Links of Interest for July 13, 2023

Jewelry insurance. AirCon and energy savings. Cars make housing more expensive.

Best Jewelry Insurance Companies

[BuySide] Homeowners insurance has limited coverage for your jewels. If you own a few thousand dollars of it, you may want to get a jewelry insurance-specific policy or purchase an add-on for your homeowners or renters insurance policy. Buyside from the Wall Street Journal has some recommendations.

Analysis: Does turning the A/C off when you’re not home actually save electricity?

[PBS News Hour] I wish the answer was straightforward, but the answer is it depends. How well your home is insulated, and how wide the temperature variance is where you live will determine whether it makes sense to turn off your air conditioning when you aren't home or to run it all the time.

Build less housing for cars and more for people. Two books on how the past can guide the future

[Los Angeles Times] A review of two books about housing, cars, and the relationship between the two by Carolina Miranda. As Miranda writes: Parking lots and garages — especially underground parking — consume vast amounts of land and are expensive to build; as a result, they send construction costs skyrocketing. This makes it near-impossible to produce the sorts of small buildings that might be affordable to middle-of-the-road wage earners in urban areas like Los Angeles.

The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me

[New York Times] If you want the short version, it's this Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism. As I wrote in my newsletter, their financial success all too often convinces them that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, without any need to consult people who’ve actually worked hard to understand the issues. And in many cases they became wealthy by defying conventional wisdom, which predisposes them to believe that such defiance is justified across the board.

How elite schools like Stanford became fixated on the AI apocalypse

This all seems like a bunch of money thrown at the wrong problems to me, in terms of artificial intelligence specifically and the global issues more broadly.