* Companies and other organizations should “Just Stop Making Official Statements About the News.” Seems obvious, but here we are. Consistent with “A simple theory of cancel culture:” “[M]ost of these online mobs are paper tigers. They have no second move. Cancellation is a ‘shock and awe’ strategy, it relies upon an initial wave of intimidation to achieve its effects.” Ignoring and blocking works surprisingly well.

* The squat is an important exercise.

* “The 20 Farming Families Who Use More Water From the Colorado River Than Some Western States.” The supposed water shortages in western states are almost entirely about agriculture and a failure to price water correctly. To a lesser degree, we’re dealing with the failure to build out desalination plants, particularly in California.

* New York City schools.

* I saw an article titled “Your Friends Don’t All Have to Be the Same Age;” no link needed, because people who are substantially older or younger are likely to know different things and see things in different ways, which is valuable and interesting.

* “The Fight for the Future of Publishing: Ideological fanatics and fear have crippled the major houses. But new book publishers [and Substack] are rising up to take the risks they won’t.” Consistent with me writing the death of literary culture, though maybe that culture will be reborn on Substack.

* Vitalik’s techno-optimism. I’m also a techno-optimist; I almost have to be, given that technology is the only path forward to me being alive for more than a year.

* “The End of History: Academic historians are destroying their own discipline.” Another one that verges on too obvious, and similar things could be said for most liberal arts and social studies disciplines.

* “Unfortunately, production efficiency isn’t going to make housing affordable.” Note:

[Two to four] unit lots have never been a particularly large part of housing growth. They probably are a sort of canary in the coalmine. A city with functional land use regulations will tend to allow them, so that they are one arrow in the quiver of potential housing development. Like VanHalen checking for brown M&Ms in the green room, a lack of ADUs probably means a lot of other things aren’t working well.

And:

From 1998 to 2022, the median home in the Compton ZIP code increased from $100,000 to $570,000. That isn’t because the cost of construction quintupled. It’s because the price of a low tier LA location quintupled. The construction costs on that house are not the reason for its value inflation

Compton!

* “How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution.”

* The U.S. doesn’t lose all its wars. Note: “even victories [in the past decades] tend to feel like losses, because war is almost never a good idea in this day and age.” In April I wrote: “The level of long-term, strategic thinking being displayed in Russia is, to put it mildly, not high.” Even if Russia somehow “wins” in Ukraine, whatever that might mean, the country as a whole has already lost: most of Europe is trying to accelerate the transition away from Russian oil and gas, and whoever remains of Russia’s smartest and most capable people are trying to get out. What will be left? Russia’s fertility rate per woman has ranged in the last two decades from 1.2 to 1.8; at present it’s about 1.5.

* Also, related to the immediately above, South Korea is on the road to disappearing.