Tyson complains about meat shortages. Left: continuation of front page article detailing how major food manufacturers, including Tyson Foods, failed to protect plant workers. Right: full-page Tyson ad discussing its commitment to worker safety.
Month: April 2020
Relief Checks Are Terrible
the financial infrastructure in the us is complete garbage. here’s how to fix it:
- Task the IRS with creating a permanent database of payment details
- implement nationwide real-time retail-payments
- Provide free accounts to people who need them
Parole hell
what an awful parole app looks like: bad geofences, alerts every 30 min throughout the night, etc.
Revenge Of The Negabarrels
So in an oil market that sputters at $60 a barrel, faints at $40, and vanishes at $20, what do negabarrels cost to produce? In 2004, Winning the Oil Endgame detailed how negabarrels costing $17 in today’s $ could save half of US oil. In 2011, our Reinventing Fire synthesis updated how saving all US oil by 2050, with far greater mobility, could cost $20 per barrel saved in US transport or $14 just in autos. Today’s efficient autos can save a barrel for less than $7. That will fall below 0 in a few more years as superior electric cars match or beat gasoline cars on sticker price alone.
Tesla Mega Casting
this is a tiny example how tesla is 10 years ahead of other car manufacturers, and they’re only getting started. future models will be far more streamlined, with fewer opportunities for problems to crop up.
Recognize art
If Everyone – Including The Women – Looks Like Putin, Then It’s Van Eyck
Quarantine Jargon
Go for the low-hanging fruit, whenever it’s available again—it’s been out of stock for weeks.
Ban parties not business
It looks like the biggest transmission danger is large droplets exchanged by people talking loudly in large gatherings, in closed quarters, and where many different people interact. Yes, it may be transmitted in other ways, but this is the fat tail, and start with the fat tail. The even greater news: practically no GDP is lost if you ban the super spreading activities on his list.
When Tailwinds Vanish
there’s no more users or minutes in the day, so tech will have to pivot to lower growth, lower margin industries.
Why Sex?
The pervasiveness of sex would make a lot of sense if the act increases reproduction both directly and indirectly, such as by increasing longevity
2022-02-16:
Research suggests the molecular machinery that makes this part of sexual reproduction possible may have existed 2 ga BP in the simple prokaryotic cells called archaea, perhaps 1 ga before eukaryotes and sex evolved. But the new findings also hint at an explanation for why this kind of cell fusion for sexual reproduction didn’t appear earlier in life’s history, when it seemingly could have. Fusexins that may once have been used for limited genetic transfer between archaeal cells may then have seeded the evolution of sexual reproduction. “The downside of lateral gene transfer is that it becomes less and less good if you have a bigger genome. If you’re just picking a bit of DNA out of the environment, what’s the probability it’s going to match up? It’s a decreasing function of genome size.” Cell fusion — made possible with repurposed ancestral fusexins — may have been instrumental in the transition to eukaryotes by allowing more coordinated, large-scale genetic exchange: sexual reproduction. Such a radical shift may have been more appropriate for maintaining the fledgling eukaryotic genome.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 