Favorites: Speed, Reach, and Needs
January 6th 2024
I love this! I wasn’t sure before how robot vacuums could improve now that they self clean and self empty, but this looks great! I'm hoping it can pick up wires. Here's The Verge's write up.
Great to see congestion pricing going live in NYC! There's actually a site (cached) where you can follow along. It really looks like there was a pretty extreme elasticity of demand, traffic dropped (cached) like a stone. When folks say “what about people who have to drive?” The answer is that congestion pricing helps them shorten the drive that they have to make (cached) anyway! What you want to do is get people who don't really need to drive to join the 85% of NYC residents (cached) who take public transit. I know it's nutpicking, but there are people who complain that they have to walk over 1000 feet (cached) to find a subway stop in some parts of the city. Finally, here's a thread about the failed attempt to implement it in SF.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– A downside of many party parliamentary systems in Europe is that there ends up being a farmers party and then you find out that farmers have very bad opinions (src)(cached)
– The roast of Chevy Chase got out of hand (src)
– Fun thread of generated videos of video games as other things. Mario Brothers as a 1940s industrial film, Zelda as community theater. (src)(cached)
– South Korean President is arguing that he can’t be arrested, and is citing the US Supreme Court ruling regarding Trump as evidence (src)(cached)
– Because OpenAI o3 did so well on graduate math benchmarks, there’s now a competition to figure out what a higher level expert mathematician can do. (src)(cached)
– It’s not true that congresspeople tend to outperform the stock market. But at the same time that means there’s no harm in outlawing them from owning individual stocks. The real improvement would be to drastically increase their pay at the same time. (src)(cached)
– Biden called Japan and the US “the closest of friends” in April. (src)(cached)
– A reminder that Harris lost because people who vote a lot and read the news swung *towards* Democrats, but this was outweighed by people who don’t vote much and don’t read the news swinging towards Republicans (src)(cached)
– NYT article describes how Scientists who disliked a proposed dam invented a new species of fish so that they could say it was endangered and use that to block the dam’s construction. (src)(cached)
– If I had to guess how SpaceX transports a rocket from Texas to Florida, I would have not guessed correctly, even with a few tries. (src)(cached)
– NIMBYs are the reason ski resorts are crowded and understaffed (src)(cached)
– Very nice “2024 in film” montage all to a Fleetwood Mac song. Here's another, longer one (cached), and here's a shorter one (cached). (src)(cached)
– A ton of top advisors are mad at Biden over the steel deal (src)(cached)
– SpaceX also managed to build their launch tower for 1% of what NASA spent. (src)(cached)
– A lot of leftist anti-YIMBY academics simply lie, get caught, and suffer no consequences. Mostly it’s broken incentive structures. (src)(cached)
– China will sell more EVs than internal combustion cars this year (src)(cached)
– Shanghai drone show was a composite, not real (src)(cached)
– Possible that the Chinese hacking is meant to intimidate us. Almost think it won’t work because Americans aren’t paying attention. (src)(cached)
– Looks like some other states are seeing the mess caused by prop 13 and saying “yes, we want that” (src)(cached)
– Trudeau’s biggest failure was not getting more homes built. The child benefit program is good (cached) though (src)(cached)
– I had no idea the NYC Subway had the most stops of any subway in the world (src)(cached)
– I didn’t watch the Golden Globes, but some of the clips of the jokes were pretty funny (src)(cached)
“SpaceX also managed to build their launch tower for 1% of what NASA spent.”
I do appreciate the scrappy nature of it all, but surely scrounging scrap metal because “rebar is too expensive” isn’t adding that much value, is it? Is there just massive margin on rebar and we don’t know it? Also eventually they’re going to run into an issue somewhere when their scrounged construction material doesn’t perform as well as even cheap options, right?
“I know it's nutpicking”
Of course it’s not David; that’s what Republicans do.