Warren Wrong

This entire plan gets headlines (duh) because so many people are (perhaps reasonably!) angry at the power of big tech companies. But, very little in the actual plan makes much sense. The “platform utility” idea will lead to massive, wasteful, stupid lawsuits. The unwinding of old mergers will involve interfering with an independent agency, and seem unlikely to do much to change the main “concerns” that Senator Warren raises in the first place.

VR Avatars

The theory underlying Codec Avatars is simple and twofold, what Sheikh calls the “ego test” and the “mom test”: You should love your avatar, and your loved ones should as well. The process enabling the avatars is something far more complicated—as I discovered for myself during 2 different capture procedures. The first takes place in a domelike enclosure called Mugsy, the walls and ceiling of which are studded with 132 off-the-shelf Canon lenses and 350 lights focused toward a chair. Sitting at the center feels like being in a black hole made of paparazzi. “I had awkwardly named it ‘Mugshooter,'” Sheikh admits. “Then we realized it’s a horrible, unfriendly name.” That was a couple of versions ago; Mugsy has increased steadily in both cameras and capability, sending early kludges (like using a ping-pong ball on a string to help participants hold their face in the right place, car garage-style) to deserved obsolescence.

Chongqing Lao Zao

The oil in the broth is important, but so is the oil they serve as a dipping sauce for this style of hot pot. Our group of 6 all found the sesame-based blend that you are supposed to dip in after the broth to be too thick and not of value. They will bring the ingredients for this to the table and serve everyone their own dish automatically, but do note that a $1.95/person charge will show up on the bill. Maybe get 2 made for the table so you can try it and then go from there.

In addition to this sauce presentation, there is an enjoyable theatre to everything they do. It is all very organized. Multi-tiered trays show up beside your table to hold all the small plates of each order before it gets put in the hot pot. They will watch over the progress and move dishes up for you and remove used ones. I found the service excellent. Are you not really a hot pot person? Have you been underwhelmed with it to this point in your life? I think this is the right place to try and see if you can have your mind changed.

Testosterone juicing

Before and after pictures of tech leaders like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sergey Brin suggest they’re taking supplemental testosterone. And though it may help them keep looking young, Palladium points out that there might be other effects from having some of our most powerful businessmen on a hormone that increases risk-taking and ambition. They ask whether the new availability of testosterone supplements is prolonging Silicon Valley businessmen’s “brash entrepreneur” phase well past the point where they would normally become mature respectable elders. But it also hints at an almost opposite take: average testosterone levels have been falling for decades, so at this point these businessmen would be the only “normal” (by 1950s standards) men out there, and everyone else would be unprecedently risk-averse and boring.

Paging Peter Thiel and everyone else who takes about how things “just worked better” in Eisenhower’s day.

Facebook Privacy Pivot

Ultimately, Zuckerberg doesn’t address the biggest trade-off: Are these changes compatible with Facebook’s fundamental business model, which relies on a steady supply of user data? If these changes are truly implemented, there will be a substantial business cost to bear. Until he fully answers that, Zuckerberg’s vision of privacy will be incomplete.

The move towards privacy seems designed to respond to a number of problems. To some extent, it responds to Facebook’s content-moderation problem: if a conversation that violates the company’s “community guidelines” is encrypted, such that even Facebook’s software can’t read it, then the company can’t be expected to expunge it. It responds to the Ralph Northam-yearbook problem (“People want to know that what they share won’t come back to hurt them later”), since, by default, content will auto-delete. And it responds to the China problem, as Zuckerberg vows “not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.” It also attempts to address Facebook’s public-relations problem: after a scandalous year, fewer people trust the network than ever.

Data Incumbency

Open-data requirements could make it clearer who is providing a valuable service and who is primarily exploiting information asymmetries between creators and services. They could help identify the genuine rip-offs that thrive on opacity, such as the chronic underpayment of artists or the role of concert organizers in ticket black markets. They could help answer the perennial question of whether streaming payments and other licensing schemes are fair to artists, based not on a notional “value gap” but on who else is getting a cut.

Prospiracy Theories

Last week I wrote about how conspiracy theories spread so much faster on Facebook than debunkings of those same theories. A few commenters chimed in to say that of course this was true, the conspiracy theories had evolved into an almost-perfect form for exploiting cognitive biases and the pressures of social media. Debunkings and true beliefs couldn’t copy that process, so they were losing out. This sounded like a challenge, so here you go:

Airships

Giant Airships Could Be a Trillion $ Industry

Mode Cost per ton-km Typical speed (kph)
Airplane >$1 >800
Truck 15-20¢ 100
Giant Cargo Airship (projected) 5-10¢ 160
Rail 3-5¢ 100 (but with transshipment delays)
Ship/Barge ~1¢ 30

Now for the disclaimers. “Per ton-km” estimates of shipping costs always misleadingly oversimplify. Costs tend to be concentrated at transshipment points. It matters a lot whether there’s a payload for the return trip. Modes differ in reliability, and if occasional transport delays make expensive bottlenecks, it might not matter if a mode can offer cheap service and adequate speed most of the time. Handling is crucial for some cargoes, e.g., fragile or perishable ones. Sometimes space is a more binding constraint than weight, and lightweight, bulky cargoes often pay “chargeable weight” proportional to the space they occupy rather than their actual weight. Above all, not all modes go to all destinations: e.g., trucks can go wherever there’s a road, but not over bodies of water, while airplanes can cross water but can only land where there’s a port. And so forth. Logistics is complicated! As for the estimates of cost and speed for a giant cargo airship, suffice it to say, for the time being, that I do have some basis for suggesting that 160 km per hour and 5-10¢ per ton-km are attainable performance goals for a giant cargo airship, though it will take a lot of investment to get there. I’m not asking readers to trust me on that, except for the sake of argument.

2021-10-22: Airships to overcome lack of roads

Airships right now are interesting as a cost-effective substitute for less efficient cargo transportation that’s already happening. But they can be much more: one of the barriers to manufacturing exports in the developing world is that exports require infrastructure, and infrastructure generally requires spending, which needs to be funded, ideally from exports. If the fixed cost of participating in global supply chains drops, the beneficiaries will be people in the poorest parts of the world, who will have a shot at joining the global market. Transportation costs are high in the developing world, which amounts to a tax on imports and exports, benefiting no one. If countries can skip some of the expensive and time-consuming process of building road and railroad networks, and focus on ports, they can jump over a significant barrier to higher incomes.

2023-02-03: Eli Dourado does another market sizing.

Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km. That would equal $650b in annual revenue for cargo airships, notably much bigger than the $106b Boeing reports for the entire global air freight market. If one company owned the cargo airship market, taking only 50% of only the container market, it would be the biggest company in the world by revenue.

How many airships would we need to fill that demand? A lot. If each airship can carry 500 tons, cruises at 90 km/h, and is utilized 66% of the time, that adds up to 260 million ton-km per year per airship. To produce 6.5 trillion ton-km per year would require 25k such airships. This is about the number of airliners in the world today.

None of this analysis yet assumes any expansion of the market from normal growth, from the availability of a new service class, or from the ability to go point-to-point rather than shipping between existing ports. But it’s easy to imagine new trading patterns and even new companies forming because cargo airships exist. Just as Uber and Lyft massively expanded the vehicle-for-hire market, the added supply chain flexibility afforded by airships would stimulate new demand.