Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.
More on Roman concrete, based on the study of a building site at Pompeii. (News story, technical article)
A claim that in 2024, the EU earned more from fines on American tech companies than by taxing European tech firms. (Twitter/X)
Nate Silver on the Democratic counterpart of the Tea Party, Heather Cox Richardsonism.
Growth matters: Alex Tabarrok on what economic growth has meant for the people of India.
Lovely painted tomb from the 3rd century AD found in Turkey.
American refrigerators are bigger, better, much more affordable, and only slightly less durable than 40 years ago. (Blog post, summary on Twitter/X)
The main reason home ownership has declined for Americans 25-34 is that fewer of them are married.
An appreciation of P.J. O'Rourke. Like this writer, I usually found him interesting and entertaining even when I disagreed wtih him. (Everybody will disagree with something he wrote, since he started as a hippie Marxist and ended up a cranky old libertarian. The constant was a deep suspicion of The Man.)
When ICE says they are arresting "the worst of the worst," they are lying.
Hollis Robbins says that nobody cares about the quality of university teaching, and if they did, we would have no way to measure it.
Following the Black nationalist playbook, J.D. Vance wonders if the Biden administration encouraged the importation of fentanyl to kill MAGA people. (Twitter/X) And a longer version, "JD Vance is the White Kendi."
Neolithic dog sacrifice found in a Swedish bog.
Update on Haitian gangs (report, summary on Twitter/X)
Sixteenth-century gallows and several mass graves found in Grenoble, France. A reminder that executed criminals were not buried in consecrated ground, which is one reason why places of execution had such strong uncanny associations.
Detailed study of data from Taiwan (where pets have to be registered) finds that pets do not replace babies; in fact, acquiring a dog makes it more likely that a couple will have a child. I have observed this in my suburban neighborhood of Maryland: most of the young or youngish couples I see walking a dog have a baby within two years.
Sec. Kennedy announces a $1 billion program to install gyms in airports. By one calculcation, that would be enough money to save more than 800,000 lives if it were spent vis USAID. (Twitter/X)
More snow drawings made by walking on frozen lakes.
Most big IT projects still fail, despite people trying to solve this problem for 50 years. The author says AI won't help because it trains on past experience and our past experience is terrible.
Study finds that you will have better luck persuading those who disagree with you by talking about what you hate rather than what you support.
Studying the lost upper floors of Pompeii, with speculation that some villas had tall towers. (English summary, Italian press announcement. From this I learned that in Italian, "super rich" is super ricchi.)
Study finds that Orcas and dolphins cooperate to hunt salmon off Canada's west coast. (NY Times, scientific paper, Guardian)
Introduction to the work of Luigi Pirandello, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 but is now mostly forgotten. Pirandello seems to have become a Fascist because he found the people of his time weak and pathetic.
They're still fighting about whether moderate drinking is good for your heart. My rule of thumb is that is they can't even agree on the direction of the effect, it can't be very big. (NY Times – kudos to their reporter for thinking to call up John Ioannidis; AHA Statement)
Summary of a paper which found that aesthetic considerations drive a lot of Nimbyism. (Twitter/X) Everyone who has followed this blog knows that to me, aesthetics is the key to a lot of housing and other land-use issues.
A claim that a Russian submarine was disabled while in port by an attack by Ukrainian underwater drones. (Twitter/X)
2 comments:
American refrigerators are bigger, better, much more affordable, and only slightly less durable than 40 years ago.
Imagine how much better, more affordable, and durable they'd be if they weren't also bigger - and not even merely "bigger", but in fact the biggest in the world, by a very large margin compared to most other countries.
Americans don't go shopping as often as other people. But it's also a much bigger deal to go shopping as an American - you tend to have to travel a great deal further, and spend much more time on the trip. Car culture makes grocery shopping a much bigger hassle, and so Americans avoid doing it, and if you only get groceries once a week, you need a bigger fridge to hold them. But larger refrigerators also, by themselves, encourage buying more than you need and storing it longer than you ought to. People don't like seeing a half empty refrigerator.
Americans also eat foods out of season to a much higher degree. Likewise, they also either needlessly refrigerate foods that are just fine (or better!) unrefrigerated, or the versions of foods sold to them are prepared in ways that require them to be refrigerated (eggs being the classic example, but there are many more).
There's also the curious American lack of truly fresh foods. In Europe, people actively prefer to go shopping for certain foods they intend to eat that day or perhaps the next, because while storing it in a refrigerator for even a day or two keeps it perfectly edible, it doesn't preserve its actual "freshness" well at all. In short, refrigerated foods taste worse than very fresh foods do. But Americans don't seem to value truly fresh food - and so they don't have as much of an incentive to shop the same day as use, and thus don't have the incentive to have a smaller refrigerator.
Pirandello seems to have become a Fascist because he found the people of his time weak and pathetic.
I mean, that's sort of why ANYBODY becomes a Fascist - delusional obsession with the shallowest possible conceptions of "strength".
Fascism is built upon staggering insecurity. It is a worldview built around the concept of being innately superior to everyone else, and yet somehow also being a helpless victim of others despite that superiority.
This absurd contradiction insidiously allows the Fascist adherent to dismiss any and all evidence AGAINST their supposed superiority as being merely the fabrications of jealous others. E.g., the Fascist KNOWS they are a genius of unparalleled intellect whose ideas are always right - then when their ideas turn out to be wrong, they don't have to question their own brilliance (which is naturally beyond reproach!), they can instead just decide that sinister external forces worked in secret to foil them and make them LOOK wrong! Those dastardly inferior beings! Always victimizing their betters out of jealousy!
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