* “Electric Vehicles (EVs) Could Last Nearly Forever.” Buying or leasing a legacy internal combustion engine (ICE) car now or going forward is nuts because its value is going to drop to near-zero within a few years. Granted there are a lot of obvious things that people don’t see coming.
* Making sense of honor culture.
* “Policy ideas for 10 lifesaving technologies.” And then it has a sequel: “FDA, ARPA-H, & CDC – policy ideas part 2.” The author, Jacob Trefethen, has less antipathy towards the FDA than I do—a low bar—but he identifies some of its problems.
* Argument for the right to self-termination; I prefer my title to the one offered. I agree with the general thrust of the article—which will not surprise anyone who read “Will things get better? Suicide and the possibility of waiting to find out,” but I also admit to hesitation around the specifics of implementation. Hardly anyone thinks it’s wise for Joe to walk into a clinic, say he wants to be euthanized, and for the procedure to be done half an hour later. Yet I sense opponents of self-termination arguing for barriers that will effective block its use altogether. Having been tortured by my own biology before, albeit over a somewhat short term, I don’t think it’s fair or wise to insist that people who are being tortured by their biologies remain corporeal. The right individual self-determination remains important.
* “Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read.” How cool!
* “Nietzsche’s Guide to Greatness | The Genealogy of Morality Explained.” Interesting, though longer than I’d like it to be, and I think Nietzsche is simply wrong in a lot of his causal arguments, and that he’s fond of false binaries.
* “What Will Become of American Civilization? Conspiracism and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city.” About Phoenix and yet doesn’t capture the flavor of the Phoenix I see; you can also find people who are poor and have problems in any big city. Notably, too, “desalination” is only mentioned twice, and Packer doesn’t emphasize that agriculture consumes about 80% of Arizona’s water. Bess and I would all else equal prefer to live in California, but California won’t build anywhere near enough housing, so, like millions of other Arizonans, here we are. That would make for a much shorter article, however. Places like Arizona, Texas, Georgia, and Florida are growing so fast in part because places like California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and Massachusetts make living there illegal via zoning.
* Argument that the Republican party is doomed, due to how “Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation.” A dying animal can still be dangerous, though.
* “Elon Musk exposes himself through Apple/OpenAI temper tantrum.” Not the exact framing I’d choose but Musk is suffering from Twitter brain worms and that’s bad.
* “Three holes in the U.S.’ economic strategy against China.”
* “Why Young Women Are Becoming More Liberal Than Young Men: The Gender-Equality Paradox.” Maybe.
* “The Optimists Ended up in Auschwitz.”
* “The Ford Foundation has spent decades tearing the country apart, tax-free.” Maybe indefinite foundations are not such a smart move?
* “GM had $6 billion to spend on next-gen EVs, chose stock buybacks.” In case you want to know why Tesla is still important.
* What things look like from Israel. It’s Ezra Klein and so not among the dumber takes that predominate.
* “How an American Dream of Housing Became a Reality in Sweden.”
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