Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 28th of February 2025.

Title, links for February 2025.

This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack.

If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com.

I haven't independently verified each link.

On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading.

I correct these as I see them and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.

1.

Which single individual has murdered the most people, with murdered meaning against the law, with their own hands and not counting, for example, dictators?

It's a surprisingly close race between the worst human serial killers and Gustave the Crocodile.

Two, a Texas town is experimenting with ski lift style gondolas as public transit.

The problem for public transit has always been finding space for it.

You can either share the street with rush hour traffic, a bus, break the bank digging a tunnel, a subway, or build an elevated rail.

Expensive and complicated.

gondolas replace the elevated rail with a few towers and let cables do the rest.

The planned prototype, quote, End quote.

3.

Net neutrality was a cause célèbre in 2017, when the whole internet seemed to join together in a rare moment of unity to warn of dire consequences from its cancellation.

But it got cancelled anyway, and no consequences whatsoever materialised.

Why?