* “How China uses foreign firms to turbocharge its industry: China uses global industry leaders like Apple and Tesla to get technology and upgrade its industrial ecosystem.”

* Bess on “Debugging the Doctor Brain: Who’s teaching doctors how to think?”

* Skepticism towards 3-D printed housing.

* Covid was almost certainly of zoonotic origin.

* Gary Shteyngart sent on a massive cruise ship and, surprise! he finds it distasteful and absurd, though in a humorous way. I mean, people on cruise ships would probably find book festivals boring, too. I would likely find a car or horse race unbearably tedious, and so I don’t go to either.

* “From Intellectual Dark Web to Crank Central.” Consistent with my read. A publication like Quillette is impressive because it has retained its taste for heterodoxy without lying, or ignoring important things that are true. I heard someone say that often the only people worse than the institutionalists are often the anti-institutionalists—maybe it was in “Losing Faith In Contrarianism: There are institutional incentives that make contrarian views that catch on mostly wrong.” Granted, “contrarianism” over time scale? Yesterday’s contrarianism is often today’s obviously right belief.

* Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war.

* “‘The Small Press World is About to Fall Apart.’ On the Collapse of Small Press Distribution.” Despite me writing about how literary culture is dead, this is still bad.

* The leadership philosophy of Jensen Huang.

* Baseball is dying. It seems tremendously boring to watch, even moreso than football. Yet football seems to be thriving, for reasons not obvious to me, though it is more fun than baseball.

* On fonio, the grain of the moment.

* That article about NPR’s extreme political bias. I stopped listening more than ten years ago; the problems go back further, I think, than this guy says. Their new CEO says things like “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

* “Opening a small business in San Francisco is still a nightmare.” Part of the challenge faced by the left right now is showing really good governance in the places, like SF, that’re ruled by the left. Ezra Klein has been good on this—this recent article about a $1.7 million toilet in San Francisco is an example.

* Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing.

* FTC announces rule banning non-competes. Good. Non-competes impede the formation of new firms and retard the circulation of ideas. California remains a startup hotbed because the state bans non-competes, which means that startups continue to congregate there despite many poor governance choices.

* There isn’t enough training data for AI on the Internet. (wsj, $) You should write more online, so the machine god has more training data.

* “Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas.” Impressive; whether it can scale remains an open question.

* “The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense.’” My view is that we don’t understand consciousness or the brain.

* “Would-be Tesla buyers snub company as Musk’s reputation dips.” The risks of Tesla becoming a partisan brand are still underrated.

* Questions about biotech. Really impressive! Don’t be put off by a title that may seem anodyne. Questions about biotech are really questions about life itself, and whether we live or, in my case, die.

* Fire departments block humane urban design, and have other statistically illiterate, deleterious effects. Sad. We should do better.

* “How China uses foreign firms to turbocharge its industry.” Perhaps we should stop that? Or at least discourage it?

* “Economic Reasons To Pass Promising Pathway Act,” which would accelerate FDA approvals of drugs for small patient populations, and for people with fatal diseases, like me.

* New Zealand liberalized land-use laws and got less-expensive housing as a result. Everywhere else should try it! Meanwhile: “California is building fewer homes. The state could get even more expensive” (LA Times, $).

* On Robert Frost.

* “How I fell out of love with academia.” The problems are well known, but no one has managed to yet produce a better system. “Yet” being the key word.

* “China Outpacing U.S. Defense Industrial Base.” And we’re asleep.

* “Hamas Actually Believed It Would Conquer Israel. In Preparation, It Divided the Country Into Cantons.” Interesting if true. I’m struck by how often throughout history leaders have just made very bad choices. That striking feature makes me pessimistic about the future of humanity, given nuclear weapons, ego, and hubris.

* “What makes housing so expensive?” Depends on where you are.

* “Greenpeace crusade will blind and kill children.” This is what passes for many “environmental” organizations now.

* “Kids Today Can’t Read – Even College Kids: The bite-sizing of books.” Fortunately, GPAs keep going up. Still, I wrote two years ago that Most people don’t read carefully or for comprehension, and I’m not sure that things have changed all that much in the last two decades.

* “Club Med: Dispatches from the Adderall Epidemic.” Often entertaining. Are all writers on Adderall or similar medications, as is asserted and/or implied here?

* Debugging the Doctor Brain: Who’s teaching doctors how to think?

* We Need Major, But Not Radical, FDA Reform. Consistent with my ongoing experiences.

* “America’s Magical Thinking About Housing: Austin built a lot of homes. Now rent is falling, and some people seem to think that’s a bad thing.” Falling rent is good!

* Early-onset cancer burden increased by ~50% from 1990 – 2019. The “early-onset” part indicates this isn’t about people getting older.

* “The Crime Rings Stealing Everything from Purses to Power Tools.” Implicitly about the need for basic law enforcement, and the way a small number (and percentage) of people cause a disproportionate number of problems.

* “Do 10x as much.”

* Is classical education making a comeback? That, like micro-schools, may be a response to the current problems in schools, including the ineffective and foolish ideologies being spread by many teachers training programs. Relatedly, in Wisconsin, Alex Tabarrok reports that the state mandated teachers be paid for performance, not seniority, and teacher qualify improved—as you’d expect.

* “Hospitals Are Adding Billions in ‘Facility’ Fees for Routine Care.” We really need price transparency in healthcare and seem to be nowhere near it.

* “Los Angeles is laying the groundwork for a better urban future.” Probably true, but neither the city nor the county have managed to build substantial amounts of new housing; the future, as measured by population growth, is presently happening in Texas, as noted above. Also, market-rate housing will make your city cheaper, which is obvious, and yet a noisy minority of people don’t seem to understand it. Overall, “There is nothing except political will stopping us fixing our housing crisis. And doing so is free. All we need to do is get a planning system that allows people, all other things being equal, to build houses on land those people own.” Obvious, and yet commonly fought over.

* “The War at Stanford: I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason.”

* “Why It’s So Expensive to Live in Phoenix.” Short answer: the same NIMBY problems that plague all of America. See also “Government of the NIMBY, for the NIMBY, by the NIMBY.”

* Covid’s origins are likely zoonotic.

* “Cancer-vaccine trials give reasons for optimism.”

* “Mahbod Moghadam: An Obituary.” He made Rap Genius (later just “Genius”), but a brain tumor felled him. He may be another of the dead at the hands of slow FDA. I’m a year younger than him.

* “Levelling Up: What got you here won’t get you there.” Doing the right boring stuff to build skills every day is also important.

* The new and amazing Lectric ONE ebike.

* “The best essay,” a new Paul Graham essay, and one that’s essential for anyone writing online.

* “Democrats Should Be a ‘Pro-Normal’ Party.”

* “Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse” (wsj, $). Building a lot of housing works to reduce prices. Who knew?

* A Mathematician On Creativity, Art, Logic and Language.

* “The Coddling of the American Undergraduate: The infantilizing social control of the university.” Almost too obvious to link to.

* The value of tiny storefronts, despite the way American zoning codes largely ban them.

* Elegy for literary blogs.

* Paul Graham on how to start Google. I note this: “Once you’re good at programming, all the missing software in the world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter.” If you develop writing skills, all the missing writing in the world starts to become obvious, and it’s possible for you (or me) to do it. The Internet makes writing vastly more important and powerful than it was pre-Internet, and yet it feels like many people haven’t properly internalized this.

* “Walking Phoenix: A quick retreat from an expansive hell on earth.” Depressingly consistent with many of my experiences. It’s funny to read this right after Bess published “The dangers of walking include falling in love.”

* Journalism about the Google employees who figured out large-language models and wrote the now-famous paper “Attention Is All You Need.” (wired, $). Perhaps most interesting for the spontaneous meetings that drove the project and its ideas.

* Astral Codex Ten (so it’s not the stupidity you may expect from the title): “How Should We Think About Race And ‘Lived Experience’?” The problem is that if we reward real goods, like jobs or tenure or money, based on race or “race,” we incentivize a lot of obsession over that topic, over boundary policing, and so on. As long as there’s money and jobs at stake, we’re going to get bitter fights, as well as silly behavior, on these topics.

* “Why the political clock is ticking for TikTok.” Good. Letting the CCP control and direct a major media channel is unwise.

* “Wharton statistician looks at Hamas’ casualty data and concludes they are likely falsifying to maintain a rolling mean & linear growth — and they don’t know how to avoid making anomalies obvious to Western analysts.” Article here.

* “Why Facebook doesn’t use Git.” Lessons in path dependence.

* 3D printing progress.

* “DEI killed the CHIPS Act.” Interesting and plausible, though I can’t verify whether it’s true. Still, the DEI requirements are an example of the problems with everything-bagel liberalism. I bet China has extensive DEI requirements in its government and companies, and that’s why they’re able to build so fast.

* “BYD to slash EV prices even more with new platform as it looks to crush ICE car sales.” American, European, and Japanese carmakers aren’t ready, though they’ve had a decade of warning. Even in the U.S., electric cars are now as cheap as gas-powered ones (WaPo, $; archive link). Buying a new gas-powered car today is crazy, because within a few years no one will want gas-powered cars.

* “Katie Herzog’s Plan B: In a new book, Katherine Brodsky explains how members of the ‘silenced majority’ find new audiences after enduring episodes of public mobbing.”

* YIMBYism and the need to lower the cost of housing transcends ideological lines. Good. As it should. Sadly, however, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs vetoes housing freedom legislation. Democrats against freedom, low costs, and the middle class.

* Why clinical trials are so expensive.

* “I Make Great Hot Sauce. State Regulations Ensure You’ll Never Taste It.” We should have more ferment in the space between home cooks and outright restaurants.

* “The artisans who are still making clothes in American factories.” I looked at Rancourt & Co.’s shoes, and, while they look impressive, I prefer that the body color of the shoe match the sole color. White soles get dirty too fast for my taste.

* Smarter ways to boost drug innovation.

* Paul Graham’s “The best essay.”

* Zvi’s housing roundup. He notes that “If we built enough housing that life vastly improved and people could envision a positive future, they would be far more inclined to think well about AI” and also that:

If you let people build minimum viable homes to house those who would not otherwise have anywhere to live, outright homelessness is rare. Mississippi is poor but has very little homeless. NYC had close to zero homeless in 1964. We could choose to cheaply provide lots of tiny but highly livable housing, which would solve a large portion (although not all) of our homeless problem, and also provide a leg up for others who need a place to sleep but not much else and would greatly benefit from the cost reduction. Alas.

There is a book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, covering these topics. But most people are unable to think systematically, which helps to explain the high economic returns to the relatively small number of people who can.

* Airbus announces an electric air taxi. Maybe we didn’t just get 140 characters, and we’re also going to get flying cars. Or maybe this is vaporware. Hard to say. I’d be surprised if the U.S. gets flying cars first, given our cultural sclerosis and a regulatory environment that’s an expression of complacency and sclerosis.

* A complete guide to fermenting hot sauce at home. And, also: “The Science of Lactic Acid Fermentation: Pickles, Kraut, Kimchi, and More.” Fermenting is fun!

* “GPT Pilot – what we learned in 6 months of working on a CodeGen pair programmer.”

* “Defending the status quo is not environmentalism,” which seems obvious to me. “Today, our biggest environmental challenges require us to build new things.”

* “Screen time robs average toddler of hearing 1,000 words spoken by adult a day, study finds.” I’d add some “supposedlies” in there, and I wonder if it’ll replicate.

* “In numbers: How the rise of electric vehicles is curbing oil demand.” If you have to drive, you should get an electric car next time you have to get a car.

* Apple releases new Macbook Airs. They’re probably the best general-purpose laptop out there right now, though Framework is also nice.

* “Why Japanese cities are such nice places to live.” The U.S. can and should do better.

* News sites can’t make money from ads any more. “The death of journalism” is a story that’s now more than two decades old, but it continues unfolding.

* Blue cities are embracing anti-crime measures. Crime sucks regardless of political orientation.

* The university monopoly must be broken.

* “Too Late for ‘Late Capitalism.’” The simple answer is that a lot of humanities academics are silly if not outright dumb. I should have come to this conclusion before I went to grad school in English, but, alas, mistakes were made.

* “The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments: The YIMBY movement isn’t just for liberals any more. Legislators from both sides of the political divide are working to add duplexes and apartments to mandatorily single-family neighborhoods.” Good.

* “Moon landing: US clinches first touchdown in 50 years.” News that is actually important. Sort of like the guy with Astro Mechanica who says he’s invented a jet engine that is “efficient at every speed. Because it’s efficient at every speed, we can use it in a new way: as the first stage of an orbital launch vehicle.” Wow. Though I have no ability to evaluate the technical plausibility.

* “Google Gemini and Revisiting James Damore.” If that doesn’t satiate your interest in Google matters, try “Google’s Culture of Fear,” although it has a lot of pointlessly incendiary framing. Still, the Google search monopoly is under more serious threat than it’s been in the company’s history, and that may inspire real change. Amusingly, I used Google search to try and find a video of Sergey Brin saying that he’s un-retired to come back to work on AI, and Google search didn’t easily find it—but it turned up a bunch of spammy YouTube videos.

* If this is true, it helps explain why I found the first Dune movie underwhelming: “Denis Villeneuve says ‘movies have been corrupted by television.'” Corrupted by? Villeneuve goes on: “Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today. Movies have been corrupted by television.”

When I watched the first Dune movie, I was like: “Who are these people? What are the stakes? Who cares?” I can answer from the books, but the movie felt oddly flat. Meanwhile, the director was thinking: “Ooooohhh pretty.” And it is very pretty. Also, the actor who plays Paul Muad’Dib doesn’t work as a warlord. He’d be a great Oscar Wilde, but Paul Atreides? Eh.

* Why Jalapeño Peppers Are Less Spicy Than Ever. About much more than Jalapeños. I read some of the articles about making fermented hot sauce and now I have a jar full of jalapeños fermenting on my counter.

* “A hymn to hot sauce.” This, combined with the article above, convinced me to buy some fermenting lids and give fermented chiles a go. What could go wrong, aside from dying?

* “Vaclav Smil and the Value of Doubt.” (NY’er, $) I think he underestimates the possibility of big changes.

* We could have had mRNA vaccines far earlier. Also, Bess wrote “mRNA vaccines: let’s be sick a whole lot less and maybe cure cancer,” which is characteristically excellent.

* “Open-Source Software Is Worth a Lot More Than You Pay for It” (bloomberg, $). The source paper is here and claims that “We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist.” Wow!

* China may dominate electric cars. The U.S.’s short-sightedness on this subject is amazing and depressing. Notably: “‘It’s a global game. It has been a global game,’ Le said. ‘Motherfuckers just haven’t been paying attention.'” And the wsj writes of “How China Is Churning Out EVs Faster Than Everyone Else.” ($) Without Tesla, American and European car companies would be ever further behind than they are.

* Can we still build big things? The answer is mostly “no,” and that’s bad.

* “Republicans can’t stop swallowing Russian propaganda: Obsessed with Hunter Biden and the Moscow Metro instead of solving problems.” This also seems bad but I don’t know how to induce a healthier epistemology. It seems that most people optimize for entertainment rather than what I’d consider effectiveness.

* What obsesses academia these days (NY’er, $), at least the administrative classes and certain academic departments. Academia is losing public support and yet many departments are devoted to internal virtue signaling spirals rather than knowledge production or dissemination, and this is the response. “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic” comes to mind. Way back when I was foolishly seeking an English PhD, I planned a dissertation about academic novels, many if not most of which were satires. Even then, the ability to satirize an absurd cultural reality was fading; by now, it’s almost impossible to satirize academia in fiction, because how can a novelist be more absurd than reality?

* “Fresh from the biotech pipeline: record-breaking FDA approvals.” But still too few, and too slowly.

* “Why small developers are getting squeezed out of the housing market.” On the importance of leverage, among other things.

* “Brooklyn’s new borough president doesn’t care about the ‘character’ of your neighborhood. That’s ‘not more important than putting people in homes.’” Good. Progress! NIMBYs have stifled human well-being for too long.

* “We’re entering a golden age of engineering biology,” and that is good. The golden age is probably too late to save my life from cancer, but it is prolonging my life versus where I’d have been a few years ago.

Continue reading →

* “The Taiwan Catastrophe: What America—and the World—Would Lose If China Took the Island?” Spoiler: it would be bad. But maybe China’s military isn’t up to taking Taiwan. There’s a lot of “maybe” out there.

* A climate tipping point for the Atlantic ocean.

* “Will Democrats Ever Embrace Charter Schools Again? The data shows that independently run public schools perform better than conventional ones, yet Biden has been conspicuously silent” (bloomberg, $). Weird that the party putatively in favor of helping the poor and disadvantaged has aligned against an important policy that will disproportionately help the poor and disadvantaged.

* “Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land?” They don’t? The argument is that he’s been unhinged for a decade or more, which is at least plausible, if one accepts the premise.

* “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies.” Odd to me, certainly, though “odd to me” may be the theme of the links in this pots. Many luxury beliefs of the luxury class seem odd to me.

* “Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation.”

* How Brian Potter writes posts for Construction Physics.

* “How Many Attack Submarines Does the U.S. Navy Need?” Short answer: a lot more than it has.

* Study links fermented foods with brain growth.

* “The Democrats’ Education Problem: It’s not too late to fix it.” Basically consistent with my views.

* “Why you, personally, should want a larger population.” To get there, we need to build a lot more housing.

* “How to Speedrun a New Drug Application.” Pity that the company described didn’t succeed.

* “Reactions to ‘Please be dying, but not too quickly’ and what it’s like for patients.”

* “You Don’t Hate Polyamory, You Hate People Who Write Books.” Notice: “Advice is disproportionately written by defective people. Healthy people perform naturally and effortlessly.” And many other interesting remarks about the types of people inclined in certain ways.

* “Humanity’s Legacy Might Be The Holes We Leave Behind.” We should dig more holes—tunnels, specifically—for subways. One tragedy is that we mostly stopped using “cut and cover” construction strategies, which are way cheaper than some deep boring strategies, particularly for stations. There’s too little interest right now in doing more with less.

* “Do Americans really only want sprawl?” Probably not, or NIMBYs wouldn’t have to pass laws mandating sprawl.

* Review of Framework’s impressive 16″ laptop. I think the reviewer underestimates the value of modularity.

* On Invitation to a Banquet, by Fuchsia Dunlop.

* “Unleashing Our Immune Response to Quash Cancer: An array of diverse and potent therapies to turbocharge our immune system.” Also, in the same vicinity: “The future of precision cancer therapy might be to try everything.” Highly relevant to me right now; hopefully less relevant to you, but a lot of people with cancer or around people with cancer are reading TSS now.

* “Why it’s impossible to agree on what’s allowed,” by Dan Luu.

* “The cost of Russia’s collapsing empire.” Russia is committing a murder-suicide: it’s likely destroying Ukraine, but it’s also destroying itself. Between the literal death on the battlefield and the displacement of millions of people to other, more stable and functional countries, both Ukraine and Russia face massive depopulation. Anyone smart has either gotten out of Russia or has been trying to get out of Russia for more than a century. That dynamic continues today. Who will be left? Hardly anyone.

* “As Much As You Ever Wanted To Know About 155mm Artillery Shell Production and More.” This is an article about complacency; notice: “[T]he DOD is attempting to plug the Ukraine-sized hole with shells from allied nations including Canada, South Korea, Finland, and Germany—places where it’s still possible to build new things.” Germany is a place that allows the building of new things? If we’re being outcompeted by Germany, that’s bad. Much of what Rob writes here applies to the FDA too:

What troubles me here, though, is that the US is pursuing that option [of having allies make weapons] because the domestic defense industrial base, inclusive of DOD and its contractors, is sclerotic. It treats time like it’s free. It does not respond quickly.

On Jan. 29 I wrote in The dead and dying at the gates of oncology clinical trials: “The FDA has created systemic problems, and it can also create systemic solutions. For example, the FDA doesn’t really account for the time-value of money,[3] which is especially important in a high-interest-rate environment.” The time-value of money is a basic finance/investment idea. If the federal government is incapable of incorporating it into analysis and plans, that speaks poorly of its ability to do just about anything.

* “China’s Shipyards Are Ready for a Protracted War. America’s Aren’t. While Chinese shipyards are thriving and primed to build at wartime rates, U.S. shipbuilding is in disarray” (wsj, $) The Navy problem is severe and, apparently, worsening.

* You’ve heard of lab grown meat, are you ready for rice-grown beef?” That’s cool. “After 9-11 days, they say the rice became a safe, usable ingredient that contained 8% more protein and 7% more fat than regular rice.” When I wore a blood-glucose monitor acquired through Levels Health, I was shocked by how much even brown rice spiked my blood glucose.

* “‘Accelerationism’ is an overdue corrective to years of doom and gloom in Silicon Valley.” Yes! Accelerationism is good.

* Against gerontocracy. We keep voting for gerontocracy, though—in some ways literally, in elections, and in other ways when e.g. corporate boards favor the elderly. Note:

In 1890, James Frazer – author of the landmark anthropological study of comparative religion, The Golden Bough – came to the conclusion that our ancient predecessors were in many respects wiser than us. They knew that gerontocracy was an age-old form of human organization, and they often embraced it, but they also put limits on rule by the old, especially rule by the faltering and senile, who were not only dispossessed of their power, but also often marked for death at an appointed time.

* Argument that Israel is winning in Gaza.

* “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted: Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively.” Have things changed that much? Since 2008, I’ve not noticed big changes, and most people don’t seem to read carefully for comprehension. But the people who do are the most interesting! I’ll also note that too few people in education seem to focus on reading, writing, and math skills.

* “Creating video from text: Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.” Incredible. I hope OpenAI builds the machine god fast.

“Love has won: a slapstick tale of intoxication, romance, and hot rot in a NYC ER” is Bess’s latest. It’s a suitable story for the almost-over Valentine’s Day, but it’s funny and great any day of the year.