Category: Little Known Facts

Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blindingly Obvious

It's Probably Nothing Little Known Facts 4 Comments

Tattoos Affect Your Immune System in Ways Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand

Plus;

“Many pigments currently in use were originally developed for industrial applications such as car paint, plastics, and printer toner, rather than for injection into human skin.”

Researchers have detected trace quantities of heavy metals in tattoo inks, including nickel, cobalt, chromium, and, on rare occasions, lead. Accumulated at high levels, heavy metals can be toxic, causing serious health problems such as internal organ damage, neurotoxicity, and increased cancer risk.

In some cases, these heavy metals triggered allergic reactions and immune sensitivity in the person receiving the tattoo.

Cuba Libre?

Little Known Facts nannystate There Goes The Narrative 6 Comments

Buried in the story about Cuba instituting some free market reforms is an interesting tidbit about loosening restrictions on imports. The common narrative implies that Cuba’s inability to function economically is a result of trade sanctions imposed by the US. But the reality is that many of Cuba’s sanctions are actually self-imposed: it’s less the case that Cubans can’t buy foreign brake pads for their cars because the US won’t allow it, but more the case that communist officialdom has always stood in their way.

The plan includes more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad. It even permits fast-food chains to establish themselves on the island.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Mirrors

Alternative Subsidy Little Known Facts 11 Comments

Doomberg: The media can’t seem to explain the collapse in China’s domestic solar installations.

We often quip that the best proof that something was predictable is having predicted it. While not totally accurate—dumb luck and broken clocks are still things—nailing a complex call in the face of cocksure counter-commentary is anything but unsatisfying. It also confirms that our mental model is still operative in the way that matters most: it remains useful for further predictions.

In August of 2025, we produced a bonus presentation for paying subscribers titled Cocktail Party Trivia: Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends and Family (available here). In it, we elaborated extensively on our current mental model in which a working understanding of electric grids became a tool for predicting when the forced introduction of intermittent renewables would cause things to break. Some 31 minutes in, we warned that China’s solar miracle was reaching the limits of feasibility, and that the breakneck pace of new construction would soon have to slow.

At the time, China was on pace to smash global records for new solar installations, and legacy media outlets were falling over themselves to heap praise on Beijing’s bold climate leadership. On social media, the Silicon Valley crowd was lamenting how the US was desperately falling behind its main competitor in the artificial intelligence race, hooked on “yesterday’s fuels” like natural gas. US President Donald Trump came under withering criticism and was pounded for his efforts to save the domestic coal industry. That China still relies on coal for the vast majority of its electricity was rarely mentioned.

Imagine our lack of surprise, then, when we opened our weekend edition of the Financial Times to find Adam Tooze’s latest lament, “Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness”…

Cocktail Party Trivia (35 minutes): Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends & Family

Sane Ideas

Little Known Facts nannystate Shiny Pony 52 Comments

At least a few boomers are quietly suggesting that Old Age Security spending be reined in by some means. Stephen Harper tried something similar by raising the age of eligibility to 67, but Trudeau Junior reversed that. Hopefully this gains traction this time around.

OAS is currently Canada’s costliest federal program, eating up roughly one in every six dollars of federal spending. This amounted to a total of $85.5 billion in 2025-26 and is expected to exceed $100 billion annually by the end of the decade. Paul Kershaw, head of Generation Squeeze, said in a media briefing on Tuesday that policymakers can ill afford to ignore ballooning OAS costs at a time of “heightened geopolitical instability and economic uncertainty.”

Artificial Stupidity

Little Known Facts Self Driving Roadkill 9 Comments

Recently I ran across an AI video which examines the problem of steam engine boiler explosions on farms in the 19th century. Starting with an image of a steam engine hooked up to a running threshing machine with no drive belt connecting them, it just got worse from then on. I cannot find any independent references to anyone mentioned in the video. The alleged design of the “miracle” valve, consisting of a brass ball with no spring to hold it closed against safe steam pressure, makes no sense whatsoever. Some days I really fear for the future.

 

Strongest Of The Weakest

Great Reset Little Known Facts There Goes The Narrative 7 Comments

As economist Daniel Lacalle points out, the rising dollar price of gold does not mean the US dollar is on the way out. Things are a bit more complicated than that in a fiat currency world with no exit ramps.

The same sources that show soaring gold demand also show that there is no true “dedollarization” in the sense of a fiat‑to‑fiat substitution. This also makes sense. The US dollar is the world’s strongest weak currency because it has a higher level of liquidity, more independent institutions, and better legal and investor security than any alternative. The US dollar is losing its place as a global reserve to gold but not losing its position relative to the euro, yen, pound, or yuan.

IMF COFER figures show that the US dollar’s share of allocated FX reserves remains at 59.6%, and when adjusted for exchange‑rate moves, the IMF itself concludes that the dollar’s share has been broadly stable, with recent declines explained mostly by valuation effects, not active selling. The euro, at 20.3%, is not even close to being a contender.

What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?

Genetics Little Known Facts 15 Comments

Davide Piffer;

Why did Rome, rather than any of its many rivals in Iron Age Italy, become the core of an empire?

A muddy settlement on the Tiber turns into a machine that can raise armies, write laws that outlive empires, build roads that stitch a continent together, and carry water for millions through aqueducts, while running a Mediterranean-wide bureaucracy for centuries. The usual explanations are familiar: institutions, military discipline, geography, luck. All true, and none of them feels fully satisfying on its own. Many societies possessed some of these advantages. Rome was unusual in how consistently it turned them into scalable institutions.

There is another angle that is rarely discussed, mostly because until recently it was not testable. What if part of Rome’s advantage was carried in its people, as average differences in traits linked to learning, planning, and administration?

Ancient DNA makes it possible to ask that question directly. Using the AADR dataset and educational attainment polygenic scores, Iron Age and Republican-era Romans come out unusually high. Besides exceeding earlier Italian groups, they sit at the top of the entire ancient European distribution, even after accounting for sample age and genomic coverage.

That by itself does not explain the rise of Rome. But it does suggest a sharper hypothesis: Rome’s institutions may have been built and operated by a population that, on average, was unusually well suited to master and scale complex social systems.

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