More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

29 Jan

An old man on the streets of Berkeley once taught me that we compliment other people in part because we want to make ourselves feel more positive about them, but that sometimes this purpose is better served by withholding a compliment and just thinking about it internally.

He also believed that everyone hates each other to some degree, even if they love each other as well, and that honest interaction between people couldn't begin until they said "I hate you" to each other.

Ahh, I see he has his own Wikipedia page. Really interesting guy. I would sit around talking to him at 1 AM. Was sad when I heard he passed away a few years ago.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_Man

Read 4 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

29 Jan

1/A quick thread of my most popular blog posts so far! (In chronological order)...

1. Techno-optimism for the 2020s

noahpinion.substack.com/p/techno-optim…

2/Nobody says hi in San Francisco

noahpinion.substack.com/p/nobody-says-…

3/Tankies!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/tankies

Read 7 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

28 Jan

HOLY SHIT. General Motors will ELIMINATE gasoline-powered cars and SUVs by 2035.

This technological revolution is for real, folks.

washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…

Some of the replies pooh-poohing this are cynical and arrogant beyond belief.

Internal combustion cars were absolutely dominant for a hundred years, and now they're being phased out in 15? That's unbelievable!!

Also, people who are like "Why isn't it 2030?" or "Why isn't it 2025?" or "Why isn't it yesterday?" don't seem to realize that the marginal effect on emissions of a small delay in car fleet electrification is small until solar/wind grid penetration becomes higher.

Read 4 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

26 Jan

1/Lots of tech companies and workers are making noises about leaving San Francisco, LA, NYC, and other "superstar" cities.

Some are predicting a shift to remote work and distributed companies.

Let's take a hard look at what that would actually require.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/can-knowledg…

2/We're all familiar with the trend of tech companies and other knowledge industries (finance, biotech, etc.) piling into a few tech hubs, raising rents and house prices.

Now some think the advent of Zoom, Slack, etc. might reverse this trend.

blog.initialized.com/2021/01/data-p…

3/But escaping the superstar cities is going to be tough.

The forces keeping tech companies in places like SF are so strong that these regions have essentially become prisons for these companies.

Read 20 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

26 Jan

@bopinion

1/My latest @bopinion post is about Biden's call for an immigrant amnesty -- a path to citizenship for the country's 11+ million undocumented immigrants.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/Illegal immigration halted and went into reverse sometime in 2007.

But would Biden's amnesty restore the pre-2007 situation?

Possible, but highly unlikely.

3/First of all, many people believe that Reagan's 1986 amnesty -- the biggest in American history -- was responsible for the huge wave of illegal immigration.

But in fact, it probably *reduced* that wave.

voxeu.org/article/us-imm…

Read 12 tweets