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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
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12 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The Senate's 50 Democrats (and Kamala Harris) have the power make the District of Columbia a state if they want to.
51for51.org/news/with-demo…
DC statehood would also need a majority in the House of course but that should be doable. The House passed a DC statehood bill last year with every Democrat voting yes except Colin Peterson. Peterson lost his seat in November. thehill.com/homenews/house…
Joe Manchin, previously one of the Senate's strongest Demodratic holdouts, now says he's open to DC statehood: "I don’t know enough about that yet. I want to see the pros and cons." washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/…
After last week I don't want to see anyone claiming that we shouldn't give me and my neighbors representation in Congress because doing so would be too "divisive" or would be a "power grab."

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More from @binarybits

Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
13 Jan
In 2007, my brother @startupandrew called to ask if I wanted to start a company with him. He needed a co-founder. I wanted to say yes but I didn't have a lot of savings and his startup ideas seemed kind of half-baked.
His first idea was a Fiverr-like website to match customers to businesses offering online services. He quickly gave up on that idea and started working on a secure mobile payments app. It was years ahead of its time but way too ambitious for founders with no banking connections.
By 2009, he was working on a lost-and-found service called SendMeHome. You'd buy stickers from SendMeHome with unique identifiers on them, then if your stuff got lost the finder would go to SendMeHome.com and contact you.
Read 17 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
12 Jan
Mobileye, a leading vendor of autonomous vehicle technology, is basing its safety case on an elementary statistical fallacy: multiplying together two probabilities as if they're independent when they're not.
Mobileye is planning to build two different self-driving stacks—one based entirely on cameras and the other based entirely on radar and lidar. Then after testing the two separately, they'll combine them into one system.
The theory is that if one system has a 1/10,000 chance of crashing in any given hour and the other system also has a 1/10,000 chance of crashing, a combined system has a 1 in 100 million (10,000 times 10,000) chance of crashing per hour.
Read 6 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
10 Jan
One of the many indefensible things about Ted Cruz's behavior last Wednesday is the fact that this supposed "constitutional conservative" was pushing a plan for an electoral commission that would have been wildly unconstitutional.
The Constitution says that electors shall vote in each state, then transmit their vote certificates to Congress. Then Congress counts them. There is no provision for Congress to send the certificates back to the states for a do-over.
So even assuming this electoral commission somehow got approval from Democrats and found clear evidence Trump won the election, it's not clear what Congress could do about it. The Constitution allows for only one electoral college vote and the winner is president. End of story.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
8 Jan
Maybe Twitter should alert it's users that some of the claims in this tweet are disputed.
I have emailed Twitter to ask whether the tweet violates Twitter's rule against hateful conduct. Image
Email from Twitter spokesperson: "This Tweet is not in violation of our policies." Cc: @jbarro Image
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
19 Dec 20
There's an under-appreciated interaction between macroeconomics and manufacturing economics when it comes to renewable energy policy.
A basic factor driving progress in renewable energy is the learning rate: the more of something (batteries, solar panels, windmills) you make, the cheaper it gets.
In the early years, this was the policy rationale for heavily subsidizing green energy technology heavily even though it didn't otherwise pass a basic cost/benefit calculation.
Read 12 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
7 Dec 20
Waymo is in a weird place right now. They're now operating an honest-to-goodness commercial driverless taxi service. No safety drivers. No rider non-disclosure agreements. A pretty big service area (~50 square miles). But it's growing very very slowly. arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/t…
Three years ago, I thought that if Waymo "solved" the self-driving problem first, as seemed likely, its big challenge would be scaling up quickly enough to grab territory before other companies came to market. I was wrong. arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/w…
Waymo has driverless cars that can operating in most situations in the Phoenix suburbs. But for some reason they don't seem to be trying very hard to scale up. They haven't provided a clear answer about why not.
Read 14 tweets

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