This is a week and a half old, but I didn’t link it at the time. Eric Berger documents its decline.
Category Archives: Economics
The Woke Bazaar
Thoughts on the faux virtue and good intentions of the Left. Related: Why young Americans are no longer taught about evil.
Obsessing Over Elite College Admissions
The Only Reason To Explore Space
Yes, it’s unclear that, absent physics breakthroughs, there will be any practical reasons to head off to another star.
Merging Lanes
You’re probably shifting out of your lane too soon.
Driving back from Yosemite on Thursday, Caltrans had shut down the right three (out of four) lanes on I-5 in Castaic. We lost one lane at a time, and the first merge was the slowest. Each next one sped things up, until we were all in a single lane, and moving at a reasonable speed. Part of the problem was that much of the traffic in the right lane was trucks (we were already in the left lane when the backup started). It added about twenty minutes to the trip time.
AI
Arnold Kling says we are all wrong about it.
Well, maybe someone is right, and we just haven’t heard from them.
Battery-Powered Cars
Just say no.
They seem like they’re fun to drive, but I would never want to rely on one as primary transportation, or for road trips.
Bidenomics
It was always insane to imagine that you could print money to pay people to be unproductive and not end up with inflation.
The Remaking Of America
A depressing litany of how far we’ve fallen in this century.
Industrial Revolution
Why didn’t the Romans have one?
Before I read it, the first thing I thought was this: “How are engineers to do experiments and calculations without any concept of the experimental method, and without anything close to the mathematical tools that are available today to any fifth-grader?”
As he notes, they didn’t have Arabic numerals, they didn’t have zero, they didn’t have negative numbers, or complex numbers. They had no higher math, and no way to get to it with their numbering system. One of the foundations of the industrial revolution was the invention of calculus, and understanding of physics, including thermodynamics. That was all happening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The other thing that was happening was the invention of capitalism in the coffee houses of London and Amsterdam (which wouldn’t have happened had coffee not become a thing in the wake of opening the New World). It’s not clear how, even had Rome not fallen, how they would have ever had those foundations.
[Update a while later]
Link is fixed now, sorry.