David Sacerdote
Software engineer.
Mostly talk climate and related politics.
- [Not loaded yet]
- One of the authors is active here: @rachitdubey.bsky.social and has been sharing a no-paywalls link so everybody can have access: rdcu.be/eh8gv I think this might be the lead author, but not 100% sure @gracegliu.bsky.social
- [Not loaded yet]
- A gift link so folks can actually read about the way the House budget is designed to dismantle the IRA and sharply curtail American clean energy production. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/c...
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- Gift link because almost no Americans have an FT subscription www.ft.com/content/f867...
- Yes pollution does real damage — it literally kills people. Pretending otherwise just increases the number killed. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/c...
- There are even decent estimates of how many die www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- Funny how breathing combustion byproducts causes all kinds of harm. www.sfchronicle.com/health/artic...
- I'll note that the study the article is about doesn't specifically provide the headline number, though its very clear that there is significant additional leukemia risk from gas stoves.
- So literally the first chat I tried, asking about the first fire incident listed on the front page, and the AI instantly bombed. Probably fine.
- NEW: California has launched ‘Ask CAL FIRE”, an AI-powered chatbot on @calfire.bsky.social’s website offering wildfire resources and emergency information in 70 languages. We’re committed to transforming government to more efficiently and effectively serve people.
- To handle that kind of query with anything resembling reliability, the AI tool needs an MCP gateway to the underlying database. They very clearly didn't do that.
- [Not loaded yet]
- A guess: the standard version doesn't do logs of everything, which you need to have as a public official. So somebody who wanted to compromise their communications produced a version like that, and marketed it to them, creating a classic Shadow IT attack.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Open-access link rdcu.be/egPvB
- Keeping your head down, or being a smaller lower-profile institution won't protect you. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-n...
- [Not loaded yet]
- We're all going to end up adopting Torricelli's approach of small easy-to-hide instruments to avoid accusations of witchcraft.
- It’s still surprising to me how useless X, Bluesky, and other 'feeds' have become at helping you catch up on news in the morning. There was about a decade where they were superior to any one homepage, but that era is over, over, over. We’re back to newsletters and typing “CNN.com” into the URL box.
- I've ended up building custom feeds for topics I care about. Here’s one example bsky.app/profile/davi... And another wildfire oriented one: bsky.app/profile/davi...
- The Gift Links feed from @davidsacerdote.bsky.social is very helpful. You can find it on his profile.
- Or more directly, right here bsky.app/profile/davi...
- [Not loaded yet]
- Thank goodness they haven't done away with the carried interest tax loophole. Radical leftists are always using it to treat their hedge fund management fees as capital gains instead of ordinary income, and get to avoid paying billions and billions in taxes.
- Today's adventure in baby hummingbird sword-swallowing.
- The hummingbird chicks have grown a lot over the past couple days.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Anna's
- Looks like there's a pretty stark impact on attitudes about climate from being able to see a state change instead of just a gradual shift. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- [Not loaded yet]
- I don't think the methane fee is being enforced messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/rend...
- [Not loaded yet]
- Fyi the authors both posted paywall-bypassing links to this rdcu.be/ei0T5
- [Not loaded yet]
- Did something like that at work recently. Ended up with rack space for 25 bicycles being added. The shift to open-plan offices has a lot of employers trying to figure out how to deal with not having enough car parking. Adding bicycle parking that people will use is a no-brainer for them.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Unpaywalled for the first couple hundred readers. If a US automaker figured out how to match this kind of price, they'd quickly dominate the market. But they're much more interested in the low-effort profits from selling giant luxury vehicles. www.wsj.com/business/aut...
- The babies need to be fed. And fed. And fed. And Fed. I think there are two, which is typical for Anna's Hummingbirds.
- I call the combo of a huge increase in military spending with a virtual end to diplomatic (and other) spending a Shoot First, Talk Later budget
- Making it easy for people to get full control over devices they own would be an amazing response for the rest of the world to take to Trump's tariffs. Even a few countries doing it would make the tools available worldwide and benefit everybody. www.ft.com/content/b882...
- This will be quite the change in the EV landscape. They're not stripping him of his stock though.
- Even MoveOn is promoting the May 1 protests www.mobilize.us/mayday/?sour...
- [Not loaded yet]
- Gift link so everybody has access www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
- [Not loaded yet]
- That's Google, not the NYT. Check your sign-in history. support.google.com/mail/answer/...
- [Not loaded yet]
- The thing about borrowing against stock to avoid capital gains taxes is it only works when interest rates stay low. Rising rates both increase your expenses and create the risk of a margin call. Stagflation is not kind to it as a strategy.
- I have to wonder how many other journals are going to face the same end in the near future. ehp.niehs.nih.gov/do/10.5555/b...
- Who your local DA is matters. www.mercurynews.com/2025/04/29/s...
- Took my kids camping in the Henry Coe State Park over the weekend. Definitely a great way to decompress; we climbed an off-trail mountain, found a pair of antlers (one in a tree), swam in a very cold waterfall, admired wild onions, and smelled the mule ears. Quite a break from the daily routine.
- [Not loaded yet]
- I've ended up learning a lot of my local plants because of iNaturalist. Several professors around here assign undergrads to observe, and I regularly see grad students identifying organisms as means of sharpening skills. www.inaturalist.org/observations...
- [Not loaded yet]
- I wonder how many hours of human labor it would take to try and evade the harm that's being inflicted on people by taking individual action as opposed to having a few people (eg: government) screen for the actual problem substances and prevent them from entering the food and water supply.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Gift link so that everybody can have access www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- Here's a starting point: help.ft.com/faq/gifting-...
- [Not loaded yet]
- The magic you want is to share gift links. The FT has them, they're completely transparent to anybody with Javascript enabled, and the non-enterprise ones can be clicked to produce a gift link with no view count limit, like this: www.ft.com/content/4c82...
- If we stop get away from the routine use of combustion, a lot of these problems Just Go Away. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/c...
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- It's going to be on us to keep the attack from working.
- And he knows it...which is why they're going after accreditors now www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...
- [Not loaded yet]
- Anecdotes of heat pump installation being followed by more frequent sex.
- [Not loaded yet]
- [Not loaded yet]
- The Cornell administration was & still is happy to throw students, adjuncts, Palestinians, and other low-status folks under the bus. But what happened at Columbia made it clear that their own status & power is at risk, so they started coordinating with Harvard before being explicitly threatened
- [Not loaded yet]
- Cornell doesn't; they did a coordinated website revamp with Harvard to stress the value of publicly funded research at universities. I strongly suspect that there is a lot more going on that's not public.
- Most of us are working today, but it only takes a few minutes to call your elected officials about climate. Lunchtime works well. You can look up your senators phone numbers: www.senate.gov/senators/con... Your representative's phone number: www.house.gov/representati... Or use an app like 5calls
- [Not loaded yet]
- Wasn't the first one at Indian Point 1, which was subsequently converted uranium fuel?
- [Not loaded yet]
- Really effective measures are likely to amount to money laundering, but if you use a donor-advised fund, you do get the ability to limit who (outside your broker) knows that you gave.
- [Not loaded yet]
- They also used to bring huge amounts of fuel to the cement plant in Davenport. Train of tank cars would go real slow, maybe 10mph, with a spotter riding on the front of the locomotive.
- Springtime in the California coast range
