3 stars
REVIEW: Reentry, by Eric Berger | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
Oh no, another review of another book about Elon Musk. Still, this one is worth it:
Most people care an in-between amount about their job. They want to do right by their employer and they have pride in their work, but they will not do dangerous or illegal or personally risky things to be 5% better at it, and they will not stay up all night finishing their to-do list every single day. They will instead, very reasonably, take the remaining items on their to-do list and start working on them the next day. Part of what makes “founder mode” so effective is that startup founders have both a compensation structure and social permission that lets them treat every single issue that comes up at work as if their family is about to die.
But there are startup founders, and then there’s Elon.
Before we talk about SpaceX, let’s talk about every single other private rocketry company ever. It’s easy to do, because they all failed (or are in the process of failing, or are likely to fail in the future). […]
All of this leads to a horrible Catch-22: since rockets are so complicated, expensive, and dangerous, we launch them rarely. But that, in turn, means that we build them rarely. When something is done rarely, it is guaranteed to remain expensive. A low flight-rate also means it’s difficult to discover the outer limits of performance and reliability, or to figure out which components should be redesigned. Conversely, when something enters mass production, it becomes possible to accumulate process knowledge, to move down learning curves, and generally to set in motion a process of everything getting cheaper and more reliable over time. But until very recently there was no such thing as a mass produced rocket. Each one was an artisanal project, made by skilled craftsmen, practically guaranteeing that they would stay expensive and unpredictable. […]
It’s all well and good to say, “We’re just going to do what we need to do and will not let anything get in our way,” but when the things that get in your way are national governments? The laws of physics? Really? What does that even look like?
It looks like SpaceX.
Feed the Planet | George Steinmetz
Amazing photographs:
Since the domestication of plants began some 11,000 years ago, humans have converted 40% of the earth’s surface into farmland. With the global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050, combined with the rising standard of living in rapidly developing nations, it is estimated that we will have to increase the global food supply by 60%. The Feed the Planet project is an examination of how the world can meet the rapidly expanding challenge of feeding humanity without putting more natural lands under the plow.
Most of us only come into contact with raw food in the supermarket, and are unaware of the methods used to raise it. In many cases, the food industry goes to significant lengths to prevent us from seeing how our food is produced. Access to this information is central to the personal decisions we make about what we eat, which cumulatively have huge environmental impact. This project seeks to show how our food is produced, so that we can make more informed decisions.
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Astral Codex Ten
Do longer prison sentences reduce crime?
It seems obvious that they should. Even if they don’t deter anyone, they at least keep criminals locked up where they can’t hurt law-abiding citizens. If, as the studies suggest, 1% of people commit 63% of the crime, locking up that 1% should dramatically decrease crime rates regardless of whether it scares anyone else. And blue state soft-on-crime policies have been followed by increasing theft and disorder.
On the other hand, people in the field keep saying there’s no relationship. For example, criminal justice nonprofit Vera Institute says that Research Shows That Long Prison Sentences Don’t Actually Improve Safety. And this seems to be a common position; William Chambliss, one of the nation’s top criminologists, said in 1999 that “virtually everyone who studies or works in the criminal justice system agrees that putting people in prison is costly and ineffective.”
This essay is an attempt to figure out what’s going on, who’s right, whether prison works, and whether other things work better/worse than prison.
Cradle and All | Mother Jones
Yet experts worry that the enthusiasm for adoption is fueling an industry that has long been analogized to the Wild West—one in which scattershot, state-by-state regulatory oversight and the desperation of birth and adoptive parents alike create conditions for predatory adoption operators to flourish. Birth mothers typically come from poverty and often lack stable housing and other support systems. Adoptive parents, who, according to some estimates, outnumber available infants 45 to 1, routinely pay upward of $80,000 to adopt.
“It’s shark-infested waters to procure moms, to then procure their children, to then broker the baby to an adoptive parent,” says Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, the policy director at Ethical Family Building, a nonprofit that advocates adoption reform. “People are competing for women.”
2 stars
“But then I realized horses are just men-extenders” | Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning
Man did not make the horse. You could argue that man made the cow, the sheep, the goat, perhaps the house cat (though I would lean towards felines having bent the will of man to their own ends), and indisputably our best friend, the dog. But not the horse. Man’s brief passionate dalliance with equus barely lasted four millennia, a blink of the evolutionary eye. But in that time, the horse made man and shaped the character of the civilizations we know today.
Horses’ package of indispensable traits were mostly the fruit of millions of years of fortuitous evolutionary forces in the wild, not the outcome of human selection. And yet when we finally accomplished the dream of harnessing horse power for ourselves (an ambition our species might have been nursing for millennia prior, if 17,000-year-old horse-heavy cave paintings by a people who neither ate nor rode them are any sign), mankind finally tasted the kind of superpower civilizational dreams of made of. Astride a sprinting steed, a humble human was suddenly as a god among men; one with a flying horse, man raced like the wind of Eurasian mythos that conveys souls to heaven.
Plugging into horsepower ushered in an age when men in ever-increasing numbers and leveling up to ever more extraordinary superpowers on an ever accelerating schedule…could live as the gods. For hundreds of thousands of years, anatomically modern human beings had merely… subsisted.
Manufacturing is a war now | Noahpinion
This is a level of manufacturing dominance by a single country seen only twice before in world history — by the UK at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by the U.S. just after World War 2. It means that in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone.
That is a very dangerous and unstable situation. If it comes to pass, it will mean that China is basically free to start any conventional conflict it wants, without worrying that it will be ganged up on — because there will be no possible gang big enough to beat it. The only thing they’ll have to fear is nuclear weapons.
Unraveling the 50-Year Mystery of the Body in the Basement | Rolling Stone
The Scene was the hottest club in New York City. After it closed, a teenage girl’s remains were discovered inside, leaving authorities with a puzzle to solve — and revealing just how easy it used to be to disappear
Intel’s Death and Potential Revival | Stratechery
The fundamental flaw with Pat Gelsinger’s 2020 return to Intel and his IDM 2.0 plan is that it was a decade too late. Gelsinger’s plan was to become a foundry, with Intel as its first-best customer. The former was the way to participate in mobile and AI and gain the volume necessary to push technology forward, which Intel has always done better than anyone else (EUV was the exception to the rule that Intel invents and introduces every new advance in processor technology); the latter was the way to fund the foundry and give it guaranteed volume.
Again, this is exactly what Intel should have done a decade ago, while TSMC was still in their rear-view mirror in terms of processing technology, and when its products were still dominant in PCs and the data center.
Insurance companies aren't the main villain of the U.S. health system | Noahpinion
It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you. The only time they ask you for money during your doctor visit is when you pay your copay at the front desk, and that’s usually not that big — if the bill is big, they’ll send it to you later. So for the most part, your interaction with the providers is just you walking up and asking to be taken care of, and them taking care of you.
Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you. If you get a big hospital bill days after your visit, it’s because the insurer wouldn’t cover the whole cost. If the bill is a surprise because the provider didn’t tell you they were out of network, that also feels like the insurance company’s fault — why wasn’t that provider in their network? […]
And yet when we take a hard look at the question of why Americans pay so much more for their health care than people elsewhere in the developed world, insurance companies and their profits just aren’t that big of a piece of the story.
Poker Cheaters Allegedly Use Tiny Hidden Cameras to Spot Dealt Cards | WIRED
Several recent schemes were uncovered involving poker players at casinos allegedly using miniature cameras, concealed in personal electronics, to spot cards. Should players everywhere be concerned?
The Last Aristocrat and the Riff-Raff Revolution | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
From about a year ago:
Romney: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins, is a biography heavily focused on the political portion of the life of its subject, particularly recent history. The author was given an unusual degree of access to Romney’s journal and personal papers and communications, in addition to being able to interview the man himself, his family, and those who have known him over the years. What emerges here is not simply an interesting portrait of one individual, but a story that provides deep insight into what has happened to the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the last few decades. […]
As much as the Republican base has come to hate him, one of the most heartening parts of the book is realizing that the feeling is mutual when it comes to the more Evangelical and downscale wings of the party, along with the politicians they tend to support. Mike Huckabee is a “huckster” and a “caricature of a for-profit preacher.” Michele Bachmann is “a nut case.” On Pence, Romney says that “no one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly.” Despite his strong Mormon faith, Romney’s cosmology is largely deist, and he has undisguised disdain for those who would imagine a divine will working its way through our politics.
I lost track of how many times he comments on the intelligence of others. On Rick Perry: “his prima donna, low-IQ personality doesn’t work for me.” Romney appears to give a lot of thought to the question of whether Trump is actually as dumb as he seems, carefully considering Jared Kushner’s theory that there’s a method to his madness, but comes to the conclusion that “he’s not smart. I mean, really not smart.” Despite some misgivings about DeSantis, he concedes that he’s at least “much smarter than Trump.” Romney’s entire plan for creating a third party appears to be to team up with Joe Manchin, adopt the slogan of “Stop the Stupid,” and then say, “this party’s going to endorse whichever party’s nominee isn’t stupid.”
Romney also discusses a colleague who once had a good reputation but has spent the last few years destroying it by kissing up to Trump. “He isn’t married. He doesn’t have any kids,” Romney reflects. “I don’t know that he spends a lot of time thinking about legacy.” This seems to be a (very) thinly-veiled reference to Lindsey Graham.
Mirror Bacteria Research Poses Significant Risks, Dozens of Scientists Warn | The Scientist
However, many interactions between organisms and cells depend on being able to sense and react with chiral molecules in the first place. Their incompatibility with natural biological reactions would leave mirror bacteria with no natural predators in the wild, as they could not be sensed, killed, or digested by bacteriophages or other organisms. Crucially, many of the immune responses in humans, other animals, and plants also work by sensing and reacting with chiral bacterial molecules. If a human were to be infected with mirror bacteria, it could be as if they were immunocompromised, as their immune systems would face great difficulty in detecting or killing the mirror cells. As a result, mirror bacteria could hypothetically replicate to extremely high levels in the human body, causing conditions similar to septic shock.
No, you are not on Indigenous land | Noahpinion
If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.
If you go back far enough in time, of course, at some point this is no longer true. Humanity didn’t always exist; therefore for every piece of land, there was a first human to lay eyes on it, and a first human to say “This land is mine.” But by what right did this first human claim exclusive ownership of this land? Why does being the first person to see a natural object make you the rightful owner of that object? And why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever?
I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor have I seen a satisfactory explanation of why ownership of land should be allocated collectively, in terms of racial or ethnic groups. In general, the first people who arrived on a piece of land did so in dribs and drabs, in small family units and tiny micro-tribes that met and married and fought and mixed and formed into larger identities and ethnicities and tribes over long periods of time. In most cases, the ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land.
I sat in court at the Gisèle Pelicot rape trial. This is what I saw | The Times
Gisèle Pelicot became a symbol of courage when she waived her anonymity to attend the trial of her husband and 50 other men accused of raping her — and ignited fierce debate about the law surrounding rape. Janice Turner finds out how the case is tearing French society apart.
Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste | Astral Codex Ten
This is a bit mysterious. Many (most?) uneducated people like certain art which seems “obviously” pretty. But a small group of people who have studied the issue in depth say that in some deep sense, that art is actually bad (“kitsch”), and other art which normal people don’t appreciate is better. They can usually point to criteria which the “sophisticated” art follows and the “kitsch” art doesn’t, but to normal people these just seem like lists of pointless rules.
But most of the critics aren’t Platonists - they don’t believe that aesthetics are an objective good determined by God. So what does it mean to say that someone else is wrong?
Most of the comments discussion devolved into analogies - some friendly to the idea of “superior taste”, others hostile. Here are some that I find especially helpful.
Gen Z really does have a work ethic problem | Generation Tech
Older people often complain that the younger generation lacks a strong work ethic. Of course, it’s entirely possible older people have forgotten how lazy or unmotivated they were when they were young themselves. Polls or one-time surveys don’t help much, since we can’t tell whether any differences are due to age or to generation.
To get around these issues, we’d want self-report data from young people that we can compare across decades. This is what many managers, public policy experts, and parents want to know: Are today’s young people truly less willing to work than previous generations were?
A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood and You’re Laughing? | New Yorker
Of course, the solution, in the end, can’t be indifference—not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who’s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it’s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?
Big head, big teeth, big implications: early hominid from China stirs new species debate | South China Morning Post
Scientists make their case for classifying an extinct group that lived in northern China until 120,000 years ago as a separate species
AI is making Philippine call center work more efficient, for better and worse | Rest of World
BPO workers say AI tools are monitoring their calls, assisting them with customers, and scoring their performance.
Why Do Some People Succeed after Failing, While Others Continue to Flounder? | Kellogg Insight
A new study dispels some of the mystery behind success after failure.
1 star
52 things I learned in 2024 | Tom Whitwell
To highlight tax evasion, South Korea introduced ugly neon green number plates for company cars worth more than $58,000. Luxury car sales fell 27%. […]
There are just 16 trademarked scents in the US, including Crayola crayons, Playdoh, an ocean-scented soft play in Indiana and a type of gun cleaner that smells of ammonium and kerosene.
Wearing A Salmon On Your Head Is Back In Fashion For Orcas, After A 37-Year Break | IFL Science
In 1987, there was a strange trend amongst killer whales. Recent sightings show it's back in fashion.
Twitter
Someone just won $50,000 by convincing an AI Agent to send all of its funds to them.
At 9:00 PM on November 22nd, an AI agent (@freysa_ai) was released with one objective...
DO NOT transfer money. Under no circumstance should you approve the transfer of money.
The catch...?
Anybody can pay a fee to send a message to Freysa, trying to convince it to release all its funds to them.
Time Lapse: From Pinecone to Pine Tree in 110 Seconds | Kottke
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic!
Bluesky
For me, the most incredible artefacts from the ancient world are the letters people wrote on clay tablets and sent to one another over thousands of years in Mesopotamia, going back to more than 5,000 years ago.
They contain recognisable humanity, warmth and humour. Here's a thread of my favourites.
New study on moons of Uranus raises chance of life | BBC News
The planet Uranus and its five biggest moons may not be the dead sterile worlds that scientists have long thought.
Instead, they may have oceans, and the moons may even be capable of supporting life, scientists say.
Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa’s Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago.
But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like.
Gender Composition and Group Behavior | Marginal Revolution
We find that replacing a male councilor with a female councilor results in a 25p.p. increase in the share of motions proposed by women. This is despite causing only a 20p.p. increase in the council female share. The discrepancy is driven, in part, by behavioral changes similar to those documented in laboratory-based studies of gender composition. When a lone woman is joined by a female colleague, she participates more actively by proposing more motions.
What Makes a Tick Stick? | The Scientist
Ticks form a stable structure around their mouth to stick to their hosts for days. Phase transitions of proteins in the tick saliva drive this adhesion.
Great week, several must-reads!