I did see that report. How embarrassing for the BBC.

Excellent news, though.

I’m not sure that’s infuriating at all, when they’re already blowing up and hacking neighboring countries. It might mean Europe has to spend more or regulate more to protect their cars, that’s it.

They get fantastically accurate results about what they study, which is large-scale voluntary exchange. Much more so than the other social sciences. The trick is just that war isn’t voluntary exchange (although it does include it), so other disciplines become really important when it breaks out.

I mean, there’s more options than just tree or grid, and if it’s not strictly a tree the fastest route from A to B could be something small again. And of course trees have their own issues, like what happens if you need to get from one leaf to another that’s nearby, but only “as the crow flies”.

That example about having to move aside for a car going through a narrow European street is something I’ve actually experienced. Maybe it’s just my Canadian brain but it feels unsafe.

That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them.

I feel like so much of the debate misses this forest for the trees. Sure, X regime is awful. How does valued ally Saudi compare? It’s at best an often-decisive factor in whether to be nice to someone or not.

Edit: Another good one:

There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad.

Even if you only care about economics, continuing the war just has to be personally cheaper for an official than ending the war. And then there’s tons of coercion, ego and ideology in the mix as well, and sometimes raw irrationality.

Early on in this, there were oil traders talking about how nothing will even disrupt oil because it’s too important. That’s replacing history with a fanfic you wrote, basically. Same vibe as the 90’s when the world decided free markets always become a democracy.

Ahh yes the good old days, when there was no urban planning, and empty land to develop on was always there from whatever section of town just burned down.

Only kinda /s. Obviously fires are bad, but development can be so politicised and dumb now.

Bingo. Allow me to introduce you to the colonial French seigneurial system.

And the ancient Romans, and Indus valley people another couple millennia earlier were both fond of grid plans.

They’re considered passe, but there’s real advantage in terms of easy scalability and adaptability to changing land uses.

I mean, you can organise grids to be more or less stroady, and if you have too much of this going - like you have a medieval street plan - you can get the opposite thing where cars are forced through areas only suited to pedestrians, and everyone has to flatten themselves against building walls to make room.

Yeah, someone deciding to clear out an area and develop it in a completely different way is possible, I guess, but seems a lot less likely. Maybe there’s a bit of both - something large like horse stables or a hospital was there, then it was replaced with a new self-contained development, and then they built out into the margin around it later on yet.

In any case, somebody had a big urban planning idea of some kind, but it hasn’t really continued to make sense as things changed. The angle could just be because one grid is aligned true north, and the other magnetic north.

There has to be some interesting history here.

A few other examples have been posted, but this is easily the wildest. It’s not even the same aspect ratio of grid, or at a normal angle to the rest, or over a very significant area. (And they’ve still managed to tie it in reasonably well)

Canada works this way too, interestingly enough.

This was a CT scan, or even a specialised kind of CT scan. X-rays are involved, but an emulsion plate in 1905 isn’t going to get you a “3D mapping”.

Although, yes, it’s a neglected area of the body in medicine.

Yeah, the crosswalk part was harmless, even if he technically wasn’t supposed to do the municipality’s job for them. The rest I’ll take your word for.

The charges include interfering with a traffic control device, grand theft, and vandalism exceeding $400

Actually reading the article, the first fits, but the rest is definitely the cops power tripping, unless he stole the equipment to do it.

Interesting. What’s the strategy here? Just “weaken Iran”? Is there some hopium that an escalation wouldn’t see them obliterated?

I’m sure they know as well as anyone else that actually bombing them out of existence isn’t realistic.

Edit: Maybe they’re just noticing that they’ve indefinitely lost free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, if it ends now.

Goes to show, there’s such a thing as government intervention making housing get too cheap. At least, relative to other things like cemetery plots.

Yeah, people also don’t want high-speed rail tracks going past their house or whatever.

If the government doesn’t address it, the people will.

Good luck with that. Most people like cars a lot more than I do.

Yup. They actually have little interest in if the Middle East is functional in any way, shape or form. If anything they’d prefer it be ruined in every way possible.

Just bombing it and then walking away serves them very well.

If you’re thinking of protein design it is, just with a sequence instead of natural language text. Although it’s not just a straight LLM, there’s some kind of physics awareness engineered in as well.

Anything that’s fuzzy and impossible to automate with traditional algorithms, but that also has a reasonably high tolerance for error. It just makes up stuff a good portion of the time, you see.

However, I’ve found some benefits with AI. For example, I’m chatting with ChatGPT on credit cards, because it is something I may lean towards getting into. It’s helping me better understand than most people have tried explaining to me. Simply because it is giving me a more stream-lined response than people just beating the bush.

Watch out, personal finance is not one of those things.