Favorites May 26 2024
There's a lot more detail in the full thread, but the short version is that container freight demand is inelastic, and surprisingly fungable. So shutting down the red sea shipping lanes means more ships are needed for the aisia/europe route, and that means those ships aren't being used for whatever they were doing before, say Asia/US. Inflation in the US has mostly been in services so far, this could cause inflation in goods prices. Very worrying.
This was in response to commentary on SCOTUS upholding exclusionary zoning as legal in 1926, enforcing segregation via urban planning. Perhaps now things are bad enough that we'll get real reform.
If you want more nuance, Jeff Maurer's "death of Ebrahim Raisi, but with jokes" was surprisingly informative.
Longer Reads
• Andrew Prokop spends some time trying to figure out what would hold back Trump in a second term, comes to the conclusion that it would be the same restrains as last time, but they're all much weaker now for various reasons. None have been improved. (src)(cached)
• Here's an article arguing that the Strong Towns 'Suburbs are Ponzi Schemes' claim is false. The article isn't that long, but the core issues are that infrastructure spending is actually a very small portion of suburbs' spending, and further, that urban infrastructure spending is significantly higher *per capita* than in suburbs. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Global poverty reduction is no longer being driven by China. (src)(cached)
– The huge tariff on light trucks in the US, which drove the initial popularity of SUVs, came out of a dispute with West Germany. (src)(cached)
– Chinese automakers may start building cars in the US, but they're going to need to figure out sourcing for parts as well. (src)(cached)
– While Germany did foolishly shut down their nuclear power plants, many other countries are pushing forward with new plants and new designs. India, Canada, Poland, and Slovakia have all made new plans in the last 6 months or so. (src)(cached)
– Detailed maps with great animations covering what a conflict over Taiwan would involve. A lot of missiles. (src)(cached)
– Morocco exports a lot of cars to Europe, more than the China, India or Japan. And it's all in the last 15 years. Here's another bulleted list of highlights of Morocco's endeavor to become a car exporter. (src)(cached)
– TikTok is censoring information about Ozempic, seems a bit sketchy to be doing that. (src)(cached)
– Yglesias was the one who shortened "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA)" into "Affordable Care Act (ACA)". Here's an article from the week it was signed into law. (src)(cached)
– This paper attempts to precisely measure GPT-4's theory of mind capabilities, finds it outperforms humans on a number of theory-of-mind tasks. I think the number of trials was relatively low, and it's also possible that the papers they got the concepts for their theory of mind questions from have found their way into OpenAI's training set. (src)
– Jason Kottke comments on a *two hour* video of the history of tetris high scores: it's a perfect encapsulation of how innovation works. Strip away the video game aspect, after decades of investigation of every detail, "one person, standing on the shoulders of giants in a near-perfect performance, can do something no one has ever done before." It's the same in every field of collective human effort. (src)
– It seems obvious that they'd do this, but Waymo is apparently using very large transformer architectures to help with predictions of other car's future actions. Here's the talk where it was discussed. (src)(cached)
– For many people, having kids leads to finding yourself doing far more singing than you ever had before. (src)
– 18-22 year old americans don't know about stuff that happened during the Trump administration! Seems obvious in retrospect, but yikes! (src)(cached)