Favorites: Solar vs Ethanol, Private-Equity Hospitals
August 2, 2025 – Monopoly fire-safety gear adds $7 k per unit, Texas’s open grid slashes power prices, and U.S. students don't know what a Nazi is
New jobs report not particularly positive. But to make things worse, BLS adjusted the previous two (post tariff) jobs reports downward (cached). Trump has fired (cached) the head of the BLS in response, explicitly as retaliation for bad numbers. Not a good way to run a statistical agency! He complained she’s a Biden appointee, but she was also a Trump appointee (cached) before that! Trump’s first-term BLS commissioner has come out was a strident statement (cached) opposing Trump’s action.
I'm filing this away for the next time someone tells me there's not enough space for solar. Corn ethanol is just such a complete waste of space.
Ah, yes, of course.
Longer Reads
• A dive into some interesting bipartisan federal pro-housing legislation that moved forward out of committee. (src)(cached)
• Blog post by someone who drank every IBA cocktail (src)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Lars Doucet paraphrases two different sayings at once in describing what it takes to do property assessment at scale accurately: "Amateurs talk algorithms, professionals talk data cleaning.” (src)
– An explanation for why Solar is dominating in Texas’ electrical grid: they’re an open cut-throat market, which drives prices down. Ramez Naam suggests (cached) that getting rid of electric utility monopolies might be an underrated climate solution. (src)(cached)
– Words change meaning over time, but it’s worth remembering that “emotional labor” was coined in reference to people who manage other people’s emotions as a literal job. Waiters take your order, but also they try to make sure people have fun. A recent NYTimes article title definitely is not on the same page with that definition. (src)(cached)
– You can slap some solar panels anywhere you want. Throw them on the side of a grain silo! They’re so cheap! (src)(cached)
– Some depressing stats on the relative lucrativeness of making up conspiracy theories vs debunking them. (src)(cached)
– Study of Private Equity acquisitions of hospitals starts with what you'd expect: patient satisfaction declines. But also, mortality and readmission rates are unchanged, while costs fall 🤯. Given the horrible outcomes from private equity acquisitions of nursing homes, I was expecting much worse here. Maybe less of a principal agent problem? I dunno. (src)(cached)
– While we're discussing corporations that people love to hate, here's one that I was familiar with: "When corporate landlords like Blackstone enter a suburban neighborhood, rents fall and segregation declines because minority renters can now afford to live there." (src)(cached)
– Definitely seems bad that a lot of kids are going through history classes without learning how bad the Nazis were. As the last people who remember WWII die, we lose an important shared historical understanding. (src)(cached)
– Trump is deporting a green card holder who has spent most of his life in the US and was working on a Lyme disease vaccine. Plus they kept him handcuffed to a desk for a week first. (src)(cached)
– In a surprising move, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Egypt all co-signed a statement calling on Hamas to disarm and give up Gaza. (src)(cached)
– Trump's previous line on Epstein was that he broke ties with him long before anything bad came to light. But now he's saying he broke ties because Epstein took away one of Trump's Mar-a-lago employees to his island. (src)(cached)
– One of the most widely cited books about ability grouping was essentially lying about what the main sources it cited said. (src)(cached)
– Credit where’s it’s due, Lena Khan was right to block the Adobe acquisition of Figma. They now appear to be more valuable on their own. (src)(cached)
– Three quarters of traffic coming from Twitter is bots, compared to less than 1% of Instagram traffic. Wild! (src)(cached)
– M.G. Siegler points out that if someone were to make Back to the Future today, the kid would be going back to 1995. Yeesh. (src)(cached)
– Tom Lehrer died at the age of 97. Here's one of my favorites of his songs: The Elements (src)(cached)
– Solar power output has tripled in 5 years. It has now surpassed nuclear. (src)(cached)
– it seems plausible that the Israel-Iran war has disrupted Iran's Bitcoin mining operations. Hash rates have fallen in recent days (src)(cached)
– Russia has had battlefield success with fiber optic cable attached drones. They're largely immune to electronic warfare and have a surprisingly long range. Cable is very light... (src)(cached)
– It's cool that New York is considering constructing new Nuclear power stations, but they've decided to go with an all-new design. That's crazy! There are so many designs that are well understood and extremely safe, the AP1000 from Westinghouse is great, there's a dozen in operation, just build that! (src)(cached)
– Someone managed to hook up some LLMs together to get them to do research into finding new AI model architectures. And indeed they. They discovered a bunch of record setting new designs. (src)(cached)
– I still can't get over how horrible it is to be destroying PEPFAR when it was so ridiculously effective. (src)(cached)