnamese people really like free market economies (src)
– An Asian NATO is becoming more likely. (src)
– Carbon pricing is no longer considered the economically optimal way to fix the 'market failure' of climate change. (src)
– Nice to see that the UK is giving up on trying to ban encryption (src)
– Old projections about climate change are now out of date. Thread contains more details, but the charts alone make the argument clear. Many of the old projections are now no longer plausible, in part due to progress on solar power. (src)
– Risk of a recession in the next year is falling. (src)
– Wind power could be so good if they didn't constantly run into ridiculous regulatory barriers, even outside the US. (src)
– Details of Musk's decision to shut off Starlink over Crimea, stopping a Ukrainian advance there last year. It appears he did it because of some stupid thing he read on Twitter. (src)