Logging out for a few days. Happy holidays! Merry Christmas! Etc

Correct take on Christmas

Counterpoint: we will do whatever I damn well please with Christmas and if we want it to be non-religious it's gonna be

“A politician must earn my vote” is really the ultimate triumph of consumerism. No conception that voting is a collective power. Just an empty belief that a vote is a type of currency that one uses to purchase a politician.

This is a pretty amazing infographic! I just wish it could be configured to have a single absolute scale for all the countries. (I know some charts would be much taller than others)

It's funny how us parochial Americans generally seem to perceive that the EV revolution is stalling or reversing when in fact it's accelerating rapidly worldwide. 25% of cars sold globally in 2025 were EVs! It's mostly just the US that's being left behind

This NYT piece on the Trump Admin finally waking up to the critical importance of batteries & their supply chains is both maddening and vindicating. Freezing DOE grants, the War on EVs, tariffs, and OBBBA have utterly wrecked our battery supply chain efforts. 🔌💡🔌🚗 www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Bill Clinton playing the long game and spending 60 years being a dirtbag in order to bring down Trump in the end

Another new a16z idea: giving letters of medical necessity to anybody so they can commit tax fraud Between funding social media bot farms, crypto, and prediction markets, this company represents the new era where tech is mostly just for fraud

What a nightmare. If we're concerned about deeply affordable housing in Portland it sure seems like we should be focused on making sure our existing stock remains habitable right now!

In Santa Monica, the FPPC has disqualified pro-housing Councilmember Jesse Zwick from all future housing votes. They said that because he works for a housing non-profit, he’s “conflicted” and must recuse. Pretty absurd. The NIMBY deep state strikes again. www.smdp.com/state-regula...

Really don't think it matters if that letter is "real" or not. I'd say it likely is

It's more than a few! And this year for the first time new zero emissions electricity generation was larger than the increase in global electricity demand, so for the moment it looks like we're starting to win. And (thankfully) data centers are not nearly as much demand as the hype would suggest.

Now every year new renewable generation capacity is a few percent of *total primary* energy consumption, and a unit of electricity can displace 2-4 units of primary thermal energy. It's a tangled race between energy demand growth on one side, and electrification + deployment on the other.

My guess is that GOP partisans can clearly see that things are going awry and are choosing to assign blame for this on Republican congressional wreckers rather than deal with the emotionally difficult step of reckoning with their feelings for Trump

GOP voter support for Trump staying fairly strong while their approval of the GOP Congress falls off a cliff seems fairly notable and perhaps underreported

yeah the cross-subsidy model of IZ turns out--as goddamn bertaud pointed out very clearly--to depend on market rents inflated by artificial scarcity

Another open-weights model creeping ever closer to the frontier models from the AI majors. While it's very tough to get hardware that can run these, z.ai is selling it as a service for maybe 10% as much as anthropic charges. Hard to see where the trillions of industry profit are going to come from!

portland’s residential infill project was a huge step towards ending exclusionary zoning but middle housing improvements are moving so fast in other cities that we’re starting to look conservative in comparison

Fun fact: this screensaver funded moveon.org

Portland's affordable housing market is entering a death spiral. The reasons are complicated but part of it is that "housing first" doesn't mean "housing only" and people with untreated addiction and behavioral disorders can make very difficult neighbors and impossible tenants

Yes, CECOT is a concentration camp in the guise of a prison. The Venezuelans were the first people to *ever* be released from CECOT since Bukele opened the prison in January 2023. Seriously. The first.

There's like one model year of Toyotas that have these horrific roughly 30hz PWM headlight dimmers that look like strobe lights to me

This game is the Dark Souls of 1983

Vandalism

Hot take: Star Trek 5 is not a good film but it is the most thematically consistent with the original series. A dude gives everyone in the crew too much emotion. Captain Kirk seeks and finds God then kills him with photon torpedoes. These could clearly be TOS episodes

Hey it's Mr. Beast! We've stranded a group of British schoolboys on an island and we're going to see how long it takes for them to DESCEND INTO SAVAGERY

Aged great

This less than half-assed redaction of the Epstein files sure seems like malicious compliance to me

I think Trump is clearly outrunning the system's tolerance for authoritarian consolidation but also the system's tolerance for authoritarian consolidation is worryingly high

The insane cost and complexity of these systems related in this 1989 story has been largely obviated by (1) modern insulation pretty comparable to the PEX water piping that may be in your home (2) switched-mode voltage converters pretty comparable to the USB power brick for your MacBook

Energy/electricity knowers: there's a lot of talk of "reconductoring" existing transmission times with new cables that can transmit more power. But the new ones always seem to also be air-insulated, which limits voltage to tower size. Any talk of hanging *insulated* cables on existing towers?

One underreported technological driver of the clean energy revolution is improvements in electric insulation. Used to be, you needed actively cooled and pumped dielectric oil sheathing for HVAC. Now, cheap XLPE-insulated cables can carry over 500kV HVDC

BlueSky seems to think that this was a request for celebration and the Streisand effect is it backfiring. Someone risked their job to post this because they want you to know.

If LLMs were pitched for only what they're genuinely and undeniably very good at–helpful digital assistants for experienced programmers–they'd still look like an economically transformative invention. But the coked-out overleveraged tech dudes running things want addictive digital friends or AGI

Ghost of future me: "some day your post about the failure of the press to hold America's fascist regime accountable will be disseminated to tens of thousands of people by that funny actor from Office Space" 1999 me: "sure. Let's get you to bed, grandpa"

Bari Weiss going from purported brave defender of free speech and open debate to chief censor of reporting about a federal concentration camp is so grimly hilarious

The NY TWU turned opposed congestion pricing as well. Really seems like they're laser-focused on extracting the rents they can from a static or declining system rather than participating in a positive-sum program to expand transit service to more New Yorkers

Shaedon Sharpe.

A n'hood assoc. colleague remarked that "getting more housing downtown will be impossible" as the downtown is "already very built up." I hold a different impression of my community, so I took to Google MyMaps to graphically illustrate just how much land in downtown on which there is left to build.

I do believe the USA is redeemable and I absolutely don’t think we’re doomed - but nothing condemns our current system and our culture more than the fact we have *chosen* to elevate the nation’s most genuinely disgusting and worthless people to positions of supreme power

just realized only now that "graphite" means "writing rock"

there is a perfect hyperdimensional jewel made of every word a human being has ever written, and all the correspondences between those words. people mostly use it to get insane household repair tips or jerk off. i guess it basically runs the government now

My knowledge of the NBA has completely lapsed in the past few years. Of the players I could name a whole lot are retired or are close, besides some superstars hanging on. I can identify very few of the players at their peaks right now. Whole lot of turnover

This is to say: had this merger happened a few years ago, the capacity pressure that required bulldozing housing in the first place would not have existed. It's incredible what re-configuring institutional incentives can do to the material world.

If you compare Douthat and Bouie's work it's pretty clear which one would remain a NYT columnist under some sort of hypothetical pure meritocracy

It is totally possible for data to be wrong. You cannot make definitive conclusions about it’s relative wrongness from your personal experiences when the universe the data is attempting to represent is “an economy composed of 340mn people”. You are not a serious person if you think you can.

Pretty hard for me to take any political program seriously that doesn't start with this indisputably correct premise