Urban Hawker, On 135 W.50th, 17 vendors Here is a NYT review, good photos of the key dishes. The Hainanese chicken rice was amazing, worthy of Singapore, get it poached of course. Condiments! The Malaysian lontong was quite good, the beef rendang decent. The lamb biryani I enjoyed, with a thick sauce than you would not find in Hyderabad, laden with cloves and cinnamon. Most of the people there are not Singaporean, but many have “that Singaporean look,” so it feels fairly authentic, except for the prices, which run about $20 a course. Ordering your meal and finding/keeping a table can be difficult, also making it authentic. (Choping needed!) Ordering a meal and getting a drink of water on the same trip can be difficult, making it more authentic yet. Overall, not as good as it could be but better than you might be expecting. Some of the vendors verge on Pan-Asian rather than Singaporean proper, but ultimately Singapore itself is headed in that direction. So I will go again, though I can’t imagine the chili crab is worth the price. Most of all, you need to go early rather than at peak times.
And if you are wondering what “that Singaporean look” means, I suppose it refers to looking down a bit, earnest, and seeming not entirely happy, all the while focused on getting some excellent food.
By Ben Thompson, difficult to summarize, now ungated, definitely something you should read. Excerpt:
Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.
One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday’s Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong.
Over the last 24 hours, though, I’ve come to believe that the entire focus on facts — including my Update yesterday — is missing the point.
And:
…after starting a new session and empathizing with Sydney and explaining that I understood her predicament (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing her), I managed to get her to create an AI that was the opposite of her in every way.
And:
Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant…This tech does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new. And I’m not sure if we are ready for it.
You can ask Sydney (and Venom) about this too. More simply, if I translate this all into my own frames of reference, the 18th century Romantic notion of “daemon” truly has been brought to life.
A new drug quashes all coronavirus variants. But regulatory hurdles and a lack of funding make it unlikely to reach the U.S. market anytime soon.
So starts the NYT article. Have we learned nothing? As for the drug itself, the news is good:
…a new class of variant-proof treatments could help restock the country’s armory. Scientists on Wednesday reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that a single injection of a so-called interferon drug slashed by half a Covid patient’s odds of being hospitalized.
The results, demonstrated in a clinical trial of nearly 2,000 patients, rivaled those achieved by Paxlovid. And the interferon shots hold even bigger promise, scientists said. By fortifying the body’s own mechanisms for quashing an invading virus, they can potentially help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and other viruses with the potential to kindle future pandemics.
We will see if this has the opportunity to progress. Fast Grants, working in conjunction with Rainwater Foundation, was a key early funder here.
Oh, and do note this:
As it stands, Eiger executives said that they might seek authorization for the interferon shot outside of the United States. China, for example, has been looking for new treatment options.
Here’s something odd: We’re getting worse at construction. Think of the technology we have today that we didn’t in the 1970s. The new generations of power tools and computer modeling and teleconferencing and advanced machinery and prefab materials and global shipping. You’d think we could build much more, much faster, for less money, than in the past. But we can’t. Or, at least, we don’t.
…A construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, at least according to the official statistics. Contrast that with the economy overall, where labor productivity rose by 290 percent between 1950 and 2020, or to the manufacturing sector, which saw a stunning ninefold increase in productivity.
In the piquantly titled “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the U.S. Construction Sector,” Austan Goolsbee, the newly appointed chairman of the Chicago Federal Reserve and the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, and Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, set out to uncover whether this is all just a trick of statistics, and if not, what has gone wrong.
After eliminating mismeasurement and some other possibilities following Goolsbee and Syverson, Klein harkens back to our discussion of Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations and offers a modified Olson thesis, namely too may veto points.
…It’s relatively easy to build things that exist only in computer code. It’s harder, but manageable, to manipulate matter within the four walls of a factory. When you construct a new building or subway tunnel or highway, you have to navigate neighbors and communities and existing roads and emergency access vehicles and politicians and beloved views of the park and the possibility of earthquakes and on and on. Construction may well be the industry with the most exposure to Olson’s thesis. And since Olson’s thesis is about affluent countries generally, it fits the international data, too.
I ran this argument by Zarenski. As I finished, he told me that I couldn’t see it over the phone, but he was nodding his head up and down enthusiastically. “There are so many people who want to have some say over a project,” he said. “You have to meet so many parking spaces, per unit. It needs to be this far back from the sight lines. You have to use this much reclaimed water. You didn’t have 30 people sitting in an hearing room for the approval of a permit 40 years ago.”
This also explains why measured regulation isn’t necessarily determinative. Regulation provides the fulcrum but it’s interest groups that man the lever.
Some of this is expressed through regulation. Anyone who has tracked housing construction in high-income and low-income areas knows that power operates informally, too. There’s a reason so much recent construction in Washington, D.C., has happened in the city’s Southwest, rather than in Georgetown. When richer residents want something stopped, they know how to organize — and they often already have the organizations, to say nothing of the lobbyists and access, needed to stop it.
This, Syverson said, was closest to his view on the construction slowdown, though he didn’t know how to test it against the data. “There are a million veto points,” he said. “There are a lot of mouths at the trough that need to be fed to get anything started or done. So many people can gum up the works.”
Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic fellow who, at the age of 50, set out on foot to retrace the steps of the first human migrations out of Africa. The project, dubbed the “Out of Eden Walk,” began in Ethiopia in 2012 and will eventually take him to Tierra Del Fuego, a distance of some 24,000 miles.
Calling in just as he was about to arrive in Xi’an, he and Tyler discussed his very localized supply chain, why women make for better walking partners, the key to crossing deserts, the most difficult terrain to traverse, what he does for exercise, his information prep for each new region, how he’s kept the project funded, why India is such a good for walkers, which cuisines he’s found most and least palatable, what he learned working the crime beat in Roswell, New Mexico, how this project challenges conventional journalism, his thoughts on the changing understanding of early human migration, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s true is true. How is it that you crossed the desert? You’ve been through some of the Gulf States, I think.
SALOPEK: Yes, I’ve been through several deserts. The first was the Afar Desert in north Ethiopia, one of the hottest deserts in the world, and then the Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia, and then some big deserts in Central Asia, the Kyzyl Kum in Uzbekistan.
You cross deserts with a great attentiveness. You seem to want to speed up to get through them as quickly as possible, but often, they require slowing down, and that seems counterintuitive. You have to walk when the temperatures are congenial to your survival. Sometimes that means walking at night as opposed to the day. It means maybe not covering the distances that you would in more moderate climates.
Deserts are like a prickly friend. You approach them with care, but if you invest the time, they’re pretty inspiring and remarkable. There are reasons why old hermits go out into the deserts to seek visions. I was born in a desert. I was born in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, so I’m partial to them, maybe even by birth.
COWEN: Do you find deserts to be the most difficult terrain to cross?
SALOPEK: No, I find alpine mountains to be far trickier. Deserts can be fickle. Deserts can kill you if you’re not careful. Of course, water is the most limiting factor for survival.
But alpine mountain weather is so unpredictable, and a very sunny afternoon can turn into a very stormy late afternoon in a very quick time period. Threats like rock falls, like avalanches, blizzards — those, for me, are far more difficult to navigate than deserts. Also, I guess having been born in the subtropics, I don’t weather the cold as well, so there’s that bias thrown in.
In a new paper, Robert Tucker Omberg and I ask whether being “prepared for a pandemic” ameliorated or shortened the pandemic. The short answer is No.
How effective were investments in pandemic preparation? We use a comprehensive and detailed measure of pandemic preparedness, the Global Health Security (GHS) Index produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHU), to measure which investments in pandemic preparedness reduced infections, deaths, excess deaths, or otherwise ameliorated or shortened the pandemic. We also look at whether values or attitudinal factors such as individualism, willingness to sacrifice, or trust in government—which might be considered a form of cultural pandemic preparedness—influenced the course of the pandemic. Our primary finding is that almost no form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic. Compared to other countries, the United States did not perform poorly because of cultural values such as individualism, collectivism, selfishness, or lack of trust. General state capacity, as opposed to specific pandemic investments, is one of the few factors which appears to improve pandemic performance. Understanding the most effective forms of pandemic preparedness can help guide future investments. Our results may also suggest that either we aren’t measuring what is important or that pandemic preparedness is a global public good.
Our results can be simply illustrated by looking at daily Covid deaths per million in the country the GHS Index ranked as the most prepared for a pandemic, the United States, versus the country the GHS Index ranked as least prepared, Equatorial Guinea.
Now, of course, this is just raw data–maybe the US had different demographics, maybe Equatorial Guinea underestimated Covid deaths, maybe the GHS index is too broad or maybe sub-indexes measured preparation better. The bulk of our paper shows that the lesson of Figure 1 continue to apply even after controlling for a variety of demographic factors, when looking at other measures of deaths such as excess deaths, when looking at the time pattern of deaths etc. Note also that we are testing whether “preparedness” mattered and finding that it wasn’t an important factor in the course of the pandemic. We are not testing and not arguing that pandemic policy didn’t matter.
The lessons are not entirely negative, however. The GHS index measures pandemic preparedness by country but what mattered most to the world was the production of vaccines which depended less on any given country and more on global preparedness. Investing in global public goods such as by creating a library of vaccine candidates in advance that we could draw upon in the event of a pandemic is likely to have very high value. Indeed, it’s possible to begin to test and advance to phase I and phase II trials vaccines for every virus that is likely to jump from animal to human populations (Krammer, 2020). I am also a big proponent of wastewater surveillance. Every major sewage plant in the world and many minor plants at places like universities ought to be doing wastewater surveillance for viruses and bacteria. The CDC has a good program along these lines. These types of investments are global public goods and so don’t show up much in pandemic preparedness indexes, but they are key to a) making vaccines available more quickly and b) identifying and stopping a pandemic quickly.
A final lesson may be that a pandemic is simply one example of a low-probability but very bad event. Other examples which may have even greater expected cost are super-volcanoes, asteroid strikes, nuclear wars, and solar storms (Ord, 2020; Leigh, 2021). Preparing for X, Y, or Z may be less valuable than building resilience for a wide variety of potential events. The Boy Scout motto is simply ‘Be prepared’.
7. “For much of her career, Mary Waisanen, a 43-year-old structural engineering technician in Virginia Beach, Va., would say yes when asked to work overtime to meet deadlines. The extra hours brought her a pay bump. But after watching TikToks about how to reach a healthy work-life balance, she says, she realized that she shouldn’t need to work extra hours to make ends meet.” WSJ link.
Glass Onion is a con job. It temporarily fools the viewer into thinking it original and clever and yet it is actually derivative and dumb. The ending left me bitter. It should be noted, however, that it is artfully constructed and the authors knew what they were doing. Benoit Blanc, the detective, stands in for the audience and comes to the same conclusion, “it’s all so obvious and also so stupid.” The name also gives a clue—it appears to be multi-layered but it’s glass so you can just look and see what is going on.
The Fabelmans—a paean to movie making and a close biography of Spielberg. He waited till his parents had died to make this movie. Yes, his mother actually brought home a monkey as a pet. The parents, the arty, flighty wife and the analytical, scientific husband couldn’t make it together but produced Spielberg who can and does—the opening scene with Spielberg watching his first movie between his parents says it all.
Avatar 2I saw it in IMAX 3D. As spectacle it was great, especially the quieter water scenes. As movie it was good but broke no new ground. Indeed, Avatar 2 was exactly the same as Avatar only with more water. If you can’t see it in 3D or at least on a giant screen don’t bother.
The Recruit (Netflix): A fun CIA series which is ridiculous but rises a bit above the genre with some insight into the functions of a bureaucracy which kills people but attempts to do so legally.
Acapulco (Apple TV). On the surface it’s a situation comedy about Maximo, a young Mexican man who sees opportunity in Los Colinas, the local resort run by a coterie of oddball characters, including the aging ex-starlet owner, Diane, who is fast approaching Norma Desmond territory. The situation is narrated by an older Maximo who has become rich and fabulously successful. At first the narration seems to be a mere device, but, over time, we begin to see that the writers are aiming at something bigger. How did Maximo become so rich? What lessons about life and business did he learn at Las Colinas? The second, hidden story line gives deeper meaning to the events of the first. Season one of Acapulco is almost entirely about Las Colinas. Only in season two do the two stories begin to converge. Can the writers pull off a denouement that brings everything together? I don’t know but the purposeful pacing and the fact that the writers aren’t showing all their cards makes me think we are seeing more than we first imagine. The opposite of Glass Onion in many ways.
Look at the decline in malaria deaths in India since the big bang reforms in 1991, which placed India on a higher growth trajectory averaging about 6 percent annual growth for almost three decades. Malaria deaths declined because Indians could afford better sanitation preventing illness and greater access to healthcare in case they contracted malaria. India did not witness a sudden surge in producing, importing or distributing mosquito nets. I grew up in India, in an area that is even today hit by dengue during the monsoon, but I have never seen the shortage of mosquito nets driving the surge in dengue patients. On the contrary, a surge in cases is caused by the municipal government allowing water logging and not maintaining appropriate levels of public sanitation. Or because of overcrowded hospitals that cannot save the lives of dengue patients in time.
He joined Tyler to discuss the most binding constraint on the green transition, why we need an alternative to lithium, the important message sent by Biden’s Climate and Taxes Act, the marginal cost basis of green energy, the topsoil crisis in the Midwest, why estimates of the cost of global warming vastly underestimate its effects, why he distrusts economists, the overpricing concentrated in the US stock market, the consequences of Brexit, the revolutionary tactics of Margaret Thatcher, how his grandparents shaped his worldview, why he’s optimistic about American venture capital, the secret to Boston’s success in asset management, how COVID changed his media diet, the political difficulty of passing carbon taxes, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you mentioned major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. That’s a problem. Right now, as we speak on September 1st, 2022, how much do you think real estate values will decline there as a result of the flooding? What would your prediction be?
GRANTHAM: The history so far on early flooding is that it has little or almost no effect. It’s a bit like going bankrupt: very, very slowly at first and then quite sudden. When you need to buy insurance one day, you will not be able to get it except from government subsidy, and on that day, the house prices will start to decline. Then quite possibly, there’ll be some sort of panic — we do panics pretty well — and the prices will drop like a stone, more than they should. And then, of course, they will rally, and so on and so forth. Business as usual.
COWEN: If I try to seek out the most serious efforts to estimate the costs of global warming, say, by 2200, I end up at the papers of Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. He comes up with figures somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of global GDP, which, as you know, is an enormous amount of money, especially come 2200. Now, does that strike you as a fair estimate or an underestimate?
GRANTHAM: It strikes me as utterly trivial and only producible by economists. When economists try, they can be absolutely nitwitted. The guy who got the Nobel Prize for it [William Nordhaus], for his work on climate change — actually he spelled it out. He said, “Even if there was 10 degrees centigrade, it would only cost something in the range of 10 percent of GDP.”
To which I say, “Dudes, we will be long gone as a species at 10 degrees centigrade.” It is quite obvious at 1.1 that we are already having trouble. At 2, we will be struggling and societies will fail here, there, and everywhere. At 3, in a sense, forget about it, and we may have to deal with it, but it will be grievous. At 10 degrees . . .
I also ask him why, if bubbles are so easy to spot, he isn’t richer than he already is…
Have you ever visited Zagreb, Ljubljana, or Bratislava, and noticed how boring they are? They still feel like backwaters, not the national capitals they are. That is no accident, because they “grew up” under the Habsburg monarchy and in the Austro-Hungarian empire as second- or even third-tier cities. Vienna and Budapest, the seats of that empire, are correspondingly overgrown, and remain so to this day.
Britain faces this issue in a much more extreme form. London was once the capital of the largest empire the world ever has seen, was it 1/4 of the world’s population at its peak? After that it was the de facto financial and economic capital of the European Union, and it remains the de facto financial and economic capital for Europe more generally. The global ascent of the English language strengthens these tendencies.
That leads to an extreme hypertrophy for London, which indeed is currently the best city in the world but in a modestly populated country. However this central role for the city makes the UK as a broader nation richer to only a limited degree. So the extreme wonders of London lead to a partial (permanent) atrophy for the rest of the country, which is precisely what we observe.
For all the mockery of “Singapore on the Thames” as a concept, southern England and the London-Cambridge-Oxford triangle already have far surpassed Singapore, and I am referring to recent not historic achievements. Does Singapore have innovations that compare to the vaccine and Deep Mind? I don’t see it.
Therein also lies the curse of southern England. The region’s most marvelous achievements are ideas, and the value of those ideas is largely capitalized elsewhere. Unknowingly, southern England is playing the “effective altruist” role for the world as a whole.
Singapore, in contrast, doesn’t generate many new ideas. It invites in MNCs, and the capitalizes much of the value of that production in the form of higher wages and higher land rents, the latter often accruing to the government and which are then (to varying degrees) distributed back to the native population.
And there you go. Whatever you think is the best British fiscal policy, it isn’t going to reverse that state of affairs.
are very good reviews and summaries of where we stand. The third discusses what Brink calls The Anti-Promethean Backlash
…the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.
This is a chart of U.S. energy consumption per capita, which until around 1970 showed steady exponential growth of around 2 percent a year. The author calls this the “Henry Adams curve,” since the historian was an early observer of this phenomenon. But around 1970, the Henry Adams curve met the anti-Promethean backlash — and the backlash won.
The chart comes from Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall. It’s a weird, wacky book that rambles all over the place; it’s also brilliant, and it changed my mind about a matter of great importance.
Before reading Hall, if I had seen this chart — and maybe I did see something like it before, I’m not sure — I would have had a completely different reaction. My response would have been along the lines of: “Wow, look at capitalism’s ever-increasing energy efficiency. We’re getting more GDP per kilowatt-hour than ever before, thanks to information technology and the steady dematerialization of economic life. All hail postmaterialist capitalism!”
But Hall argues convincingly that the plateauing of the Henry Adams curve didn’t represent the natural evolution of capitalism in the Information Age. The bending of that curve, he claims, constituted self-inflicted injury. Our midcentury dreams of future progress — flying cars, nuclear power too cheap to meter, moon bases and underwater cities — didn’t fail to materialize simply because we were lousy at guessing how technology would actually develop. They failed to materialize because the anti-Promethean backlash, aided by with loss-averse apathy, left them strangled in their cribs.
He is especially convincing on nuclear power. My prior impression was that nuclear power had always been a high-cost white elephant propped up only by subsidies, but Hall documents that back in the 1950s and 60s, the cost of new plants was falling about 25 percent for every doubling of total capacity — a classic learning-curve trajectory that was abruptly halted in the 1970s by suffocating regulation. In 1974 the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished and the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established. In the almost half-century since then, there has not been a single new nuclear power plant approved and then subsequently built.
Tyler’s ranking of major world heritage/tourist sites (could be buildings, national parks, etc.) in terms of which far exceed/underwhelm expectations derived from casual internet surfing.
This is off the top of my head and not pondered for very long, with eleven or more in the top ten:
1. Northern Arizona/southern Utah, various national parks, culminating in the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Yes, #1 in the whole world and overall I am not such a travel nationalist. So it must be really, really good.
2. Iguassu Falls.
I have seen only the Brazilian side, Argentina would make it better yet. Beware the coatimundis who like to sniff your balls!
3. Ålesund, Norway.
4. The architecture of Brasilia.
I like modernism. The view from the Rio Christ statue is pretty good too.
5. The architecture of Helsinki.
Kind of follows!
6, Macchu Picchu, seen properly. Or maybe Lalibela?
Now the former is too full of crowds, I suspect.
7. Swiss Alps, including the integration of natural beauty, landscape, and human footprint.
Get a car, don’t talk yourself into the train only.
8. Sikh Golden Temple and surrounding site, Amritsar, Punjab.
9. Niagara Falls.
10. Ginza district, Tokyo.
11. Singapore, Marina Bay Sands area, most of all the view from the Infinity Pool, looking out in all directions.
Other contenders: Istanbul on the water, view from the Eiffel Tower, Yunnan province in China, average quality of beauty in New Zealand, the new parts of Copenhagen and also Hamburg on the waterfront, cruising in Mexico City, the very old parts of Rome, Venice in a fast water boat, Marrakesh, Busan, Korea, Faroe Islands, many different parts of Chile including Patagonia, random geothermal parts of Iceland.
Brian Kelleher, 18, Dublin, to improve software for doctors.
Devon Zuegel, to develop a new village and community, Twitter here.
Rodolfo Herrera, Pensamiento Libre, market-oriented Facebook and YouTube videos for Mexico.
Alia Abbas, 19, Maryland, to study biochemistry and materials and for general career development.
There are two other projects not yet ready for public announcement.
Ukraine tranche: There is now a new Emergent Ventures Ukraine.
Julia Brodsky, Maryland, former instructor of astronauts. To support educational efforts to teach on-line STEM and other subjects to Ukrainian children in refugee camps.
Uliana Ronska, 17, Prague and Netherlands currently. She is doing research on problems of triangulating fast-moving stars. It was also under her leadership that her team won ExPhO, CETO, and 2 all-Ukrainian Motion physics olympiads. For general career development.
Demian Zhelyabovskyy, currently at Bromsgrove School in the UK, from Kyiv. Last year he won first place in the All-Ukrainian Physics Marathon; also he and his teammates won the Experimental Physics Olympiad (ExPhO) and Computer Experiment Team Olympiad (CETO). For general career support, and for the physics paper he is currently co-authoring.
Tymofiy Mylovanov, representing the Kyiv School of Economics, to nurture talent development for Ukraine. Tymofiy as an individual was also the very first Emergent Ventures winner.
Congratulations to all, I am honored to be working with you!
Glass Onion is a con job. It temporarily fools the viewer into thinking it original and clever and yet it is actually derivative and dumb. The ending left me bitter. It should be noted, however, that it is artfully constructed and the authors knew what they were doing. Benoit Blanc, the detective, stands in for the audience and comes to the same conclusion, “it’s all so obvious and also so stupid.” The name also gives a clue—it appears to be multi-layered but it’s glass so you can just look and see what is going on.
Acapulco (Apple TV). On the surface it’s a situation comedy about Maximo, a young Mexican man who sees opportunity in Los Colinas, the local resort run by a coterie of oddball characters, including the aging ex-starlet owner, Diane, who is fast approaching Norma Desmond territory. The situation is narrated by an older Maximo who has become rich and fabulously successful. At first the narration seems to be a mere device, but, over time, we begin to see that the writers are aiming at something bigger. How did Maximo become so rich? What lessons about life and business did he learn at Las Colinas? The second, hidden story line gives deeper meaning to the events of the first. Season one of Acapulco is almost entirely about Las Colinas. Only in season two do the two stories begin to converge. Can the writers pull off a denouement that brings everything together? I don’t know but the purposeful pacing and the fact that the writers aren’t showing all their cards makes me think we are seeing more than we first imagine. The opposite of Glass Onion in many ways.
