Favorites: Senate Deals, Dementia, and Traffic Routing

July 12, 2026 — Texas weighs gutting its property-tax advantage, New York finally scraps a residential cap, Washington legalizes scissor stairs.

One person said (cached) they have “a lot of respect for the kind of backroom deals that Mitch negotiated for the grim reaper to take a different republican senator.” Two Republican Senators with health problems on the same day, you end up with a lot (cached) of discussion (cached) on the topic (cached). (src)(cached)

Click through to check out a whole thread about the improvements, but overall this is very good news. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Boko Haram commander discusses how they used ChatGPT to plan attacks. But I do have some serious questions about how much uplift (cached) it’s really giving them, especially because one of the main examples appears to have been terrible advice. (That they should get motorcycles and use them to do Evel Knievel jumps into enemy bases). (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Just a quick reminder that the CA wealth tax ballot prop is purposefully economically destructive because the SEIU is holding the CA government hostage, and it’s not the first time they’ve done it. They don’t even hide it. (src)(cached)

– In Amsterdam they had this as well, and the best ones were attached to the city’s playgrounds. They served food and drinks, and when a World Cup game was on they had TVs for that. It’s not even clear (cached) why US cities don’t do this, it doesn’t seem like anything is stopping individual cities from experimenting. (src)(cached)

– CATL is investigating lithium-air EV batteries, they’d have like 40× the energy density per unit weight of existing batteries, getting them close to gasoline in weight efficiency. Probably could be realistically used for ships or even planes. (src)(cached)

– The French Green Party has been talking about how horrible Air Conditioning is for a long time. Now the far right is quickly rising in popularity simply because they’ve decided to take the other side of that issue. If you loudly campaign on something people hate, eventually the other side will exploit that, and they’ll bring other policy priorities with them. (src)(cached)

– Seems weird that Platner’s campaign ran out of money, they were really good at fundraising. It seems they were just spending everything that came in. But that’s unusual, Talarico saved about a quarter of the cash that came in to use later, Platner was saving only about 10% and his opponent in the primary was so weak she stopped campaigning. What’s going on there? (src)(cached)

– The new superman actor says his favorite Superman is Tom Welling, and like yea… he’s everyone’s favorite, at least of living actors. (src)(cached)

– Google maps found that by preferring alternative routes when travel times are similar, they were able to lower travel times 2% citywide. (src)(cached)

– An Apple employee went to OpenAI and refused to return his old corporate laptop. Retrieved tons of confidential files from it. Then directed another Apple employee to retrieve even more files, then OpenAI hired the other employee as well. Seems extremely bad for the former Apple employees. Not yet clear how bad it is for OpenAI (cached) but it certainly isn’t good. (src)(cached)

– Some others have a stricter definition of acceptable weather, making this infographic even starker (cached), those explorers looking for a promised land in the west really hit the jackpot. (src)(cached)

– Texas is considering changing their property tax laws to be horrible like California’s already are (cached). Texas is not a low tax state (cached), their property taxes currently cover everything and that’s a huge advantage that they’re getting close to throwing away. (src)(cached)

– I had to double check this but yes, until 2025 residential in NYC couldn’t be taller than 12 stories if it covered the lot, 24 if it covered half the lot. What an insane way to run the only serious city in the United States. (src)(cached)

– Social housing is like 15% of the housing in Britain, and because of the way it’s allocated, no one is ever willing to move out, even if over time the location is no longer right for them. It’s leading to a massive deadweight loss in their economy. (src)(cached)

– Piper argues that Alpha School is doing a lot of stuff that seems ineffective, but their decision to focus on teaching kids based on their abilities is so good that it probably wipes away the detriment of their bad choices. (src)(cached)

– Dallas is basically all suburbs, and everyone drives. Paris is quite dense and has extensive public transit. Do you think this would make a difference in what the average commute is for someone in each of these cities? How big a difference? Lock down your guess before opening this link. Let me know if you got it right. There’s a secondary argument (cached) about GDP, but Paris itself actually has a higher GDP per capita than Dallas. (src)(cached)

– Scissor Stairs have been legalized in Washington. It’s not as good as legalizing Single Stair, but it’s a step in the right direction. (src)(cached)

– Reasonably structured study points towards smartphone availability being what led to a drop in fertility. They figure this out by controlling on when the phone became available in different countries. (src)(cached)