CEQA Cleanups, DOGE Dissolves
May 30th 2025: Courts call Trump’s tariff “emergency” fake, solar + battery beats diesel in 40 days, and Musk exits with nothing to show
The key to tariffs onshoring economic activity is stability, and an expectation that they'll be in place for the long term. Generally that means using a law based on deliberations, not random executive actions of dubious legality. It’s good that the courts are moving towards ruling that Trump’s tariffs rest on an obviously fake emergency, but it’s bad that Congress still isn’t revoking the ability (cached) to set tariffs that they granted the president.
Sometimes the scientific frontier is pushed forwards by crazy people. The guy microdosing bullets is probably barking up the wrong tree though.
If you zoom in you can see a few tax havens and city states are in blue.
Longer Reads
• I’ve posted a bit about Solar PV + Battery costs recently, here’s a great article breaking down exactly how expensive it is to install/operate these days. Noah Smith gives a great TL;DR (cached): “We can generate 40% of our electricity very cheaply with solar and batteries. And if costs fall by a fairly modest amount, we'll be able to generate 80% from solar pretty cheaply” (src)
• A thread from Adrian Mackenzie analyzing SCOTUS’ recent ruling regarding NEPA. His TL;DR is that it’s better than expected but there’s still uncertainty. He also believes that what we really need is for Congress to reform NEPA (cached). (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Chinese company doing solar deployment in Australia using a robot to reduce costs, seems promising. Elsewhere, robots are being used to clean large-scale solar installations (cached), but it's like... a squeegee on a rail, rather than a robot arm. (src)(cached)
– Maybe it's obvious, but solar is better for remote locations than a generator because you don't have to keep schlepping fuel to it. After about 40 days a panel can provide as much power as its weight in diesel. (src)(cached)
– If you’re wondering why ‘the groups’ have so much power over politicians, it’s because primary voters treat them as intermediaries who they trust to help make voting decisions. But the General electorate doesn’t care about that, and evaluate candidates based on candidate positions. It’s a recipe for problems if groups don’t recognize this is happening. (Or if they don’t care about getting any part of their agenda enacted) (src)(cached)
– New plan for SF school grading seems extremely stupid. Good news, folks dunking on the SF School District caused them to roll it back (cached) in like a day. (src)(cached)
– It’s been a while since I mentioned how horrible the Jones Act is, among its many flaws is that it immiserates the population of Puerto Rico, literally doubling the cost of shipping products to them vs shipping to nearby non-US-territory islands. (src)(cached)
– I really want to see more development of geothermal, and some of the best US opportunities are in California, but instead development is happening in Nevada. And of course, it’s because of CEQA. (src)(cached)
– Now that we finally have better data about voting in the 2024 election, Nate Silver assembles it and finds that persuasion was the deciding factor, rather than turnout. (src)(cached)
– HHS is cancelling the contract with Moderna to develop an H5N1 vaccine. (src)
– There’s a rumor that Apple is going to switch to year based names for their OSes. I’m not sure I have a strong opinion about this, but MG Siegler hates it. (src)
– Google’s AI overview will give you an explanation for any idiom you put into it, including ones you just made up. Ars Technica gets into details of what’s happening, it’s often coming up with quite reasonable interpretations. Ars argues that the problem is that it still presents the answer as authoritative. If the text opened with “I can’t find any evidence anyone ever said ‘you can’t lick a badger twice’ but maybe it means…” that would be a perfect response. (src)
– Significant drop in percent of young children being read to by their parents regularly. Fell from 60% in 2012 to 40% now. (src)
– Rubio says they’re going to start revoking visas of Chinese students, to counter CCP influence. But actually it's good that Chinese people are paying to soak up US culture (cached) at our Universities. If the Trump admin was serious about CCP influence, they would shut down TikTok as they’re legally required to (cached). Beijing may make negative statements about this publicly, but CCP leadership must be happy about this (cached). There’s a joke in China (cached) that the CCP doesn’t go to war with the US because of all the Chinese elites who send their kids to school in the US. Banning these students seems bad!! (src)(cached)
– Dwarkesh Patel interviews a scholar of Chinese politics, who claims that Xi doesn’t plan to invade Taiwan: if he wanted to, he would have already, “he’s been in power for 12 years”. Patel argues there’s plenty of evidence pointing the other way though. (src)(cached)
– It’s good that the courts have ruled that Trump’s tariffs are illegal, resting on an obviously fake emergency, but it’s bad that Congress still isn’t revoking the ability to set tariffs that they granted the president. (src)(cached)
– Elon has left the Trump admin, and DOGE appears to be shutting down, but they’re saying they never had any power, that their organization was simply used as a fall guy for unpopular decisions (cached) made by the Trump-appointed department heads. Everyone who thinks they can control Trump or use them for power seems to end up tricked and out of power. Except Steven Miller somehow (cached). Musk clearly realizes he’s been used, he’s attacking Trump’s spending bill publicly, and Tesla's official Twitter accounts have similarly turned against the Republican bill (cached). The entire thing is a huge lesson on the limit of money in politics (cached). He spent 300m and got essentially nothing he wanted. (src)(cached)
– RFK is citing fake studies to justify new policies. (src)(cached)
– China has power over critical minerals not entirely because of mining, but because they lead in processing minerals. A recent write up from a16z argues that if the US wants to ensure independence, we need both. (src)(cached)
– Understanding AI published a deep dive into vibecoding tools. Worth a read. A major takeaway is that Anthropic is easily in the lead on AI programming tools. (src)(cached)
– I don’t follow Tyler Cowen or ACX closely, but they’re apparently having quite a fight right now. (src)(cached)