Idea Soup

A beautiful neo-Moorish style apartment building, abandoned on the back-streets of Detroit, Michigan.

@harshmadhusudan @balajis @elidourado WTF happened in 1971? wtfhappenedin1971.com

Not doubling down on nuclear energy globally in the 70s, 80s and ever since has *perhaps* been humanity’s biggest recent mistake. For illustration check out US TFP - a rough proxy for the global innovation frontier. @balajis has made a similar point as well. Graph via @elidourado

Congress can change the number of justices on the Supreme Court at any time, and has done so 7 times throughout history. Since 1869, the last time the court was expanded, the U.S. population has grown by over 800%, yet the court has stayed stagnant at 9 justices.

Truly weird to wake up in America and be like "What hath the council of six decreed today?"

please just build a fucking train

If the Empire State Building had to adhere to Cupertino, CA's parking requirements, the surface parking lot would cover 12 city blocks or 2.541 million square feet!

One of my senior year Business Strategy essays was advocating that Apple should purchase a major bank and enter into banking themselves I think I got a B-, they thought it was unrealistic

Most jobs appear less grifty than they are Most self employed paths appear more grifty than they are

Honestly wild what a mirror image rents and vacancy rates are. It's not like we needed more evidence supply and demand are real, but it's always nice to have neat illustrations of it.

If you had a giant scale and you put three Empire State Buildings on one side and a cubic millimeter of neutron star on the other, the neutron star side would go down and the buildings would be thrust up. A cubic mm of neutron star—the size of a grain of sand—is over 1M tonnes.

Every citrus fruit you eat is the product of a long line of human experimentation and cross-breeding. They share three primary ancestors (the citron, the pomelo, and the mandarin), all native to South and East Asia. [Image: National Geographic, February 2017]

This is blowing people’s minds, so as an amateur historian and sociologist I’m going to try to explain this development/ cultural artifact.

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

“If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.” Montesquieu said this 300 years ago. We’re still working on this one.

People on Twitter, I present to you the preventable problem paradox: