Faisal’s Web Site
Saturday, 11 January 2025
Learn smart lessons from the L.A. fires, not stupid lessons
Noah Smith: “Basically, Americans have decided to think of private insurance as a form of social insurance, except instead of taxpayers footing the bill as in a real social insurance system, Americans imagine that some mythical wellspring of private-company profit should pay all of the costs.”
Thursday, 9 January 2025
The Future Of Fire Cannot Look Like Its Present
Patrick Redford, Defector: “Today is Jan. 8, which, for those unfamiliar with the solar cycle, is in the middle of winter, traditionally a time of lower temperatures and wetter conditions even in Southern California. Fourteen Decembers ago, similarly fierce Santa Anas blew through Los Angeles. The winds downed power lines and destroyed over 40 buildings, though they did not spark destructive wildfires, because they came on the heels of what would turn out to be the last good rainfall year for half a decade. It would be foolish to anticipate that the trend of the next 14 Decembers will be anything but dry.”
Wednesday, 8 January 2025
Limit coffee-drinking to [THE MORNING] to lower early death risk, study suggests
Kristen Rogers, CNN: “For morning coffee drinkers, the amount of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee consumed didn’t matter, either — whether they drank less than one or more than three cups of coffee daily. Having done so in the morning was still better than other patterns in terms of mortality risk.”
Thursday, 2 January 2025
The Players on the Eve of Destruction
Noah Smith: “America, like every other nation, has been created anew as the generations turned. This is not the America of Franklin D. Roosevelt, or even the America of Ronald Reagan. My grandparents are dead. Their hard-earned warnings are abstract words fading into memory, and I wonder if the world they won will outlast them by much.”
Tuesday, 24 December 2024
The Next Great Leap in AI Is Behind Schedule and Crazy Expensive
Deepa Seetharaman, The Wall Street Journal: “There may not be enough data in the world to make it smart enough. […] There are no set criteria for determining when a model has become smart enough to be designated GPT-5. […] It’s up to company executives to decide whether the model is smart enough to be called GPT-5 based in large part on gut feelings … ”
Monday, 23 December 2024
The 2024 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog
Drew Magary: “And if you travel throughout Southern Potomac, you’ll find Denali-owning soccer moms serving arancini that they PRETEND came from a Neapolitan street vendor but really came from a box in the freezer, courtesy of a Trader Joe’s subcontractor.”
Friday, 29 November 2024
The Lies We’ve Been Told About Alcohol
Haley Weiss, Women’s Health: “It makes sense that we’d lean into any good news about a beverage that’s helped prop up most of our civilizations”
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics
the Onion: “The American people are sending a strong message here: We don’t like the implications of this law, and we will not rest until it has been reversed in the courts.”
Saturday, 16 November 2024
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Do Almost Limitless Harm
Zeynep Tufekci, The New York Times: “Modern public health is one of civilization’s great achievements. In 1900, up to 30 percent of infants in some U.S. cities never made it to their first birthday.”
See also: “Yet in the face of these problems that are fundamentally collective, we are now confronted with perhaps the most deliberate dismantling of public health since its inception.”
I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is
Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic: “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”