* “Pentagon ‘alarmingly slow’ at fielding new weapons.” China seems not to suffer this problem. Perhaps, given what’s happening with Taiwan, we should pay more attention. In other “China moves fast” news: “China State Shipbuilding Corporation is the world’s largest shipbuilder. It builds vessels for the People’s Liberation Army Navy and increasingly sophisticated dual-use commercial ships.” And the U.S. response so far is to shrug, it seems.

* “Not Everyone Needs to Go to Therapy: There be too much ‘mental-health’ awareness.” It turns out that if you tell people they’re robust, they’ll often turn out to be robust. If you tell people they’re fragile enough, they’ll start to believe that.

* A “blitz primary” seems like a good idea, compared to alternatives.

* “Are You a Jerk, or a Liar? On talking past each other.” On the gap between truth-seeking versus community-building communication styles. Ideally one figures out what kind of conversation one is in. Probably there are some sex differences in default style, and when I was younger I thought truth-seeking and information-exchanging were the purposes of communication. It took too much life experience to demonstrate that those beliefs were wrong.

“Are You a Jerk, or a Liar?” goes well with “The quality of your life is the quality of the people you get to know: Illuminating the David Brooks way.”

* In praise of potatoes (and an archive link).

* China is harassing Filipino vessels but not Vietnamese vessels—why that might be.

* The national debt is going unsustainably up, and that’s only now making it into the discourse.

* “California has surrendered its streets to assholes.” In general government needs to balance majority rule with minority rights, and when “minority ‘rights'” impede the ability of a city or society to function at all, that’s a problem.

* Metascience reforms at the NIH.

* “Drone Adoption Favors Quantity Over Quality In Warfare: Development of drones both large and small has outpaced institutional adoption across militaries. Battlefield successes will pressure an update to a deadlier kind of warfare.” The U.S., Europe, and Japan should ban DJI and build a drone industry. Better late than never.

* Lessons from a 37-year old.

* “China’s superrich are eyeing the exit.”

* “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.” On the Pirahã people and language; I downloaded the book, although I’m not convinced I’ll live long enough to read it.

* On the history and maybe future of nuclear power.

* “Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data.”

* “Why haven’t biologists cured cancer?”

* “How we should update our views on immigration.” On Marginal Revolution, not the usual, and I’m struck by how few people can think over decades or centuries about this issue. In the United States, almost all of us are in some sense the descendants of immigrants.