Favorites: Shipping Shockwaves, Polling Plunge, and a Rare‑Earth Squeez
Look at pictures of shipping operations, we’re in for something crazy. And as Noah Smith wrote recently, the real pain hasn't even hit (cached) yet, and already democrats have as much of a lead in polls (cached) as they had in April 2017. Andrew Yang estimates 5 weeks (cached) till tariffs become noticeable in shortages. Look at how tourism from europe has dropped like a stone (cached), that's not going to be possible to roll back like tariffs. Ask americans to grade Trump's first hundred days, 45% say F (cached) much worse than his last presidency. Trying to force Amazon not to break out tariffs in prices (cached) is not going to paper this over.
A lot of discussion of this article in the last few days. The surface-level takeaway is that they basically need to give up on assignments as part of a grade. But the second level takeaway is that it's unclear what the goal of higher education even is going forward, since likely many employers will want employees to be able to use AI.
It's important to do what we can to care for the less fortunate. But if you want to be able to do that, you need to get elected. And re-elected. Sometimes doing good work requires keeping it out of people's faces. Climate policy is also not a huge winner among voters. (Look at the ballot initiatives in Washington). Foreign aid is similar. You can believe in doing good things while simultaneously taking into account the fact that those things aren't actually going to win you many votes (cached).
Flotsam and Jetsam
– China is banning Korean companies from exporting transformers containing rare earth metals to the US. (src)(cached)
– The tariff pause on Mexico and Canada was supposed to be one month, good thing the Trump admin is pretending they didn't say that. (src)(cached)
– Someone showing off their 'security business card', it's got quite a few things wrong with it, but easy number one is that he's got spaces in his filenames. (src)(cached)
– Non-tariff barriers to trade are a real thing, and Trump wants to eliminate them, but he wants an excessive Japanese car safety test removed. But it doesn’t exist, so negotiators are unsure what to do. (src)(cached)
– A summary of an article about arguments around birth rates, some on the left “respond to mild heterodoxy... by 1) denying the fact, 2) thereby concluding that those who speak about it have vile motives, and 3) proving this by lying about what they argue.". I thought the whole piece was interesting, but it’s mostly about specific questions around pronatalism. (src)(cached)
– Things are going well for Mark Carney, especially given that his main profession isn’t even politician, he spent most of his life as an economist. Now he gets to make the policy decisions without having to spend decades on electioneering. (src)(cached)
– Gruber’s whole write-up of the Apple/Epic update is great, it really seems like Apple’s VP of finance is in serious trouble for lying under oath. Tim Cook pretty clearly directed his staff to ignore the judge's orders (cached). Ben Thompson thinks Apple's got a good chance (cached) of overturning the most recent ruling on appeal. (src)
– Tim Lee likes the core of the argument from this longer article about why using Nuclear Weapons as an analogy for AGI risk is exactly backwards. (src)(cached)
– Interesting angle on how much of the value of nice commercial development accrues to home values nearby, not to the commercial developer, so we under produce such nice spaces. But Disneyland doesn’t have that problem. (src)(cached)
– Russian air travel is all shut down due to Ukrainian drones. They don’t even need to actually attack, just flying close to the airports is enough. Russia can’t retaliate easily because Ukraine’s airports have all been closed since 2022 (src)(cached)
– Trump admin folks were using a compromised fork of Signal. (src)
– Low information voters no longer like Trump. Real events have actually gotten through to them. (src)(cached)
– FutureSearch has created a benchmark for research AIs, and finds that most are actually not that good at finding specific numeric answers that humans are capable of finding given enough time. (src)(cached)
– Ethan Mollick had some fun with blade runner references and ChatGPT o3 (src)(cached)