Two more chapters of The Voice from the Darkness are up at Royal Road.
Scott Siskind on the "vibecession": why do people feel so poor when economists insist we are richer than ever?
Claire Lehmann demolishes the argument that public hangings deter crime; historical evidence shows that all forms of violence track each other, so cultures that revel in brutal punishments will have more violent crime.
Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize lecture, on what led to technological innovation in the past and whether those conditions still exist. He says they do, so innovation will continue. He identifies conflict between nations and populism as the two biggest threats to future growth. All three prize speeches are at the link but Mokyr's is the first 30 minutes.
Major ceremonial site of the Neolithic to Bronze Age discovered near Dijon in France. In French, but Google translate is good at French.
Major French study finds (like all other major studies) that the Covid vaccine greatly reduced mortality during the pandemic.
Politico: "How Chiropractors Became the Backbone of MAHA"
Ozy Brennan: "Sometimes you have a problem, and you observe that other people don’t have this problem. The natural conclusion is that they have some kind of special skill or technique that they used to solve the problem. But, in reality, often people aren’t better than you at solving problems. They just never had the problem in the first place." Via Scott Siskind's monthly links post.
The Victorian Cult of Mourning, 13-minute video from the Victoria & Albert.
Reddit occasionally sends me links to popular posts, and the latest was titled "Should we be worried about this too?" I didn't click on it; no subject matter could make it a more perfect summation of the current mood.
Fascinating analysis of how Nick Fuentes was algorithmically boosted on Twitter/X, possibly by foreign actors. (Twitter/X)
A claim that ads created entirely by AI get 19% more clicks than ads created by human ad designers or humans using AI assistance.
Interesting interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who wants to use ranked choice voting to end gerrymandering. In theory, sure, but how many Marylanders could even name eight people in Congress? How can you expect them to pick eight candidates? And what about states with dozens of representatives? I suppose you can set up multi-member districts, but we have some of those in Maryland (for the state senate) and that seems to allow even more creative gerrymandering.
Rubio makes a true conservative move, announces that the State Department is returning to Times New Roman after the Biden administration's woke experiment with a sans serif font. (NY Times)
Tyler Cowen attacks Australia's new law limiting the access of under-16s to many internet sites, including YouTube.
On the subject of writers knowing things, interesting obsevation about Joseph Conrad, who had read "every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians' memoirs." Via Tyler Cowen.
Fabulous summary of an episode of Candace Owens' podcast. (Twitter/X)
Noah Smith, Europe is Under Siege, with thoughts on why MAGA has no interest in defending Europe as it is.
Cremieux on Japanese birth rates: "In the future, you'll have to explain to your kids that anime was an art form made by an extinct race of serene beings that excelled at art and manufacturing and always took pride in their work. And then they just decided to disappear."
A note that one of the biggest AI conferences has for 25 years offered both a Best Paper Award and a Test of Time Award for work that still looks great ten years later. There is zero overlap between the two categories. (Twitter/X) Predicting the future is hard.
Clamart is another Parisian suburb the has been redeveloped according to new urbanist principles, lovely and dense at the same time. (Twitter/X, article) The mottos is, "dare to ask people what they want." (You will find that it is NOT modernism.)
The moon in medieval art and thought.
Interview with a guy who wants a public social media platform so this important space isn't all controlled by corporations. Seems to me he just wants to be the one who decides what can be posted.
British archaeologists claim that their 400,000-year-old evidence of humans making fire is the oldest in the world. Maybe, but there is still a raging debate over whether Home erectus controlled fire a million years ago.
The Russian MOD is claiming a successful attack by ground drones on a Ukrainian position. (Twitter/X) And from the Ukrainian side, what they claim is the first case of one of their ground drones destroying a Russian armored vehicle.
Thought from Magyar's Birds, one of Ukraine's top drone units: "The essential skill in this war is camouflage. You must be able to hide everything: bunkers, equipment, and exposed parts of your body. You need to be highly proficient if you want to survive." The same unit says they are killing 100 Russians a day.
Video of a Russian motorcyclist who got stuck in the tangle of fiber optic drone cables near the front.
4 comments:
Scott Siskind on the "vibecession": why do people feel so poor when economists insist we are richer than ever?
A close friend of mine is a senior microbiologist who works for a major pharmaceutical company. She is not just a tech, she is the lead for her entire lab. She works full time, with frequent overtime. She has a husband who is the stay-at-home dad taking caring of their young elementary school age son. She lives in a house that's over a century old, rarely eats out, doesn't travel, buys store brand goods, drives mechanically unreliable vehicles bought at impound auctions, and is generally quite frugal. She also lives in a low population area with low rental rates, and has a very good landlord currently who gives her preferential pricing and actually maintains the property unlike most.
They still can't pay the bills, and are slowly sinking into more and more debt. She has been paying off student debt for 15 years, and will be paying it off for a long time to come. She had a small tumor she had to get removed about 10 years ago, and she's still paying off the medical debt from that. Her husband had an accident and lost multiple toes in the past couple years, and they have debt from that - and he is facing difficulty healing, to the bafflement of the doctors, and might lose an entire foot in the future if it takes a turn for the worse, and then they'd be in even more debt, because prosthetics are extremely expensive.
A family of three, making the effort to live within their means, in a city of about 60,000 people in an area with lower than average cost of living, with the working parent earning about $70,000 annually, shouldn't be struggling this badly. But they are, and they will continue to do so for decades.
But of course, the economists say they should be doing just fine, so I guess it's all just in their heads, right? If they just adjust their "vibes", they'll suddenly stop being in crippling debt, and won't have to scrimp and save on... well... everything... to keep their heads above water?
Interesting interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who wants to use ranked choice voting to end gerrymandering. In theory, sure, but how many Marylanders could even name eight people in Congress? How can you expect them to pick eight candidates?
This is one of the most American political take I've ever read. "We can't have greater voter options, because we poor simpletons will be overwhelmed by choice!"
Americans are happy to pick from 46 flavors of Häagen-Dazs, but they can't be expected to pick half a dozen names to potentially fill the public offices vital to the functioning of our state and society? Give me a break, John!
But let's grant you the full benefit of the doubt, and say that we really do think the bulk of Americans are just that stupid and pathetic - what's the issue? In many ranked voting systems, you don't HAVE to list more than one name if you don't want to! Or even in a system where you MUST list multiple names, you can just do what massive amounts of voters already do - just vote based on party lines, without actually knowing anything at all about the candidates in question other than which "team" they're on.
So all the people who are frightened by choice can simply... do exactly what they already do, and only worry about one single name (or a pre-prepared list of party candidates supplied to them by the party). For them, nothing changes! But for the portion of our population who can both walk AND chew bubble gum at the same time without having a panic attack, ranked voting would be a godsend - giving choice to the people who want it, without affecting those who don't!
There is literally no downside to the idea, John. So why are you acting as if it were some risky and dangerous proposal?
Clamart is another Parisian suburb the has been redeveloped according to new urbanist principles, lovely and dense at the same time. (Twitter/X, article) The mottos is, "dare to ask people what they want." (You will find that it is NOT modernism.)
No offense, John, but I'm starting to think you just REALLY like facades on buildings, no matter how cheap their construction.
I looked through the "article" you linked (actually a sales pamphlet .pdf), and uhh...these appear to be just bog standard European apartments with a bunch of detail pieces that are flimsy imitations of classic architectural elements. Fake stonework; fake columns; fake exterior moulding; fake lintels; fake windows in a few places; pretend wrought-iron railings that I assume are hollow pot-metal at best, or potentially just coated plastic; ditto for light post casings; et cetera, et cetera. We have these kinds of buildings in many parts of America, cheaply made but meant to LOOK correct. And in ten or twenty years, most of these flimsy decorate elements will be falling apart and looking terrible.
Quick followup on Clamart - in fairness, there are some quality looking elements that do have a deal of aesthetic charm.
The rounded "tower" walls are something you can't really fake too much even if you wanted to, and they add a nice visual element and nicely break up the otherwise quite standard square-ish construction. And the roofs look to be quite well done, even if they're nothing special for much of France and Europe in general. Credit where credit is due.
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