Battery production still ripping

Bari Weiss flatters the ego of a very specific sort of self-important man with wildly over-inflated senses of their own intelligence -- judgmental, conservative half-wits who view themselves as rational intellectual giants. Their admiration for Weiss is one of the easiest ways to spot them.

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

45. Specifically, we've decoupled economic growth from fossil energy consumption. Coal demand has collapsed. Oil use is flat. Natural gas use is growing but < GDP, even as standards of living have gone up. That's happened because of higher efficiency and decarbonization.

Terrifying headline if you don’t realize they are sports teams.

*I blame the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs youtu.be/xiIKyTFCQik?...

Sincerely one of the funniest things the WSJ has ever written or done. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

OK. “Renaming the deck chairs on the Titanic” is a dynamite turn of phrase.

I read a really interesting paper a couple years ago discussing what it looks like to form collective memory about these kinds of fights. Essentially, people used to government responding to them will use government paths to achieve their goals. If they don't work, it can (permanently?) change their

Update: giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Casino capitalism

There must have been a rodent In that old top hat they found ‘Cause when they put it on his head He began to jump around

I have a theory about this. Regular people want tech to reduce our real-life burdens: cooking, errands, dishes, and definitely laundry. Rich tech bros already have "staff" to take care of all that for them, so they don't care. 1/

They used to "laugh and call him names." Now they're all dead

Michael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.

Oh wow, absolute power corrupted you absolutely? That’s so weird, I got absolute power last year and my subjects say I’ve only gotten wiser and more virtuous

We lost more than that his last year as president. Not that anyone members that part. All we talk about is how people were forced to wear masks and kids had to go to school via computer for a few months. And it was hard to get a haircut. The 1.3 million people who died are completely forgotten.

'Let it Snow' with all the positive lines removed

So I don't have a view on UK industrial policy, but I do on higher education. On the broader college-degree question: when we interact with complex systems, we often see that interventions work even when we don't know why. College works, even if you can't see the direct productivity connection.

4. BUT I think inasmuch as aesthetics are often politicized, typefaces OBVIOUSLY are. TNR is what MAGA has always used for their hats, and it has always coded as "everyman/amateur" as opposed to the Obama-era use of slick typefaces like Gotham ("CHANGE") to reflect their urban consultant vibe.

Consumption heterogeneity is central: even a uniform initial price increase produces sharply different inflation outcomes for poor and rich households, depending on the structure of spending across income groups. 7/16

One Laptop Per Child, 10 years later: "we find no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative effects on grade progression... computer access significantly improved students’ computer skills but not their cognitive skills" www.nber.org/papers/w34495

ever wondered about what ranking officers in the us civil war were like? good news. there's not that many types of them. here you go

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

My mother’s people were Hoosiers.

My dad died in August. He would have loved to have seen Indiana beat Ohio State to win the Big Ten championship and rank number one in the nation. In football. My god.

It turns out that Dollar General and Family Dollar routinely overcharge people—their advertised price tags are fictions. These are the only stores in many small towns. Scam culture. It's all scam culture. On this matter, Democrats should run on audits and serious fines for overcharging.

Chinese researchers build 31.71%-efficient perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell based on new interfacial engineering www.pv-magazine.com/2025/12/05/c...

Slowly becoming clear to me that there may just come a time that I'm far better off financially than my peers, not because I have some great paying job or inherited wealth, but because I never fucking gamble and so I just... keep what I have!

Der Spiegel: Commander in Sleep

As a Hoosier and Indianapolis resident, I would confidently say that being pulled into a toxic parallel dimension ruled by a misanthropic tyrant who despises all of humanity would not register as vastly different to most Hoosiers.

And I don't know if the answer is: everyone is too traumatized to do work and we need to reinvent society. Or if it's more like: generations are losing their cognitive abilities and willpower due to destructive technologies. Or: we all have post-viral brain damage. Or: all of the above.

If your business model doesn’t work without breaking the law, you’re not in business. You’re in organized crime.

They can’t make computers as intelligent as humans, but they can make humans as unthinking as computers.

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

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El Niño and La Niña are little children of our former calm climate. What is coming next is El hombre and La mujer The big grownup weather is about to hit.

"Excavate and enforce": the motto for Mamdani's transition reminds us that much of his program is a return to things New Yorkers have known and liked for decades

It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now and what he’s doing at this moment. He just ran all his homework through ChatGPT. He just read that article about vaccines and autism at the CDC website. He just watched an Instagram video about the moon landing hoax.

Good morning. I've got a banger new post out today that develops a new method for placing voters on the left-right ideological spectrum, and adds a new, "non-ideological"/affordability axis to usual way we chart & think about US voters (esp swing voters). www.gelliottmorris.com/p/not-just-l...

I think I probably have ADHD, I've been encouraged by professionals to do all the research I can, and now I've learned all sorts of things that are really interesting and none of them are about ADHD

Editors have a really hard job, and the good ones can make something unreadable readable, and the great ones can make something unreadable into something good. But they're basically invisible, until someone tries to write without one.

The same brain areas that help us map physical space help us chart social connections, and the best relationship cartographers have most clout

amazing q&a with paul krugman

15 years ago @jevinwest.bsky.social and I talked about how we needed a data scientists’ code of ethics like the Hippocratic oath. We still do.

i can’t talk about sports gambling anymore without sounding like a crank but i do believe legalized sports gambling is like 15-20% responsible for our current dystopia

i think online gambling is a cancer that is spreading throughout our society, it was a horrible mistake to de-regulate it, and we desperately need to crack down on it again