* 2020 had the warmest September on record. And still we continue to dither.
* “Prefab was supposed to fix the construction industry’s biggest problems. Why isn’t it everywhere? The Canadian company Bone Structure can produce zero net energy homes months faster than a traditional builder. But its challenges highlight the difficulty of disrupting the entrenched construction industry.”
* “Don’t Pay for 95%,” something we seem almost psychologically incapable of understanding.
* Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s work.
* “College Enrollment Slid This Fall, With First-Year Populations Down 16%.”
* Speaking of education: “Large variation in earnings returns among postgraduate degrees, with returns of more than 15% for masters in business and law, but negative returns for many arts and humanities courses.”
* Psilocybin is going to be legalized, at least therapeutically, in the near future.
* Cruise is actually going to deploy driverless cars as an Uber-like service in San Francisco?
* American magical realism, with Bruno Maçães, who has written various interesting things.
* The Great Unread: On William Deresiewicz’s The Death of the Artist. Seems like a book for which the reviews suffice.
* Where has San Francisco’s money gone? A useful framing starts the story: “In 2009, San Francisco’s municipal budget totaled $6.5 billion—$8.6 billion in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation and population. San Francisco’s budget for 2019 is an eye-popping $12.2 billion, a 10 percent increase just since 2018.”
* Why is wokeness winning?, Andrew Sullivan asks. I’m not sure that it is, or that the reasons stated are really the correct “why,” as opposed to a post-hoc story.
* Where are all the successful rationalists?
* Labor’s share of national income is falling, but it’s primarily going to increased rents—which are increasing due to laws that prevent the development of new housing.
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