Molecular Metal, Monochrome Menus
August 24th 2025: Germany's A/C culture war, California's drought plan, and batteries displace diesel for backup.
This could be phrased in a way that sounds cooler: they're 3D printing metal at the molecular level, using an aerogel scaffold.
Just overall, the total rewrite of the UI in the Apple '26 OSs looks to have gone a bit too far in making things look boring.
I'm very excited about SB79. If you want more info, CA YIMBY has info, and they have a call tool, very easy to use (cached)
Longer Reads
• Epic thread about how air conditioning in Germany has become a cultural / class conflict. It's also making normies distrustful of bourgeois planners, public-media and NGO/professional elites—who call A/C a climate killer, and push fussy sustainable workarounds instead. If you're wondering what the US equivalent of this mistake is, one person suggests it's Japanese-style bidets (cached). (src)(cached)
• Menswear Guy blundered in some confused arguments about international trade and automation. But it was subtle enough that I didn’t catch it when I first saw his post, which argued that if a US manufacturer adds robots to compete with low Chinese labor costs, his Chinese competitor will do the same and still outcompete him. TL;DR: if you can get your labor costs in the ballpark of a foreign competitor, you can still beat them by simply being closer to your customers. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Article detailing how Lakshya Jain's Wins Above Replacement model for electoral overperformance works, interesting throughout. Further, here's another article on how moderation helps politician from the perspective from a forecaster. (src)(cached)
– The mayor of LA, Karen Bass, was recorded explaining her justification for modifying ED1, her own directive for streamlining housing. She did it because it was becoming clear that it was working really well, and a lot of new homes were going to get built. Further, she argues "The lower income areas - South LA, East LA, were getting ready to have their single family units replaced by apartments buildings and I thought that was the wrong thing to do". But look at the homes in that area, none of them could be purchased or rented on a low income. Just to add insult to injury, Bass is also opposing SB79. She says she "supports the intent". Each time something looks like it could actually get homes built, she does everything in her power to stop it from working. But she "supports the intent". (src)(cached)
– Canada's legalization of Euthenasia sure seems like it's gotten out of control, it now accounts for 5% of deaths in Canada. (src)(cached)
– I think it's worth noting that this doesn't necessarily mean an amazing performance in the general election. But it really seems like this is the most effective route (cached) to primary victory for a democratic candidate. But on paper, Newsom is not a particularly great candidate (cached) (src)(cached)
– The federal patrols of the safe parts of DC have absolutely tanked the restaurant scene there. Unsurprisingly, a bunch of dudes with guns walking around ruins the vibe (cached). (src)(cached)
– Trump seems to have responded to Gavin Newsom’s relentless parodies of his all caps screeds on Truth Social by no longer posting in all caps. (src)(cached)
– Jerusalem Demsas is starting a new group substack with a bunch of other former Vox contributors. It’s sorta weird that they made an announcement video for a text based publication, but it’s still cool. Tagline is “Liberalism deserves better”. Looking at the list of contributors: “We can’t replace Vox 2014, but we can recreate it in the aggregate” (cached). Demsas says they have a new mission (cached) though: “We’re not just going to explain. We’re going to persuade.” (src)(cached)
– Europeans are trying to find ways to build structures so that they don’t need air conditioning in hot weather. But it turns out that the refrigeration cycle is ridiculously efficient. The energy expended to build the structure differently could easily not even pay off over the lifetime of the building, and still wouldn’t be as comfortable in the summer. (src)(cached)
– If you’re into Severance, you might want to check out Britt Lower’s audition tape for Helly. (src)(cached)
– The California Department of Water Resources published their plan for how to handle adapting the state’s strategy as climate change causes more frequent and severe droughts. Casey Handmer handled the yeoman’s work of checking all 88 pages: zero mention of desalination. (src)(cached)
– “batteries are already cost competitive with diesel for data center backup power in many scenarios today”, and high power requirements for AI will make the equation move further towards batteries. Here's the full article. (src)(cached)
– While UBI continues to be extremely effective in extremely poor regions in Africa, experiments in fighting poverty with UBI in developed nations have not gone as well as many (including me) expected. (src)(cached)
– The age of Americans at first marriage has been rising since the 1950s. The only pause was in the 2000s when we were building tons of homes. Maybe that’s how many we should have been building the whole time. (src)(cached)
– Sure seems bad that Trump is doing a purge at The Pentagon. He fired a lot (cached) of leaders (src)(cached)
– In the past, Yglesias has discussed the concept of "Tory men and Whig measures" as a common configuration in politics. But now with Trump's purges and partial nationalization of intel, we're moving towards "fascist men and communist measures", and that's bad! (src)(cached)
– I had forgotten about Golden Gate Claude, a version of Claude that always related anything it spoke about to the Golden Gate Bridge. Here's its finest hour, attempting to address the Rwandan Genocide. (src)(cached)
– "WSJ: Trump’s global tariffs, especially on Indian imports, have caused multinational manufacturers to pause or terminate their plans to shift production out of China" (src)(cached)