Category: Worth Your Time

1. Watch Seinfeld, in 1992, on the sociopathy of social media.
2. “Secrecy and democracy are antithetical” but there’s a lot of dark money flowing around, made possible by government policies (the US is a big perpetrator).
3. “The world isn’t heading toward a new Cold War – it’s closer to the grinding world order collapse of the 1930s.” Agreed.
4. Want less crime? Turn DOWN the streetlights.
5. Oh great. Chatbots can implant fake memories.
6. Listen to How PETA Made Radical Ideas Mainstream
7. Flashback to 2013: How Scammers Steal Millions Through Carbon Markets
8. Flashback to 2011: How to survive a zombie apocalypse… or natural disaster
9. Nouveau riche bling (2008): The less money your peer group has, the more bling you buy—and vice-versa.
10. Listen: The Problems of Boys and Men in Today’s America

1. The stories behind people’s tattoos.
2. House prices will drop as climate risk gets priced in (most obviously, “this neighborhood won’t be here”)
3. Watch this vlog, by a carpenter who was attacked and how he is recovering, mentally and physically. Key insight: “for the one person who attacked me, 10,000 others have not… and many have stopped to help. We are good people, most of the time.”
4. The resurgence in restaurant diversity that I predicted is taking place (can’t find the link, but I said that new ideas would grow where older restaurants went broke during COVID), as pop-ups turn into full time locations (in the US). Watch.
5. Listen to the interesting history of “gaslighting”
6. Will pro-life evangelicals abandon El Cheeto, now that he’s pro-choice? Probably not, sadly.
7. Impatient people have no problem with facial recognition, so businesses are making it harder to avoid it.
8. A coffee geek shows an influencer how to really do the scientific method. Bravo James!
9. The Economist has a good overview of how climate chaos is making water dirtier, in shortage or surplus. They did not do a good job of explaining private vs social water, nor of how “bad water” will reduce our quality of life, but it’s a start.
10. Well, this sucks: “In 2010 the Nuffield Foundation, a think-tank, decided to test whether Britain was really so bad at offering educational breadth by comparing it with 24 other countries, mostly drawn from the oecd, a rich-country club. In England fewer than one in five students studied maths after 16. In 18 of the countries more than half did; in eight, everyone did. Government data suggest that almost half of the working-age population in Britain have the numeracy skills of a primary school child.”

1. Price fixing (and the AI-assisted variety) is getting worse. Profits up, customers screwed.
2. People are already dying from extreme heat.
3. Yes, it pays to “buy the dip”
4. Listen to this discussion on the loss of trust in UK politicians.
5. Watch this nice overview of the Thames flood barrier
6. It’s happening! A podcast on the need (and failure) to adapt to climate chaos.
7. The strange (mostly imaginary?) connections between “settler colonialism” and everything that Isreal does.

1. People are not having kids more because of a cultural shift than affordability (demand shifting in rather than sliding up and down).
2. Texas has more renewables than California because TX allows markets to work.
3. Listen to this discussion on the downsides of globalization
4. Higher inheritance taxes are better for society and equality. Listen.
5. The collapse of AMOC (the current that keeps northern Europe warm in winter) is now more than likely before 2050. Sharpen your ice skates!
6. Keanu Reeves: “The Matrix changed my life… and that of many others.” Watch.
7. America has so many laws that nobody can count the ways you can end up in jail.
8. Vienna’s “social” housing is a gift to the middle class, not the poor. Related: Why rent control doesn’t work podcast.
9. More schools are banning phones. Good.
10. An air-conditioner’s “money saving mode” is really “not-as-cool mode”

H/T to PB

1. The mathematics driving faster swimming
2. We need to follow Dr Ruth’s sex advice rather than lose ourselves in woke mumbo jumbo.
3. Listen to this warning of how dependence on AIs can lead us to disaster.
4. Way too deep for an article on sports: Aside from tax collectors, meter maids, and politicians, umpires and referees might be the most disliked people in public life. It’s a wonder anyone signs up for the job. We all say that we believe in fairness, that few things matter more, and yet we abuse and vilify the people who enforce it. That’s because we’re liars. We don’t want to believe that the world is a fair place; we want to believe that it’s rigged against us, because then we don’t have to feel responsible for our own failures.
5. What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street
6. Trees are good for reducing urban heat but don’t forget shade!
7. Poor Black Kids Are Doing Better. Poor White Kids Are Doing Worse [in the US]… due to inequality. I am pretty sure that the rich will deflect this by encouraging racism… as they did in the 17th century. Read more on class, race and the chances of outgrowing poverty
8. Lithium batteries are feeding the problem of throw-away-electronics.
9. Wanna break a cozy cartel? How about the Italian beach umbrella mafia?
10. Use taxes to fix overtourism (start with €20/night for Amsterdam). I wrote about this 20 years ago!

1. Listen to this nice explanation of the science of sleep
2. Power outages in Houston (and Texas) mean that people will die more often in extreme temperatures when their HVAC shuts off.
3. Food shortages will make grocery shopping more expensive and less fun (as I wrote here).
4. Slava Ukraini! The Ukranians are not getting the weapons that NATO can offer, so they are using prop-driven training planes to shoot down drones with a shotgun (!)
5. I told you so (and I was not alone): Rental housing supply plunges while rents for new contracts soar… as Dutch government rent controls kick in.
6. You gotta admit that the photos of “defiant bleeding Trump” are kinda classic, in terms of American memes.
7. Dr Ruth and Richard Simmons, two “weirdos” from the 80s, have died. We need more like them.
8. Communal tables are a good way to meet (and trust) strangers.
9. Listen to this really good history of the Los Angeles “river”
10. Also in LA, an experiment in school choice (from among various public schools in the same area) leads to better academic outcomes for students. Who would have thought that competition would deliver value? /s

1. Read about the most dramatic art scam of the twentieth century
2. Listen to the fascinating details of the Salman Rushdie’s blasphemy, and how it divided real from phoney “liberals” and “conservatives.”
3. Listen to Jonathan Haidt argue (convincingly) for regulating social media for under 16s.
4. Tally-Ho is going to sea! Watch.
5. Fuck this: 36 percent [of young liberal academics] approve using violence, 57 percent approve blocking entry, and 77 percent think it’s okay to shout down some speakers.
6. Doctors have a hard time with young people dying of cancer, the rate of which is increasing (!). Read more.
7. A nice discussion of 20 years of blogging at Marginal Revolution.
8. Listen to Kevin Kelly explain his important life lessons
9. Time to plant? “Globally, annual food inflation rates could rise by up to 3.2 percentage points per year within the next decade or so as a result of higher temperatures” due to climate change.
10. More danger means more push alerts, but will people stop paying attention as they become more common? Read more.

1. Read this update on cyberwar between the US and China, which is “cold” but could easily go “hot.”
2. Are American teens exporting their angst to other English-speaking teens? Read more.
3. Read: No amount of adaptation to climate change can fix Miami’s water problems. Related: In the US each year, heat kills more people overall than do tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods combined—and heat deaths have been increasing. Read more about measuring heat (wet bulb, etc.)
4. Read: Brits are “done” with Brexit but Brexit is not done with them.
5. Read how “divestment activists” harm the arts without making any progress towards their goals: “This smells like activism aimed less at global warming than the warm glow of moral smugness.”
6. Canadian pensions made excellent returns on real estate investments, but now they are not. Read more.
7. Read: (US) Federal workforce-training programs prepare people for dead-end jobs that no one wants.
8. Listen to Professor Dunbar discuss the “natural scales” of our relationship networks.
9. David Brooks writes an excellent counter-point to the widely held belief that “only the young innovate.” Turns out that older folks have a few of their own tricks, relying on diversity, curiosity and wisdom.
10. I agree: LLMs (AIs) now write lots of science. Good.

1. Happy solstice!
2. Read how expats experience discrimination in NL (familiar to me).
3. “Smoke from California wildfires prematurely killed more than 50,000 people from 2008 to 2018.” …and it will get worse. Read more. Related: Outdoor exercise is getting more dangerous.
4. Read the constitutional case against exclusionary zoning.
5. Read: The space commons are filling up, and one crash could lead to a cascade in which ALL satellites are blown to pieces.
6. Read about the many (conflicting) ways Americans see immigration.
7. Read: How to give and take criticism.
8. Listen to this backgrounder on Bergheim (Berlin)
9. Watch John Oliver explain the suffocating impacts of corn subsidies
10. Read: Thames Water, loaded up on debt to pay investors dividends while failing to upgrade London’s Victorian-era sewers (and now Thames is bankrupt).

1. Listen to this podcast if you think that maybe (just maybe!) whales might have a point in seeking revenge against humans.
2. I’m impressed by this use of AI to help a Japanese mayor speak fluent English. It’s nice to understand more about local politics.
3. Listen to this critique of America’s crony capitalism, and the need (I agree!) for more worker (counter-veiling) power.
4. Well shit. US Supreme Court justices are picking the “facts” they want to support their political beliefs? What could go wrong?
5. Listen to this clear explanation of how the US constitution is supposed to work (e.g., the Electoral College is a feature, not a bug).
6. Read an update on trying to slow glaciers from sliding into the oceans, which was a big plot point in the 2020 Clif-Fi Ministry for the Future.
7. Read this VERY LONG but very interesting article on Aridzona’s water issues… and very complex politics. A real masterpiece of journalism. It’s full of zingers like these:
   

   At certain moments in the Valley, and this was one, ingenuity took the sound and shape of an elaborate defense against the truth… When Kari Lake ran for governor in 2022, everyone knew her position on transgenderism and no one knew her position on water, because she barely had one. The subject didn’t turn out voters or decide elections; it was too boring and complicated to excite extremists.