Quarterly Update Q4 2022

Welcome to the quarterly update on the topics we’ve touched in Uncharted Territories! Today you’ll hear updates on:

1. Germany’s energy

2. Republicans did die more from COVID

3. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

4. Cultural effects of fertility

5. Market turmoil was predictable

6. Cities make you nicer

7. How to open people up, fast

8. Inspiring literary figures

9. How remote work is evolving

For premium customers only:

10. Twitter as a world brain

11. Plastic pollution: debunking some myths

12. How the news is playing you, and how to avoid it

13. The drivers of global growth, and the role of laziness

14. The role of the Mississippi is still enormous

15. Updates on Ethiopia’s civil war

16. The Spanish Reconquista shows up in DNA

17. England’s center of gravity during the Viking Age

Also, I’m a bit late on articles. I’ll catch up this week.

Enjoy!

Germany’s Energy

Germany ended up keeping the three nuclear reactors open. Huge victory!

In Why Germany Won’t Keep Its Nuclear Plants Open, I explained why the German excuses to justify the shutdown of the three remaining nuclear reactors were bollocks. I simply read the official position of the Ministry of Energy, Environment, and Economy, and could identify key failures: None of the arguments stood up to scrutiny, and the paper was biased because it only looked at the costs of nuclear and not its benefits.

Now, the German newspaper Die Welt has reviewed 166 documents and found the exact same thing:

MagicMuffinman @MuffinmanMagic

This is pure Gold! German Newspaper "Die Welt" has reviewed 166 documents concerning the stress test and other processes regarding the german nuclear power plant flip flopping A short 🧵 welt.de/wirtschaft/plu…

welt.deDer Mythos vom unbefangenen AKW-Entscheid - WELTBei der Frage der Atomlaufzeitverlängerung gab es keine ergebnisoffene Prüfung. Darauf deuten interne Dokumente der Bundesregierung hin, die WELT analysiert hat. Zudem zeigt sich, dass Robert Habeck sogar gegen die Einschätzung der eigenen Fachleute handelte.

Thankfully, data and reason have prevailed. 

Republicans Did Die More

I wrote Coronavirus: Out of Many, One on Apr 2, 2020. The Republicans had not yet taken the full COVID denial position, but I saw it coming. I tried to influence their direction by alerting them that more Republicans would die of COVID than Democrats, simply because Republicans were on average older.

They didn’t pay attention. Now the bill came due and, indeed, more Republicans have died. But not just a few more. A LOT more: precisely 2.5 times as many. Obviously, the bigger impact was not age, but simple denial.

Tomas Pueyo @tomaspueyo

Anti-vaxxing might have killed 2.5 times more Republicans than Democrats

Here’s the paper with the data.

Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

We’re not back to where we were before the war, but things are going in the right direction. Hopefully, we will get there soon.

Remote Work

I’ve long said that there was no turning back from remote work, even if some people will go back to the office, lured by older and previously successful managers. 

Indeed, offices remain completely empty in San Francisco:

@jason @Jason

San Francisco went from 5% office vacancy to... 23%. it's getting worse and worse... and it's not going to get better folks. Start the process of converting these offices into residential folks. Remote work is here to stay for tech.

Also, we now know that remote workers work more hours, have more leisure, and sleep more:

• 64% of US workers say they would consider looking for a new job if they were asked to go back to the office.

• 45% of US workers work hybrid or fully remote.

• 35% of the commute time saved is spent working.

• Also, sleeping more reduces diseases, so remote workers might be healthier and age more slowly, unless sedentarism takes an even bigger toll.

This is not just a US phenomenon. Between 20% and 40% of work time of highly-educated people across the world is spent working remotely.

The pieces of remote work were there before the pandemic struck, but we didn’t realize how good it could be. 56% of people were pleasantly surprised with remote work, and only about 12% were negatively surprised. Among those hugely surprised, there were 6x more people positively surprised than negatively.