Favorites: Waymo Wins, Weary Fusion, and Whole-Aisle Coca-Cola
November 25, 2025 — Charm turns out to be a real political asset in one surreal White House exchange, a social rule about who demands the “doctor” title survives another stress test.
Very impressive, but they sure are slow
Sorry for the long quote, but what an ending!
I mentioned this previously, but the approval of the entire Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego makes it all the clearer that Waymo’s only remaining impediment is getting the cars and building the service facilities.
Flotsam and Jetsam
– As much as people probably won’t accept film acting that’s purely AI generated, in commercials don’t worry about that as much, and so AI video generation tools are being used there extensively already. Here’s a great article with more details from Understanding AI. (src)(cached)
– Platner, in Maine, has said some very dumb things on Reddit over the years, and that has not been good for his polling. Mills’ team gleefully released polling data showing this, but interestingly, they didn’t release any polling about Mills herself, which makes us think that her own numbers are not great. (src)(cached)
– There was some recent data (cached) indicating that the median age of a homebuyer is almost 60 and rising fast. But that’s extremely misleading, the average age someone buys their first home is ~36, and it’s actually fallen a bit in recent years. (src)(cached)
– Lower cancer death rate on GLP1s, maybe people crave fewer processed foods? (src)(cached)
– Look, hopefully you weren’t laying all your hopes on Fusion as a future power source, but if you were, this article makes some new arguments against it that I had not seen before. (src)(cached)
– Clear evidence that US models are still better: Chinese hackers ran an AI-based hacking campaign using Claude, even though it meant that once they’re caught US investigators would be able to go through their strategy line-by-line. Weisenthal calls this (cached) “very bullish news for American AI labs!” (src)(cached)
– Interesting data analytics around polling shows that most voters, when asked to describe their ideal political party don’t really mention any ideological elements, they focus on affordability and general wellbeing. (src)(cached)
– It appears the Biden admin made at least one bad appointment to the Federal Reserve board. (src)(cached)
– The Chinese government is now making social media posts about how the UN charter says they can take unprovoked military action against Japan. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Mamdani, meeting Trump for the first time at the White House is asked if he thinks Trump is a fascist, as he thinks, Trump jumps in: “Just say yes, I don’t mind”. Overall, being charming seems to be a major advantage for a politician (cached), what a concept! (src)(cached)
– Tim Lee found that Waymo may be able to use Zeekr cars without being hit by the 100% tariffs if they import ‘kits’, just the chassis and powertrain, and do final assembly in Arizona. (src)(cached)
– Josh Barro identifies the rule about insisting on being called ‘doctor’: anyone who does this and isn’t a medical doctor is insufferable. An english lit major who spends her time arguing about climate change and economics but insists on being called ‘doctor’ shows up in the comments, it’s almost too easy (cached). There is a very short list of exceptions (cached) (src)(cached)
– Someone discovered that in Arizona, grocery stores have a whole section dedicated to Coka Cola. (src)(cached)
– Mamdani has appointed a member of the NYC YIMBY group as head of his housing transition team. So that’s hopeful! On the other hand, looks like they’re not making plans to get rid of the unnecessary sidewalk sheds (cached), they’re just making plans to make them even more expensive. (src)(cached)
– MG Siegler was quite impressed with the new Dynamic View beta feature in Gemini, which I had not actually tried myself. The idea is that it’ll generate an entire dynamic web page to answer your question. (src)(cached)