Favorites October 25th 2022

OPEC, Regulation, and Natural Gas Futures

October 2022, San Francisco

Sam Gilbert @samgilb

"Apple acts as an extractive rentier capitalist in the mobile app market" bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/can-renti…

Eric Seufert @eric_seufert

Apple has update its App Store guidelines to require that social media post “boosts” be purchased as IAPs, entitling Apple to 30% of that advertising revenue. This is new as of iOS 16.1, which was released today https://t.co/OggqkMRRTW

People who are usually pretty pro-Apple were also quite taken aback by how horrible the new App Store display ads are. (They're basically all ads for casino apps, plus some other garbage)

Javier Blas @JavierBlas

Strong words from Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. No names named, but clearly directed at the Biden administration's use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve: "People are depleting their emergency stocks [...] as a mechanism to manipulate [oil] markets" #OOTT

Sorta rich coming from founders of OPEC. Turns out that these days, the United States is sorta the Saudi Arabia of Oil.

More Housing Choices; NH=neighborhood @bnjd1837

"When YIMBYs try untangle unhelpful regulations that inflate soft costs like density zoning, excessive community meetings or aesthetic-based building codes, opponents respond by calling it 'deregulation.'"

darrellowens.substack.comThe Million Dollar Affordable HousingSome thoughts about the issues of allocation by price rather than by waitlist and the significance of expensive subsidized housing.

From the article: "Ironically, flattening regulation to a good or bad category is itself a Ronald Reagan-era propaganda strategy to lump in needed protectionist regulations with bureaucratic red tape that was widely understood to be corrupt or inefficient."

Andy Boenau @Boenau

- Engineers design road for 55mph, but speed limit is 35mph. - Drivers go 55 because it's *engineered* to go 55. I wonder if traffic calming would become the design of choice for engineers if they had to pay 10% of the speeding tickets.

This tweet follows up with a reminder of the 40-20 rule of traffic safety: "If a person walking is struck by a vehicle traveling 40 mph, the pedestrian almost always dies. If a person walking is struck by a vehicle traveling 20 mph, the pedestrian almost always lives."

Pushing The Needle @pushtheneedle

the space race vs the timeline for seattle to build a bike lane and bus lane. same scale.

Yglesias: "Neil Armstrong acting with no regard for the existing character of the Moon"

Threads

• Thread investigating why Russia has repeatedly said they think Ukraine will try to frame them by detonating a 'dirty bomb' in their own territory. TL;DR: Russia thinks there's a good chance that if they use nukes they'll malfunction and want to try to then frame Ukraine, it won't work anyway because the signatures of a dirty bomb and a failed nuke are quite different.

• Thread of takeaways for NATO from the war in Ukraine on how to update military hardware going forward. Lots of photos.

• Thread about how European natural gas futures prices are near zero right now. TL;DR: Storage is full, tons of ships are waiting to offload LNG, and forecasts across Europe don't indicate cold weather coming up.