Good Tokens 2025-12-05
Worth your time
A little shameless self promotion: My annual list of things I learned in 2025 is here. Loyal readers of Good Tokens will have already seen most of these, but perhaps a curious person in your life might enjoy them.
Over regulation is hamstringing deep tech innovation. Real specific complaints, not just someone ranting about red tape.
Noah Smith on housing: “The true homeownership rate for Millennials at age 30 is less than 35%; for Gen X it was around 45%, and for Boomers it was almost 50%.” Also Noah on drones and the future of war.
How to get someone to leave a cult. Reminds me of Dr. David Burns’ work on relationships and communication.
There’s less pushback on the building of new housing when it’s beautiful. I definitely see this in Roswell where there is intense, almost blind opposition to building apartments but strong support for mixed use development from the people that are opposing the building of apartments. This paper helps me understand those people better and more graciously.
A long read on what it would take to revitalize the American industrial base.
How penicillin was discovered. It’s more complicated than the story that you’ve heard and yet still somehow increased my belief in the value of unguided experiments (play).
Things I learned
Extinction rates seem to be slowing across plant and animal groups — University of Arizona
New York, LA, Chicago, and Boston have all seen a more than 30% decline in the number of children under 5 living there in the past 20 years — Bobby Fijan
33% of Oregon public school students are chronically absent (missing more than 17 days in a school year) — Oregon Live. What are we doing here people?
Girls are now less likely than boys to say that they want to get married; the percentage of girls who say they want to get married has fallen from 83% to 61% since 1993 — American Storylines. Tons of other interesting information in here about the perceptions and realities of marriage. Also this anecdata:
To start off our conversation, I asked participants to raise their hands if their parents had ever talked with them about the importance of getting a good education and pursuing a rewarding career. Every single hand shot up. The response was identical in both the male and female groups. I then asked whether their families had stressed the importance of finding a partner or starting a family. No one raised their hand.
LLM Corner
Nano Banana can make beautiful charts. I can’t wait to have an excuse to use this.
Lessons on designing AI agents