Using scientific terminology in colloquial speech is weird and creepy in most contexts. Calling kids “juveniles” and women “females” carries certain connotations, most of them bad.

Yeah it’s a somewhat standard reporting structure, of an intro paragraph about the stat, 4 paragraphs about a specific person’s journey from unemployed college grad living with parents and mowing lawns for extra cash to becoming a CFO in the span of 15 years, and then a longer description of what the stats show, then placement of those stats in context comparing to Gen X and Boomers, and important caveats in what the stats actually mean (unclear whether this makes millennials better off when they’re expected to face higher lifetime costs on housing and healthcare). Then it dives back into the anecdotes, including how most rich millennials perceive the fragility of their own financial position.

Here’s an archive.is link:
https://archive.is/Gr6qG

I’ve read the article. It goes into detail in the stats across the entire generation. It talks about the big rise in both median and average household wealth for millennials between 2019 and 2022. It also acknowledges that the gap between 20th percentile and 80th percentile for millennials has grown to the largest in history for any generation.

It’s the rise in house prices and the stock market. For millennials who already owned that stuff before the pandemic, and in a position to take advantage of the huge salary gains from the great resignation, the last 5 years have been a financial boon.

I think this Luigi dude shouldn’t have been charged with terrorism under New York law, but I can also recognize that Dylann Roof also shouldn’t have been charged with terrorism under New York law for killing people in South Carolina.

Roof was literally sentenced to the death penalty for federal hate crime killings, so I’m not sure there was more the prosecutors should have done. And I’m categorically against the death penalty, even for people like Roof, but this is a terrible example of a double standard.

I’m more than willing to buy products elsewhere, but it’s so easy to default to Amazon.

One of the practices that the FTC sued Amazon over was their requirement that sellers list their lowest prices on Amazon and outsource fulfillment (and give up a huge cut) to Amazon in order to qualify for Prime and good search results.

The result is that even though most sellers can afford to sell on their own store and keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue, they’re not allowed to actually undercut Amazon’s prices. And so Amazon has shielded itself from price competition, despite engaging in pretty expensive practices (free 2 day shipping for most items and places, free 1-day or even same day shipping for some items in some places). And they did it with contracts instead of actually competing.

Hiroshima’s bomb was Little Boy, which contained 64 kg of uranium, which at 19.1 g/cm^3 would be about 3.3 liters, significantly larger than a cricket ball.

But Nagasaki’s Fat Man used about 6.2 kg of plutonium, which has roughly the same density as uranium, although the implosion mechanism to initiate the chain reaction compressed it to about half the volume. So that’s closer to a cricket ball.

But also to add even more nuance, the plutonium in Fat Man used a uranium tamper to reflect neutrons, and estimates are that about 30% of the explosion yield was due to fission of the uranium too. So it’s hard to really draw the line on what was or wasn’t the “explosive” in that bomb.

Well, efficiently, at least.

You can always heat up a hot air balloon and have it yank a system of pulleys, but you’re gonna lose a lot of energy that way.

Nuclear gets more expensive. That’s worse.

Way too many birds.

But also I need to know about the maids a milking, the ladies dancing, the lords a leaping, pipers piping, and the drummers drumming. Like, this is a performance where the humans get paid and get to go home afterward, and not like a slave trade situation, right?

Okay, now solve for local transportation and create a single network that’s highly optimized for both long distance, medium distance, and last mile solutions.

Why does it need to be a single network? A shipping container can go on ship, train, and truck pretty seamlessly, and that combined multi-modal network can connect sources and destinations that no one method is sufficient for.

And once you design an optimized network under your parameters, it starts to look like a hub and spoke model, with high volume arterial routes connecting the hubs, pretty close to how parcel delivery tends to work. And once you have that, you can optimize specific segments, including using hubs connected by air for time sensitive stuff (same day, next day, 2-day service), waterways or rail for really heavy or bulky stuff, and all sorts of intermediate methods or a variety of last mile delivery needs for the specific needs of any given package.

That’s why the county level data makes the trend that much more obvious, because the states tend to clump big groups together. Here’s an example.

There, you can see that Colorado is special in that its rural counties tend to be low obesity, compared to even its neighbors in the Rockies. You also see a sliver of green following the Appalachian Mountains.

And obviously it isn’t the only factor. Poverty is really important, as are lifestyles (and the intentional and unintentional features of any given community in incentivizing or disincentivizing things like walking, regular exercise, eating healthy, etc.).

Altitude is an appetite suppressant.

The trend of altitude being inversely correlated with obesity rates is really obvious from county-level data. That trend persists across multiple countries, but the specific correlation varies from country to country, in a way that suggests that rich countries have a stronger inverse correlation between altitude and obesity.

Yeah, the IRA and Infrastructure Bill steer about $67 billion to railways, $80 billion to transit systems. And even though a lot of the other spending goes towards the status quo of car-based passenger transportation, electrifying that will go a long way towards reducing carbon emissions.

And there are some more ambitious ideas baked in, too: redesigning cities to require less car infrastructure and overall energy use, etc.

I thought it was a big deal when passed and honestly can’t understand why people who care about climate don’t acknowledge just how big of a deal it was (and how devastating that so much of the money authorized will now be in control of a Trump administration).

The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.

There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.

There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.

I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.

Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.

By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.

In context, what we’re seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there’s no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What’s going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?

The “Stan Kelly” persona itself is a fictional satire. The work is actually done by cartoonist Ward Sutton, whose standard political cartoons under his own name criticize the right wing directly.

One is something you choose to pay, the other you get shot if you don’t pay.

Contract claims and property claims are ultimately enforceable by government force, as well. A “no trespassing” or “no loitering” sign, or a “Copyrighted work, all rights reserved” notice is enforceable by men with guns, too.

If taxation is theft, the same reasoning would extend to property being theft, too.

If he’s running again in 52 years, then I’ll have serious questions about what I know about the fundamental rules of life on this planet, so maybe he should be president again at that point.

The explanation is pretty mundane.

The last 2 years have seen really, really fast depreciation, because the car shortage of 2020-2022 drove up cars way beyond their normal prices. Some cars actually appreciated in value in 2021.

So when the shortage untangled eventually, used car prices plummeted. Here’s a chart of the most robust used car price index.

At the same time, several EVs saw huge price drops as Tesla tried to preserve market share against increased competition. When the new car drops in price by $20k, then the used market for that car similarly drops suddenly.

So when the value of vehicles drops unexpectedly across multiple markets, you’ll have a lot more people whose car values failed to keep up with their loan balances.

Most people make a down payment so that their loan balance starts off being significantly lower than the value of the car.