Favorites: Warning Shots and Gold-Card Grift

June 23rd 2025, Stem-cell therapy reverses diabetes in 10 of 12 patients, while a bill forces the US Post Office to dumpster its EVs and Chargers

Jun 24, 2025

Trump pretty loudly communicated that the US was considering striking Fordow before doing so, and now Iran clearly communicated which US base (cached) they were going to strike. This is not normally how airstrikes work.

Post See new posts Conversation Timothy B. Lee @binarybits Tesla fans are really convinced that one of Tesla's big advantages over Waymo is that Waymo's cars use maps and Tesla's don't. This is wild to me because you can see the map right there on the screen when you are driving a Tesla. 6:07 AM · Jun 23, 2025 · 5,864 Views Timothy B. Lee @binarybits · 16h "No Tim, you don't understand. Tesla only has shitty maps. Waymo has good maps. Therefore Waymo is doomed." Timothy B. Lee @binarybits · 16h I know I know the idea is that it's going to be too expensive for Waymo to collect the higher-quality maps nationwide. But Waymo's parent company is Google, which already has a fleet of mapping cars. How hard can it be to add some lidar sensors to them? — (src)(cached)

Tesla had their first day of operating their taxi service in Austin with safety observers in the passenger seat with a shutoff button. Some of the passenger footage looks sorta worrying!

Microplastics Sommelier ‪@leastactionhero.bsky.social‬ Follow manager: you make that allergy warning sign for the counter? employee: sure did boss, real fuckin ominous just like you asked manager: what Bagel store sign ALL BAGEL VARIETIES MAY COME IN CONTACT WITH THE EGG BAGEL. — (src)(cached)

This is of course a reference to the famous Eliot Gould / Grover photoshoot.

See new posts Conversation will brown @willccbb idk about that, most of my friends know what it is Quote the Rich @Duderichy · Jun 20 black pill: pretty sure a majority of the population has no idea what sampling bias is — (src)(cached)

My friends all know about sampling bias, and I've got normal friends, only a few are statisticians.

Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan It’s crazy to me that American showers don’t use thermostatic mixing valves. It’s a better experience. The water gets to the temperature you want faster. It’s more stable. You set it once and it’s ready every time. It saves water because you don’t have to wait as long. It saves energy because you’re not heating up water you don’t use. It’s safer because it prevents scalding. And it’s — cheap. You can get one for like $30. We could finally solve the problem of every shower having its own confusing interface. The rest of the world uses these. Why aren’t we using them? — (src)(cached)

I wasn't even aware such a valve existed. I had assumed achieving something like this would require electronics! Why don't we have this everywhere?

See new posts Conversation YIMBYLAND @YIMBYLAND Literally this Quote Moses Kagan @moseskagan · Jun 17 Irony: YIMBYism won the argument... at the exact moment the president tariffed construction supplies to the moon and kicked out all the construction workers. — (src)(cached)

Always another bottleneck in housing production, but it'll be good to make progress on zoning even if it doesn't have the positive effects it would have had under a Harris admin.

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Diabetes cured 10/12 patients in a trial of a stem cell related treatment. Early, but very cool. (src)(cached)
– Robinson Meyer summarizing a scoop from WaPo: "The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act would force the USPS to sell off its 7,200 EV delivery vehicles and *rip up post office facilities/lots* to uninstall their chargers. The chargers have no real market value so it’s just incinerating public dollars." (src)(cached)
– While Apple says the goal of many of their apps is for the app UI to get out of the way of the content, if you check out the most recent version of Safari compared to the last few, it sure looks like they’re doing the opposite of that. The Safari user interface is taking up more and more space. (src)
– Presumably you already know how US zoning results in suburban sprawl. But if you're interested in the simplest possible version, Lars Doucet explains it with Play-Doh in this video. (src)
– Why do developers build so many 1br apartments when higher bedroom counts are in relatively high demand and less expensive to build per square foot? Because we restrict building sizes so much that maximizing unit counts is more important than lowering cost per square foot built. (src)(cached)
– I may have mentioned this previously, but worth pointing out again: US tariffs on imported metal (and any other imported intermediate good) make US finished products more expensive to manufacture, and less competitive with other country's exports in international markets. It's very dumb! (src)(cached)
– Trump's 'Gold Card' seems to be a straightforward way for foreigners to buy citizenship so that they can then legally make campaign contributions. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– The Atlantic had an article about how Harris' campaign made bad decisions on which policies to focus on. For once, leftists and moderates both now and at the time actually agreed on what she should do, the only people who wanted the strategy they went with seems to have been the people on the Harris campaign. (src)(cached)
– Given recent events, the Voice of America is quickly un-firing all the Farsi language staff so that we can attempt to run Farsi language media targeting Iran. (src)(cached)
– The end of zero interest rates has frozen a lot of American homeowners in place with what amounts to golden handcuffs (src)(cached)
– It's weird to go around saying you've been radicalized by things. In response to conservatives yelling about being radicalized by trivial things Yglesias quips "It's better to be chill about things". Yes, obviously. (src)(cached)
– Interesting thread arguing that discussion of precisely how many years away from having a nuclear weapon was probably not a factor in Israeli decision-making (src)(cached)

Tugboat for Today

Discussion about this post