Superb Owls

This Sunday, the subreddit /r/superbowl will host a gathering of hoo-ligans. They’ll be fans of the Nocturnal Flying League. Real birds of a feather. The Superb Owl community will kick off an Ask Me Anything with biologist James Duncan, who has spent his entire adult life studying owls and a mere 3 weeks playing football.

Tac ‘N Roll

One of the East Village’s greatest culinary sleepers is Tac ‘N Roll, a 3-year-old fusion cafe owned and operated by chef Eric Wong, who traveled the world while in the Marine Corps and blends international flavors he was exposed to during service. While I generally run in the other direction when a restaurant is labeled “fusion,” in this case the term fits and the result is splendid. Here’s the gimmick: pick corn tortillas or a paratha, sandwich roll, burrito, salad, nachos, or rice bowl, and then choose from among 6 principal sauced ingredients to fill them. Beef with chimichurri goes well in the double tortillas, sending the taco spinning in an Argentine direction, while the chicken tikka belongs in the flaky paratha, which tastes more like the parathas eaten in Singapore than those found in India. All receive lush garnishes. Finally, there’s a notable pureed soup made with kabocha squash, smoothies, and a few more snacks

A&A Bake & Doubles

Bed-Stuy Trinidadian mainstay A&A Bake & Doubles Roti just gained a spot in the James Beard canon. The foundation, which runs one of the country’s biggest restaurant awards, named the counter-service spot one of America’s Classics — an honor for regional institutions that have been around for more than 10 years.

Carlos Ghosn

Spending much of his time at 9K m, confident that Kelly and others had worked out the details of his ample compensation, Ghosn didn’t notice that some of his closest colleagues in Japan were working to engineer his arrest. At times, he’d been collecting more than 2x as much pay as the rest of Nissan’s directors combined, in addition to his other salaries and 5 company residences. He might simply have been enjoying the spoils of corporate success, as his defenders insist. Or, as Nissan and prosecutors argue, he might have transgressed legal and ethical bounds. Either way, he gave his enemies an opening.

2020-01-07: he’s back in corporate housing:

See, Ghosn jumped bail in Japan because he was falsely accused of stealing from Nissan: He paid himself much more money than the officially approved compensation that was reported to investors, charges that he has strenuously denied. “I have not fled justice – I have escaped injustice and political persecution”. And to prove his innocence he escaped from Japan to Lebanon, where … he is stealing from Nissan? Where he’s living in a mansion owned by Nissan, without Nissan’s permission? “The nerve of them, to accuse me of taking anything from Nissan that isn’t mine”, wandering around Nissan’s mansion in Nissan’s bathrobe, taking snacks out of Nissan’s refrigerator as Nissan’s guards glower at him. What?

Micromobility

NYC DOT data mines Uber and Lyft Trips

New York will start clawing in the same kind of data from the ride-hailing companies that have stormed its streets in recent years. If Uber, Lyft, Via, and Juno want to keep operating in the city, they’ll have to provide the TLC with even more finely detailed data than they do now: the date, time, and location of pickups and drop-offs (at least down to the intersection), the vehicle’s license number, the trip mileage, itemized trip fare, route (including whether the vehicle entered traffic-choked Midtown), and how much the driver was paid. The city intends to use all this data to learn more about what’s happening on the streets, and to plan. It will ponder how to beat traffic and improve road safety.

2019-02-05: Massive growth in bikeshare

The rate of the industry’s growth is no joke. The global explosion of shared bikes and scooters in the past few years amounts to the “the fastest technological adoption in history,” as the event’s website noted. And it’s just getting started. “Logarithmic is the way to go with everything” explained Micromobility Conference founder Horace Dediu. He pointed to charts showing the expected rise in adoption of shared electric scooters and their 1-to-3-wheeled brethren. “If you’re not measuring in logarithmic, you’re in the wrong business.” In the meantime, the mini-vehicle gold rush will likely keep beckoning new prospectors. 2 former employees of the traditional docked bikeshare operator Motivate, now both working at 2 new-mobility startups, reminisced about old times maintaining New York City’s hardy CitiBike fleet. They complained that all the sudden interest from software startups was leaving critical hardware overlooked. A former manager pointed to the apparently fragile wheel hubs on a competitor’s shared bike model. “We tried those. They’re just not going to last.”

2019-05-08: The segway was too early but was otherwise correct

This transformation is one that Dean Kamen trumpeted when introducing the Segway in 2001 — the Segway will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking” — but the Segway was too early and expensive and now e-scooters and e-bikes are actually set to deliver on that promise

2019-08-12: Tiny cars

Minimobility vehicles will use more energy and road space than scooters, but still much less than full sized cars and transit systems. Expect to see energy numbers perhaps 33%-50%, though it is possible to do even less. Minimobility vehicles will take 50-25% the space on roads of human driven sedans. Many are only 2.5m long and thus fit perpendicular in parallel parking spaces as motorcycles do. That’s cool, but even better is the ability of computer-driven cars to valet park, fitting 5 in the space used by 1 human driven sedan. (You can also fit 10s of small micromobility scooters in a sedan’s parking space.)

2019-08-24: Similarly in LA

Los Angeles will deploy a massive surveillance dragnet targeting the less than menacing threat posed by…bikes and scooters. That’s right, a city-wide, real-time tracking network, a veritable Orwellian surveillance state, targeting the same sort of scooters popular with middle schoolers. In a perplexing technical document posted by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to the open-source software development site GitHub, the city laid-out its vision for an unprecedented tracking system. Buried between technical jargon like “All MDS compatible provider APIs must expose a public GBFS feed…” is a terrifying vision of the future. Under these guidelines, every scooter and bike will need to report the exact GPS coordinates of each device with military precision every 5 seconds. Even worse, the devices will have to report this data in real time.

2022-12-14: More on tiny cars

Why do minicars offer so much societal upside? Let’s walk through the reasons.
To start, they pose far less danger than automobiles to pedestrians and cyclists, whose deaths have been soaring in the US. It’s easy to understand why: If forced to choose, you’d rather be hit by a 500kg golf cart puttering along at 30 kmh than a 3500kg Chevrolet Silverado going 70kmh.
Minicars are better for the planet, too, devouring much less energy and resources for propulsion and manufacture. Their batteries are a fraction of those underpinning electric SUVs and trucks. A Hummer EV’s battery weighs 1500kg, 30x the size of Nimbus’s battery pack. Smaller batteries require less lithium, cobalt and nickel — essential minerals whose shortages have hobbled electric vehicle manufacturing. Even a modest shift toward miniature EVs would free up precious material, catalyzing the transition from fossil fuels.
Minicars also expand mobility access, in two ways. Most obviously, their lower prices put them within reach of those who struggle to afford a full-sized car. But slower minicars, such as golf carts, offer another key advantage. Because most operators don’t need to pedal (or, in some states, possess a driver’s license), they offer mobility to those physically unable to drive a car or ride a bike. That’s an especially valuable capability in a country with soaring numbers of older people.

0 To 1

A short review can’t fully do justice to the book’s treatment of monopolies. Gwern’s look at commoditizing your complement almost does. But the basic economic argument goes like this: In a normal industry (eg restaurant ownership) competition should drive profit margins close to 0. Want to open an Indian restaurant in Mountain View? There will be another on the same street, and 2 more just down the way. If you automate every process that can be automated, mercilessly pursue efficiency, and work yourself and your employees to the bone – then you can just barely compete on price. You can earn enough money to live, and to not immediately give up in disgust and go into another line of business (after all, if you didn’t earn that much, your competitors would already have given up in disgust and gone into another line of business, and your task would be easier). But the average Indian restaurant is in an economic state of nature, and its life will be nasty, brutish, and short.