January 2025
Wednesday, 22 January 2025
The delusions behind a bitcoin strategic reserve
Brendan Greeley, Financial Times: “We rely on dollars not because we’re stupid, but because a bank is literally a licence to print money, and a state has not yet been founded that can prevent powerful people from getting that licence. A long-term bet on bitcoin is bullish on the permanent collapse of all institutions, everywhere. It’s a nuclear put.”
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
Google Search, More Machine Now Than Man, Begins Requiring Javascript
John Gruber: “But the bottom line is that with this change, Google Search is more of an app than it is a website.”
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.”