Favorites: Apple’s Airlift, Austin’s 8-Story Win
April 4, 2025: Even Thomas and Alito say Trump’s gone too far, California housing bills may face a new obstacle
I’m sorta surprised that the market recovered as much as it did given where we still are, plus the Trump admin's stated reasoning sounds ridiculous (cached). Friday the Trump admin announced (cached) Smartphones are being exempted from tariffs, yet another sudden change. Yet more evidence that they’re not intended as industrial policy, it’s just graft. If you were trying to hurt (cached) American manufacturing, I don't know if you could imagine a more effective way to do it (cached). But of course coffee, bananas and shirts would remain (cached) at the higher tariff rate.
It would seem like Cook is earning (cached) his paycheck. Then Sunday Trump announced that they would not be lifting tariffs on electronics, it'll go into effect in 30 days they say. And then this morning he stated that indeed tariffs won’t Apply to Apple after all. @linkofsunshine speculated (cached) about whether all the switching is market manipulation or just idiocy. So looks like the tariffs are back on, Nintendo needs a plan for the Switch 2. Inexplicably, they say they'll be exempting Temu though?
Apple's actual short-term plan has been to just pack as many iPhones onto planes (cached) as they physically can. Apparently one plane fits very roughly one day of US iPhone sales. And of course, the analysts trying to figure out what the impact will be are not pleased (cached).
If they were sent to 1960, the ffmpeg folks think it’s more plausible. Basil lays out the problem (cached) succinctly: “You would need to discover Binary, than Hexadecimal, than Discrete Cosine Transforms, all while figuring out it's in the format of Luminance, Blue-difference Chroma, and Red-difference chroma color space” all from just ones and zeros.
Longer Reads
• A short thread responding to the claim that “even if we removed all regulatory barriers to infill construction, we still wouldn’t be able to build as many homes as there’s demand for”. TL;DR: The counter example is the places that have removed some restrictions, they’ve built an immense amount of homes. (src)(cached)
• The California Senate housing committee chair, Wahab, doesn’t believe in building housing. This seems like it’s going to be a huge problem if we want to address the state’s single worst problem. To the extent there's any good news, Darrell Owens thinks Wahab might be willing to change her mind on some of these issues. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– If all that tariff stuff wasn't bad enough, it looks like the Trump administration is about to put in place new regulations that would act as an expansion of the Jones act, imposing massive fees on Chinese ships (src)(cached)
– Great interactive article about how different languages transliterate animal noises. I wish they had more than just the three animals though. (src)
– Not only did stocks crash, but bond yields went up at the same time. You don’t want to see that! 30 year treasuries hit a 5% yield (cached), some speculation was that the sudden spike represents a forced unwind (cached) of the basis trade. Despite partially pulling back, both stocks and bonds (cached) continue to look grim. (src)(cached)
– US citizens are being interrogated entering the country recently. Here’s a lawyer being threatened by border agents over his work helping pro Palestine protesters. (src)(cached)
– When Trump won the election, his approval among 18-29 year olds was above water, now he’s -29z how fickle the youth can be if you attempt to crash the economy. (src)(cached)
– I enjoyed this article from Lars Doucet about the concept of Dark Mirror ideologies, the concept that people you're debating agree with you on the facts but disagree with you on the moral component. TL;DR: Darth Vader is a dark mirror of the Jedi in Star Wars, but this basically doesn't happen in real life. (src)
– While Trump has backed off the most insane version of his tariffs, the place we’ve landed is still worse than the worst-case-scenario for his admin back in 2024 (src)(cached)
– Austin has raised the single stair height limit to 8 stories, matching Japan. (src)(cached)
– Even Thomas and Alito joined in the ruling that Trump’s gone way too far with sending folks to El Salvador (src)(cached)