Cadillac Desert was a fascinating read on all of the bureaucratic history there.

there is a very obvious reason the u.s. did not go to war with iran over the last 35 years and I think at this point it's clear what that reason is

This is interesting, as there are folks at Google who do genuinely cutting edge work on AI for weather and climate (some of them collaborate with my PhD advisor's group at Ai2). Would be interesting to see skill comparisons between Apple weather, Google weather, and NWS point forecasts at scale.

Would be curious to see Diane Vaughan’s thoughts here… (in the middle of reading Dead Reckoning)

Once Starlink on phone works, the magic is really gone. In the near term, I’ve solved for this by finding progressively more remote mountains. A Garmin inReach is a good compromise for adding safety while being sufficiently high friction for communication to still feel “off grid.”

I think part of what makes matt Levine good reading is not just that hes funny and very good at explaining complex finance topics but that you can also feel his desire to be a neutral professional journalist at war with his desire to scream that so much happening in markets is so fucking stupid

That’s stupid thing to say. I was clearly mad from the start of this thread. I didn’t suddenly get mad when your dumb ass showed up.

Big, fluffy flakes in the Cascade foothills with a convergence zone over the I-90 corridor. Wish we’d had more this winter, but it’s fun to look at while we’ve got it. Even a bit of thunder earlier.

I forgot they actually intended a design variation that would power the rotor for hover:

web.archive.org/web/20120320...

Still kinda bummed this concept didn't take off, it's a neat idea. But like many other innovative aero concepts, the program never recovered from crashing the prototype.

Fairey Rotodyne - Wikipedia

Yah, hover is the obvious point, at least for UH-60 or MV-75 sized stuff. I forgot that the Fairey Rotodyne (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_...) had tip jets for spinning up the rotor and that could maintain a hover. I think CarterCopter assumed VTOL was enough, but revealed preference says not...

This thunderstorm produced a waterspout over Puget Sound! Photo via Reddit.

This is an excellent, thought-provoking essay.

Can't decide if this is a bull trap or if we've transitioned to a fully post-modern (a la Matt Levine), lol-nothing-matters market... like, I guess the "can only good happen" scenario is somehow possible, but seems unlikely to me? Market thinks this is just Liberation Day TACO redux, tho, so...

Slicing this stuff always gets interesting! I'd love to see more cohort analysis for this stuff that considers age or life-stage specific CPI baskets, wages distributions, sectoral compositions, etc. We should be investing more in public statistical data.

Thx, George!

How diff is the median vs avg wage for line, non-manager workers? <<opens FRED in new tab>>

Tangential q for you, since you mentioned retreating blade stall and are an aerospace enjoyer: was the CarterCopter style autogyro never worth pursuing compared to tilt-rotor alternatives, or just not enough advantage for the investment needed in a totally different branch of the tech tree?

“It’s not targeting criminals, it’s not targeting dangerous people, it’s targeting individuals who are members of our community, who have a lot to offer and continue to offer a lot of positive things for our entire country and our society.”
One of Batra’s children recently enlisted in the military.

the main issue with editing Calvin & Hobbes comic strips as a meme template is that you are probably not as funny as Bill Watterson

Dogs are truly the best.

Blockade-ception

I see no problems (multi-decade ground quagmires) here. H/T r/noncredibledefense

I'm curious what you'd consider as a better, more practical framing. If we set aside security risk as a reason for industrial policy to support specific industries/process knowledge within a given national geography, what are the risks hedged and benefits gained that the market is failing to value?

Zero arguments from me there. Full agreement with your previous threads on the topic. Was just news to me that the IDF stuff actually utilized LLMs as part of the workflow vs more traditional tabular ML/network analysis.

Not saying they haven’t now bolted LLMs in there as a component to featurize long-form text/analyst reports, but LLMs were nowhere near as good 2.5yrs ago as they are now. Maven feels more like a more generalized US take on the IDF’s more specialized toolchain. I’m just an internet rando, tho, so.

AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip - Wikipedia Civilian attacks

My impression is that Gospel and Lavender, at least in the form I’ve seen them described, are much closer to Maven than an LLM: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assi...

This is spot on. Iterated games are fundamentally different, and trying to play them like a string of one-shot games is ruinous. Statecraft is an iterated game.

Missed it - curious what the most egregious bits were, or should I hate listen to it in podcast form for full effect? Haven’t had an excuse to bust out the KMFDM in a while…

This would be fun - it'd be awesome to include a list of particularly notable episodes and the specific margin/clearing mechanics involved. $GME and Robinhood I think would be the best known recent example, but seeing others explained would be cool!

I can’t find words for this travesty. I hope we will someday be able to collectively look back at this period with the appropriate degree of horror and shame.