Chinese economy is successfully reorienting away from real estate towards high tech

functional government

Speaking of functional government, provinces rely on land use sales of various lengths. Many of them heavily overborrowed to build out infrastructure in anticipation of future land sales that are now lower or non-existent. And meanwhile, the real estate crisis is still quite active.

If the Chinese government was so special, it should have learned from the US’s issues with companies that posed a systemic risk with inadequate oversight. Instead, they let Evergrande and others become way too large with too little oversight. They should have taken a cue from the financial regulators in the US, which identify systemically risky companies and imposes onerous regulations. Then at the height of the real estate bubble, Xi introduced a new set of policies that immediately popped the bubble instead of trying to ease it down. Too often, Xi in particular seems to work on principles like “people should invest wisely” instead of “if I introduce this policy, it will cause problems.” The good news is that China does seem to be listening more lately, but it’s already done damage.

How’s Evergrande been these days?

Not if they’re going to disturb the relaxing cat.

Semantic versioning.

Most of the time. I use calendar versioning (calver) for my internal application releases because I work in IT. When the release happens is more consequential than breaking changes. And because it’s IT, changes that break something somewhere are incredibly frequent, so we would constantly be releasing “major” versions that aren’t really major versions at all.

OpenDocument.

Agreed compared to .doc and .docx. And if you’re going to version control it, markdown instead of a binary blob.

For academic documents in STEM fields, I’d love to see a transition from LaTeX to Typst. Much cleaner, better error handling, and it has a web UI if people don’t want to install a massive runtime on their own computer.

Recipes in concrete metric units, preferably mass instead of volume. Recipes come together incredibly quickly when measuring out ingredients can just be dump-tare-dump-tare-dump instead of trying to get sticky ingredients like tahini out of a measuring cup.

More torx screws. There are apparently some uses for phillips, but torx are criminally underused.

Yup, a late friend of mine was a lobbyist at the state level for a mental health lobbying group. His daughter has schizophrenia and that was his way to give back in his retirement. Without lobbying, it’s hard for politicians to know when there is a problem they need to fix. They have a small staff and they don’t just magically know when there is a problem. The problem is when a politician either can’t sniff out unethical lobbyists or just doesn’t care.

Pretty much anything that substantially improves batteries will be huge. R & D money is pouring in and that likely means progress. Improvements could be felt in factors like environmental impact, weight, energy density, safety, and charge time.

If you look at Hillary’s broader statements, she has always favored universal single-payer healthcare. She worked her ass off to get a plan passed in 1994, and she was relentlessly attacked for it.

The last time Democrats got successful movement on healthcare was March 2010 with a filibuster proof Democratic majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, and a popular new president in the White House. Even then, only a relatively tepid compromise bill was passed, with even the “public option” stripped out (thanks Joe Lieberman).

Will conditions change in the future? Quite possibly, especially as our health care becomes increasingly unaffordable. Maybe it’s not so helpful to have senior politicians telling voters something is impossible and potentially affecting the Overton Window. But Hillary’s warning, that Bernie Sanders’ plan hadn’t a chance of getting passed, was a good reality check.

Biden supported a 1994 crime bill that is considered racist today.

Some context is required there, though. The 1994 crime bill did have significant support among Black leaders and activists. It was seen as an imperfect solution to a critical issue that disproportionately affected Black neighborhoods at the time.

Are we replacing infrastructure or are we just adding capacity?

They are ultimately going to wind up as one and the same. We need to add more capacity before we can rid ourselves entirely of fossil fuel. Using grid power for things like HVAC, cooking, and electric vehicles means those devices get more CO2 efficient as the grid generation gets more efficient.

What is this number if you exclude China?

According to this source, largely unchanged. China’s a touch above the average, but relies heavily on fossil fuel, with a large share of that being very dirty coal. Its campaign to install renewables is encouraging, though.

maybe she respected your input on the way the task got done

This is when I knew I was starting to really learn how to do my current job, when people came to me with questions instead of the other way around. It took about two years, but it was a nice shift.

Oh, yeah, don’t get me wrong, my pocket EDC isn’t minimalist. I have ADHD, so I find that I work best if I can depend on a medium number of items always being with me. A few less things for my brain to keep track of, because they are always there.

Lots of types of plastic. Sure you might be able to hand them off to someone else, but there’s no guarantee they are not just headed for a landfill.

Human Centipede begs to differ.

Some recording programs can do transcripts as well. They’re not perfect, you have to tidy them up, but it is nice to not need to go back and do the transcribing manually.

Even then it’s a little dicey.

Usually there is cheese and other food on it. I’ve never seen one that can be recycled.

I love OSM in so many ways, but unfortunately its address resolver is kinda garbage compared to Google Maps. For example, the string “10392 SE 23, portland, or, usa” correctly resolves to what I meant, “10392 SE 23rd Ave, Milwaukie, OR, USA” in Google Maps. OSM needs the exact city (Milwaukie is a suburb of Portland) and the “rd” on 23 to resolve.

I have really fallen in love with my carbon steel skillet for general purpose cooking, including more delicate food like eggs. It took some time to get the hang of cooking with it and I still haven’t quite gotten the seasoning right, but it’s a sturdy piece. I also have a cast iron skillet, but it’s much heavier and I’ve never been able to get it to cook eggs. Since I started using the carbon steel for eggs, I have basically stopped using our non-stick pan.

I actively use a couple of appliances with a nonstick interior, an air fryer and a rice cooker. I just try to treat them very nicely but I know they won’t last forever. At least the parts are trays or liners that can be replaced separately from the appliance.

I also have a very nice 3 ply stainless steel pan, but I find that I don’t pull that out as much. Maybe because I’m usually not making the sorts of recipes that it excels with, like ones that use the fond to make a pan sauce.

I can see wanting to keep it very minimalist, but I’ve slimmed down my pockets pretty well already so I have some space to spare. Besides, the flashlight I have is about the size of the AA-sized battery it uses, so I find the benefits outweigh the slight cost.