Favorites: Solar-Powered Texas, Spectrum Sell-Off
July 6th 2025 Two days after the fireworks: California fast-tracks infill housing, battery prices fall in China, steel mills close at home.
There's a lot of stuff in there that people these days don't seem to understand anymore.
Look at all those hexagons, when you see a ton of those, you know something cool is going on.
If you’re wondering why this is, it’s because we use technology. 90% of Americans have A/C, rates even higher in the South. Penetration in Europe is much lower, 19% as of last available data (cached). But impact on total years of life lost is more complicated, because heat stroke hits it elderly much harder, and gun violence kills the young.
The context (cached) is that Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on a College Application. Since he was born in Africa, there may be some technicality by which this is accurate, but I have no idea. The main thing this shows is that Cuomo really didn't try that hard (cached) to win the Democratic nomination.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Next time a conspiracy theorist goes on for a while about vaccines being dangerous, ask if they're worried antivaccine propaganda is a foreign plot. (src)(cached)
– Mamdani's property tax change proposal is actually pretty good, but his framing of it is pretty bad. (src)(cached)
– I didn't realize that Dwarkesh Patel's most popular episodes are the interviews with military historian Sarah Paine, and it's not even close. (src)(cached)
– Happy to see that NYC approval of congestion pricing has continued to rise since it was implemented. (src)(cached)
– Musk really seems to be admitting that he made a mistake in his participation with the Trump campaign. (src)(cached)
– When Zuckerberg announced the major new AI hires, he didn't just say who they are, but named which company each came from. It's mostly OpenAI. (src)
– Paramount settled with the Trump administration over a fake lawsuit in order to get their merger approved, and Axios is reporting on it as if that’s normal. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Based on what he's saying about the bill to other Republicans “There’s a ~95% chance that Trump hasn’t read a single thing about the Big Beautiful Bill" (src)(cached)
–Utility-scale battery costs have fallen 30% in a year. Unfortunately that’s in China, we can’t get prices that good in the US yet. (src)(cached)
– " what makes this all the more galling is that they oppose fully autonomous trucking by arguing it’s too unsafe to have autonomous trucks that can’t put down little red flags by the side of the road when the truck breaks down. I’m pretty sure one single truck accident from a sleeping driver caused more carnage than every stopped truck on the shoulder. (src)(cached)
– Short thread about how Republicans just voted to auction off the spectrum that the government has simultaneously been trying to use to deploy broadband to rural areas. (src)(cached)
– Crime in SF is down across the board, good to see! (src)(cached)
– Germany’s air quality has taken a huge hit since they switched off nuclear plants and went back to some unusually dirty coal. Heartening to know that other countries can do ridiculously counterproductive stuff. (src)(cached)
– Claude had great ideas for research, but when researchers tried to execute on the ideas, the quality gap disappeared. Here's the paper about it. As Zvi points out, this isn’t an idea/execution gap, it’s that LLMs are better at making things that sound good, but not better at things that _are_ good. (Research ideas in this instance) (src)(cached)
– California just passed some excellent housing reforms. But Washington state (and Oregon) are way out ahead of us on bill after bill. One bill requires high floor area ratios for properties near transit, which is good, but they go further, and entirely exempt 3-bedroom units (cached) from the calculation. Now that's how you get more family-sized units! (src)(cached)
– US steel mill closes because of our own protectionist policies. (src)(cached)
– In the recent India/Pakistan confrontation, it appears China was giving Pakistan direct military aid. (src)(cached)
– “Since the 1990s, the share of Americans with passports has gone from 5% to 50%.” Americans are a lot more aware of the rest of the world than they were in the 90s. (src)(cached)
– Ever compared casualties between the US in Afghanistan and the Soviets? US was in Afghanistan twice as long, but the Soviets killed millions of civilians, the US did not. The differences in how various militaries handle conflicts can be immense! (src)(cached)
– The extreme flooding in Texas actually was forecasted by the National Weather Service, but only with a couple of hours notice. (src)(cached)