Benjamin is offline for a bit

Middlemarch? You mean the Ides?

no way of knowing what will come of it when you press the button, but it‘s usually something good

what logging off will do to you (recommended!)

I wonder if there's a geofence somewhere around here

ClearSky ClearSky - Bringing information closer to you

clearsky.app

Jesus saves. His total amount of savings S as a function of his income Y is given by

just optimized loading times on my personal website a bit, if only 5% of the world population visit it I'll have saved more than a year of human life!

guy who reads "goodreads" as "goo dreads"

19th century pope absolutely DEMOLISHES socialism

YouTube video by Mostly Water Stephen Colbert tells the story of when he knew his wife Evie was the one + Evie's cameo on the show

My favorite Colbert moment: Him telling the story of how he met his wife in a pre-show Q&A

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW_n...

never trust a prediction I make, unless I say it has a probability of ~0.3, in that case take it extremely seriously

incredibly nice evening

A propos of nothing, a project I recently thought would be kind of cool to do is to have members of parliament fill out a survey to see how well they are calibrated about various facts and figures about Switzerland and its government

I always find survey results like this staggering (almost to the point of unbelievability).

The US was spending around 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid.

The average guess among 1,000+ surveyed Americans was 26%.

15% thought it was over half of the budget (?!)

www.kff.org/global-healt...

I'm not sure what I would have guessed — but I never thought about it too much before, and only checked because I'd seen a post about a related topic around the same time. I think it would be good for people to at least have a rough idea more often.

e.g. a while back, I went to a classical concert and paid ~60.– for my ticket. I checked the last annual report of the institution, and dividing all the government subsidies they got by annual concert attendees gave an extra ~200.– I benefited from!

Sometimes I think there should be a requirement to show on the label how much the price of something is being subsidized. I'm not against subsidies everywhere on principle, but people get really distorted views sometimes.

the house my parents rent a flat in is currently covered in scaffolding, so it was clear what I had to do

residential solar power tapped into the most powerful marketing machine known to man, giving dads something new to be nerds about

Zurich 🇨🇭

has anyone ever let a blister heal fully intact, ever?

PSA: 100% cocoa dark chocolate with zero to negligible added sugar exists (I also happen to find it the most delicious kind)

Line chart from The Economist showing cancer deaths by type in the US. Fatal cases of lung, trachea and bronchus cancer have been falling steeply since peaking in 1990

Line chart from Jason Kottke called "The rise and fall of American smoking". Adult cigarette consumption in the US has been falling sharply since peaking in the 1960s

A fantastic chart from our cover Briefing on the impressive progress the world is making on averting cancer, and an unrelated chart on cigarette consumption
www.economist.com/briefing/202...

don't forget the bedtime modafinil!

🫶

turns out getting up early, getting some work done, then going on a walk for 1.5 hours is a great way to spend a morning

HOPP SCHWIZ!!!

ahem