Favorites: Some Dormant Drafts: Darth Vader, and Deficits
November 12, 2025 — A long-delayed tour through remedial math and missing test scores, electric trash trucks and aging EVs, and the awkward middle ground between fewer parking mandates and smarter sha
And while we’re at it, here’s some digging into cat/car accident statistics (cached)
Since you’re wondering, yes, the British economy around the time of their rise really was quite sheep-heavy.
Longer Reads
• A thread from a study by the Math department at UCSD. The proportion of students needing remedial math has gone from 1/100 to 1/8. It seems to be driven by the decision at the UC level to get rid of standardized testing as a consideration for enrollment. (src)(cached)
• Here’s an interesting thread that focuses on how laws from Japan work for combining parcels to allow development of apartments replacing groups of single-family homes. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
Some of these are real old, I’m trying to clear out my backlog
– Oregon now has Electric Garbage trucks, check out the video, they’re much quieter. Almost all of the noise is now from the arm that picks up the toter. (src)(cached)
– Hawaii probably has the worst housing crisis of any state, but doesn’t get talked about as much because people think of it mostly as a vacation destination. But their development rules are horrible. Despite the high land prices, there are huge areas that are zoned exclusively single-family homes. (src)(cached)
– A proposal for “cash payments to residents of communities that embrace more building” (src)(cached)
– Trump has pardoned a Chinese spy. Seems bad. (src)(cached)
– Every Democrat since Carter has decreased the deficit. Every Republican since Eisenhower has increased the deficit. (src)(cached)
– Old post, but US shale oil producers started capping wells back in May, but this doesn’t instantly lead to a huge drop in production. US oil production will be lower than expected for 2025, but is still near record highs. (src)(cached)
– It’s way easier to build a roof deck in NYC than SF. (src)(cached)
– I’m a bit surprised to discover that pharmaceutical returns on investment have fallen over the last few decades. We should probably be trying to lower the cost of getting new innovative drugs to market, there could be more opportunities like GLP1s out there that we just aren’t getting because development is too expensive. (src)(cached)
– Back in May, there was a moment where “Of the world’s 9 nuclear powers, four [were] actively engaged in major conventional wars with peer adversaries.” India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia. (src)(cached)
– Derek Thompson argues: ADHD is real, but we should be careful not to pathologize normal behavior. “If your brain chases interesting non-important things [like entertainment] rather than important boring things [like doing your taxes] you might have ADHD” is a good way to diagnose 99% of the human population with an attention disorder. (src)(cached)
– Reviews of Abundance continue to misinterpret it. (src)(cached)
– “In just ten years, we went from predictions of steadily rising carbon emissions to predictions of steadily falling emissions.” In part, this is because India China and Indonesia will hit peak emissions for power (cached) this decade (src)(cached)
– The vast vast majority of used EVs for sale still have 90%+ of their battery capacity. While gas cars don’t get smaller tanks over time, their engines do lose efficiency over time. This puts used EVs on a similar status. (src)(cached)
– Trump administration may finally be realizing that no matter what they do with tariffs, no one is going to grow bananas in the US. (src)(cached)
– Recommendation to use an airport like Toronto, Vancouver, or Dublin to enter the US. They still deny entry at random on a whim, but if they do, you’re not on American soil and can’t be detained. (src)(cached)
– Bring back boarding houses! (src)(cached)
– If AI Scaling keeps continuing to be heavy on inference, we’re actually going to start running up against the total number of chips that can even be produced. Right now there’s only theoretical capacity to run about 10 Million AI agents simultaneously. Sounds like a lot, but in terms of changing the world, is it? (src)(cached)
– Fortnite added an AI powered Darth Vader using the voice of James Earl Jones. It’s quite impressive IMO. (src)(cached)
– A major paper was retracted. It had showed that showed AI was helpful for top performing materials scientists. Now that it’s gone, all remaining papers on the effects of AI on people’s performance outcomes show it only helping low performers. (src)(cached)
– reducing parking requirements is good, but it’s also good to figure out standards for shared parking (src)(cached)
– Trump goes after people like Comey and Bolton because the Democrats and Republicans all hate them. But that’s no reason to let phony prosecutions get normalized. (src)(cached)
– I’m not sure how covered it was when it happened, but Sinclair, the broadcaster that got Kimmel off the air eventually caved despite getting absolutely nothing they asked for. (src)
– Tim Hardford, author of the Undercover Economist, wrote an article arguing that there’s too much math in economics these days. This was... not recieved well, and he definitely came out of it looking quite foolish. Here’s a whole post about him branding calculus as ‘newtonian mathematics’. (src)(cached)
– I’ve previously discussed reasons why Private Equity isn’t necessarily bad, but if you want a clear explanation from an economist about why they’re destructive, here’s an excellent one from Larry Summers. (src)(cached)