Friday, September 6, 2024

Links 6 September 2024

From NASA

Double portrait of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck stolen in 1979 is returned to Chatsworth House in England after it turned up in an auction.

Russian fortune tellers are doing a brisk business telling the relatives of missing soldiers that their loved ones are still alive.

Su Min, China's "road trip auntie," a retired woman who ditched her grouchy husband and hit the road, becoming a video star and an "icon for women all over the country." (NY Times, The Guardian, video at Sixth Tone)

The last of four dams on the Klamath River has been demolished, and the river flows unvexed to the sea.

The role of the white pine tree in the rising tensions that eventually led to the American Revolution. British attempts to reserve these trees for the use of their navy were not appreciated by settlers.

Someone has finally done a serious study of whether adding lithium to drinking water reduces suicide, and they found "a near perfect null result." They say the notion only seemed supported before because of publication bias, that is, only studies with positive findings got published.

Indian archaeologists claim that they have confirmed the existence of a shipyard at the Harappan site of Lothal on the Gujarati coast. But the study of Harappan (=Indus Valley) civilization has become such a nationalist football between India and Pakistan that I am now suspicious of all claims related to these sites. Compare wikipedia.

Marilynne Robinson, a novelist famous for curiosity and moral seriousness, has written a book about Genesis (the Biblical book) that this reviewer says is warmed-over dogmatism. Never inquire into the beliefs of writers you enjoy.

The cost of solar panels continues to fall, but the cost of installed solar power has stagnated, because costs related to land, labor, grid connections, and so on have increased. If you have solar panels installed on your house, the cost of the panels is only 10% of the total cost. Some futurists have talked about solar panels that cost no more than paper, but that may not lower electricity costs as much as you might think. From my own work I can tell you that US solar firms have plenty of money and want to build now but are having trouble finding sites, overcoming regulatory hurdles, and getting hooked up to the utility grid.

A Navajo woman weaves a replica of a Pentium chip.

A quiet Atlantic hurricane season will likely not stop news outlets from mindlessly repeating that storms are worse and more frequent these days because of climate change, a claim with no empirical basis.

This week in conspiracy theories: "Joe Biden and the CIA rigged the 2022 Brazilian election in favour of Lula in return for Brazil banning Elon Musk's X two years down the road to protect globalist control." That Joe Biden really plans ahead.

The old McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site in Washington, DC is finally being redeveloped after decades of opposition from fake historic preservationists. Matt Yglesias has commentary on Twitter/X. I really hate it when people pretend to care about history in order to fight development.

Panel discussion on liberal solutions to climate change: "I think that the push to address climate change both drives left-wing people towards very illiberal approaches—substantively and procedurally—and then global efforts to address climate change is fuel for a lot of right-wing populist backlash." And: "There’s this fear: Which am I afraid more of, climate change or climate change policy?"

Graves in Poland are thought to be Vandal warriors.

Detailed itinerary of Pocahontas' trip to London.

A new drug shows promise in treating the hot flashes and insomnia often caused by menopause.

Why you should read books by horrible people (like Alice Munro).

Against rereading.

Bat diseases and human mortality. (original paper, summary from Kevin Drum)

How did Ireland end up with a housing shortage just 15 years after a financial collapse caused by massive overbuilding of houses? This NY Times piece asks the question but doesn't really answer it. One part must be that the banks were crippled by the crisis, but I don't feel like I understand this at all.

NY City banned airbnb a few years ago partly because of concerns that it was taking apartments out of the rental market. But the ban has made NYC more expensive for visitors without doing anything to lower rents or increase the availability of apartments for residents. Of course you might argue that without the ban things would be even worse.

Russian paid millions to US right-wing influencers to spread Kremlin propaganda: NPR, AP, CBS. The indictment says the influencers may not have known where the money was coming from, but: "As far as being an anti-American piece of sh*t goes, Russia wanting to give you millions of dollars because they love your opinions is not better than selling your opinions for Russian money." And this: "The good news is there's someone out there with deep pockets willing to put real money into alternative media and actually pay their talent well. The bad news is that it's the Kremlin."

And see here on an alleged Russian plan to foment angry disputes between liberal and conservate US Jews.

Ukraine is doing great in the paraolympics because they have so many healthy young people missing limbs. So depressing it hurts.

Just when you thought the war couldn't get any worse: meet the flamethrower drone.

Retired US general and military writer Mark Hertling posted on Twitter/X that he was concerned to have read this sentence and hoped it wasn't true: "Distrust has become society's default emotion." The first response was from an adbot that posted, "Zero trust is more than a buzzword – it's essential."

Seeing the news that the Netherlands had upped their order for F-35 fighters to 58, I got curious as to how many of these have been sold. Exact numbers seem scarce, but at least 3,100 have been ordered and Lockheed Martin expects to sell 5,000 before they are through. They cost $80 to $100 million each. Right now production is about 150 per year, half for the US and half for other customers, so it will take quite a while to reach 5,000.  Anyway weapons manufacture is one part of the American economy that's going gangbusters.

5 comments:

  1. Against rereading.

    Skimmed through it, found this mind boggling line:

    Is the compulsion to reread a regression to this infantile state? A denial of maturation? Margaret Atwood suggests that it might be when she compares it to “thumb-sucking” and “hot-water bottles”; she admits that she does rereads only for “comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.”

    Given how much the author seemingly goes on about having been "taught" that rereading is the only serious way to read, I'm confident this piece is more about the author's resentment toward bad teachers and literary snobs than it anything of worth about rereading or not.

    Reread if you enjoy it. Don't if you don't.

    Books are like anything else - music, movies, etc. Going back to them will give you the chance to notice things you missed, analyze the techniques employed in its craft, etc. If you enjoy that sort of thing, reread.

    But if you instead prefer simply enjoying a book once and setting it aside, by all means do that. If you feel the novelty of going in blind outweighs the potential added depth you might glean from reading again - and particularly if you value the time savings of not rereading, which you can put toward reading OTHER books that interest you - then don't reread.

    But spare me this moralizing nonsense about determining a person's maturity or "conservatism" by whether they enjoy returning to a book (or song, or film, or whatever else) or they prefer to move on. Good grief!

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  2. How did Ireland end up with a housing shortage just 15 years after a financial collapse caused by massive overbuilding of houses? This NY Times piece asks the question but doesn't really answer it. One part must be that the banks were crippled by the crisis, but I don't feel like I understand this at all.

    I looked up two simple statistics that seem to shed some light on things.

    Between 2010 and 2024, the population of Ireland grew from 4.56 million to 5.127 million - an increase of 12.43%.

    Meanwhile, the peak number of new home constructions completed in any single year during that same time period was a mere 7,500.

    It's staggeringly obvious what happened. The population grew by 567,000 people, but they built less than 100,000 new homes in the same period.

    The thing is, even BEFORE the housing crisis, the number of new homes being built each year was only about 1,400 at its highest point in 2005. (That same year, the population in Ireland was only 4.16 million.)

    So what happened is a lot like a traffic jam where the backup lasts long past the time when the actual road obstruction has been cleared. They had too many homes for a time when population was much lower, so they slashed the number of homes being built. But then the population started booming, so you'd think people would start building houses again.

    But that's not how the market works. People lost a lot of money because there were briefly "too many houses", but then that sentiment stayed with people even not long after when the population began spiking massively, and people continued to hesitate to build housing out of fear of losing money, despite the fact that the growing population would naturally raise demand.

    Even before the pandemic, there's a clear hesitancy. Even though the crisis happened around 2010, and even though by 2018 the population had grown by over 700,000 people, new constructions still never broken 7,500 new homes a year, which is just far too little. People should have been building, but either were unwilling to do so, or were unable to do so, or both.

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  3. It reset me to anonymous again, dangit! The above post is mine.

    And a quick clarification in the last paragraph - the population growth of 700,000 is measured from 2005 (the peak year for new home constructions) to 2018. I muddied the context accidentally by framing things in terms of the crisis happening around 2010 - my bad.

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  4. From my own work I can tell you that US solar firms have plenty of money and want to build now but are having trouble finding sites, overcoming regulatory hurdles, and getting hooked up to the utility grid.

    My go-to in this sort of situation is to compare the situation in America to the situations in other countries that are doing better at something.

    The country with the largest solar success thus far is China, but it didn't take much looking into it to determine that much of their success is attributable to things like the exploitation of cheap (or even forced) labor, forcible clearing of indigenous lands by the government to use for installations, and a general willingness to overlook things like corruption, illegal waste dumping, etc, in the name of meeting government expectations. Solar is a strong political talking point for China, so they're willing to pursue it in some pretty ruthless and awful ways in order to bolster their national "prestige".

    Also, while China has the highest raw numbers, they still have a fairly low percentage of their power consumption that is actually met by solar. In terms of a proportion of their national energy needs being met by solar, Germany is doing about twice as well as China - 12.1% vs 6.2%.

    Heck, Poland is doing better than China, percentage wise. So is Brazil. So is Mexico. So is Bulgaria. Denmark. Belgium. Japan. Vietnam. The Netherlands. Hungary. Lots of places. (Although not the US, of course.)

    And most of said places don't have the benefit of possessing large, mostly empty deserts that they can build virtually all of their solar farms in, and then simply export it to the more populous areas, as China does. They're building solar farms all over their westernmost controlled territories (usually over the objections of the local ethnic groups), and simply shipping the power east.

    (Although said places ALSO don't have anywhere near the population of China, and thus the staggering total energy needs...)

    I think the main reason we don't see more progress in solar here in America is that the way we handle construction permissions is outdated - we can't even manage to build enough houses for our current needs (or in the places where modern people want to live) due to zoning and related regulations; much less build large scale solar installations. We need a major overhaul of some kind on our construction laws in general, and we could definitely use some government obstacle-clearing in the case of solar farms specifically.

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