Interesting Links

2025-07-08 Tuesday

• Trump lists the tariff rates 14 countries will face if they do not come to a trade agreement
  • Yesterday, Trump sent letters to 14 countries detailing the tariffs they were going to face if trade agreements could not be signed by the revised August 1 deadline
  • Japan and South Korea face a 25% tariff
  • Tunisia, Malaysia and Kazakhstan also face a 25% tariff
  • South Africa and Bosnia face a 30% tariff
  • Indonesia faces a 32% tariff
  • Serbia and Bangladesh face a 35% tariff
  • Cambodia and Thailand get hit with a 36% tariff
  • Laos and Myanmar are hit with a 40% tariff
  • These tariff rates are subject to further negotiations
  • The EU did not receive a letter, as negotiations are ongoing
  • President Trump did not elaborate on the tariff rate that India would face, only stating that a deal was "close"
• China risks the global supply of heavy rare earths after issuing an ultimatum to rebels in Myanmar
  • The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has been battling government forces near the town of Bhamo, located in the northeast
  • Fighting has been taking place less than 100 km from the Chinese border
  • The area is the site of several rare earths mines, specializing in the heavy rare earths that are used for magnets in electric motors
  • These mines supply over half the world's supply of heavy rare earths
  • China is stating that it will boycott those mines if the KIA does not retreat from the area
  • The KIA has seized control of the mines themselves, and has raised taxes on miners to fund its operations
  • The rebels are confident that China is too dependent on the mines for any boycott to last long
  • Although the rebels have gained territory on the ground, the central government retains air superiority and has conducted extensive airstrikes against rebel positions
• Hopes fade for finding further survivors as the death toll from the Texas floods reaches 96
  • Camp Mystic confirmed that 26 children were among the dead, with a further 10 and a camp counselor still unaccounted for
  • Debate over whether the area should have had warning sirens intensified
  • A privately operated drone collided with a search and rescue helicopter, forcing the helicopter to make an emergency landing
  • European officials warn that large-scale intense flooding events are more likely in a warming world
• UBS makes "goodwill payments" to clients hit by trading losses due to Trump's tariff announcements
  • Some of UBS's customers suffered heavy losses on foreign exchange derivatives trades when the US dollar fell sharply following Trump's announcement on April 2
  • The derivative contract obligated clients to exchange dollars for Swiss Francs
  • However, when the dollar/franc exchange rate moved out of its normal range as a result of Trump's tariff announcement, the terms of the contract forced the clients to continue trading under increasingly adverse circumstances
  • Clients allege that UBS misled them about the risks inherent in the contract, and said that the contract could be restructured if clients began suffering excess losses

2025-07-07 Monday

• Trump extends tariff deadline to August 1
  • Trump signed an extension granting three more weeks for tariff negotiations
  • Said that if deals were not done by August 1, the US would be unilaterally imposing tariffs
  • Sent letters to a number of countries indicating the tariff rates that they would have to pay if they did not negotiate a deal
  • Rates were usually identical to those announced on "liberation day", with some minor differences in some cases
• Trump tells Zelensky that he wasn't personally responsible for halting weapons shipments to Ukraine
  • On July 2, the US announced a halt in the shipment of further weapons to Ukraine
  • Today, in a phone call with President Zelensky, that he wasn't personally responsible for the halt in shipments
  • Said that he had only ordered a review of US stockpiles, not a halt in shipments of weapons to Ukraine
  • Remarks come after a "disappointing" phone call with Putin
  • Zelensky expressed optimism that shipments might soon resume
  • The Pentagon's spokesman, Sean Parnell, said that the review of stockpiles had been completed, and the Pentagon was preparing a report to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about whether shipments to Ukraine should resume
• AI tools introduce new vectors for code execution attacks
  • AI tools are useful because they can run arbitrary commands on behalf of the user
  • However, this is also why they're dangerous
  • AI-enabled development is removing developers from direct control over the code they download and execute
  • AI tools may increase developers' vulnerability to supply chain attacks
  • The solution is increased isolation for developer systems
  • Great, so the solution to a self-inflicted problem is to make things yet more difficult for people who actually want to have control over the hardware that they own
• How fiber-optic drones are re-making drone warfare in Ukraine
  • Increasingly effective electronic warfare has made radio-control precarious
  • Carry up to 20 km of fiber optic cable
  • Fiber-optic drones are deployed at the beginning of drone assaults to target opposing electronic warfare systems
  • Then, once those have been disabled, further attacks can be carried out by radio-controlled drones
  • Fiber optic drones can also fly into buildings and shelters where radio waves cannot penetrate
  • Although wired weapons seem an anachronism in an era of increasingly sophisticated wireless communications, they are effective and cheap
  • The cable spool adds weight, reducing the payload capacity of the drone, often by half
  • The cable can also be tracked by enemy drones; as a result fiber optic drone teams have learned to move after every attack
  • Currently, most fiber-optic cable going into Ukraine comes from China
  • However, Ukrainian companies are seeking to increase native production of fiber-optic cable in order to meet the increasing demand for these drones
  • Ukrainian forces are also attempting to build AI-enabled drones which will fly and attack targets completely autonomously
• Russia's transport minister found dead hours after being dismissed by Putin
  • Roman Starovoyt was found dead in his vehicle of a gunshot wound
  • Was 53 years old
  • Authorities labeled the death a suspected suicide
  • Putin's decree dismissing him did not mention a reason for the dismissal
  • Was it actually a suicide? Was it an assassination? Was it Russian elite politics? Who can say?
• Meta hires a top AI researcher from Apple
  • Ruoming Pang led Apple's foundation models team
  • Is reported to be receiving a pay package worth "tens of millions"
  • Mark Zuckerberg has massively increased Meta's recruitment of AI talent, offering large pay packages and personally reaching out to specific researchers
  • At Apple, Pang was responsible for leading a roughly 100-person team responsible for Apple's own large language models
  • Internally, Apple's foundation models team has come under scrutiny, with Apple exploring partnerships with OpenAI or Anthropic to use their models in Siri and other applications
  • Pang's departure could spark further exits from the foundation models group at Apple
  • People don't work for companies, they work for managers, and often a good manager is the only thing person tying a person to a company
  • After Pang's departure, the foundation models team will be led by Zhifeng Chen
  • The foundation models team has also been reorganized with a layer of management between Chen and the engineers, whereas under Pang, most engineers reported to him directly
  • The reorganization comes as John Giannandrea, overall lead of Apple's foundation AI efforts has been sidelined internally
  • Giannandrea had been stripped of responsibility of adding LLM functionality to Siri and integrating LLMs with robots
• Houthis attack a ship in the Red Sea for the first time since Trump announced a truce
  • On May 6, Donald Trump announced a truce with the Houthi movement in Yemen, saying that the US would cease bombing Houthi targets in exchange for the Houthis agreeing to cease their attacks on shipping flowing through the Red Sea
  • Today, the crew of the Magic Seas was forced to abandon ship after it started taking on water after being attacked with small arms and rocket propelled grenades
  • Houthis said that the attack was in retaliation for another ship owned by the same company, Allseas Shipping, docking at Ashod, in Israel
  • Earlier that day, Israeli warplanes had conducted an attack on Yemen following a ballistic missile attack against Israel
  • Among the targets struck in the attack was the Galaxy Leader, another ship captured by the Houthis in 2023 and used as a floating radar station
• Carbon markets may be funding illegal logging in Brazil
  • Voluntary carbon offset projects in the Amazon are being run by landowners and forestry firms that have been fined for illegal deforestation
  • In five of these cases, it was found that backers of carbon offset projects had been illegally logging inside project boundaries
  • However, there is no direct evidence that the carbon offset projects are failing to deliver their credits
  • The accrediting firms Verra and Cercarbono, responsible for two of the world's largest carbon credit registries have opened investigations into projects owned by Brazilian entities fined for illegal logging
  • The value of the carbon offsets in a given area increases based on the threat the region's forests face, providing an incentive for loggers to cut around the boundaries of a carbon offset project
  • Permits issued for selective logging inside a carbon project can be used to launder wood illegally logged elsewhere
• The number of first time homebuyers dwindles, improving prospects for landlords
  • Rate of people buying a home for the first time has slowed to almost half of historical norms
  • High home prices and high mortgage rates are pricing out first-time homebuyers
  • Is hurting homebuilders who have become increasingly dependent on the market for starter homes
  • At today's prices, buyers would need to earn $127,000 a year to afford the mortgage payments on a median-priced home
  • This is up from $79,000 a year in 2021
  • First time homebuyers are also seeing lowered credit scores as lenders resume reporting student loan delinquencies to credit rating agencies
• Europe increases its crackdown on hate speech
  • Lucy Connolly has been jailed for 331 days because of an angry message she posted on social media, calling for all asylum seekers to be deported
  • Deleted the post after cooling off, but was still arrested and sentenced to a 31 month prison sentence for posting material intended to stir up racial hatred
  • Sentence was longer than some of the actual rioters
  • In the US hate speech is generally protected, because of the First Amendment
  • While the US does have restrictions on threats, the threat has to be imminent, specific and of a nature that a reasonable observer would not take as hyperbole
  • However, in Europe, governments have taken a much narrower view of free speech, arguing that a lack of restraints on speech enabled Hitler to gain power
  • The Trump administration has criticized EU governments for allegedly using their hate speech laws in a biased manner against conservative activists
  • In the UK, British police made 12,183 arrests in 2023 under a law that makes it illegal to say something "grossly offensive" or share content of a "hateful, indecent or menacing character"
  • Germany has tightened enforcement of a 1950s law that makes it illegal to insult public officeholders
  • Increasingly I look at Europe and China and think, "It's the same picture"
• We have hair on our heads to keep our brains cool
  • Humans are the only mammals that have dense hair only on their heads
  • Evolutionary biologists have tied this change to the transition to walking upright, which exposed heads to more intense solar radiation
  • Head hair appears to have evolved at around the same time as the loss of body hair and increased production of sweat glands
  • Scalp hair reduces the amount of heat the head receives by at least half
  • Originally scalp hair was likely dark in color and wound tightly
  • The range of hair colors and textures we see today likely evolved when our ancestors left Africa, and moved into cooler climates
• The TSA will allow passengers to keep their shoes on when transiting airport security
  • TSA is rolling out a procedural change that will allow passengers to keep their shoes on
  • Requirement to remove shoes was put in place in 2001 after Richard Reid attempted to detonate an explosive device in his shoe on a flight from Paris to Miami
  • Attempt came in the months after 9/11 and increased paranoia regarding potential copycat attacks
  • Great. Now let us keep our water bottles too

2025-07-06 Sunday

• How Medicaid cuts in the new budget will affect Americans
  • The "Big Beautiful Bill" cuts over $1 trillion in healthcare spending overall, mostly from Medicaid
  • Includes work requirements for citizens receiving medical assistance
  • Manatt Health, a consulting firm specializing in advising healthcare providers, estimates that 8.7 million people will lose healthcare coverage as a result of the budget
  • Says that this will lead to people putting off preventive care, leading to higher costs later
  • Hospitals are facing a double-whammy
    • Fewer insured patients means more uncompensated costs
    • Reductions in supplemental payments that states could send to hospitals to bring Medicaid compensation in line with Medicare or private insurance
  • Hospitals are forecasting layoffs or even shutdowns as a result
  • The Big Beautiful Bill also cuts subsidies for private insurance plans purchased on exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act
  • These subsidy reductions are forecast to reduce the number of insured by a further 5.1 million
  • State budgets will also be hit, as the federal government will reduce its matching payments to state-funded Medicaid systems
  • The hardest hit states will be Republican states which chose to expand Medicaid under Obama administration policies
  • Although Democratic states have more generous Medicaid programs and will face higher absolute cuts, a smaller proportion of their Medicaid budget is targeted by the federal government
• Oracle gives the government a large discount on cloud services and database software
  • Oracle is cutting the price of its database software and cloud services for government customers
  • In an agreement with the General Services Administration (GSA), Oracle agreed to provide a discount of up to 75% on licensed software
  • Discount on cloud services is unspecified, but is reported to be substantial
  • Earlier, the GSA had come to an agreement with Salesforce for a 90% discount on Slack
  • Oracle is working to catch up to Google, Microsoft and Amazon in its cloud offering
  • Discount will help Oracle gain market share among government customers
• Tesla faces a steep challenge in China
  • Tesla's market share in China has dropped steeply as competition from local brands has intensified
  • Chinese cars have features that Tesla's don't, such as in-car refrigerators and selfie cameras
  • Tesla's Chinese salespeople are frustrated, as they feel pressure to meet sales targets without having what they perceive as competitive vehicles
  • Say that Chinese customers are prioritizing integration between their cars and their smartphones, which doesn't appear to be a priority for Tesla
  • Chinese data security laws make it difficult for Tesla to acquire the training data needed to roll out its self-driving features in China
  • Meanwhile, Chinese brands are rolling out their own advanced driver assistance systems
  • Chinese regulators have grown more wary of self-driving systems after a fatal crash involving a Xiaomi SUV
  • Tesla is the latest of a number of American companies, including Motorola and Apple, to thrive at first in China, but then fall behind as local brands catch up
  • Chinese regulators often invite foreign firms in specific industries to provide competition for local firms and train engineers
• The death toll in the Texas floods rises to 82
  • The death toll from the floods continues to rise as hopes fade of finding more survivors
  • More storms in the area have prompted renewed flash flood warnings
  • Survivors and residents are frustrated by a lack of communication from officials about the status of those still missing
• Texas officials had pushed for early warning systems years before deadly floods
  • Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer had pushed for the installation of sirens to warn of flooding as early as 2016
  • Had worked in Kerr County, conducting rescues, during the previous bout of deadly flooding in 1987
  • Neighboring counties had installed outdoor early warning sirens
  • In 2018 Kerr County had applied for state funding to install early warning systems
  • However, the application was denied, and in order to avoid raising taxes, Kerr County chose to forego the flood warning sirens
  • State and county officials emphasized the extreme nature of the flooding, saying that warnings didn't adequately convey how quickly waters would rise

2025-07-05 Saturday

• The AI startups betting they can profit from Google Search's demise
  • At least a dozen new startups are betting they can profit from the decline in traditional search queries
  • Developing tools to help marketers understand how AI chatbots navigate the web, so that they can ensure their products remain visible
  • Athena, one of these startups, was founded by ex-Google members, who say that the old "ten blue links" version of search is obsolete
  • Looks at how AI models process information in order to ensure that brands' websites are comprehensible to these models
  • Google itself has been working to augment its search with AI capabilities
  • Profound, another AI analytics company, has been working to discover how users are viewing brands through the lens of chatbots
  • Is helping companies optimize their websites for AI traffic, as well as human visitors
  • Although these companies' valuations are tiny compared to the overall $90 billion search engine optimization category, marketers see these tools becoming increasingly important as traditional search traffic declines
• Trump and Zelensky hold a phone call to discuss the provision of further air defenses for Ukraine
  • Phone call took place yesterday, after Trump's phone call with Putin
  • Comes in the aftermath of Russia's recordbreaking air attack on Ukraine, involving 539 drones and 11 cruise missiles
  • Trump said in the phone call with Zelensky that he was unhappy with Putin, who seemed to show little openness to negotiations
  • German Chancellor Friedrich Merz also spoke with Trump, in an effort to resume the flow of air defenses to Ukraine
• Death toll from Texas flash floods rises to 51, including 15 children
  • The majority of fatalities were recorded along the Guadalupe River
  • Rescuers are still attempting to find 27 missing people in Kerr County, many of them girls swept away from the Camp Mystic summer camp
  • Survivors have been located in trees or on patches of high ground
  • Rescue efforts are focused on the riverbanks as floodwaters recede

2025-07-04 Friday

• Clorox has invested in AI to improve its advertising
  • Has used AI to generate images of food that would pair well with Hidden Valley Ranch, which it owns
  • Learned that teams should be given flexibility in how they integrate emerging technologies, such as AI, into their workflows
  • AI technology adoption is still largely being driven by grassroots efforts — bosses aren't automating away jobs, rather workers are adopting AI to make themselves more efficient
  • Of course, when a worker makes him or herself more efficient, the boss will notice, and a future job will not be created
  • Workers are using AI to augment their own abilities rather than replacing their efforts wholesale with AI
  • When Clorox initially adopted AI, they found that many of the AI's suggestions were invalid or even nonsensical
  • Developed an internal tool, dubbed a "prompt improver", which allowed teams to rapidly refine AI prompts in order to get better suggestions
• Trump says he is "very disappointed" with Putin after a phone call regarding Ukraine
  • On July 2, the US paused weapons shipments to Ukraine
  • Today, President Trump spoke with President Putin of Russia, but made no progress towards a cease-fire
  • Putin expressed interest in talks but did not commit to a specific date to resume negotiations towards ending the war
• The warning signs for Russia's economy are flashing red
  • Russia recorded massive economic growth over the past two years, as war spending flooded the economy with cash
  • However, economic activity over the past several months has been weakening
    • Manufacturing activity is declining
    • Consumer spending is down
  • Officials are now openly warning that the economy may slip into recession
  • Although the economic hardship is unlikely to alter Putin's war aims in Ukraine, it shows that sanctions are having an effect
  • Another drag on the Russian economy is the low price of oil, a result of Trump's overall trade war
  • Recession warnings are the result of the central bank raising interest rates sharply to combat inflation as a result of wartime spending
  • Could result in the government having to bail out corporations who took on adjustable rate loans to pay for war production
• Trump increases pressure on the EU as the EU and US negotiate on a tariff agreement
  • Trump has set a self-imposed deadline for July 9 for countries to negotiate new trade agreements with the US
  • Has said that he will impose levies of 50-70% on imports from the EU on August 1 if a trade agreement is not in place
  • The August 1 date for collection of tariffs is interesting because it leaves open the possibility that negotiations could continue beyond the July 9 deadline
  • The US has struck trade deals with the UK, and with Vietnam
  • Also has an interim agreement with China
  • It's not clear how much tariff relief the EU will be able to secure for industries like steel and autos — sectors on which Trump has imposed sector-specific tariffs of up to 50%
  • EU officials believe that the Trump administration is grouping states into three categories
    • Countries that have reached a trade agreement with the US
      • Subject to 10% baseline tariffs
      • Might be able to secure reductions or exemptions from tariffs through further negotiations
    • Countries that are negotiating and are close to an agreement
      • Tariffs will increase
      • Will then reduce to whatever level is negotiated in the tariff agreement
    • Countries who are not negotiating or with whom negotiations are proceeding badly will see tariffs increase to a higher rate indefinitely
  • The US says that it is negotiating detailed trade agreements with a core group of trading partners
  • Countries that the US does not have as close a relationship with will have tariffs imposed on them unilaterally, according to Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary
  • EU negotiators are threading a needle, trying to come to an agreement with the US without giving away so much that EU member states balk at the agreement
• Xi Jinping has spent decades preparing China for a trade war with the US
  • Xi Jinping is seeking to secure a "strategic stalemate"
  • Is aware that the US has woken up to China as geopolitical competitor, and accepts that there will be ongoing US pressure on China
  • However, President Xi seeks to manage that pressure, ensuring that it does not threaten China's political stability while taking steps to allow China to catch up to the US
  • Has taken lessons from the Soviet collapse
    • Is not overinvesting in heavy industry
    • Working to build up alternative trade networks and international relations
    • Is maintaining the defense budget at at a sustainable level (roughly 1.5% of GDP) in order to avoid a costly arms race with the US
    • Focusing on ideological indoctrination and information control — cites loss of belief as a key cause of the Soviet collapse
  • Xi is convinced that, eventually, the strategic balance of power will shift in China's favor
  • Is portraying China as an example of calm and consistent leadership, to contrast with the mercurial decisions of the Trump administration
  • Has stepped up Chinese soft-power propaganda efforts, inviting Western influencers to spend time in China and showcase Chinese advances in electric vehicles
  • The Chinese government's pursuit of export-driven growth has led to economic stagnation over the past few years, with an increasingly deflationary cycle
  • However, for Xi Jinping, economic deflation may be an acceptable price to pay in order to ensure that China can sustain itself as a competitor to the US over the long term
  • This reinforces something that I've been saying for some time
  • For Xi Jinping, economic growth is merely a means to an end
  • The goal is Chinese geopolitical domination, at least of East and South Asia
  • Economic growth is necessary for that, but not sufficient, and Xi Jinping is wary of encouraging economic growth that doesn't enhance Chinese geopolitical power somehow
• Brandy has been hit hard by the trade war
  • China said it would introduce up to a 34.9% import duty on European brandy
  • This comes as the 90-day suspension of US tariffs is set to expire on July 9
  • Trade restrictions has hit cognac sales hardest
  • Cognac must be produced from specific grapes and aged in oak barrels in the Cognac region of France
  • Has gained signficant popularity in the US because of promotions by rappers as a symbol of luxury
  • Had similar growth in China among buyers drawn to it as a symbol of European sophistication and wealth
  • 97% of cognac production is sold outside of France
  • In response to tariffs, cognac manufacturers have considered moving bottling overseas, stoking labor tensions
• At least 24 dead, with hundreds missing, including over 20 children from a summer camp, as catastrophic floods hit Texas
  • Heavy rains caused the Guadalupe River to increase 26 feet in 45 minutes
  • The flash flood went through Camp Mystic, a Christian girls' summer camp located near Hunt, Texas
  • The region, known as the Texas Hill Country, is prone to flash-flooding, as the tall hills and narrow valleys mean that excess rainfall has nowhere to go
  • The rainstorm dropped as much as 6 months of rain in less than 12 hours
  • The region previously saw deadly floods in 1987, when 10 teenagers died attending a summer camp on the Guadalupe River
• Welcome to Dallas, the city that just can't stop expanding
  • In 1990, Frisco, a town north of Dallas, had a population of 6,000
  • Mostly agricultural land
  • It has since surpassed 250,000 people
  • City planners expect the city to reach a maximum population of 350,000
  • Frisco is the latest in a series of cities to feel massive growth as the Dallas metropolitan area expands
  • The Dallas metro area's greatest asset is its abundant land
  • City and state officials invested in building a massive road system, enabling growth in outlying areas
  • Frisco made deliberate investments to attract companies and real estate developers
  • Invested in its school district to attract highly educated workers
  • Examined location tracking and traffic analysis data to ensure that the city had all the amenities desired by its residents
  • Reached to to businesses in order to recruit them to Frisco and the North Dallas area
  • Many of the people moving to Dallas are coming from California
  • Far from bringing Californian liberalism, they are embracing Texan conservatism
  • Increasingly diverse — large South Asian community

2025-07-03 Thursday

• Chief executives petition the EU to delay the implementation of its AI rules
  • CEOs from companies such as Airbus, ASML and Mistral petitioned the European Commission to delay the full implementation of its AI Act
  • The AI Act was passed by the European Parliament on March 13, 2024
  • The letter from the CEOs petitioned the European Commission to introduce a two year delay in the full implementation of the AI Act
  • Several provisions related to governance and obligations for general-purpose AI were scheduled to come into effect next month
  • Letter argues that the EU's ability to build competitive AI models is being hampered by rushed and ill-considered regulation
• Meta offers to buy a minority stake in venture fund run by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross
  • Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross founded a venture fund named NFDG
  • Friedman and Gross were hired by Meta on June 30 to lead its new AI-focused Superintelligence Labs unit
  • Meta is offering to buy out the limited partners in the fund at the fund's current net asset valuation
  • NFDG has invested in other AI startups, such as Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI) and ElevenLabs, an AI voice generation firm
  • Meta is offering to cash out the other LPs in Friedman and Gross' venture fund so they'll be free to focus 100% on Meta's AI efforts
• Scientists say that Meta's AI tool raised false hopes about the feasibility of carbon removal
  • Meta trained an AI tool on properties of materials
  • Ran quantum mechanics simulations to generate a database of chemical structures
  • Then ran an AI tool over that database, and asked it to generate similar chemical structures
  • The idea here is that computationally intensive simulations only have to be done for a few materials
  • An AI trained over the materials for which detailed simulations have been performed should be able to develop heuristics that allow it to identify similar materials, even if no simulations have been performed for them
  • The tool found 135 candidate materials which it claimed could "strongly" bind to CO₂
  • However, none of the materials had that property
  • Some of the candidate materials did not exist, and were totally hallucinated
  • Meta replies that the purpose of the experiment was not specifically identify new materials, but rather to assess the ability of AI tools to generate candidates and screen for desirable properties
• The US-Vietnam trade deal offers relief but key provisions remain unclear
  • The US and Vietnam signed a trade deal yesterday
  • Vietnam agreed to allow US products into the country duty-free
  • US agreed to reduce the tariff on Vietnamese products to 20%, down from an initial tariff of 46%
  • However, several details of the deal still need to be finalized
  • Most notably, the deal does not define the standard used to determine whether a product is made in Vietnam or is being transhipped through the country
  • This is significant because transhipped goods are subject to a higher 40% tariff
  • In previous years, Vietnam had served as location where Chinese products could undergo final assembly in order to avoid US tariffs on China
  • The lack of clarity around transhipment puts that status at risk
• EU President Ursula von der Leyen says that a comprehensive US-EU trade deal is impossible before July 9
  • Says that the volume and complexity of trade flows between the US and EU make it impossible to have a full trade agreement in place by July 9
  • Instead the US and EU negotiators are working on a more general statement of principles that will be used to guide future negotiations
  • EU negotiators have said that a baseline tariff of 10% is probably unavoidable, but they are working to mitigate sector specific tariffs, such as the 50% tariff on steel imports and the 25% tariff on vehicles and vehicle parts
  • German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reiterated the importance of reaching an interim deal quickly, arguing that having a deal in place that offers certainty for important sectors such as the auto industry is more important than having a comprehensive trade agreement
  • The United States is considering extending sectoral tariffs on goods such as copper, lumber, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, which would cover a large portion of the trade between the US and EU
• South Korea expressed doubts that a trade deal can be signed before Trump's July 9 deadline
  • Said that it was doing its utmost to find a deal that would avoid 25% "reciprocal" tariffs
  • However, the government of Lee Jae Myung said that it was unlikely that a full deal could be agreed to before July 9
  • Lee's comments come in the wake of Trump threatening to raise tariffs on Japan
  • South Korea has said that it's willing to increase its purchases of American natural gas and defense equipment
  • Also is willing to invest in American shipbuilding
  • As with Japan, Korea is pushing for an exemption to the 25% tariff on auto imports
  • Korean exporters have also been affected by US tariffs on steel and household appliances
  • Are worried about forthcoming sectoral tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals
• Copper prices surge as traders rush to beat Trump's tariffs
  • The benchmark prices of copper on the London Metal Exchange (LME) rose to almost $10,000 a ton
  • High volumes of copper have flowed out of Asia and Europe into the US as importers have sought to build up inventories ahead of incoming tariffs
  • This reduction in inventory has resulted in sharply increased volatility in the price of copper
  • As a result, the LME has introduced new rules on the positions taken by large traders in an effort to ensure market stability
  • The increase in demand has been such that spot prices have risen above future prices, in a phenomenon known as "backwardation"
  • This has created the potential for severe losses for traders, as when futures contracts expire, they have to either be rolled forward or settled with physical deliveries
  • This means that traders would either need to renew their contracts at a loss or buy metal on the spot market to settle their contracts
  • The increase in demand for copper comes at a time when several copper mines have been hit by natural disasters, reducing production
• Trump and Zelensky hold phone call to discuss the pause in US weapons deliveries
  • On July 2, the US paused weapons deliveries to Ukraine
  • Trump said during the NATO summit that the US would consider selling more Patriot interceptors to Ukraine, but warned that supplies were low
  • Trump also spoke on the phone with Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour
  • However, he said that little progress had been made towards a peace deal
• China's latest naval ambitions are in the Yellow Sea
  • The Yellow Sea is especially important to China because Chinese naval vessels would need free movement through the Yellow Sea in order to attack Taiwan
  • On the other side of the Yellow Sea sit US bases in South Korea
  • As with Taiwan and the Philippines, Chinese vessels have increased their incursions into South Korean waters
  • The Yellow Sea is narrow enough that Chinese and South Korean exclusive economic zones overlap
  • 20 years ago, China and South Korea created the Provisional Measures Zone (PMZ) an area within the Yellow Sea where the two countries agreed to cooperate in fighting illegal fishing and cooperate on marine conservation
  • In May, Beijing declared the PMZ as a "no-sail zone" as it conducted military exercises with its most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian in the region
  • In addition, China has been building marine installations in the Yellow Sea
  • It says that these installations are for weather and marine research, but independent researchers suggest they could serve military purposes as well
  • Korean observers worry that China is pursuing a strategy similar to what it's doing in the South China Sea, where its construction of "artificial islands" has served to bolster its territorial claims
• China tries new tactics to influence the Philippines
  • Historically the Chinese navy and coast guard have pressured Filipino forces with regards to Chinese claims in the South China Sea
  • Now Chinese spies are conducting influence operations and espionage to gain more information about airbases and other land installations that could be used in a potential conflict against China
  • Chinese firms are pursuing political influence at the local level, hoping to undermine the national government's official opposition to Chinese naval claims and support for Taiwan
  • China is also seeking to use Filipinos of Chinese heritage as a point of leverage
  • Many of these espionage influence operations are coordinated by the United Front Work Department, a Chinese government agency that has coordinated influence campaigns in the US and Australia as well
  • Does this mean that, in the event of a future conflict with China, we'll have to intern Chinese-Americans, just as we did with Japanese-Americans during World War 2?
• Siemens, Synopsys and Cadence have stated that the Trump administration has allowed the resumption of sales of chip design software to China
  • On May 28, the Trump administration ordered the halt of sales of chip design software to China, in retaliation for Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports
  • However, with the renewed agreement reached in London, those restrictions have been lifted
• GOP holdouts threaten to sink Trump's budget bill
  • Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" has faced resistance from both the conservative and moderate wings of his party
  • Conservatives would like more spending cuts in order to avoid increasing the deficit
  • Moderates are worried about social safety net cuts, notably those to Medicaid
  • The GOP has a thin 220-212 majority in the House, so House Republican leaders can't afford more than four defections
  • Trump has been increasing the pressure on House Republicans with in-person meetings and social media posts
  • House Republicans are trying to get the bill passed ahead of a self-imposed July 4 deadline
• The House of Representatives passes Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"
  • Bill passed by a 218-214 margin
  • Two Republicans, along with all the Democrats, voted against the bill
  • Erases the expiration date for their tax cuts
  • Includes new work requirements for Medicaid
  • Reduces subsidies for green energy
  • Significantly increases the deficit, according to nonpartisan analysts
  • Passage of the bill overcame resistance from both fiscal hawks and those opposed to cuts to social safety net programs
• Wall Street worries as crisis-level deficits become the US government's norm
  • Even before the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill, deficits were approaching $2 trillion per year
  • In the past, these sorts of deficits were only seen in crisis situations, such as during wartime or economic recessions
  • Economists are concerned that the high baseline deficit level limits the government's ability to stimulate the economy if a crisis should hit
  • Deficits will result in higher interest rates on long-term government bonds
  • However, the Trump administration can mitigate this effect to a certain extent by increasing its issuance of shorter maturity bonds
  • Trump also maintains that increased economic growth will offset the effects of higher deficits
  • Which might be true, except for the part where his tariffs will act as a drag on economic growth
• The US economy added 147,000 jobs in June
  • Gain was higher than expected
  • Unemployment rate fell to 4.1%
  • However the rate of job growth fell, with most gains coming in state and local governments, who were hiring for education roles
  • Manufacturing employment fell, despite promises from President Trump that tariffs would increase employment in manufacturing
  • Growth in leisure and hospitality was flat, possibly indicating that Trump's crackdown on illegal immigrants is having an impact
  • The reduction in immigration could mean that fewer jobs need to be added to keep the unemployment rate down
• Shein hit with €40 million fine over misleading discounts
  • French regulations require discounts to reflect a price reduction compared to the lowest price charged over the previous 30 days
  • Regulators found that Shein increased prices before offering discounts, in a violation of the rules
  • Also found that Shein could not justify environmental claims made on its website
  • Shein, in turn, has stated that all pricing issues were resolved over a year ago
  • The European Commission has launched a separate investigation of Shein to determine whether it is systematically selling products that are illegal in the EU
  • Is also launching an investigation into Shein under the Digital Services Act
• China's growth targets cause headaches, even when they're met
  • Chinese GDP growth targets distort incentives
  • Results in local governments excessively subsidizing industries, leading to price wars that reduce profitability for everyone
  • As a result, Xi Jinping has issued guidance saying that GDP growth must be "high quality"
  • The uncertainty around the definition of "high quality" could lead to paralysis, as officials choose to do nothing rather than do something that will earn them a reprimand
• Glovo pauses "heat bonuses" for workers after backlash
  • Glovo is a food delivery app
  • Offered its gig workers bonuses for working in the heat
  • Bonuses ranged between 2% and 8% for making deliveries in heat greater than 32 °C
  • Was forced to pause the scheme after a public outcry against the perception that it was encouraging workers to put their health at risk by making bicycle deliveries during the hottest part of the day
  • In 2022, Glovo was ordered to provide water, rehydration salts, and sunscreen to its workers after several suffered heatstroke after working in extreme temperatures
  • Typical EU attitude
  • The workers will still be working during the heat, they'll just now be making less money
• Britain is a hot country, and should act like it
  • Days above 30 °C are increasingly common
  • Britain should reform its regulations to allow individuals and business to accommodate the increasing heat
    • Allow stores to have awnings in front
    • Allow air conditioning in new homes
    • Britain currently offers subsidies for heat pumps, but only if the produce heat — if they cool in the summer, they get no subsidy at all
    • Water regulations should be reformed to address drought and water insecurity
    • Roads should have more trees planted along them in order to ensure shade for pedestrians
  • Allowing more people to take vacations during the summertime would lead to greater domestic tourism
  • Changing climate has made growing wine grapes in England increasingly viable, but vineyards are often prohibited from expanding, even when they already own the land they would be expanding into
• Israel's weird war clock — 12 days for Iran, 21 months for Gaza
  • Unlike with Iran, Israel appears to be stuck in its war in Gaza
  • The Israeli government doesn't appear to have a good conception for what victory would look like
  • Has suffered from mission creep in its fight against Hamas
• Why all Indians are rule breakers
  • India has over 7,000 federal crimes
  • By comparison the US has only approximately 5000 federal crimes
  • Tax rules are incredibly complex
  • Ministers propose rules because they seem like good ideas without any thought to enforceability or long-term consequences
  • The end result is that almost everyone in India is a rule-breaker
  • Business growth is stifled because it is impossible to know which rules one has to follow and a growing business will attract unwanted official attention

2025-07-02 Wednesday

• OpenAI announces a $30 billion data center deal with Oracle
  • Oracle had announced the contract on June 30, but had left the buyer undisclosed
  • Today's annoucement confirms that the buyer is OpenAI
  • Potential locations for the new data center include Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania
  • Oracle also plans to expand the existing Stargate data center that it has under construction in Abilene, Texas
  • Will be purchasing approximately 400,000 of Nvidia's high-end GB200 chips for the Abilene data center
• Japan is proving difficult to make a trade deal with
  • Despite increasing pressure, Japanese negotiators have stood firm on a demand that the US lift its 25% tariff on Japanese vehicle imports
  • The trade standoff with Japan is emblematic of the difficulty that US negotiators have had with securing trade deals
  • Trump has set a deadline for July 9 for trade deals after he paused his "reciprocal tariffs"
  • Although some White House officials have indicated that a further extension could be considered, Trump himself has expressed a reluctance to extend the deadline further
  • The Trump administration's unilateral imposition of tariffs on certain sectors, such as steel and aluminum has complicated efforts to build comprehensive bilateral tariff agreements
  • Japanese officials, in particular, have stated that they want the same exception from steel and automotive tariffs that the UK received
  • Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is under significant domestic pressure, as Japan holds elections for its legislative upper house on July 20
  • The US sectoral tariffs on steel are also complicating negotiations with Canada and South Korea
  • US restrictions on transhipment from China are complicating negotiations with Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries
  • While the US and EU had appeared to make progress towards reaching an agreement on non-tariff trade barriers, recently EU President Ursula von der Leyen repudiated any agreement that would give the US a say in internal EU policy or decision-making
• The US and Vietnam have come to a trade agreement
  • Vietnam will drop all its tariffs on American goods
  • The US will impose a 20% tariff on Vietnamese products
  • However, goods transhipped through Vietnam will face a 40% tariff
  • The transhipment tariff is an effort to prevent Vietnam from being used as an alternative route into the US for Chinese products
  • Represents the second trade pact to be struck before a July 9 deadline, following the trade deal with the UK announced in May
  • Agreement will likely increase Vietnamese imports of US agricultural products
• The US halts weapons shipments to Ukraine
  • The US has stopped deliveries of air defense interceptors to Ukraine in order to pad US inventories
  • Decision was made following a Pentagon review of US military aid
  • Shipments had reached Poland when they were halted
  • Included
    • Interceptor missiles for Patriot batteries
    • Air-to-air missiles
    • Hellfire air-to-ground missiles
    • Surface-to-surface rockets
    • Artillery ammunition
    • Stinger surface-to-air missiles
  • So, in other words, everything
  • Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, didn't address the halt directly, but said that he was focused on providing the President with options to continue military assistance to Ukraine that were consistent with his goals of bringing the war to an end
  • Many outside analysts were puzzled by the halt, given that Trump had indicated at the NATO summit that he was prepared to sell additional Patriot batteries to Ukraine
  • The halt in Patriot ammunition is especially troubling for Ukraine, given that it is the only system in Ukraine capable of intercepting Russian hypersonic missiles
  • This halt comes in the wake of the Department of Defense redirecting anti-drone fuzes from Ukraine to the Middle East
• Microsoft lays off approximately 9000 workers
  • Layoffs had been previously announced on June 18, although Microsoft had left the size of the layoffs uncertain
  • Comes on top of a previous round of layoffs announced in May, bringing the total number of layoffs at Microsoft this year to over 15,000
  • Layoffs span geographies, levels, tenure and teams, according to a company spokesman
  • This is interesting because the announcement of the layoffs indicated that the layoffs would be concentrated in sales
• CEOs begin to admit that AI will kill jobs
  • Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Farley said that AI would likely replace half of all white-collar workers
  • Marianne Lake, head of JPMorgan Chase's consumer lending business argued that AI would reduce operational headcount by 10%
  • Come on top of remarks by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in June
  • In April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke said that managers would have to demonstrate that AI could not do the work before hiring new workers
  • Ssome, such as OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, argue that changes to employment are overblown and will take longer to percolate through the economy than people expect
  • However, even he said there would be some amount of job displacement
• Elon Musk is unfazed by Tesla's declining sales
  • Tesla's second quarter sales are down by 13.5% compared to last year
  • First quarter deliveries were down by a similar amount
  • Cybertruck sales have been disappointing
  • Tesla halted work on the design of a newer, more affordable model, the Model 2, last year
  • Trade disputes have impacted Tesla's ability to procure rare earth magnets for its electric motors
  • Trump administration policies have reduced the subsidies for EVs
  • Consumer preference for EVs in general has eroded, with Tesla's competitors, such as Ford, Kia and Hyundai all reporting declines in EV sales
  • However, Musk insists that all of these are temporary setbacks and Tesla's growth will resume with cybercabs and robots
• The US jobs market is starting to fall apart
  • Top-level numbers in the US jobs report appear good
  • Few layoffs
  • However, the growth rate of new jobs has slowed dramatically, especially for new graduates
  • Stagnant market — no one is getting laid off but there is little hiring as well
  • This could easily flip over into a declining job market should employers decide to start layoffs in response to tariffs or automation
  • ADP's payroll data indicates a sharp slowdown
  • Another reason the job market has been anemic has been the reduction in immigration
  • While fewer immigrants might mean fewer jobs need to be created in order to keep the unemployment rate down, it also means that economic growth overall is reduced
• SPACs make a comeback
  • During the pandemic, the Special Purpose Acquisition Corporation (SPAC) became a favored approach for taking private companies public
  • Process involves an investor listing a shell company on public markets, and then finding an unlisted company to merge with
  • Is an alternative to a traditional IPO
  • SPACs were great for the financiers and banks raising them, as they got to take a cut of the investment proceeds
  • Less great for retail investors who often had to endure losses investing in companies with shaky financials
  • Increases in interest rates were thought to have made SPACs obsolete
  • However, there has been a recent revival
  • Unlike the last wave of SPACs, which mainly focused on EV companies and delivery apps, this wave of SPAC mergers focuses on cryptocurrencies and AI
• Trump's plan to revive US shipbuilding runs into roadblocks
  • Shutdown of USAID has led to a reduction in cargoes for US-flagged ships
  • Cutbacks at the National Security Council led to the maritime policy coordination office being cut down to two staffers from seven
  • Trump's budget request for the Navy cuts down on the shipbuilding allocation, according to Senator Roger Wicker
  • Russ Vought, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) disputes Sen. Wicker's claim, stating that Navy would make up the funding via discretionary spending
  • The Trump administration has yet to appoint a head for the United States Maritime Administration, nor does have a chief of naval shipbuilding
• A majority of voters agree that President Trump now bears greater responsibility for economic performance than President Biden
  • Up until this month, Trump voters said that Biden was more responsible for the economy than Trump
  • Harris voters had said that the economy was Trump's responsibility starting in March
  • Trump's moves on immigration and trade policy have been major factors in voters deciding to give him responsibility for economic performance
  • Voters' outlook on the economy has taken a partisan cast, as economic indicators are mixed
  • Inflation is above the Federal Reserve's target, but job creation is acceptable and unemployment is down
• Methane tracking satellite backed by Google, Bezos and Musk is lost in space
  • The MethaneSAT satellite was launched in 2024 to monitor methane plumes from the oil and gas industry
  • Methane is a more potent (although shorter lived) greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and reducing methane emissions is an important part of combating climate change
  • Satellite tracking of methane prevents oil and gas companies from hiding methane leaks
  • MethaneSAT suffered a power failure, and the ground crew responsible for communicating with the satellite said that recovery was probably impossible
  • It is unclear whether a second satellite will be launched
• Armor maker Kevlar targeted by private equity in rush for DuPont's assets
  • Private equity groups Advent International and Platinum Equity are bidding on a number of assets being shed by DuPont as it undergoes a broad corporate breakup
  • Among those brands are Kevlar and Nomex
  • DuPont is shedding assets as it seeks to reposition itself as a diversified industrials group with an emphasis on materials science and engineering
  • Will also spin off its electronics division as a separate listed company by November
  • DuPont announced the breakup plan last year, as it sought to take advantage of a sum-of-parts discount and return cash to shareholders
  • The plan largely undoes the merger of Dow and DuPont
• Ferrari's valuation is less like a carmaker's and more like a fashion designer's
  • Ferrari's market captialization has grown impressively since it was spun off from Fiat-Chrysler
  • Much of this success can be attributed to the strategy of Bernadetto Vigna
  • Non-traditional CEO who came to Ferrari from STMicroelectronics, an electronics firm
  • Has been successful in raising prices and margins for its new cars
  • Uses limited editions of existing models to generate novelty during long gaps between new models
  • 80% of Ferrari customers are repeat buyers
  • Ferrari's latest flagship, the F80, was 3-times oversubscribed for its production run of 799 cars
  • Customers are chosen by Ferrari, on the basis of their brand loyalty, for an opportunity to buy flagship or limited edition cars
  • This is similar to how high-end fashion designers like Hermes operate — being allowed to buy a F80 is an even more exclusive honor than being allowed to buy a Birkin
  • Ferrari's customer base is the ultra-rich who tend to be shielded from economic downturns
  • Has limited exposure to China, meaning that downturns in the Chinese economy won't affect it as much as other high-end luxury brands
  • The biggest challenge for Ferrari will be maintaining its exclusivity and cachet as it transitions to electric powertrains
• Heathrow fire caused by "catastrophic failure" in substation
  • An official review found that moisture had entered bushings of the electrical transformer that failed
  • High moisture levels had been detected as early as 2018, however, mitigating actions were deferred
  • Readings indicated an imminent fault, which, per protocol would require the bushings to be replaced right away
  • However, due to a missed step in the process, the high moisture readings were not translated into action, and further maintenance of the substation was carried out in ignorance of the high moisture readings
  • The National Grid's review also found the fire was so severe that an automatic fire suppression system would not have prevented the destruction of the substation
  • If you don't schedule the downtime, the downtime will schedule you

2025-07-01 Tuesday

• China is rapidly erasing the US's lead in the global AI race
  • Chinese companies are rapidly catching up to leading US firms in developing cutting-edge AI
  • Worldwide, firms are increasingly turning to Chinese AI models as an publicly available alternative to proprietary models offered by American firms
  • HSBC and Standard Chartered have begun commercial testing of DeepSeek's models
  • The low running costs of Chinese models have enhanced their appeal in developing countries, even though the models aren't as good as models offered by leading American firms
  • The Chinese government is providing subsidies to build an AI supply chain that is resilient against American sanctions and export controls
  • The loss of the Chinese market due to export controls has meant reduced revenue for western developers of AI models and AI computer chips
    • A Jeffries estimate forecast that US export controls banning exports of Nvidia's H20 chip to China would cost it nearly $10 billion in revenue
    • Adoption of Chinese models would mean lost market-share and earnings for US AI firms seeking to expand overseas
  • Another advantage for Chinese models is that they're available to run on private infrastructure, allowing users to keep their data on their own systems
  • OpenAI has publicly warned that Chinese AI firms, such as Ziphu, are locking developing countries into Chinese standards
  • There's a contradiction here — if Chinese models are succeeding by being more open and more flexible, then how can they be locking users into Chinese AI standards?
  • It seems that OpenAI is whining that there are open-weight alternatives to its low-end models that enable users to use AI on their own data, on their infrastructure, without paying OpenAI
  • Chinese gains have been helped by Chinese firms' emphasis on building practical applications over pursuing ever-more capable foundation models
  • This helps them in the short run, but might hurt them in the long run as they'll be behind if OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc, make a theoretical breakthrough that enables much more powerful models
• AI talent wars lead to superstar salaries for top staff
  • OpenAI has told its staff that it is seeking creative ways to reward top talent after seeing a large number of departures to rival AI outfits, notably to Meta
  • While some pay packages for top scientists are over $10 million a year, $3 million to $7 million a year are more common
  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives are discussing counteroffers individually with top OpenAI researchers, in an effort to persuade them to remain at OpenAI
  • OpenAI is leaning on its reputation as a leading AI research organization in an effort to persuade researchers into staying, despite higher offers elsewhere
  • AI organizations without the budget or name recognition of OpenAI, such as AI image generator HuggingFace are turning to Europe to find talent at lower salaries than in the US
• The US Senate overwhelmingly rejects a ban on state-level regulation of AI
  • An amendment proposing a 10-year ban on state-level regulation of AI was introduced as an amendment to the budget bill
  • Proponents, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the White House's AI czar, David Sacks, said the ban was necessary to prevent the US from stifling AI innovation with a patchwork of state-level rules
  • However, the amendment encountered widespread bipartisan opposition, and was voted down 99-1
• The tech stock bargains hiding in Nvidia's shadow
  • Nvidia's role in enabling the AI boom has caused its share price to soar to record highs, taking its market cap to an all-time high of $4 trillion
  • However, there are a number of lesser-known companies which stand to benefit from the AI boom, whose share prices have not jumped as high
  • Increased demand for chips should eventually require increased capital expenditures, resulting in greater revenue for companies such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, whose products support the chip manufacturing process
  • One reason for the current divergence in the share prices between chip designers such as Nvidia and AMD and chip manufacturing companies, such as Applied Materials is that the latter have been hurt by reduced sales in China because of US export controls
  • While the market for AI chips has exploded, demand for other semiconductor products remains weak
  • However, these are short term dynamics taking place within a longer-term trend of increasing demand for chips
  • One thing I would caution is that it can be hard to choose winners here
  • A good example is the divergence between SK Hynix and Samsung
  • SK Hynix has benefited from an early technological lead in developing high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, placing it perfectly to capture increasing demand for GPU memory
  • Samsung, meanwhile, has been in the doldrums because it doesn't have the same HBM lead as SK Hynix, meaning its business is more exposed to broader industry dynamics, such as reduced demand for cell phones and computers in the wake of the pandemic
• Kim Jong-Un publicly mourns North Korean troops killed fighting for Russia
  • Held a public ceremony commemorating those killed fighting for Russia in its war against Ukraine
  • Ceremony aimed at suppressing dissent against the deployment of North Koreans in support of Russia and preparing the public for future deployments
  • According to South Korean estimates, approximately 600 North Koreans have died on the battlefield
• Donald Trump threatens to raise tariffs on Japan
  • Trump escalated his trade war rhetoric days before his 90-day pause was set to expire
  • Says that if Japan doesn't make more concessions he will unilaterally impose a 30-35% tariff on all Japanese products
  • The original "liberation day" tariff rates on Japan was 24%
  • This tariff, like the other tariffs announced that day, was suspended for 90 days in order to allow negotiations to take place
  • Japanese products currently face a 10% baseline tariff
  • However, cars face a 25% tariff, and steel and aluminum imports face a 50% tariff
  • Trump is seeking to force Japan into allowing greater imports of American rice and cars
• US negotiators are narrowing their focus in an effort to strike deals before July 9
  • US negotiators are seeking narrow agreements focused on tariffs in order to avoid the reimposition of the "reciprocal" tariffs outlined by Trump in his "liberation day" speech
  • Piecemeal phased agreements to allow the US to claim that deals have been struck, even though full implementation and details have yet to be worked out
  • Countries that agree to narrow agreements would be spared reciprocal tariffs, but would be subject to the 10% baseline tariff while negotiations continue
  • Complicating negotiations are the Section 232 national security investigations that have been launched into sectors such as copper, lumber, aerospace parts, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals
  • These investigations are often the prelude to sector-specific tariffs, which would override any bilateral tariff deal
  • The only comprehensive trade deal the US has struck has been with the UK
  • Also has an interim agreement with China
• Hyundai seeks to ride Chinese coattails to increase its market share in Europe
  • Hyundai is seeking to replicate its success with EVs in the US in Europe
  • Executives argue that the growth of Chinese brands in Europe represents an opportunity, not a threat
  • Shows that brand loyalties haven't solidified with EVs, allowing Hyundai an entrance
  • Hyundai has been seeking to grow its sales in Europe, Southeast Asia and North America after a decline in sales in China
  • Is also facing pressure from Chinese brands in its home market
• Companies are shrinking package sizes in an effort to retain customers
  • Companies are increasing the range of product sizes on offer in an effort cater to more price-conscious consumers
  • Instead of raising prices, companies are introducing smaller package sizes
  • Smaller-sized offerings often have higher margins, but can also result in more overhead
  • Also runs into resistance from retailers who have been working to reduce the number of products they stock in order to reduce shelf space and make inventory management simpler
  • This is a strategy that these companies have often pursued in developing countries, where consumers are extremely price-conscious
  • However, the strategy is new to the US
• The problematic politics of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"
  • One of the reasons that Republicans have struggled to unite behind cuts to Medicaid is because so many more Republicans represent working-class constituencies
  • Today it is the Democratic Party which represents higher-income people, while the Republican Party has taken over representing the working class
  • This represents a total reversal from the 2000s
  • Although the Big Beautiful Bill cuts Medicaid, it does so by less than previous Republican proposals
  • Cuts to Medicaid are seen as more politically viable than cuts to retirement benefits, such as Medicare and Social Security
  • Republican political analysts are warning that cuts to Medicaid could result in marginal Republican districts flipping to Democratic control, depriving the Republicans of their majority in the House
• Elise Stefanik proposes major changes to private equity valuations
  • As part of her investigation into Harvard University's disclosures, Representative Elise Stefanik is arguing that the methods that endowments use to value private equity assets are flawed
  • Argues that the actual realizable value of Harvard's private equity investments is much less than Harvard discloses to bondholders, because the value of those investments has not been adjusted to account for higher interest rates and declining valuations
  • However, Harvard does not develop those valuations itself — relies on the private equity firms themselves to disclose valuations
  • Thus Stefanik's questioning could lead to a wholesale revision in how private equity investments are valued
  • Outside investors in private equity are allowed to use the funds' own reported Net Asset Value (NAV), even though the funds have a clear incentive to overstate the values of their holdings
  • Some investment funds have exploited this by purchasing shares of private equity fund at a discount on private markets and then immediately increasing their valuation to NAV, booking an increase in value that may be illusory
  • The SEC could cut down on this loophole by forcing purchasers of private equity shares to conduct their own indpendent fair value assessments, as is already required of other illiquid and hard-to-value assets
• Palmer Luckey and Peter Thiel launch Erebor, a new bank to replace Silicon Valley Bank
  • A group of investors led by Palmer Luckey are planning on launching a new bank, Erebor
  • Like many of Thiel's other ventures, Erebor is a reference to Lord of the Rings — is the mountain where the dragon Smaug kept his treasure
  • Erebor would seek to replace the services of Silicon Valley Bank, a startup friendly bank which went out of business in a 2023 bank run
  • Like its predecessor, Erebor would provide services to underserved businesses, notably those involved in cryptocurrency
  • Would also act as a bridge for foreign businesses seeking to gain access to the US financial system
• California overhauls environmental law in a bid to boost home construction
  • The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) was passed in 1972, under the governorship of Ronald Reagan
  • Requires state and local governments to conduct environmental reviews before approving new construction
  • Critics have stated that the CEQA gives local residents a veto over any new construction, by enabling them to file endless legal challenges
  • As a result home construction has declined significantly in California, leading to dramatically higher prices and rents
  • The reforms passed today exempt most new construction within existing city limits from CEQA review
  • Enables infill construction and redevelopment
• Britain's royal family gives up its luxury train in the name of fiscal restraint
  • The royal family's private train will be taken out of service and sent to a museum in 2027
  • A review determined that two helicopters could provide equivalent transport options at a lower price
  • Although the royal family's personal finances are in good standing, the ongoing deficits and austerity of the British government has meant that a luxury train is out of step with the public image the royals wish to keep
  • The importance of the train has declined since the death of Queen Elizabeth
• The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issues a warning about leaking the details of merger negotiations
  • The FCA found that nearly 40% of mergers in the UK were reported in the media before they were finalized
  • Officials believe that the increase in reporting is due to "strategic leaks" by companies seeking an advantage in merger negotiations
• Poland to introduce border controls on German border
  • Poland is introducing border controls against Germany in retaliation for border controls introduced last year
  • Poland is seeking redress from the European Commission, which it says has been too lenient with states that introduced border controls in the wake of the wave of refugees from Syria, but never lifted them after the crisis was over
• How The Red Brigades Terrorized Italy
  • Throughout the 1970s, Italy was convulsed by a series of bombings and assassinations
  • Carried out by a variety of left-wing terror groups
  • The most feared of these were the Brigati Rossi, or Red Brigades (BR)
  • On March 16, 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, after killing his 5-man police and carabineri escort
  • After holding him for 55 days in a "people's prison", he was summarily executed, and his body was found in the trunk of a Renault 4
  • John Foot, a professor of history at Bristol University, has written a new book examining the Red Brigades and this period in Italian history: The Red Brigades: The Terrorists Who Brought Italy To Its Knees
  • Behind the terror campaign lay a paranoid belief among left-wing groups in Italy that Italy was primed for a second fascist dictatorship
  • Sought to spark a left-wing Communist revolution in Italy to preempt the fascist takeover
  • Carried out shootings and bombings of conservative journalists and businessmen
  • Movement eventually petered out in the 1980s, as the Red Brigades increasingly came to resemble the Mafia
  • This is the real counterargument to punching Nazis

2025-06-30 Monday

• Mark Zuckerberg announces new Meta "Superintelligence Labs" unit focused on AI
  • Formalizes the structure that Zuckerberg had been building inside Meta with an intense recruiting blitz
  • Will consolidate Meta's foundational AI efforts and AI-enabled application development efforts into a single organization
  • Will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexsandr Wang
  • Product work will be led by former Github CEO Nat Friedman
  • Zuckerberg also announced 11 new hires for the team, with many hailing from Meta's AI rivals, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic
• Amazon is on the cusp of using more robots than humans in its warehouses
  • The retailer has deployed over a million robots in its warehouses, approaching the number of human workers it employs
  • Has replaced menial lifting and pulling tasks with more skilled labor managing machines
  • Enabled Amazon to increase the number of packages shipped per employee to 3,870, up from 175 in 2015
  • Amazon is also rolling out AI technologies in its warehouse to better place highly-demanded items
  • Robotics initiative began in 2012 with its purchase of Kiva Systems, a robotics manufacturer
  • Since then Amazon has steadily increased both the number and sophistication of its robots, moving from moving large boxes and pallets up to picking and sorting individual items
  • Has been testing humanoid robots to handle tasks that more specialized robots have difficulty with, such as recycling containers
  • Slowed hiring at warehouses
  • The deployment of robots has created new jobs in mechatronics
  • Worker advocates have expressed concerns about the long-term future of warehouse work
• Oracle shares hit record high on announcement of $30 billion cloud contract
  • The customer of the contract was not disclosed, but many suspect that it's OpenAI
  • Oracle has been a primary beneficiary of capacity constraints at Microsoft, which has prompted OpenAI, among others, to look to other providers for compute infrastructure
  • Oracle is one of the partners in the Stargate initiative, an effort to spend $500 billion on AI-focused data center infrastructure in the US
  • However, the majority of the investment in Stargate is expected to come from other firms
• Canada rescinds digital services tax in an effort to restart trade negotiations with the US
  • Last year the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau passed a digital services tax targeting revenue collected from Canadians by online firms based elsewhere
  • On June 27, as the tax was about to go into effect, Trump halted trade negotiations with Canada because of the tax
  • Today, Mark Carney's government said that it would be suspending collection of the tax and would be introducing legislation to formally rescind the tax
  • National Council of Economic Advisors director Kevin Hassett has stated that the US would resume trade negotiations with Canada
• Chinese rare earths are flowing, but not freely
  • European customers of Chinese rare earths say that they have enough export licenses to avoid widespread disruptions
  • However, products targeted for re-export to the US are having more trouble getting export licenses
  • European automakers, such as Volkswagen and Stellantis have reported that they have acquired enough export license from to avoid widespread disruptions
  • Ford CEO Jim Farley said in an interview that Ford had to curtail production because of magnet shortages, without elaborating on specifics
  • However, the Chinese government is still not approving the full amount of rare earths exports requested by Western firms
  • Pretty similar to this Wall Street Journal article from June 26
• For Iran's nuclear program, a month is longer than it sounds
  • The debate over how much US and Israeli strikes delayed Iran's nuclear program has ignored the political calculation for Iran's leaders
  • If the Iranian leadership moves to acquire a nuclear weapon, it would be betting that it could do so in secrecy and establish deterrence before Israel and the US mounted a military response
  • Even a delay of two or three months could significantly increase the risk of detection, potentially dissuading such a breakout effort
  • Before the war, analysts assumed that it could take Iran two to three months to create a crude nuclear weapon deliverable by truck or ship and one to three years to create a weapon that could be fit on top of a missile
  • The US and Israeli strikes may have increased that timeline several months
  • However, the strikes may also have convinced Iran's leadership that the only way to guarantee their long-term security is to pursue nuclear deterrence
  • Iran's leaders might also pursue a dual-track — engage in diplomacy while pursuing a nuclear weapon in secret
  • I discount the dual-track approach because, as we saw with the war that just concluded, the US and Israel can also pursue a dual-track of their own, engaging in military strikes while negotiations are ongoing
  • Before the war, Iran had amassed a stockpile of partially enriched uranium sufficient for 10 nuclear bombs if enrichment were completed
  • Has tested and developed many of the ancillary components for a nuclear bomb
  • However, experts do not believe that Iran has started the work to miniaturize a nuclear weapon to make it fit on top of a missile
  • Ultimately, Iran's next steps depend on decisions taken by its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
• UK antitrust officials are investigating Boeing's takeover of Spirit Aerosystems
  • Last year Boeing announced a deal to reacquire Spirit Aerosystems, its fuselage supplier
  • Spirit Aerosystems was spun out of Boeing in 2005
  • However, recently Spirit has had quality problems with manufacturing, culminating in the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout
  • As a result, Boeing agreed to reacquire Spirit in a $4.7 billion deal, with Airbus taking on some of Spirit's European facilities
  • The UK's Competition & Markets Authority launched an initial investigation of the deal to see if it stifles competition in the UK
  • Will decide by August 28 whether a full investigation needs to be launched
• Donald Trump lifts most sanctions on Syria
  • Donald Trump signed an executive order today lifting the sanctions today
  • Had announced the sanctions relief on May 14, after a meeting with the new Syrian leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Riyadh, along with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman
  • Expressed hopes that, in time, Syria could join the Abraham Accords and reopen diplomatic ties with Israel
• Boeing announces a new CFO as part of its turnaround plan
  • Jesus "Jay" Malave will be replacing outgoing CFO Brian West
  • West will remain as an adviser to CEO Kelly Ortberg
• Google signs deal to purchase fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems
  • Commonwealth Fusion is developing a fusion reactor that produces energy using the same process as the sun
  • Was spun out of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center
  • Seeks to produce fusion via a tokamak fusion process using new high-temperature superconducting magnets
  • No one has successfully demonstrated a fusion reactor that generates more energy than it takes to start
  • Unlike nuclear fission, fusion does not produce long-lived radioactive waste
  • Deal comes in the wake of Microsoft signing a deal with Helion Energy in 2023 which stipulates the beginning of power production in 2028
  • Google has sought to acquire more clean energy sources in order to achieve a net-zero goal by 2030
• Home Depot signs $5.5 billion deal for building products distributor GMS
  • Home Depot kicked off a bidding war with QXO over building products retailer GMS
  • Increases Home Depot's market share in the commercial building supplies business
  • Slows Brad Jacob's QXO's efforts to build a large commercial building supplies conglomerate
  • Under the terms of the deal, GMS will have to pay Home Depot $147.5 million if it chooses to cancel the deal and pursue a merger with another company
  • Home Depot will have to pay GMS $230 million if the deal does not win regulatory approval
  • Home Depot had acquired another commercial building supplies vendor, SRS, last year
  • Its aquisition of GMS will allow it to merge SRS and GMS into a single nationwide commercial building products wholesaler
• The worst housing market in the US is Cape Coral, Florida
  • A surge of homebuyers lifted property values in Cape Coral
  • Led to a rush of new homes being built
  • Now, as pandemic era remote work flexibility has faded, Cape Coral housing prices are down by 11% and still falling
  • Home prices have declined for 12 out of the past 13 months
  • In addition to elevated mortgage rates, Cape Coral is feeling the effects of increasing insurance prices in Florida, as a result of increasing levels of damaging weather
  • Homebuilders have noticed the decline in property values and are offering half-finished homes as-is at a discount

2025-06-29 Sunday

• Nvidia executives cash out over $1 billion worth of shares
  • Over the past 12 months, Nvidia executives have sold over $1 billion worth of stock
  • Sellers include CEO Jensen Huang, who started selling shares for the first time since last September
  • Nvidia responds that Huang's sales are part of a prearranged selling plan where he cashes out stock as it meets certain price thresholds
  • At current prices, Huang's sales would earn him more than $900 million
• Russia masses 50,000 troops around Sumy, putting Ukraine in a precarious position
  • Russian forces are massing around Sumy, a Ukrainian regional capital in the north of the country
  • Sumy is across the border from Kursk Oblast, where Ukrainian forces launched an incursion into Russian territory last year
  • Russian forces have sought to broaden the front-line in Ukraine in order to stretch Ukrainian defenses and open up weak spots
  • Ukrainian forces have expressed confidence that they won't be overrun in the immediate future
  • However, some Ukrainian soldiers have expressed disappointment that more fortifications weren't built around Sumy while they were holding Russian territory in Kursk
• Lindsey Graham was a key persuader in convincing Trump to strike Iran
  • Many in Trump's inner circle were wary of US involvement in Israel's war against Iran, arguing that striking Iran risked drawing the US into yet another long-term Middle-East entanglement
  • Graham persuaded Trump by saying that a successful strike on Iran would restore America's image, which had been damaged by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan
  • I hate this reasoning — it's this kind of neoconservative face-oriented reasoning that got us into Iraq
  • Also argued that a potentially nuclear-armed Iran would launch a preemptive strike against the United States, unlike North Korea
  • Graham has long pursued a more active US foreign policy, especially with regards to Iran and Ukraine
  • However, with Ukraine, he has had less success in persuading President Trump to increase support
• Trump's fiscal policy and attacks on the Federal Reserve put the US dollar's "safe haven" status at risk
  • Investors are increasingly shying away from the US dollar, and are putting their assets in commodities like gold
  • Also investing in the Swiss Franc
  • Declines in US markets were coupled with declines in the value of the US dollar, a pattern normally only seen in emerging markets
• Israel-aligned hackers have crippled Iran's financial system
  • Israeli authorities and a pro-Israel hacking group nicknamed "Predatory Sparrow" targeted Iranian financial organizations, specifically focusing on institutions, such as cryptocurrency exchanges, that could help Iranians evade international sanctions
  • Drained more than $90 million from the largest Iranian crypto exchange, Nobitex, forcing it offline
  • Disabled online banking services and cash machines for Bank Sepah, which serves Iran's armed forces, halting pension payments to veterans
  • Pro-Iranian hackers retaliated with denial of service attacks against Israeli government websites and mass phishing campaigns
  • Predatory Sparrow has targeted Iranian cyber-infrastructure for years
  • In the past it has disabled gas station payment systems across the country and caused a fire at a steel plant
• Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promises a crackdown on student protests against his government
  • Previous coverage from The Economist
  • Protests against his government began last year when a railway station roof in Novi Sad collapsed, killing 16
  • Protests began, as people blamed the collapse on substandard construction enabled by government corruption
  • Saturday's protests devolved into violence, with protestors throwing rocks and bottles at riot police who responded with tear gas and baton charges

2025-06-28 Saturday

• Intel's chief strategy officer to depart
  • Chief Strategy Officer, Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah will be leaving Intel
  • Departure comes as part of new CEO Lip-bu Tan's efforts to flatten Intel's management hierarchy
  • Yeboah-Amankwah's job functions will be split among the CEO and CTO's offices
• How coupons became passé even in a high-price world
  • RRD, a marketing and digital services firm, estimated that last year, only 50 billion coupons were distributed, as compared to 330 billion in 2010
  • People have less time to clip coupons
  • The number of coupons issued has been declining since the 1990s, with a brief resurgence during the 2008 financial crisis
  • Retailers have also sought to reduce the expense of processing coupons by limiting the number of coupons customers can redeem in a day
  • Target and Walmart say that coupons can induce abrupt spikes in demand that make it difficult to keep certain products in stock
  • Customers have become less price-sensitive over time — fewer people plan grocery trips around which coupons they have
  • Emphasis on cost-cutting has shifted to loyalty programs and credit card rewards points
  • Many influencers who became famous for "extreme couponing" have pivoted to demonstrating how to use maximize benefits from hotel and airline loyalty programs

2025-06-27 Friday

• OpenAI begins to use Google's TPUs for inference
  • Until now OpenAI had been exclusively using Nvidia GPUs for both training and inference
  • Has begun using Google's TPUs for inference in an effort to lower costs
  • Comes in the wake of OpenAI's announcement that it will rent compute capacity from Google Cloud
  • Deal is a win for Google, which has been seeking external customers for its custom-designed AI chips
  • However, Google will not be making its most powerful TPUs available to OpenAI
  • Other customers of Google's TPUs include Apple, Anthropic and Safe Superintelligence Inc
• Truck operators were hoping for a recovery; instead they got a trade war
  • Truck operators were seeing a nascent recovery from the 2022 supply glut that reduced prices and drove several shipping firms out of business
  • However, Trump's trade war has put that recovery at risk
  • Freight demand is expected to stay relatively flat as the industry heads into the busy part of the year, as retailers bring in inventory for back-to-school and Christmas
  • Retailers had brought in additional inventory at the beginning of the year, before Trump's tariffs went into effect
  • Domestic manufacturing has experienced a contraction, resulting in less domestic demand for shipping
  • Freight fees continue to decline from their 2022 post-pandemic highs
  • As a result, demand for new trucks is down, with trucking companies placing the fewest orders for new trucks in more than 5 years
• Trump halts trade talks with Canada
  • Trump suspended trade talks with Canada over Canada's proposed Digital Services Tax
  • The tax would have taxed US technology companies on the revenue they made in Canada
  • Tax is retroactive to 2022, and would result in large initial payments, due Monday
  • Opposition to the tax was a key factor in several tech executives, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, muting their criticism of Trump
• Trump says he will pick a Federal Reserve chairman who will only cut interest rates
  • Trump continued his attack on the Federal Reserve, saying that if he suspected a potential nominee would increase rates or even keep them steady, he would nominate someone else
  • Argued that interest rates should be cut to 1%
  • However, the chairman of the Federal Reserve does not have unilateral power to set rates — rates must be approved by the 12 other governors of the Federal Reserve branches
  • Trump's threats to nominate someone who will take an ideological approach to interest thus just would serve to weaken the chair
• Senate effort to restrain Trump's war powers in Iran fails
  • Senate Democrats introduced a resolution seeking to prevent President Trump from taking further military action in Iraq
  • Argued that Trump's actions encroached on the power to declare war, which is reserved to Congress by the Constitution
  • Republicans, however, said that Trump's actions were well within precedent for unilateral military actions authorized by the Commander in Chief
  • Resolution failed on a largely party-line 47-53 vote, with Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul dissenting from the Democratic and Republican parties respectively
  • I have to side with the Trump Administration on this one
  • Trump's actions in Iran are well within the envelope established by George W. Bush and Barack Obama regarding US interventions in the Middle East
• Hamas faces many challenges as it tries to maintain control of the Gaza Strip
  • While Hamas is still capable of killing Israeli soldiers in ambushes, it is not the organized coherent fighting force it was in 2023 when it launched its attack on Israel
  • Hamas' chief rivals for Gaza are Bedouin tribes, among whom Abu Shabab's group is the strongest
  • There are questions about Shabab's collaboration with Israel
  • While Hamas would welcome a cease-fire, it is loath to do so on terms that would appear to be capitulation
  • Hamas is doing its best to hold on and stay relevant so that any post-war governance plan for Gaza would include a role for it
  • Is also grappling with the loss of Iranian support due to Israel's successful war against Iran
• Trump claims victory as the Supreme Court limits nationwide injunctions
  • The 6-3 decision overruled a lower court injunction on Trump's suspension of birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrant parents
  • The majority opinion stated that lower court injunctions should only apply to the district they were issued in, and that district courts did not have the right to rule for the nation as a whole
  • The dissent stated that disallowing nationwide injunctions from district courts opened the door to legal chaos, as federal mandates would have different enforceability in different parts of the country
  • I agree with the dissent — it doesn't make sense for the e.g. the 9th district to give California an opt-out from certain federal mandates while the 5th district mandates that they be enforced in Texas
• Sinaloa cartel hackers tapped phone data and surveillance cameras to track FBI informants
  • According to an audit published by the Department of Justice's inspector general's office, the Sinaloa cartel managed to obtain the phone number of an FBI legal attaché working at the US Embassy in Mexico City
  • Tapped the phone system to trace calls to and from that person's number
  • Obtained geolocation data which they correlated with Mexico City's citywide system of surveillance cameras to trace the movements of this person and see who they were meeting with
  • This tracing allowed the Sinaloa cartel to identify informants, and, at least in some cases, kill them
  • The audit highlights the problem posed by "ubiquitous technical surveillance", a term for the collection of increasingly fine-grained data from people's phones combined with the widespread presence of closed-circuit television cameras
  • This omnipresent passive surveillance poses a challenge for spies and police agencies who have to work with confidential sources
  • The audit says that the FBI is implementing a plan to mitigate the effects of this surveillance, including providing more training for Bureau officials posted outside the US
  • Welcome to the bold cyberpunk future
  • Also, I have little sympathy for the FBI, because the monitoring capabilities that were used to trace this agent are ones that the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies worldwide, specifically requested from telecom equipment vendors, over the objections of privacy activists
  • Turnabout is fair play; if they can use telecoms surveillance to track ordinary citizens, then they can't complain when criminals use the same surveillance capabilities to track them
• Bank regulators reduce the severity of stress tests
  • The Federal Reserve used a less intense theoretical recession than it did last year to assess whether banks were adequately capitalized
  • The Federal Reserve also agreed to average the results of the last two years' stress tests in calculating whether banks are adequately capitalized, reducing the volatility of stress test results
  • Combined with increases in the maximum allowed leverage ratio, this allows banks to reduce the capital they have on hand against economic shocks
  • Allows for more share buybacks and greater dividends to shareholders
• Lotus plans to end production in the UK
  • The British sports car manufacturer, now owned by Chinese automaker Geely, plans to end production at its factory in Hethel
  • In response to US tariffs, Lotus announced that it plans to manufacture more cars in the US
  • Lotus has struggled with a pivot towards high-end electric vehicles
  • The closure of the factory would mean the loss of 1,300 jobs
• "Superwood", made from processed waste wood scraps, shows promise as a new building material
  • Superwood, made by startup InventWood, treats and compresses wood so that it becomes denser and stronger than regular wood
  • Beams made by layering superwood along with conventional lumber have demonstrated strength comparable to steel I-beams
  • Superwood's initial application will probably be for siding, which doesn't require as many certifications as structural building materials
  • After that InventWood intends to make high-strength wooden beams for buildings
  • Although Superwood can in theory be used to manufacture consumer products, machining it requires new techniques

2025-06-26 Thursday

• China is still choking exports of rare earths despite US trade pact
  • On June 11 the US and China reached a deal to restore their interim trade agreement
  • Part of this deal was a Chinese agreement to restore exports of rare earths minerals and magnets made from rare earths
  • However, Chinese officials are dragging their feet on actually removing the export restrictions
  • Exports have increased, but not by enough to allow Western firms to rebuild inventories
  • Chinese officials are asking for sensitive details, such as product designs, ostensibly to ensure that exported rare earth magnets are not used for military purposes
  • Companies that refuse to provide proprietary intellectual property on rare earths applications are seeing those applications be delayed or even denied outright
  • The Chinese government also appears to be preventing stockpiling by asking customers for the "business reasons" behind large orders
  • The Chinese government understands that rare earths exports are their most powerful bargaining point, and are doing everything they can do to preserve it for future trade negotiations
• Trump says US-China trade truce has been signed
  • Trump says that the informal agreement reached in London two weeks ago has been formalized and signed
  • According to Chinese officials the deal instructs the Chinese government to lift restrictions on "controlled items" (presumably meaning rare earths)
  • In exchange the US will lift "restrictive measures"
  • However, the specific details on what export restrictions would be lifted by the US were not disclosed
• US exports drop by the greatest amount since 2020
  • US trading partners cut back their purchases US products, anticipating retaliatory tariffs
  • US exports had increased in advance of the announcement of Trump's "liberation day" tariffs, and this decline reflects the unwinding of that trade
• Friedrich Merz is warned that a EU trade deal will not include a carve-out for the German automotive sector
  • Merz had been pushing for EU negotiators to ask for a trade deal similar to the one signed between the US and UK
  • That deal exempts the first 100,000 vehicles imported into the US from tariffs
  • Merz has been pressing EU negotiators to narrow their focus to four or five industries, including automotive, steel and pharmaceuticals
  • However, EU negotiators have replied that these are the sectors where Trump is most intent on reshoring production, making them the most difficult to strike deals on
  • Other EU member states are wary of the EU making too many concessions to get a deal quickly
  • Germany's economy is highly dependent on automotive exports, and, as a result, it has been hit hard by the tariffs
• A trade deal with India is taking longer than expected
  • At the beginning of the year, the Indian government enthusiastically reported its willingness to negotiate a new trade deal with the Trump administration
  • This urgency was redoubled after Trump revealed his "reciprocal" tariffs
  • However, as Trump's July 9 deadline approaches, the US and India still appear to be far from a deal
  • A major priority for the US, increasing Indian imports of US farm products, is politically very difficult for Narendra Modi
  • Indian business tycoons are wary of deregulation and increased openness to foreign competition
  • Hindu nationalists oppose making concessions to foreign governments
  • Indian analysts think that quickly agreeing to a trade deal, as Britain did, risks giving too much away
• The success of Israel's attacks against Iran surprised even Israeli planners
  • Israel launched simulatenous attacks seeking to kill a large number of Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists at once
  • If the attack had failed these individuals would scatter, making them more difficult to kill and increasing the risk of severe Iranian retaliation
  • Origins of the attack date to the 1990s, when Israeli intelligence started building a spy network inside Iran to sabotage Iran's nascent nuclear ambitions
  • Israeli planners determined that sabotage and assassinations would be insufficient to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, and started working on plans for an aerial attack that would degrade Iran's nuclear program
  • Starting in 2008, Israeli aircraft undertook a series of training missions westwards, towards Greece, to test their ability to fly long distances with tanker support
  • However, the plan did not really become feasible until Bashar Assad's government in Syria was toppled, allowing Israeli aircraft to fly up to Iran's borders without being engaged by Iranian and Syrian air defenses
  • By that time the Israeli intelligence network inside Iran had become sophisticated enough to track the positions of Iranian generals and scientists in real time and smuggle in large numbers of drones to attack Iranian air defenses from the ground
  • Adding urgency to Israel's plan was the knowledge that Iran had intensified its uranium enrichment efforts, and was potentially only months away from being able to construct a nuclear weapon
  • On June 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the final decision to launch the attack in four days' time
  • Israeli officials carried out a series of misdirections to convince Iran that a strike wasn't imminent
    • Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that he would be taking some time off to attend his son's wedding
    • Israeli officials leaked the details of a phone call between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump in which Trump appeared to be against an Israeli military strike
    • Israeli officials publicly announced that they would be willing to let negotiations between the US and Iran conclude before taking the decision to launch a strike
  • The key factor in maintaining surprised was launching the strike without US mobilization or participation — Israeli planners thought, correctly, that Iran would discount Israeli preparations if they did not also see the US mobilizing
• Early intelligence indicates that Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium is largely intact
  • European intelligence agencies suggested that Iran had dispersed its stockpile of enriched uranium
  • The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said that Iran's nuclear program had been significantly damaged, but not destroyed entirely
  • The EU's negotiations with Iran are "on hold", pending further developments between Iran and the US
• How much did American bombs damage Iran's nuclear program?
  • It's unclear how much damage the US strike on Iran's nuclear program actually did
  • The US dropped several GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iran's nuclear facility at Natanz and Fordow
  • Fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan
  • Given how deeply Fordow was buried, it's unclear how much physical damage was done to the facility
  • However, some experts argue that it's likely that the facility suffered significant damage, because Israeli intelligence would have been used to determine precise aimpoints calculated to do maximum damage
  • What's even more unclear than the extent of the damage is what this strike has done to Iranian nuclear ambitions
  • Have they been ended, like Syria's nuclear efforts were after Israel bombed its reactor in 2007? Or have they been strengthened, like Iraq's nuclear efforts after the Israeli strike in 1981?
• The Israeli war against Iran has reordered the Middle East, but not as expected
  • The success of the Israeli war against Iran may have made Arab states less likely to ally with Israel
  • Israel's demonstration of military power causes Gulf monarchies to be wary and seek assurances that Israel will not use its power unilaterally to drag them into a conflict they have no desire to enter
  • Are especially wary about any talk of regime change in Iran — brings to mind the chaos unleashed by the US ouster of Saddam Hussein
  • Don't want to see Iranian power replaced with Israeli power
  • This is a classic case of neorealist balancing
  • States naturally gravitate to oppose the most powerful state, unless the powerful state voluntarily embraces constraints
• US strikes on Iran force China to reconsider Donald Trump's isolationism
  • Chinese officials thought that Trump, in his second Presidency, would be more transactional and pragmatic
  • The US strikes on Iran have forced China to consider whether Trump would intervene forcefully if China acted against Taiwan
  • The US intervention shows that Trump's foreign policy isn't wholly isolationist
  • However, Trump's redeployment of assets away from the Pacific towards the Middle East might reduce the US's ability to respond to a crisis over Taiwan or in the South China Sea
  • Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz have added urgency to Chinese efforts to pursue energy self-sufficiency
  • Chinese officials are also likely reassessing their defenses after seeing the US's ability to strike Iran undetected with little warning
• Chinese authorities encourage more students to go into engineering
  • China has a much larger proportion of students going into engineering than countries in the West — over 30% as compared with 5%
  • This is because the central government has heavily encouraged the expansion of engineering programs, at the expense of economics and social sciences
  • Families are likewise encouraging their children to study engineering as they assume that if the central government is encouraging students to go into engineering, it will also be increasing investment in industries that require engineering talent
  • Not sure this is a good assumption
  • The central government does what the central government does — just because they're encouraging engineering now doesn't mean they'll be doing so in the future
  • I think the CCP is encouraging elite overproduction to an even greater degree than is occurring in the West
  • 5% of students in the West go into engineering; 35% of students in China go into engineering; what will happen to the bottom 30% when AI automates away "low quality" engineering labor?
• Tesla's rollout of robotaxis is marred with glitches and driving errors
  • Videos posted by riders of Tesla's new robotaxi service in Austin show a number of driving errors
    • Veering into the wrong lane
    • Sudden braking and speeding
    • Driving over a curb
    • Dropping passengers off in the middle of the road rather than curbside
  • While none of the incidents has resulted in a collision, experts are concerned at the number of visible incidents, especially compared with other autonomous taxi services, such as Waymo
  • However, riders, who were generally supportive of Tesla, were largely unfazed by the issues
  • This is something that's dangerous for Tesla
  • Tesla drivers and Elon fans have formed something of an echo chamber
  • They don't know how bad their self-driving systems appear to the vast majority who aren't emotionally invested in the success of Tesla
  • This could lead Tesla to believe that its system has more public support than it actually does, and be caught by surprise when there's a serious issue or regulatory crackdown
• Tesla executive and Elon Musk confidant Omead Afshar leaves Tesla
  • Afshar had overseen Tesla's sales and manufacturing in Europe and North America
  • Had previously come under some scrutiny in 2022 when he was accused of using Tesla's influence in manufacturing supply chains to acquire hard-to-obtain construction materials for Elon's personal use
  • Departure comes amid significant pressure on Tesla to reverse declining sales, especially in Europe
  • Afshar's subordinates will now report directly to Tom Zhu, Tesla's head of automotive
  • Afshar's departure comes in the wake of some other prominent departures at Tesla
    • Milan Kovac, head of the Optimus robot program
    • Jenna Ferrua, North American HR director
• Apple reworks App Store rules to avoid EU fines
  • Apple plans to allow app developers more ways to steer users to external payment options
  • The change comes in response to a European Commission ruling that holds that Apple's terms and conditions still violated the EU's Digital Markets Act even after it allowed app developers to put hyperlinks to external payment options in their apps
  • According to the Financial Times, Apple will also allow sideloading in the EU
  • The DMA allows the EU to fine Apple up to 10% of its annual revenue if it is held to be in violation
  • Even though it is making changes to remain in compliance, Apple plans to appeal the European Commission's ruling
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that the Section 899 "revenge tax" is no longer needed
  • The Section 899 provision would have allowed the government to impose taxes as high as 20% against foreign entities hailing from countries deemed to have "unfair" taxes on US companies
  • The Trump administration reached an agreement with other G7 nations to exempt US companies from corporate taxes that were part of a 2021 minimum tax agreement
  • As a result, Treasury Secretary Bessent says the Section 899 provision is no longer necessary, and lawmakers in Congress are expected to strip it from the "Big Beautiful Bill" this week
• Shell denies that it is going to make an offer for BP
  • Following speculation reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Shell has denied that it has any interest in a merger with BP
  • Although Shell had considered making an offer for BP in the past, most recently in 2004, it denies that any negotiations are ongoing
  • In a previous interview with the Financial Times, Shell CEO Wael Sawan said that share buybacks were a better use of Shell's excess cash than a bid for BP
• Auto parts suppliers, once more profitable than carmakers, are starting to struggle
  • The finances of suppliers, like Bosch, Denso, and Continental have slipped as of late
  • Suppliers used to have economies of scale by supplying the same parts to many different automakers, allowing them to pad their profit margins
  • These margins were hurt by the pandemic-era chip shortage, which reduced the amount of parts suppliers could sell
  • At the same time, long-term contracts ensured that suppliers couldn't raise prices in response to shortages
  • Invested heavily in capabilities to support EV production, only to see those facilities sit stagnant as EV sales growth hasn't been as strong as expected
  • Suppliers are also facing a wider industry trend of greater vertical integration, as automakers seek to make cars that are controlled by a single powerful central computer
  • This eliminates many of the differentiating factors that suppliers could use to raise prices and increase margins
  • The shift towards "dumb hardware" also allows traditionally non-automotive firms to compete with existing auto parts suppliers, especially for EV-related components, such as batteries and motors
  • Another factor is that Chinese automakers largely use only Chinese suppliers, eliminating a potential source of growth for Western and Japanese supply firms
• The war in Ukraine shows how the West can rearm without reinudstrializing
  • Received wisdom holds that protracted high-intensity conflicts are won with the side that has the greatest industrial capacity
  • While the US defense industry still accounts for a plurality of the dollar value of exported weapons, it no longer has the ability to generate mass that it did during World War 2 or even the Cold War
  • There are concerns that, given a high-intensity conflict between the US and China, the US could exhaust its stockpiles of expensive, sophisticated weapons within weeks
  • While Western manufacturers can increase production in an emergency, the amount of slack they have is far below wartime demands
  • Western countries already spend far more than China on defense, so there is relatively less ability to increase spending to build up capacity
  • The main problem is that, for a large number of defense-related industries, such as heavy machinery and shipbuilding, China just has way more industrial capacity than the West
  • However, this may not be as much of a problem as it appears
  • It is no longer true that civilian industrial production can be rapidly converted to wartime needs
  • Assembly lines, especially for weapons are far more specialized than they were in the past
  • Ukraine is a good example of this — although Ukraine was the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, relatively few of Ukraine's legacy industrial companies were useful in helping repel the 2022 Russian invasion
  • Instead, entirely new private firms building weapons systems, such as drones and new cruise missiles have taken the lead
  • Any effort by Western governments to deliberately foster industries with potential wartime relevance could backfire if those industries turn out to be irrelevant for a future conflict
  • The most fungible resource is skilled workers
  • Workers trained in manufacturing can be more easily retrained to work on wartime assembly lines
  • The big question this article leaves unanswered is, how do you get the base of skilled workers without having a large manufacturing industry?
  • The problem is that in addition to having a much larger inventory of manufacturing capital, China also has a much larger population of manufacturing workers
  • The presence of the capital creates the skilled workers
  • A good example of this is sewing machines
    • During World War 2, the Singer sewing machine company was tasked with building bomb and artillery aiming systems
    • Although these components had nothing specifically to do with sewing machines, the War Production Board noted that the same skills used to make the precision components for sewing machines could be used to make other precision instruments
  • Similarly, Chinese factory workers trained in welding could be retrained in short order to perform welding for naval construction and repairs
  • Meanwhile, the US struggles to expand shipbuilding because the experienced welders and machinists that could be employed by shipyards no longer exist, as manufacturing has gone overseas
• How the next financial crisis could start
  • As climate change intensifies, there is increasing pressure on the insurance market from record-breaking payouts caused by storms, wildfires, etc.
  • Over time, this could lead to properties becoming uninsurable
  • Uninsurable properties would become ineligible for mortgages, potentially leading to a drastic fall in the values of those properties
  • This fall in value could potentially trigger a financial crisis, similar to how a fall in value of subprime mortgages triggered the last financial crisis
  • Previously, the primary risk of climate change to the financial system was thought to take the form of "stranded assets", such as coal mines and oil fields that would become economically unviable due to restrictions on carbon emissions
• Support for gay marriage among Republicans is dropping fast
  • Support for the recognition of same-sex marriage has dropped recently
  • Driven largely by a steep decline in support among Republicans
  • As Democrats have moved trans-rights under the overall LGBT policy umbrella, Republican support for all LGBT rights has dropped
  • While the overturning of Obergefell is unlikely, the government can loosen mandates that require businesses to serve gay couples
  • Yeah, who could have foreseen that trying an unpopular issue to a popular one would reduce support for the popular issue? Not Democrats!
• Japan's civil war over surnames
  • Japan makes it a legal obligation for a married couple to have a single family name
  • In practice, this means that the woman usually gives up her name and takes on her husband's name
  • However, as female participation in the labor force has grown this requirement has caused resentment as women do not wish to give their names and associated reputation
  • Japanese reformers also argue that allowing married couples to retain their own family names would prevent uncommon family names from dying out
  • However, the rule requiring a single name has become a "totemic" issue for portions of the Japanese right-wing, making it difficult to repeal
• The "motorsport mindset" behind British success in Formula 1
  • 7 out of the 10 teams in Formula 1 are based in Britain
  • Credit a strong ecosystem of specialized manufacturing geared towards motorsport
  • Enables fast turnarounds, allowing teams to improve their cars during the season between races
  • Industry has over 4000 companies, employing over 50,000 people and generating revenues of £16 billion
  • New F1 teams, such as General Motors and Audi are looking to set up manufacturing in Britain as well
  • Tacit knowledge rules the world
  • Why are new F1 teams moving to Britain? Because all the existing F1 teams are already there
• Jane Street's sneaky retention tactic
  • Jane Street is one of the world's most profitable (and secretive) hedge funds
  • Almost all of Jane Street's systems are written in OCaml, a relatively obscure programming language developed by French academics
  • Recently announced a fork of the language, OxCaml, designed for higher-performance applications
  • Jane Street's outsize importance to the OCaml community means that they have a greater say in language design decisions
  • Allows Jane Street to retain developers more easily, as expertise in OCaml does not easily translate to other roles in finance

2025-06-25 Wednesday

• Nvidia moves into cloud computing, competing with its customers
  • Nvidia has created its own cloud service, DGX Cloud, which resells GPU resources from existing cloud providers in a unified marketplace
  • Has invested in GPU cloud upstarts such as CoreWeave and Lambda
  • Although Nvidia doesn't break out DGX Cloud revenue specifically, it has reported $10.9 billion in cloud service revenue, a large fraction of which is thought to come from DGX Cloud
  • This is a signficant increase from $3.9 billion from the year before
  • While these initiatives are a small fraction of the overall market for cloud services, they represent a threat to the high margins of traditional cloud providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft
    • Amazon's cloud was responsible for over 60% of its operating income
    • Google might be increasingly reliant on cloud revenue, as anti-trust concerns and competition from AI-enabled services crimp its ability to make money from search
  • Cloud providers signed up to be resellers under DGX Cloud because, when DGX Cloud was announced two years ago, they did not have their own AI services to offer and gained an advantage from participating in Nvidia's initiative
  • However, now cloud providers have much more mature AI services, they're likely to reevaluate their relationship with DGX Cloud
  • Cloud providers, notably Google, have also sought to reduce their dependence on Nvidia by designing their own AI processing chips
  • This is a textbook example of commoditizing your complement
  • Nvidia is trying to commoditize clouds, by pressuring all cloud vendors to sell GPU resources under its branding
  • Cloud providers are developing their own chips in order to commoditize the GPUs that form Nvidia's market advantage
• Micron Technology's profit soars on AI demand
  • Micron's Q3 profit was $1.89 billion, more than 5x higher than Micron's $332 million profit from the same quarter last year
  • Revenue climbed 37% on demand for high-bandwidth memory for AI chips
  • Micron forecasts high demand for its memory chips, resulting in higher margins and reduced inventories
• Meta fends off authors' copyright lawsuit over AI
• Meta poaches 3 OpenAI researchers
  • Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been actively recruiting top AI researchers to revitalize Meta's flagging efforts
  • Meta managed to recruit Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, three OpenAI researchers from its Zurich office
  • Researchers had previously worked together at Google Deepmind
• OpenAI, Microsoft rift hinges on how smart AI can get
  • OpenAI's contract with Microsoft stipulates that OpenAI can restrict Microsoft's access to its models when the models reach the threshold of "artificial general intelligence" (AGI)
  • According to experts, AGI is a threshold where the AI system has human-like performance across a wide variety of tasks
  • According to OpenAI, its models are close to reaching AGI levels of proficiency
  • However, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has expressed doubts about the capability of OpenAI's models and wonders whether it will be possible to reach AGI using current approaches
  • Says that apparent progress towards AGI is "benchmark hacking"
  • Microsoft and OpenAI are in the midst of fraught negotiations over the equity stake that Microsoft will receive in OpenAI after OpenAI completes its transition to a for-profit entity
  • Microsoft is seeking to remove the AGI clause entirely from its contract with OpenAI, or revise the contract to allow it to access OpenAI's models even after OpenAI has declared them to be AGI
• AI valuations are bordering on the unhinged
  • Venture capitalists are coming up with valuations for AI companies that have little to do with current revenues
  • Example: Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has raised $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation without having much of a strategy
  • Valuations are seemingly determined more by the number of former OpenAI researchers on staff than any other metric
  • The ease of switching AI tools has reduced the value of traditional metrics of SaaS valuation, such as annual recurring revenue, which assume that user churn is negligible
  • Further harming valuations of companies building applications on top of foundation models is that the companies building the foundation models, like OpenAI and Anthropic, are also branching out into applications
  • No AI company is even close to profitable — even Google is heavily subsidizing its AI efforts from other parts of its business
• Shell is reportedly in early talks to acquire BP
  • According to sources, Shell and BP are in preliminary merger discussions
  • Would be the largest oil industry merger since the one that created Exxon Mobil
  • Shell has denied that any discussions are taking place, and calls the report "market speculation"
  • BP's share price has been a laggard among oil stocks as a result of its ill-fated push into green energy
  • Recently, BP has vowed to limit its green energy investments and refocus on oil and gas production
  • Will sell off Castrol, its lubricants business and at least part of Lightsource, its solar subsidiary
  • BP would make an attractive takeover target for Shell due to its presence in the liquefied natural gas market
  • Shell, also being a British company, would be a more palatable buyer for British regulators who might be hesitant to see a major British energy firm fall into foreign hands
  • A merger between BP and Shell would be the capstone to a wave of mergers across the oil industry
    • Exxon closed a $60 billion merger between itself and Pioneer Natural Resources
    • Diamondback Energy bought Endeavor Energy Resources for $26 billion
    • Chevron is in the process of acquiring Hess for $53 billion
• FedEx traffic to China drops sharply amid trade tensions
  • According to FedEx, the route, which accounts for 2.5% of its overall traffic, saw traffic "deteriorate sharply"
  • FedEx says that the reason for the decline in traffic is due to the ending of the de minimis exemption for goods from China, which has affected smaller retailers as well as the ecommerce sites, Temu and Shein
  • The company has declined to share financial guidance for the remainder of the year citing the uncertainty caused by Trump's trade policies and its effect on shipping
• Trump reassures NATO allies that he is "with them all the way" after initially wavering on his commitment to the alliance
  • On his way to the NATO summit today, Trump had said that the the meaning of the North Atlantic Treaty's Article 5 mutual defense clause had "numerous interpretations"
  • However, at the summit, Trump reassured allies, saying the United States was with Europe "all the way"
  • At the summit, NATO members also formally adopted a goal to spend 5% of GDP on defense and defense-related infrastructure
  • The adoption of the goal appears to have mollified Trump, who has previously complained about the United States' disproportionate contribution to NATO's defenses
• Prediction market Kalshi hits $2 billion valuation
  • Kalshi is a prediction market that became popular during the election
  • Offers a variety of yes/no contracts that allow people to bet on the outcome of a variety of topics
  • Raised $185 million at a $2 billion valuation
  • The money will go towards enabling integrations with more brokers, in addition to WeBull and Robinhood
  • Kalshi gained prominence during the election, after it successfully won a case against the CFTC to enable it to offer betting contracts on the outcome of the election
  • Since the election, betting volumes have declined and the most popular contracts are related to sports
  • This has drawn attention from state gambling regulators in Nevada and New Jersey, who argue that sports gambling is regulated at the state level
  • However, Kalshi maintains that its license from the CFTC allows it to offer sports-related outcome contracts nationwide
  • Kalshi, and an overseas rival, Polymarket, gained prominence for correctly forecasting the outcome of the election when polls showed a dead heat between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
  • However, prediction markets remain niche
  • Kalshi is hoping that investors accustomed to placing high-risk bets on options and cryptocurrencies will also bet on prediction markets
• Tesla sales in Europe fall for the fifth consecutive month
  • Although Tesla has rolled out a redesigned Model Y, its sales have continued to decline in Europe
  • The weakness of Tesla's sales, driven by an aging product lineup and disquiet over Musk's political activism, has allowed European EV manufacturers to gain market share at Tesla's expense
  • However, Tesla's share price continues to increase, as investors buy into Musk's argument that the future of the company is robotics and self-driving taxis
• Flipped, tricked and stuck in the snow — the streets are mean for delivery robots
  • Unmanned ground vehicles are being increasingly used for deliveries, especially on college campuses
  • Manufactured by startups such as Coco, Bear and Serve
  • However, outside of a controlled environment, these robots are encountering unexpected problems
  • Robots have trouble overcoming snow and slush
  • Are getting hit by traffic
  • Mischief-makers sometimes sit on them
  • Students at Notre Dame are complaining that robot traffic is clogging walking paths
• Trump calls Putin the more difficult partner in ending the Ukraine war
  • Trump made remarks at a press conference in The Hague, on the sidelines of the NATO summit, where he said that Putin had proven unexpectedly difficult to negotiate with
  • Has recently expressed increased frustration with Putin's refusal to accept a cease-fire in the war
  • Also voiced increased support for the NATO alliance, which he'd expressed skepticism towards during the 2024 Presidential campaign
• How Trump brokered the cease-fire between Israel and Iran
  • After the US strikes on Iranian nuclear targets, Trump phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him it was time to end the war
  • According to Vice President Vance, this was in keeping with Trump's policy of defining US foreign policy interests narrowly and using overwhelming force to secure them
  • Negotiations on a cease-fire were limited to a very narrow circle of US advisors
  • By the time the US acted, Israel had already largely hit all the targets it could it, and the US strikes apparently caused sufficient damage to Iran's deeply buried nuclear facilities to mollify the Israeli government
  • The Iranian government was initially reluctant to agree to a ceasefire under duress, and insisted on conducting a largely symbolic retaliation at a US airbase in Qatar before agreeing to end hostilities
• The Chinese government asks rare earths companies to compile lists of employees with specialist knowledge so they can be tracked
  • Goal is to create a database of Chinese workers with specialist knowledge of rare earths in order to ensure that they don't spill secrets by traveling abroad
  • In some cases, these workers have been asked to deposit their passports with local authorities in order to ensure they don't take any unauthorized trips
  • This imposes the same requirements that China puts on workers for state-owned firms on select employees of rare earths mining firms
  • China makes 90% of the world's rare earths magnets, and has developed expertise allowing it to efficiently separate and refine rare earths from ore
  • Chinese scientists and engineers have developed technology that is widely regarded as best-in-class for processing rare earths
• Michaels gains a lifeline from tariff pause and the decline of its rivals
  • Two of Michaels' major rivals, Party City and Jo-Ann Fabrics, have gone out of business
  • In addition, the tariff truce between the US and China has given Michaels a reprieve from having to pay 145% taxes on many of its goods
  • Michaels tapped a portion of its $1 billion revolving credit line after Trump's announcement of 145% tariffs on Chinese goods
  • However, more recently, it turned down a financing offer from its bondholders
  • Michaels has announced plans to increase inventories and redirect its supply chains away from China
• US regulators move to ease financial crisis-era regulations on bank capital
  • In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve increased the supplementary leverage ratio, or the amount of capital that banks must hold to protect against loan losses during market turmoil
  • Today, the Federal Reserve's board voted 5 - 2 to lower the ratio
  • The revised ratio reduces the amount of capital that bank holding companies, as a group, are required to maintain by $13 billion
  • Reduces the reserve capital requirement for subsidiary banks by $210 billion
  • Related proposals have to be adopted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation before the freed capital can actually be used for lending
  • Another proposal that the Federal Reserve is considering is excluding Treasuries from leverage ratio calculations, essentially treating US government bonds as perfectly safe assets
  • Not a fan of this change
  • The capital ratio rules were put in place to prevent cascading failures caused by one-bank overextending, and becoming a source of counterparty risk for the remaining banks
  • Now we're on the road back to where we were in 2006, where a single highly connected bank could threaten the stability of the entire financial system
• Bumble cuts 30% of its staff as online dating hits "inflection point"
  • Bumble is seeking to reduce layers of management in order to iterate faster
  • Online dating services are seeking to reinvent themselves to reach a younger generation that doesn't see online dating apps as novel or interesting
  • During the pandemic, dating apps saw a large influx of new users, but that didn't result in better outcomes
  • As a result, the reputation of online dating deteriorated, leading to slower growth
• Eurostar services are delayed after an incident of cable theft near Lille
  • Eurostar trains are experiencing significant delays after having to be diverted onto alternate routes
  • European train operators have faced issues with cable thefts due to the high price of scrap copper
  • These Eurostar delays are compounded by the fact that trains were delayed yesterday after a Eurostar train struck two people on the tracks in the same region

2025-06-24 Tuesday

• Anthropic lands partial victory in AI copyright case
  • Anthropic had been sued by authors who alleged that using their work to train an AI was a violation of their copyright
  • Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California found that using copyrighted books to train AI is legal if those books have been legally acquired
  • The ruling does not apply to using pirated materials to train AI
  • I agree with this decision
  • AI is a transformative work — training an AI on a large collection of books is analogous to a person reading a large number of books and forming their own thoughts
• Abridge AI succeeds in raising $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation
  • Abridge AI had been in discussions to raise $300 million of funding at a $5.3 billion valuation
  • Succeeded in that task with a funding round led by Andreesen-Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures
  • Abridge AI uses "ambient listening" technology to listen in on and transcribe conversations between patients and physicians, reducing the paperwork and notetaking workload on doctors
  • The tool also makes it easier for physicians to correlate their notes with previous patient notes from nurses and other doctors
  • Also helps physicians assign appropriate billing codes
  • Abridge has deals with over 150 large health systems worldwide
• AI companies continue to struggle with model interpretability
  • Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI are all pushing forward with "chain-of-thought" reasoning models that write out step-by-step how they're solving problems
  • These step-by-step descriptions are sometimes at odds with the final answer given by the model, showing that these companies are not always aware of how their models reach conclusions
  • While chains of thought can be useful for interpreting how a model is approaching a problem, there is no guarantee that the model is outputting chains of thought that correspond to its internal state
  • Ensuring that chains of thought remain faithful to the underlying model state is a key problem in the further development of AI
• OpenAI and Jony Ives accused of trying to "bury" rival firm in trademark dispute
  • iyO is a startup making AI-enabled hardware
  • Its founder, Jason Rugolo, an ex-Google executive, pitched his venture to OpenAI in the months before OpenAI's acquisition of Jony Ive's hardware startup
  • Argues that the name of Ive's startup, io, is too similar to the name of his company, and that by purchasing and backing Ive's startup, OpenAI is attempting to "bury" his company
  • OpenAI responds that iyO's product wasn't functional during the demonstration and that its acquisition of io has nothing to do with Rugolo's firm
  • Just seems like sour grapes from Rugolo
• Trump secures a deal from NATO allies for increased defense spending
  • The brief communique from the NATO summit at The Hague, to be published tomorrow, commits NATO nations to spending 5% of their GDP overall on defense and defense-related matters
  • This is broken down into a 3.5% of GDP goal for direct spending on traditional military spending
  • The remaining 1.5% of GDP will be allocated towards nonlethal investments, such as infrastructure, defense-related manufacturing and cybersecurity
• Finland hardens NATO's northern border in anticipation of a potential war with Russia
  • Finland is building fortifications on its far north on the border with Russia
  • On the other side of the border, satellite images show Russian forces reoccupying Soviet-era northern military bases which had been mothballed after the end of the Cold War
  • Troops posted along the border are training with drones to improve their surveillance capabilities
  • Finnish troops are well motivated to defend their border after seeing what Russia did to Ukraine
  • Participation in voluntary reservist training has increased
  • Cross-border traffic between Russian and Finland, once a vital source of income for local businesses has gone quiet
  • As a result, some locals are unhappy
  • Some Finnish families with members working in Russia have been split by the closure of the border between Russia and Finland
  • These families are challenging the closure of the border in Finnish courts and the European Court of Human Rights
  • The Finnish government says the border closure is necessary because Russia was "weaponizing migration" by encouraging migrants to cross its territory to apply for asylum in Finland
  • The goal behind the fortifications is to signal to Russia that any cross-border incursion will be met with maximum force
• Trump announces a ceasefire between Iran and Israel
  • After the US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran responded with a missile attack against Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar
  • However, the attack was telegraphed, and the US was able to shoot down the incoming rockets
  • After the attack, Trump announced a ceasefire negotiated in the background between Israel, the United States and Iran
• The pillars of Iran's regime have been damaged, but not destroyed
  • The twelve-day war between Iran and Israel set back Iran's nuclear program but did not end it
  • The extent of damage from airstrikes to Iran's nuclear facilities is unclear
  • Iran still has its stockpile of approximately 400 kg of highly enriched uranium, thought to be sufficient for 6 nuclear warheads
  • However, US and Israeli strikes on Iran's older enrichment facility at Natanz appear to have wiped out the centrifuges there, according to Rafael Grossi, head of the UN atomic energy agency
  • Israeli strikes against Iranian air defenses have also reduced Iran's ability to protect its nuclear facilities against future attacks
  • Many analysts believe the cease-fire just a pause while both Israel and Iran figure out their next steps
• Trump contradicts his own spy agencies by claiming to Congress that Iran had a nuclear weapons program
  • The latest intelligence assessments presented by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stated that Iran had not restarted the nuclear weapons program it had put on hold in 2003
  • However, in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson justifying the US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, Trump claimed that those facilities were housing a nuclear weapons program
  • Gabbard downplayed the disagreement between herself and President Trump, saying that Iran's increased uranium enrichment efforts ensured that it could get a bomb quickly if it did choose to restart its nuclear weapons program
  • According to Gabbard, this was tantamount to a restart
• Feckless Europe accepts Trump's "Lone Ranger" diplomacy
  • Leaders of Britain, France and Germany have tacitly endorsed Trump's strikes against the Iranian nuclear program
  • Is a stark contrast to 2003, when these leaders of three countries publicly grappled with the international law implications of another US intervention in the Middle East: the Iraq War
  • Part of why European governments went along with Trump's policy is because Trump publicly forswore regime change in Iran
  • European governments' primary fear is anarchy in the Middle East, and publicly committing to allowing the current Iranian regime to stay in place relieves that concern
  • Europe has become adept at coming up with post-hoc justifications for its impotence
  • Response stands in contrast with China and other non-Western powers, who denounced Trump's strikes
  • China's response, driven by concerns about oil prices, was that the use of force is not the correct way to resolve international disputes
  • However, this was undercut by Chinese support for the Russian war in Ukraine
  • It's possible for Europe to regain relevance through diplomacy, by acting as a broker between Iran and the United States
  • It's possible, but it won't happen
  • European leaders are too convinced of their own irrelevance and impotence to actually do anything
• The UK moves to purchase F-35A fighters capable of carrying nuclear weapons
  • The move is a large change in UK nuclear strategy, which, previously had exclusively used nuclear submarines for deterrence
  • The RAF had retired its air-launched nuclear weapons at the end of the cold war
  • The jets will operate from RAF Marham, in Norfolk
  • The UK already operates F-35B aircraft off its aircraft carriers, but those aircraft are not capable of carrying nuclear warheads
• The French Socialist Party moves to hold a vote of no-confidence in Prime Minister Bayrou's government over controversial pension reforms
  • French President Emmanuel Macron's proposed pension reform raises the retirement age from 62 to 64
  • The center-left Socialist party opposes raising the retirement age, but thus far has refrained from calling a vote of no-confidence
  • Prime Minister François Bayrou is holding negotiations with legislators to attempt to secure enough votes for the passage of the retirement reforms
  • France's parliament has been divided into roughly three blocks, following snap elections called last year in an attempt to halt the rise of the far-right National Rally party
  • However, the election led to Macron's own Renaissance Party to lose seats, leading to a parliament with no clear majority
  • As a result Renaissance have been governing in a coalition with the French Socialist Party
  • If the Socialists decide to put forward a no-confidence motion, the deciding vote would belong to National Rally
• Tesla threatened with fine in France over deceptive claims regarding its self-driving capabilities
  • The French anti-fraud directorate has found that Tesla engaged in deceptive marketing practices about the capabilities of its self-driving system
  • Tesla is also accused of not properly filling out sales contracts by e.g. leaving the date of sale blank in some cases
  • Tesla sales have dropped by 67% in France, compared to this time last year
• Banks move to revise policies criticized by Republican state governors
  • The governors of Republican-controlled states, such as Texas and Oklahoma have accused large nationwide banks of refusing to do business with businesses such as oil companies and firearms vendors
  • These governors argue that these refusals are for political reasons rather than financial
  • As a result, Republican-controlled states have prohibited state agencies from doing business with banks that they allege are behaving in a discriminatory manner
  • Bank executives from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and other major banks have held meetings with state officials in order to try to allay these accusations
  • The meetings are a preemptive step to ensure that the Trump administration doesn't tighten federal banking regulations to restrict when banks can refuse to provide accounts to certain customers
• NTSB investigators fault Boeing and the FAA for the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout
  • NTSB report primarily faulted Boeing for inadequate training, which led to the 737 being sent to Alaska Airlines without the necessary bolts in place to secure the rear door plug
  • The report said that the plane had left Boeing's factory without the requisite bolts, and there was no way that Alaska Airlines crew could have detected the panel shifting prior to the blowout
  • Even a single properly installed bolt would have held the panel in place
  • At the time the aircraft was manufactured, Boeing had only one of the 24 technicians operating on doors had experience with properly removing and reattaching a door plug
  • That technician was on vacation at the time
  • Boeing is redesigning the door plug in light of the Alaska Airlines incident, and existing planes will be retrofitted with the new plugs
  • The NTSB also recommended that Boeing develop a more structured training program for new assembly line workers
  • The FAA was faulted for not supervising Boeing properly, allowing quality issues to slip through
• The Morning Midas sinks
  • The car carrier had been adrift in the Pacific after a fire broke out on a deck carrying electric vehicles
  • Had been carrying vehicles from China to Mexico
  • All crew had been successfully evacuated
  • Fire damage compounded by heavy weather caused the ship to sink approximately 400 miles off the Alaska coast
• RV companies face mounting concerns over quality control
  • RV companies, despite making far fewer vehicles than automakers, have issued many more recalls
  • Forest River, one of the "big-three" RV manufacturers, along with Thor and Winnebago, has issued the most recalls
  • Production process for these vehicles is bespoke — does not rely on assembly line manufacturing
  • Workers are paid piece-work rates, which encourages rush jobs
    • Misaligned fireplace flues were shipped after the worker who was supposed to be checking them quit
    • Workers created a fire hazard by using the wrong fuse, after the factory ran out of the correct fuse
  • The workers assembling the RVs are often inexperienced, due to high turnover at RV factories
  • RV manufacturers attempt to conceal quality problems by issuing technical bulletins, which don't require them to track how many vehicles have been affected, instead of recalls, which force them to track the number of affected vehicles and conduct repairs for free
  • Of particular concern is wiring in Forest River RVs, which can cause fires
  • RVs just seem like a money pit, kind of like boats, but worse
• The Great Scottish tea swindle
  • Ron McNaughton is a Scottish entrepreneur who claimed to be growing tea in Scotland
  • Claimed to be a veteran, and said his tea had won the prestigious "Salon de The" awards in France
  • University qualifications were also found to be faked
  • McNaughton was found to have bought tea from Sri Lanka, Malawi and China and passed it off as tea grown in Scotland
  • Scotland does have some nascent tea planations, as a result of climate change, but their production was nowhere near sufficient to account for the amount of tea that McNaughton was selling
• Customers at bars and restaurants prefer wider drinking glasses
  • A study published in the Journal of Business Research found that wider drinking glasses led to greater satisfaction and influenced people to buy more beverages
  • People also reported greater satisfaction with beverages consumed from a wide-rimmed glass

2025-06-23 Monday

• Google brings AI features to ChromeOS
  • "Chromebook Plus" devices, featuring at least 8GB RAM and a new CPU, will get new AI features that will operate on-device
  • Google Lens will allow users to long-press the the launcher icon and search for content from screenshots
  • Lens will also integrate with Google Calendar and Docs to capture appointments and text from images
  • ChromeOS will also feature a Gemini integration that will allow users to seamlessly insert AI generated images into documents
  • New Chromebook Plus devices will come with a 12-month free trial of Gemini Pro
  • In addition to the above features which will be available on all Chromebooks, Google and Lenovo announced a new Chromebook Plus 14, which features chipset from MediaTek featuring an NPU
  • This hardware allows AI-enhanced document organization and photo editing without having to send data into the cloud
• Several robotics companies demonstrate AI-powered robots that can autonomously load and unload trucks
  • Loading and unloading trucks is the last frontier of warehouse automation
  • Packages need to be loaded onto the truck in order to minimize wasted space while ensuring that light, delicate items aren't crushed under heavier boxes
  • Ambi Robotics' machine understands the size, weight, center of gravity and durability of each package
  • Robot places boxes on pallets in order to minimize wasted space and the chances of damage to the package
  • Boston Dynamics has signed a contract with DHL for its "Stretch" robots which use vacuum-powered grippers to unload trucks
  • Stretch can unload packages weighing up to 50 pounds, althought it has trouble with bags and thin parcels
• Snowcap computing raises $23 million to develop superconducting chips for AI
  • Superconductors transmit electricity without resistance, allowing signals to move across chips much more efficiently
  • However, superconducting chips need to be kept chilled at very low temperatures, often just tens of degrees above absolute zero
  • This requires energy intensive chillers, which has meant that until recently, it wasn't cost-effective to develop superconducting chips
  • However, as the compute demands for AI have grown, individual chips have become more power-hungry — Nvidia's new "Rubin Ultra" server consumes 600 kW of power
  • This means that it may require less energy to run a superconducting chip and its accompanying chiller than it would to power a conventional GPU
  • Snowcap claims that its chips have 25 times greater performance per watt than current integrated circuits, even after accounting for the energy used to cool them
  • Snowcap's chips can be manufactured using conventional lithography techniques, but require niobium titanium nitride, whose supply relies on imports from Brazil and Canada
  • First basic chips are expected to be released at the end of 2026, with full systems coming later
• Apple negotiates with EU regulators in an attempt to avoid fines
  • Apple is in talks with the European Commission after already being fined €500 million
  • EC has fined Apple for being in breach of the Digital Markets Act with its "Core Technology Fee" that it charges developers who wish to use payment systems outside the App Store
  • Further fines on Apple could escalate to 5% average daily worldwide revenue
  • Fines on Apple and Google are a sticking point in trade negotiations between the EU and the United States
• The US House of Representatives orders staffers to remove WhatsApp from government devices
  • The House's Chief Administrative Officer declared that WhatsApp was a "high risk" app
  • Staffers were ordered to remove WhatsApp from their devices, if present, by June 30
  • Instead they are instructed to use one of a number of approved messaging apps, including
    • Microsoft Teams
    • Signal
    • Apple iMessage and Facetime
    • Wickr, a messaging app offered by Amazon for use with AWS
  • A spokesperson from Meta disagreed with the House of Representatives' characterization, stating that WhatsApp messages were end-to-end encrypted and could only be read by their recipients
  • Stated that WhatsApp offered more stringent security guarantees than many of the apps on the approved list
• Ford is still struggling to import rare earth magnets
  • Although the US and China agreed to a further deal to ease Chinese export controls on rare-earth magnets, Ford is still reporting difficulty in receiving adequate supplies
  • Is having to "scramble" in order to make sure sufficient parts are at each factory in order to avoid production shutdowns
  • China is likely doing the minimum required to be in compliance with the deal, and is maintaining pressure on rare earths exports in order to ensure that any final trade agreement is favorable to it
• A preliminary report indicates that the US did not significantly damage Iran's nuclear program
  • A preliminary report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency stated that the damage to Iran's nuclear program caused by yesterday's strikes only set Iran's nuclear program back by a month or two
  • The White House challenges the conclusions from the report, calling it "flat-out wrong"
  • Government sources emphasize that the report is preliminary, labeled "low confidence", and could be significantly revised as more information is gathered
• Russia is giving Iran the cold shoulder after Israel's attack
  • After meeting with Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi, President Putin made no mention of military support for Iran
  • Instead he said that Russia would seek diplomatic pathways to end the conflict between Iran and Israel
  • Putin's remarks underscore the transactional nature of Russia's foreign relations, even with nations that are closely aligned with it
  • In 2023, just after Hamas' attack on Israel, Iran signed an agreement with Russia to purchase Su-35 fighter aircraft, Yak-130 trainers, Mi-28 attack helicopters and S-400 air defense systems
  • Of those, only the Yak-130 trainers were actually delivered
  • The remainder of the sale was canceled due to production problems and diplomatic pressure from other Gulf states
  • Iran has also had trouble convincing Russia to replace the air defense systems that were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes
  • Similarly to Iran, Armenia has also had trouble convincing Russia to honor its treaty commitments, as it faces aggression from Azerbaijan
  • Russia also did not offer any military aid to Bashar Assad when his government was being overthrown, only asylum
• Liberty Media wins approval from EU regulators to acquire Dorna Sports, owner of the MotoGP championship
  • Liberty Media already owns the media rights for the Formula 1 championship
  • This allows it to own the broadcasting rights for the MotoGP motorcycle championship as well
  • After an antitrust investigation, the European Commission found that there was not significant market overlap between Formula 1 and MotoGP, and thus the merger did not present any significant anti-trust considerations

2025-06-22 Sunday

• Mark Zuckerberg offers large pay packages as he seeks to recruit superstar researchers for Meta's AI efforts
  • Zuckerberg is reaching out directly to AI researchers via email and WhatsApp messages
  • In some cases the researchers didn't respond because they believed the messages were a hoax
  • Is offering large (reportedly $100 million) pay packages to key AI researchers from OpenAI and other AI startups
  • Has hosted AI researchers at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe in order to persuade them personally
  • However, researchers are hesitant to accept the deal because of uncertainty about the direction and leadership of Meta's AI efforts
  • Zuckerberg has tried to recruit Ilya Sutskever, who was formerly OpenAI's lead researcher before he departed OpenAI after a boardroom dispute
  • Meta has invested in Sutskever's AI startup, Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI)
  • Zuckerberg is also in talks to hire Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, who are SSI's CEO and a Microsoft executive who was formerly the CEO of Github, prior to its acquisition by Microsoft
  • Zuckerberg has also invested $14 billion in buying a stake in Scale AI, hiring its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to be his head of AI research
• The US strikes Iranian nuclear facilities with "bunker buster" bombs
  • The US launched a major strike on Iranian nuclear facilities
  • According to President Trump, US B-2 stealth bombers struck Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan
  • Used the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000 pound bomb specifically designed to destroy deeply buried targets
  • According to Iranian officials, enriched uranium had been removed from those facilities several days ago and there is no threat of contamination
  • Trump was congratulated on his decision by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Where Israel and the US have struck Iran's nuclear facilities: a visual breakdown
  • Israel has hit Iranian facilities at Natanz, Khondab (previously known as Arak), Isfahan, Karaj and Parchin
  • Has struck facilities that manufacture centrifuges, refine uranium, and, at Khondab, an under-construction heavy-water reactor that could be used to manufacture plutonium
• Tesla launches robotaxi service in Austin
  • Tesla launched its robotaxi service
  • Consists of 10 self-driving Tesla Model Y vehicles
  • Cars all have safety drivers on board for now
  • According to Musk, the cars will operate in a limited area without challenging intersections, and will be capable of teleoperation in case they need to be guided out of a situation they can't handle
  • Tesla is seeking to expand rapidly in order to catch up to Waymo, the only company operating fully driverless taxis in the US
  • Unlike its rivals, Tesla self-driving technology relies only on cameras, rather than cameras plus LIDAR like Waymo and other self-driving companies
  • Analysts state that Waymo still has a large head start and Tesla has a long way to go before it can demonstrate that its vehicles are as safe as Waymo's
• Politicians slashed migration; now they face the consequences
  • Immigration has been massively reduced all across the industrialized world
  • Is the result of a number of factors
    • Post-COVID "catch-up" in immigration levels has passed
    • The Ukraine war is past its acute phase
    • Most importantly, policy changes have made it more difficult for immigrants to arrive and stay
  • Many politicians and some economists argue that high immigration reduces living standards
  • However, as immigration levels have dropped, living standards have not increased
  • Wage growth across industrialized countries has dropped by 1 percentage point, from 4.8% to 3.8%
  • Unemployment rates appear to be unaffected
  • A better metric than unemployment here would be labor force participation — has the decline in immigration encouraged discouraged workers to re-enter the labor force?
  • The best statistical argument against immigration is that an influx of immigrants raised housing prices
  • However, housing prices are holding steady or even climbing slowly in areas of formerly high immigration, even as immigration levels have reduced
  • One of the reasons for this is that the migration that has been most curtailed is low-skill immigration, which is particularly important for the construction industry
  • The reduction in immigration may have been offset by a corresponding reduction in the pace of homebuilding

2025-06-21 Saturday

• The Senate considers abolishing CAFE rules
  • The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules ratchet up fuel economy requirements for cars on an annual basis, requiring automakers to make their fleets more fuel efficient each year
  • Enacted in 1975 by President Gerald Ford
  • Under the latest CAFE rules, automakers have to have an average fuel economy of 49 MPG across their fleet to avoid fines
  • That standard would rise to 50.4 MPG by 2031
  • The Senate is considering a proposal from the Trump administration that would abolish the fines for violating CAFE rules, effectively rendering them toothless
  • The measure would have to survive a review by the Senate Parlimentarian for inclusion in Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill"
  • Automakers have argued that the rules have become excessively stringent, and require them to produce vehicles that consumers won't buy
  • However environmental advocates say that CAFE rules have been an important factor in making cars more efficient and reducing the amount of petroleum consumed by vehicles
  • I'm in favor of this
  • CAFE rules are why sedans died out — sedans were subject to the rules while trucks and SUVs were not, so automakers switched to producing trucks and SUVs to sidestep the rules
  • It's also been a key factor in why the price of cars has been going up — it's increasingly illegal to make a cheap car, because the features mandated by CAFE rules, among others, cost money

2025-06-20 Friday

• Putin says 'the whole of Ukraine is ours' in theory
  • Putin said, "Wherever a Russian soldier steps, that is ours"
  • Said that Ukraine must accept the reality on the ground if there is to be a chance of peace
  • Putin also theorized that Russian troops could take the city of Sumy in an effort to carve out a buffer zone along Ukraine's northern border near where Ukraine launched its incursion into Kursk last year
• President Zelensky of Ukraine appoints a new commander to address recruitment shortfalls
  • Zelensky appointed Hennadii Shapovalov as commander of ground forces, replacing Mykhailo Drapatiy
  • Shapovalov previously was the Ukrainian military's representative to NATO, and also held prior operational command, over the Kherson region
  • Shapovalov will also have responsibility for recruitment
  • Ukraine has struggled with recruitment as Russia continues to press its offensives
  • Reforms have made it easier for soldiers to transfer out of brigades where they are unhappy
  • Ukraine has also waived penalties for desertion if soldiers agree to return to military service voluntarily
  • Zelensky has refused to lower the minimum mobilization age, despite pressure from Western governments
  • Instead he inaugurated a new voluntary service contract aimed at men between 18 and 25 years of age that includes a €4000 sign-on bonus and the possibility of leaving the military after only a year if certain conditions are met
  • Few recruits have signed up for the program, however
• Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is valued at $10 billion after a $2 billion fundraising round
  • Murati resigned as OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer on September 25 last year, in the wake of an abortive boardroom coup against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
  • Began raising funds for her new startup shortly after
  • Today the fundraising deal closed, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $10 billion
  • Thinking Machines has hired a number of former OpenAI staff, including co-founder John Schulman and head of special projects Jonathan Lachman
  • Company is scretive, and it's not clear what it's working on nor what its eventual product will be
  • Murati holds board voting rights that outweigh those of the other directors combined, ensuring that she cannot be ousted easily
  • Another ex-OpenAI leader, Ilya Sutskever, raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation for his company, Safe Superintelligence Incorporated (SSI) in April
• Applebees and IHOP plan to introduce AI in their backend operations
  • AI tool introduced by the two brands' parent company, Dine Brands
  • Built on Amazon's Q generative AI assistant
  • Aims to streamline tech support to allow restaurant managers to fix operational problems, such as broken equipment, more quickly
  • Another tool built by Dine Brands offers personalized deals to repeat customers
  • Testing AI-powered infrastructure that will help streamline restaurant operations, such as cameras that can detect when tables need clearing
  • The goal of all these AI-powered tools is to reduce restaurant labor costs by making workers more efficient and more accurately forecasting when workers are needed
• Japan scraps meeting with the US after Washington demands more defense spending
  • Tokyo canceled plans for a high-level meeting with the United States after the Trump administration asked Shigeru Ishiba's government to boost defense spending to 3.5% of GDP, up from their earlier 3% request
  • Demand was conveyed by Elbridge Colby, the third most senior official at the US Department of Defense
  • The US is now taking the same approach to Asian allies, asking them to spend more to guarantee their own security, that it has been taking with NATO allies in Europe
  • Colby has also initiated a review of the AUKUS submarine deal, arguing that the US should devote its submarine production to its own needs first, before allocating submarines to allies
  • Colby is a China-hawk, so he's working to ensure that US allies in East Asia are prepared to support the US if it has to deal with a Taiwan contingency
• The US and EU near agreement on non-tariff trade restrictions
  • A draft agreement on reciprocal trade circulated by the US Trade Representative's office lays out tentative deals on a number of issues
    • Digital Markets Act
    • Carbon-based border tariffs
    • Shipbuilding
  • However, the draft does not address tariffs
  • The draft proposes ongoing negotiations between the EU and US on how US companies should comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act
  • Also proposes that the EU delay the implementation of its deforestation regulations for a year
  • Would also propose ongoing negotiations on how the EU's carbon border adjustment would apply to US firms, and would exempt US energy exports to the EU from the EU's methane regulations
  • It's unclear how close the EU is to agreeing to this agreement
  • The draft does not detail what concessions the US would be willing to offer the EU in return
• The US plans actions targeting allies' chip factories in China
  • The Biden administration had granted validated end user certificates to companies such as SK Hynix, Samsung, and TSMC, enabling them to use US-derived chipmaking technologies worldwide, including in their factories in China
  • Today, the Trump administration's head of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, Jeffrey Kessler, said that he wished to cancel those certificates
  • Would implement a licensing system similar to that which China has for rare earths
  • The cancellation would force companies to seek case-by-case exemptions to operate US technologies in China
  • However, other parts of the US government, including the Department of Defense haven't agreed to the retraction of verified end user status for these companies
  • One concern is that restricting licenses for the use of advanced technologies in Chinese factories would hobble US allies' ability to compete against Chinese firms, strengthening Chinese firms, such as Yangtze Memory Technologies
• ArcelorMittal abandons plan to convert German steel mills to green technologies
  • ArcelorMittal said it would turn down €1.3 billion in subsidies to convert steel mills in Bremen and Eisenhüttenstad to use hydrogen rather than coal in blast furnaces
  • According to ArcelorMittal, even with subsidies, the high cost of energy in Germany meant that it was prohibitive to convert the mills to use hydrogen
  • German manufacturers and heavy industry have been affected by the loss of cheap Russian gas as a result of the war in Ukraine
  • Germany faces a steep challenge to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2045
  • ArcelorMittal also warned that it might shut its ethanol plant in Ghent, which makes ethanol from waste carbon from the steelmaking process, as more restrictive EU rules forbade it from labeling the output as "green" and charging a premium for it
  • The EU continues to score own-goals
• Casual dining chains struggle to grow their customer-bases
  • Several casual dining chains have filed for bankruptcy recently, including Red Lobster, Roti, TGI Friday's and Rubio's Coastal Grill
  • Other brands, such as Denny's, Applebees, and Hooters are closing underperforming locations in order to improve margins
  • Red Lobster has emerged from bankruptcy with a new CEO, Damola Adamolekun, who is working to change the menu and improve brand awareness in order to grow traffic
  • Cracker Barrel has sought to update its decor, even though it's prompting a backlash from long-time customers
  • Casual dining chains are also increasing their alcohol offerings, in an effort to get patrons to spend more per meal
• PCAOB elimination plan hits roadblock in the Senate
  • On April 26, Republican Senators introduced an amendment to the "Big Beautiful Bill" that would eliminate the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)
  • Amendment would seek to streamline regulations by folding the PCAOB's functions into the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
  • However, the Senate Parlimentarian ruled that the amendment eliminating the PCAOB would violate the "Byrd Rule", named after the late Senator Robert Byrd, that prevents the inclusion of non-fiscal amendments in a budget bill

2025-06-19 Thursday

• Spain threatens to derail NATO summit by refusing to commit to a 5% defense spending target
  • Donald Trump requests NATO allies spend 5% of their GDP on defense
  • However, the Spanish government of Pedro Sanchez has refused to commit to the target, arguing that 5% was unaffordable for Spain, and would threaten spending on public welfare programs
  • Also says that a rush to meet the 5% spending guideline would cause NATO countries to invest more in off-the-shelf equipment which would exacerbate interoperability problems
  • Instead, Sanchez argues for a more gradual increase which would allow for the development of common equipment and allow the European defense-industrial base to ramp up
  • Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General, has sought a compromise solution, whereby allies agree to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense and 1.5% of GDP on "defense-adjacent" areas such as infrastructure and cybersecurity
  • NATO's summit has been drastically cut back in order to ensure that Trump doesn't walk out early, as he did with the G7 meeting in Canada
• Air India chairman says crashed plane had a 'clean history'
  • Air India chairman N. Chandrasekaran said that the Boeing 787 which crashed in Ahmedabad last week had relatively new engines
  • Right engine was a new engine, installed in March of this year
  • Left engine had been serviced in 2023 and was not due for a maintenance check until December
  • Air India announced that it would cut long-haul services by 15% in order to account for increased safety checks and airspace restrictions because of the Israel-Iran conflict
• The Paris Air Show highlights the growing importance of uncrewed adjuncts to conventional fighter jets
  • Many firms at the Paris Air Show highlighted "wingman" drones
  • Designed to fly alongside manned fighter jets
  • The US has selected General Atomics and Anduril to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft, a series of drones designed to accompany US fighter jets
  • Jason Levin, Anduril's Senior Vice President of Engineering, said that Anduril has raised $2.5 billion to build a factory in Ohio to manufacture collaborative combat aircraft and other drones
  • Boeing has also demonstrated its Ghost Bat drone with the Royal Australian Air Force, showing how an E-7 Wedgetail surveillance aircraft could control Ghost Bat drones to monitor and attack airborne threats
  • Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar showed off two of its latest drones at Paris
    • Akinci heavy lift drone
    • TB3 - a successor to the popular TB2 "Bayraktar" which has foldable wings and can take off and land from short runways and aircraft carriers
  • Baykar and Italian defense group Leonardo announced joint venture to manufacture unmanned systems
• Google faces setback as EU court advisor backs antitrust regulators
  • Advocate-General Juliane Kokott said in a non-binding opinion that Google's appeal before the European Court of Justice should be dismissed and the ECJ should uphold a €4.1 billion fine levied against Google for anti-competitive practices
  • The ECJ rarely contradicts the opinions of advocate-generals, following them in 80% of cases
  • The European Commission brought the antitrust charges against Google for using its control over Android to stymie rivals
• Home Depot kicks off bidding war for GMS
  • GMS is a building-products distributor
  • Yesterday, QXO, another major building products distributor, submitted an unsolicited $5 billion bid for GMS
  • Today Home Depot made an offer for an undisclosed amount
  • Both QXO and Home Depot are attempting to grow their share of the fragmented commercial building products market
  • Home Depot's offer comes in the wake of its acquisition of SRS last year
  • Home Depot has a market capitalization over ten times larger than that of QXO
  • However, QXO is led by Brad Jacobs, an experienced dealmaker who led QXO's acquisition of Beacon Roofing Supply, overcoming Beacon's initial resistance in the process
• Drone warfare hits Haiti
  • Haiti's weak central government has begun deploying drones in an effort to counter the criminal gangs which have seized a significant portion of the country's territory
  • While Haitian gangs had started using unarmed drones first, the government is the first to use armed drones to carry out attacks against gang members
  • The use of drones is raising human rights concerns, as there are few precedents on the use of drones in areas with large numbers of civilians
  • There are also questions of corruption — many of Haiti's politicians have ties to one or another gang, and there are concerns that these drone strikes are gang vendettas carried out with official authorization
  • It's unclear how the central government is obtaining or paying for the armed drones
• Why India has so many snakebite deaths
  • Snakebites are an underfunded area compared to infectious diseases, such as HIV or tropical fevers
  • Affects the poorest disproportionately
  • India is taking steps to ensure that all clinics have access to antivenom
  • Simple interventions, such as cots and shoes could reduce snakebites signficiantly
• Serbia's president Aleksandar Vucic faces increased pressure from student protests
  • Student demonstrations are ongoing against Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic
  • The demonstrations were sparked by railway station roof collapse in Novi Sad
  • Protesters blame the collapse on substandard construction enabled by government corruption
  • While initially the focus of the protests was to reform government construction practices, as of March, they have started to call for early elections
  • Vucic will be disinterested in calling early elections because results in local elections have indicated a steep decline in support for his party
  • Accuses the student protests of being funded by shadowy foreign groups
  • Has closed universities, preventing students from graduating or advancing to their next year of classes

2025-06-18 Wednesday

• Microsoft is reportedly considering walking away from negotiations with OpenAI
  • Microsoft and OpenAI are negotiating over how much of OpenAI Microsoft will own after OpenAI converts itself to a public benefit corporation
  • The negotiations have been complicated over disputes regarding access to intellectual property and the size of Microsoft's share of OpenAI
  • Microsoft is considering walking away from negotiations over OpenAI's conversion to a public benefit corporation
  • Microsoft and OpenAI need to agree on a deal in order to allow OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit public benefit corporation
  • Without this conversion, OpenAI would give up a significant chunk of its valuation
  • Would rely on its current agreement with OpenAI to retain access to OpenAI's models until 2030
  • Microsoft also recently announced an agreement with xAI to make xAI's Grok series of models available on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, giving it a potential alternative to OpenAI for foundation models
  • Under the current agreement with OpenAI, Microsoft has the exclusive right to sell access to OpenAI's models, and receives a 20% share of revenue from those models
  • OpenAI is reportedly seeking to loosen that exclusivity, in order to make its models available on other platforms
  • OpenAI is also negotiating on Microsoft having the right of first refusal when providing compute services to OpenAI
• Microsoft announces additional layoffs as it also tries to increase investment in AI
  • This round of layoffs will be in addition to the previous round of layoffs announced in May
  • Final size of layoffs will be announced early next month
  • Sales roles will be most affected
  • Savings will allow Microsoft to focus further on AI investments
• Waymo is seeking to bring robotaxis to New York City
  • Waymo is seeking a permit to deploy its driverless vehicles in New York City
  • However, New York state law does not allow for driverless cars
  • Therefore, initially, Waymo vehicles will operate with specialists in the driver's seats
  • What a stupid law
• Texas Instruments has announced plans to invest $60 billion in US chipmaking
  • Will invest in seven semiconductor fabs in Sherman, Texas, Richardson, Texas, and Lehi, Utah
  • Additional capacity will be used to manufacture chips for cars and electronic devices
• Ukraine recognizes dual citizenships in order to ease life for refugees living abroad
  • Previously, Ukraine did not recognize dual or multiple citizenship, meaning that Ukrainians abroad had to renounce their Ukrainian passports if they elected to become naturalized citizens of another country
  • Now Ukraine has lifted that requirement
  • The new citizenship law will also simplify the process of getting Ukrainian citizenship for children born to Ukrainian parents overseas and foreign fighters who have joined Ukraine's army
  • Foreigners will still have to pass a test proving their knowledge of the Ukrainian language, history and constitution
• Trump has reportedly approved an attack plan on Iran but has held off on giving final approval
  • Thus far, the US military has limited its role in the Iran-Israel conflict to helping Israel defend against incoming Iranian missiles and drones
  • Trump has reportedly reviewed and approved of a plan for the US military to attack Iranian nuclear enrichment infrastructure directly, but has held off on giving the final order
  • A possible target for a US strike would be Iran's deeply buried Fordow uranium enrichment facility, which cannot be effectively targeted with the bombs that Israel has
  • White House officials say that multiple options remain on the table, including diplomatic pressure
• Trump's political supporters are split over whether the US should strike Iran
  • Trump's political base is split between foreign policy interventionists, who are generally supportive of a military strike to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and restrainers who are wary of US involvement in the Middle East
  • Vice President JD Vance said on social media that while he understood the concerns regarding yet another potential Middle East entanglement, he thought that a limited strike against Iran could be justified
  • However, other Trump supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, have come out strongly against a potential strike on Iran, arguing that it would violate Trump's campaign pledge to avoid starting wars
• Israel is reportedly running low on air defense interceptors
  • Israel is reportedly running short of interceptors for its Arrow-3 ballistic missile defense system
  • The US has sent assets into the area as well, but the US supply of interceptors capable of intercepting ballistic missiles is also limited
• Israel is using its air dominance to attack Iranian missiles before they launch
  • Israel has been striking launchers and missile stockpiles in an effort to reduce the number of missiles that Iran is able to launch at a time
  • This reduces the strain on Israel's dwindling supply of air defense interceptors
  • Iran reportedly started the war with a supply of approximately 2,000 ballistic missiles
  • It has fired approximately 400
  • It's unclear how many it has left after Israeli strikes
  • Israel's attacks are forcing Iran to use longer ranged liquid fueled missiles, which require more preparation than solid-fueled ballistic missiles, reducing launch rates and increasing visibility to Israeli aircraft
  • Israeli attacks on Iranian commanders have also had the effect of disrupting command and control systems and have reduced Iran's ability to coordinate large scale missile launches
  • However, Iran has not yet made large-scale use of its most advance "Fattah-1" missiles, which has a maneuvering hypersonic warhead that Israeli air defense systems would struggle to intercept
• Israel has reportedly struck the underground halls housing uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz
  • Report comes from the UN's atomic energy agency
  • Initial claims of the destruction of centrifuges came from the fact that power had been abruptly cut, which could have caused the centrifuges to self-destruct
  • High resolution satellite imagery, collected later, clarifies that the underground halls containing the centrifuges had sustained direct hits as well
• Why Iran's "Axis of Resistance" is missing in action
  • Iran has spent over a decade building up a network of militias and non-state actors across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to support its foreign policy aims
  • However these non-state actors have been largely missing during the most recent conflict between Iran and Israel
  • Hezbollah hasn't fired a single missile into Israel since the war started
  • The Houthis, in Yemen, fired a few missiles at Israel at the start of the conflict, but has remained silent since
  • Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq have not targeted US bases
  • Lack of support is the result of both dissatisfaction with Iran's government and a reduction in capabilities
  • Hezbollah's leadership has been decimated by Israeli strikes
  • Iraqi militias are largely focused on commercial activities in Iraq rather than supporting Iran
  • The assassination of General Qassem Soleimani by the US in 2020 and further assassinations of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leadership carried out by Israel in 2023 have reduced Iran's ability to coordinate with its non-state proxies
  • Many of Iran's allies have been dismayed to see just how thoroughly the Iranian government has been infiltrated by Israeli intelligence services
  • However, further escalation or the the direct involvement of the US in the conflict could change the calculus for Iran's non-state allies
• Transatlantic airfares fall as Europeans skip travel to the US
  • Fewer Europeans are traveling to the US, citing concerns about Trump's border policies
  • Overseas arrivals to the US fell by 2.8% from numbers seen last year
  • Total inbound bookings to the US in June are down by 13%
  • As a result, the price of round-trip airfares from the US to Europe is down by an average of 10%
  • Certain fares, such as Atlanta - London are down by almost 40% from a year ago
• The Boeing 787 that crashed in India reportedly had its emergency power generator active
  • On June 12, Air India Flight 171, a Boeing 787 departing Ahmedabad for Gatwick, crashed
  • Today, investigators found that the 787's emergency ram air turbine (RAT), a mechanism for keeping flight instruments powered in the event of a loss of engine power, was operating when the plane crashed
  • The RAT deploys automatically in the event of power failure from the engines, but it can also be deployed manually by pilots if they think they've lost engine power
  • The investigation into the crash is ongoing, and officials caution against drawing premature conclusions from the deployment of the RAT
• Anduril partners with Rheinmetall to develop drones for Europe
  • The two companies will develop versions of Anduril's Barracuda and Fury drones for the European market
  • Barracuda is a cheap, quick-to-build drone designed with lessons from the war in Ukraine in mind
  • Fury is a longer-range, more expensive drone
  • Collaborate on the development of solid rocket motors, as rocket motor production is a key bottleneck in the production of air-defense missiles
  • Anduril emphasized that the new joint venture was distinct from its existing partnerships with European firms in that it was aimed at creating a "sovereign capability" for Germany and the EU
• Temu battles data privacy allegations by storing data in the US
  • Temu has signed a deal with Oracle to store American customer data in the US
  • Mirrors an approach used by TikTok, which was subject to the same concerns earlier
• The Trump administration issues a presidential permit to allow the construction of an elevated guideway between Laredo, TX and Monterrey, Mexico
  • Permit was issued to Green Corridors, an Austin, TX based company
  • The guideway would consist of self-driving diesel electric shuttles that would ferry 53' dry goods trailers from terminals in Monterrey, Mexico, across the US-Mexico border, and deposit them in Laredo TX
  • Operates much like a monorail
  • Goal is to reduce congestion at border crossings
  • The Trump administration issued a permit, which will expire in 5 years if construction has not begun by then
  • Green Corridors says that its system will complement existing trucking and rail infrastructure in the area
  • Will be paid for by a fee that trucking companies will pay per trailer for transport across the border
  • Although Trump proposed tariffs on goods coming in from Mexico, trade between the US and Mexico is still expected to grow, especially if tariffs on goods produced in Mexico remain lower than those on goods produced in China

2025-06-17 Tuesday

• xAI will be raising $9.3 billion in debt and equity
  • Will be issuing around $5 billion in bonds and $4.3 billion in equity
  • Money will be used to construct new data centers to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others
• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says AI will results in job cuts
  • Jassy stated that generative AI is capable on taking on more tasks at Amazon
  • Says Amazon is using AI to take care of rote work and start projects "from a more advanced starting point"
  • Amazon has invested heavily in internal AI tools to speed up business processes
• Oracle unveils new program to make it easier for small firms to sell technology to the Department of Defense
  • Oracle Defense Ecosystem initiative
  • Companies will have access to Oracle's knowledge of navigating the Pentagon's procurement bureaucracy
  • Will receive discounted access to Palantir's data mining platforms and Oracle's NetSuite accounting and ERP software
  • There will be a dozen initial participants in the program, including AI firms Blackshark.ai and SensusQ
  • The initiative dovetails with the Pentagon's own efforts to reform contracting and acquisitions
  • Enables Oracle to carve out an advantage in the competition for cloud customers, where it trails significantly behind Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure and Google's Google Cloud Platform, by enabling smaller companies to sell products using Oracle's cloud infrastructure to the government
• Airbus and Dassault have differing views on the design of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) aircraft
  • According to the Chief Executive of Defense and Space at Airbus, Michael Schoellhorn, Airbus and Dassault have "different viewpoints" on the second phase of the FCAS
  • Schoellhorn said that recent comments by Dassault CEO Éric Trappier suggest that Dassault wants to rearrange the governance of the project, possibly scrapping the "one country, one vote" principle underlying decision-making on the French/German/Spanish project
  • Trappier argued that, despite its disproportionate contribution to the program, France could get outvoted by Germany and Spain
  • Also said that Dassault should have a freer hand to take leadership of the program, given its experience in making fighter aircraft, like the Rafale, which have seen success in the export market
  • Resolving this dispute will likely require intervention by politicians
  • FCAS is under pressure to deliver results as it competes with the Global Combat Air Program, run by Britain's BAE Systems, Italy's Leonardo and Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
  • Schoellhorn says that disputes will have to be resolved by the end of the year if the program is to remain on track
  • I wrote about how the FCAS was a disaster in 2021
• Trump calls for Iran to "unconditionally surrender"
  • Trump said that "we" have total control over the skies over Iran, implying US collaboration with Israel
  • Issued a veiled threat against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying that the US knew his location but would hold off on carrying out a targeted strike against him
  • Trump's threats come as the US has begun to move tankers and other support aircraft to airfields in Europe, where they would be available to help if the US chose to strike Iran
  • The US has an aircraft carrier strike group, led by the USS Carl Vinson, in the area
  • Another, led by the USS Nimitz is on its way after skipping an expected port call in Vietnam
  • There is an option for the US to send a third carrier, the USS Ford to the region as well
• US intelligence agencies express doubts about Iran's intent to rush for a nuclear weapon
  • Israeli officials provided US intelligence agencies with information that they claimed indicated Iran was imminently pursuing a nuclear weapon
  • Documents indicated that Iran was researching neutron radiation and multi-point detonations of plastic explosives, both of which are necessary for actually detonating a nuclear device
  • The US and Israel are in agreement that Iran has put itself in a stronger position to build a nuclear device should it wish to
  • Donald Trump expressed a position closer to the Israeli one, saying that he believed that the Iranians were intent on acquiring a nuclear bomb, and that he wouldn't press for a cease-fire between Israel and Iran
  • US intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran's nuclear work has been set back by 5-6 months by Israel's air campaign
• Israelis scramble to get home after Israel closes its main international airport
  • Israel has closed its airspace as a precaution, as a result of the ongoing conflict with Iran
  • As a result many Israelis who were abroad on vacation or for work are stranded there
  • Some are re-booking trips to Egypt or Jordan, in order to re-enter Israel via land
  • Others are chartering boats from Cyprus
  • Not happy with comments from transportation minister Miri Regev, who said that there was a plan in place to return overseas Israelis, but, in the meantime they should "enjoy" being abroad
• Trump's tariff clock keeps ticking after G-7 summit fails to yield deals
  • Leaders from many G-7 nations were hoping to secure deals with President Trump in advance of the end of the 90-day pause, which will end on midnight, July 9
  • Countries without a deal in place by then risk having the original "reciprocal" tariffs reimposed
  • Trump left the G-7 summit early in order to deal with the ongoing Israel-Iran crisis
  • Foreign negotiators are complaining that the Trump administration is sending mixed messages regarding tariffs
    • Source of income
    • Way to redress trade imbalances
  • As a result, they don't have a good idea about how much they can negotiate to reduce tariffs, and which tariff levels are non-negotiable for the Trump administration
• The surge in ocean shipping rates is beginning to subside
  • Ocean shipping rates from China to the US had increased rapidly after the US announced its tariff truce with China on May 12
  • The truce led retailers to bring over inventory that had been stranded in China before the 90-day reprieve expires on August 10
  • Retailers are also working to bring in inventory from countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, before Trump's 90 day pause on "reciprocal tariffs" expires on July 9
  • Trump has said that there won't be another tariff pause
• Real estate developers are beginning to shrink office space inventory
  • Pace of demolitions and conversion into residences is increasing
  • Developers built excess office space, motivated by demand from startups, low interest rates and federal tax breaks
  • The glut of office space was aggravated by the shift to remote work caused by the pandemic
  • Now, as the prices of office buildings fall, more developers are investing in conversions
  • Analysts forecast 40 million square feet of office space will be converted into residential space over the next 5 years
  • The inventory of office space is set to shrink by 23.2 million square feet this year
  • Only 12.7 million square feet of new office space is being constructed
  • However, the vacancy rate is still high, standing at 19%, as businesses delay expansion plans due to economic uncertainty
• Senate Republicans continue to negotiate over Medicaid cuts
  • Republicans have a relatively narrow 53-47 vote majority in the Senate
  • One faction of Republicans wants deep Medicaid cuts in order to reduce the deficit while still retaining Trump's tax cuts
  • Another faction wants to preserve Medicaid, which many constituents rely on for health insurance, even if it will raise the deficit
  • Hospitals and state governors are warning of negative repercussions if Medicaid is cut significantly
• The US Senate passes legislation regulating "stablecoins"
  • The "Genius Act" regulates "stablecoins", a type of cryptocurrency asset whose valuation is pegged to an established currency, like the US Dollar
  • The bill mandates that stablecoins maintain reserves of stable assets, such as cash or treasury bills, equal in value to the cryptocurrency tokens they have in circulation
  • Stablecoins with more than $50 billion in circulated value would be required to publish audited financial statements
  • Requires that stablecoins comply with regulations designed to prevent money laundering
  • Also prevents executive branch officials from issuing stablecoins, in order to prevent conflicts of interest
  • Passed the US Senate on a 68-30 bipartisan vote
  • The bill now moves to the House of Representatives, where it is likely to pass even though it's not on the immediate agenda
  • Did they really make the bill's name a pun on Trump's, "I'm a very stable genius," comment?
• The EPA will reconsider its ban on asbestos
  • Under the Biden administration, the EPA moved forward with a total ban on asbestos
  • The last form of asbestos still legal, chrysotile asbestos, remains in use for products like automotive brakes and diaphragms used to make chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and chlorine
  • However, under the Trump administration, the EPA has moved to reconsider this ban
  • Trump supports the use of asbestos and argues that moves to ban it have been driven by the mafia, who he says is a major player in the asbestos removal business

2025-06-16 Monday

• EU plans ban on new Russian gas imports
  • This is the implementation of the plan that the European Commission announced on May 6
  • The European Commission is proposing using trade law to circumvent possible vetoes by Hungary and Slovakia on a proposed ban on Russian gas imports
  • The legislation would allow companies to invoke force majeure clauses to end their contracts to buy Russian gas
  • Companies would have to provide detailed information on their gas contracts to ensure that no Russian gas was entering the European market
• OpenAI and Microsoft are having trouble coming to an agreement over Microsoft's ownership stake in OpenAI
  • Previous coverage
  • Microsoft has invested a significant amount of money in OpenAI when OpenAI was still a nonprofit
  • Has a licensing deal for the AI models and other intellectual property that OpenAI creates, as well as the exclusive right to resell access to OpenAI's models through its Azure cloud services
  • However, OpenAI has sought to acquire the AI programming tool Windsurf, which is a potential competitor to Microsoft's Github Copilot
  • OpenAI doesn't want Microsoft to have access to Windsurf's IP
  • OpenAI is also negotiating with Microsoft over how much of the company Microsoft will own if it converts to a public benefit corporation
  • OpenAI has reportedly considered bringing anti-trust allegations against Microsoft over its contract; however, that step has been described as a "nuclear option" that would likely cause a permanent rupture in the relationship between the two companies
• OpenAI wins $200 million US defense contract
  • The Pentagon awarded OpenAI a contract to develop "frontier AI capabilities" for the US Department of Defense
  • Work will be largely conducted in Washington, with an estimated completion date of July 2026
  • This comes in the wake of Anthropic releasing a version of its Claude chatbot customized for government and national security applications
• Iran looks to Trump for a reprive from the Israeli air campaign
  • When Israel began striking Iranian facilities on Friday, Iran canceled negotiations with the US regarding its nuclear program
  • However, now Iran has sent signals indicating that it would be open to further negotiations
  • Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations are also pressuring the Trump administration to begin negotiations, as they fear that the Israel-Iran conflict could escalate into a wider regional war
  • Iranian officials, while blaming the US for not restraining Israel, have not taken any steps to attack US assets in the Middle East in order to avoid antagonizing Trump
  • However, Trump has remained supportive of Israel, blaming Iran for not agreeing to end its enrichment program, and thus inviting Israeli attack
  • The Iranian government was reportedly taken by surprise by the Israeli attack, as they did not think that Israel would attack while Iran was in the process of negotiating with the US
  • Israeli analysts see Iran's diplomatic overtures as a means for Iran to drive a wedge between Israel and the US
• Middle Eastern investment in AI could be problematic for AI companies
  • Countries along the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have announced multi-billion dollar investments in AI data centers
  • Seek to develop AI locally, rather than cede control of this technology to foreigners
  • Deals have been welcome for chip designers such as Nvidia and chip manufacturers such as TSMC, who see the Gulf as an alternative source of demand after export restrictions reduced their ability to send chips to China
  • However, there are questions about the sustainability of Middle Eastern revenue
  • Many large projects in the Middle East are scaled back or scrapped entirely as priorities shift
  • Demand for AI services in the Middle East is unclear
  • Export controls could be imposed on these countries if, as many suspect, they become a side door for China to access Western AI technologies
• Young graduates in the US are facing an employment crisis
  • The US labor market is holding steady, but there aren't very many entry level jobs for new graduates
  • The unemployment rate for new college graduates is 6.6%, much higher than the overall unemployment rate of approximately 4%
  • Older workers, age 35 - 44 have an unemployment rate of just 2.2%
  • Companies are holding off on hiring for entry-level positions as they take a wait-and-see approach to see what the situation will be with tariffs and the broader economy
  • Adding further pressure is companies' usage of AI to automate basic data entry and programming tasks that would have previously required hiring new graduates
  • The unemployment rate thus far has been flattering because it has not yet captured the influx of students who've just graduated in May and June
• Trump will extend the reprieve on TikTok for another 90 days
  • Further coverage from the Wall Street Journal
  • Upon assuming office, Trump had issued a 90-day reprieve for TikTok in order to allow itself to be sold to a consortium of American investors,
  • That reprieve ended on April 4, and Trump signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to hold off on enforcing the law for another 75 days in order to allow the deal to close
  • However, the trade war with China threw the deal into question, and Chinese authorities have indicated that their permission for ByteDance to sell TikTok was conditional on broader trade negotiations
  • As a result, Trump has signed another executive order instructing the Justice Department to hold off on banning TikTok, this time for another 90 days
  • Democrats should sue to force Trump to enforce the law
• France blocks off the displays of four Israeli companies at the Paris Air Show for refusing to remove offensive weaponry
  • Stands of Elbit Systems, Rafael, IAI and Uvision were blocked off with black partitions
  • The French government said that it had reached an agreement with all vendors putting up displays at the Paris Air Show that offensive weapons would not be displayed, and the four Israeli companies were in violation of that agreement
  • The Israeli embassy replied that the French action was in response to the four Israeli vendors competing with French companies for weapons contracts
  • Sources familiar with the Israeli firms indicated that the closure of the stands took them by surprise, as they thought they had received French approval of a pre-submitted list of items that were to be displayed
  • The French government is reportedly working with the Israeli firms to find a compromise that would allow them to reopen their stands
• Airbus secures large orders from Saudi and Polish airlines
  • Saudi aircraft leasing company AviLease announced a $3.5 billion deal for 30 A320neo passenger jets and 10 A350 freighters
  • Riyadh Air signed a deal for 25 A350-1000 long-haul passenger jets worth $4.6 billion
  • Polish airline LOT announced an order for 40 short-haul A220s, worth $1.6 billion, with an option for a further 44 planes
• Korea Zinc backs the Trump administration's deep sea mining ambitions
  • Korea Zinc announced an $85.2 million investment in mining startup The Metals Company (TMC)
  • TMC seeks to mine minerals from the ocean floor
  • Represents the first large investment in deep sea mining since Trump signed an executive order authorizing companies to ignore International Seabed Authority regulations when mining minerals from the ocean floor
  • Korea Zinc seeks to support customers as they diversify away from Chinese sources of zinc
  • Is examining whether it can work with TMC to refine zinc mined from the ocean floor in the US

2025-06-15 Sunday

• Southwest Airlines is adding additional cockpit alert systems to help prevent close calls at airports
  • Cockpit alert system is designed by Honeywell
  • Will warn pilots if they're approaching the runway at too steep an angle or are landing too far down the runway
  • Will also warn pilots if they're attempting to take off from a taxiway rather than the main runway
  • Airbus and Boeing are working on adding these alerts to new-built aircraft
  • The Honeywell system allows airlines to retrofit existing aircraft to have these alerts
• Boeing offices in Ukraine were damaged by a Russian air attack
  • A large scale drone and missile attack on Kyiv damaged an office building used by Boeing
  • Attack appeared to deliberately target the US company
  • Despite the damage to the building, no one was hurt and Boeing reports that there have been no operational disruptions to it work in Ukraine
  • Boeing has a signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ukrainian aircraft manufacturer Antonov to explore joint ventures to produce military aircraft and other defense-related projects
• Israel takes control of Iran's skies, a feat that still eludes Russia in Ukraine
  • Israel took control of the skies over western Iran in less than 48 hours
  • This has allowed Israeli warplanes to attack Iranian targets directly with bombs rather than having to use more expensive and scarcer long-range guided missiles
  • Israel's initial attacks against Iranian air defenses involved advanced F-35 aircraft, with Israeli modifications
  • As Iran's defenses weakened, older F-15 and F-16 aircraft were able to join the fight
  • By contrast, Russian troops have been bogged down in trench warfare in Ukraine, largely because the Russian air force has been unable to secure air superiority in the skies over Ukraine
  • Reinforces a point that many western analysts have made — air superiority matters greatly, even in an age of drones
  • It appears that the Israeli air force is better at offense than the Russian air force, and the Ukrainians are better at defense than the Iranians
  • Experts point out that the primary advantage that Israel has is the quality of its pilots, which are trained to handle a wide variety of scenarios
  • Iran had also underinvested in air defense more recently, counting on its missiles and proxies, such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, to deter Israel from striking Iran directly by promising retaliatory attacks
  • However, Hezbollah has had its leadership decimated by a long-running Israeli campaign of targeted assassinations
  • The collapse of the Assad government in Syria further isolated Hezbollah from its main sponsor
  • Israeli attacks on air defense systems in Syria created a corridor that Israeli warplanes can use to attack Iran
  • Another factor in the differing performances of Iran and Ukraine is surprise
    • Russia was unable to take Ukraine by surprise, because the US shared intelligence assessments with Ukraine detailing Russian attack plans
    • This allowed the Ukrainian government to disperse and hide air defense assets before the war started
    • When these defenses inflicted losses on Russian aircraft early in the war, the Russian air force stopped operating its fighters beyond the front line
    • This forced Russia to rely upon limited stocks of ballistic and cruise missiles to strike deep inside Ukraine
    • By contrast, surprise worked in the Israelis' favor
    • Iran was not expecting an Israeli attack before negotiations with the US had concluded
    • This allowed Israeli special forces teams to sneak into Iran and position themselves to destroy Iranian air defense assets from the ground as the war started
  • The advantage that Israel has gained in the skies over Iran will allow it to attack Iranian missile launchers before they fire, relieving pressure on Israeli missile defense systems
• Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba hopes to get concessions from Trump on auto tariffs
  • Japan faces a 24% "reciprocal" tariff and its automakers face a 25% tariff on top of that if a deal cannot be reached
  • Ishiba is under pressure to secure a favorable deal, as a loss in recent lower-house elections have left him reliant on a coalition government
  • Japanese automakers have absorbed the costs of tariffs thus far, but that isn't going to be sustainable under the higher tariff rate that will go into place if there is no deal
  • Good luck with that
  • Cars are still one of the things that the US produces a lot of domestically, so Trump isn't going to want to compromise on that
  • If the higher tariffs on Japanese cars go into effect, what will happen is that the floor on the price of cars will rise significantly in the US, as domestically made vehicles tend to be the ones which are sold at higher price points, and yield higher margins
• Corporate bond defaults decline in China, despite economic distress
  • Although the Chinese economy is facing a number of headwinds from the popping of a property market bubble and declining consumer confidence, corporate bond defaults have declined
  • Indicates that the Chinese government is doing more to support failing companies rather than allowing them to enter into bankruptcy
  • Shows that the Chinese government is prioritizing (the appearance of) economic stability over growth
  • Foreign participation in China's corporate debt market is extremely limited and most bonds have been issued by state-owned companies which enjoy an implicit government backstop
  • Chinese corporate borrowers are avoiding outright default and instead are restructuring loans with the cooperation of lenders

2025-06-14 Saturday

• India orders inspections of all Boeing 787s after crash
  • In the wake of the crash of Air India flight 171, the Indian government has ordered inspections to be carried out on all Boeing 787s operated by Indian airlines
  • 34 Boeing 787s are in service for Indian operators, and 8 have been inspected thus far

2025-06-13 Friday

• Israel strikes Iranian nuclear program
  • Israeli airstrikes targeted Iran's primary uranium enrichment facility at Natanz
  • Reportedly used over 200 aircraft
  • Also targeted senior military leadership with airstrikes and assassinations
  • Attack came days before US envoy Steve Witkoff was scheduled to meet with Iranian officials for a sixth round of negotiations of Iran's nuclear program
• Iran retaliates with a drone and missile barrage
  • Most of the incoming weapons were shot down by Israeli missile defense systems
  • The US military also shot down some incoming warheads
  • However, some munitions made it past Israeli defenses, causing injuries and damage to buildings in Tel Aviv
  • The Trump administration announced that it had been aware of Israeli strike plans
  • Mossad special forces operated inside Iran, setting up a drone base outside Tehran that they used to attack Iranian air defenses
• Scale AI gets an investment from Meta valuing it at more than $29 billion
  • Previous reporting from June 10
  • Unlike other AI firms, Scale AI doesn't focus on building models
  • Instead it focuses on labeling and creating high quality training data
  • Manages more than 100,000 contractors who help label images, categorize text and refine training data for AIs
  • Scale AI didn't disclose the overall size of the investment, only the valuation
  • However, given that the previous valuation of Scale AI was around $14 billion, the new investment was likely also around $14 billion, giving Meta a 49% stake in the company
  • As part of the deal Scale AI CEO will join Meta to lead its artificial intelligence efforts
  • Jason Droege, Chief Strategy Officer, will serve as interim CEO at Scale AI
• Google plans on ending its contract with Scale AI after Meta's investment in the company
  • Google had a $200 million contract with Scale AI, which it is now ending
  • xAI is also looking to back away
  • OpenAI had decided last year to cut back its use of Scale AI for training data
  • Meta's rivals are concerned that its large investment in Scale AI and the fact that former CEO Alexandr Wang will continue to sit on Scale AI's board while serving as Meta's lead for AI development will leak information about their AI efforts to Meta
  • Provides an opening for Scale AI's competitors
    • Labelbox
    • Handshake
    • In-house data labeling efforts
• The flight data and cockpit voice recorders of Air India Flight 171 have been recovered
  • The two "black boxes" are thought to contain key evidence that will help investigators determine what went wrong as the plane took off from Ahmedabad airport
  • The death toll from the crash has risen to 265, including victims on the ground
  • Experts note that video of the plane taking off shows it appearing to leave the ground normally, before suddenly losing altitude and crashing
  • The investigation is focusing on potential factors that could have caused a sudden reduction in thrust
• Apple sends 97% of Indian iPhone production to the US
  • Previously only about 50% of Indian-produced iPhones went to the US
  • Exports were split between other countries, such as the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Britain
  • However, after Trump's imposition of tariffs on China, Apple has redirected nearly all of its iPhone production to the US
  • India is currently subject to a 10% "baseline" tariff, and is in the processs of negotiating a bilateral trade agreement to avert 26% "reciprocal" tariffs
  • Efforts to shift more final assembly to India are hampered by India's own tariffs on imports of electronic components
• Nippon Steel closes its acquisition of US Steel after reaching a national security agreement with the Trump administration
  • The Trump administration has been awarded a "perpetual golden share", giving it authority over US Steel's production
  • The share does not represent any equity rights, but allows the US to veto Nippon Steel's investment and material sourcing decisions
  • This assuaged the Trump administration's national security concerns and Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing the deal to proceed
• "Tariff stacking" creates a new headache for US importers
  • Many goods from China are paying a far higher tariff than the headline rate of 30%
  • This is because the 30% tariff is applied on top of other tariffs, such as those on imported steel and aluminum products
  • Importers are saying they will pass tariffs costs through to customers
• The Trump Organization announces a mobile phone network, Trump Mobile
  • Says that the mobile network will use US-based call centers for customer service
  • Will offer a new Trump-branded US-manufactured Android smartphone to customers
  • Control of the company will be handled by Donald Trump's children, which raises potential conflict of interest questions

2025-06-12 Thursday

• An Air India Boeing 787 crashes in Gujarat
  • Air India Flight 171 was on its way from Ahmedabad to Gatwick
  • The plane crashed into a hostel at a medical college seconds after takeoff, after reaching a peak altitude of just 625 feet
  • Plane was carrying 242 people
  • There was a single survivor from the plane, and an unclear number of casualties on the ground
  • Pilots had issued a mayday call shortly before the crash but there was no response to Ahmedabad airport's air-traffic control's follow up messages
  • The 787 involved was 12 years old, according to Air India
  • Prior to this crash, the 787 had a perfect safety record, with zero fatal accidents
• AI tools represent the biggest threat to ad agencies
  • Google, Amazon and Meta are creating tools to enable customers to make their own ads using AI tools
  • These tools represent a threat to the traditional billing model of ad agencies, which charge customers based on the time spent to create their ad campaigns
  • Corporate marketing teams will be increasingly able to craft their own campaigns
  • Ad agencies will have to transition to a strategic advisor role, creating themes and concepts, which provide scaffolding for AI tools to craft a coherent marketing campaign around
• The Indian government announces multiple investments in AI
  • The largest fraction of ChatGPT users come from India
  • The Indian government has announced an initiative to create locally-trained large language models capable of conversing in Indic languages and, later, locally designed AI training chips
  • However, current AI models targeted towards Indian users in their native languages have been fine-tuned versions of other publicly available models, such as Mistral
  • India also faces a problem with data
  • Indian data is often siloed and inaccessible
  • Having more publicly available datasets would make it easier to make foundation models geared towards Indian needs
  • India also faces a dearth of AI researchers
  • Many talented AI researchers go abroad
  • Locals complain of a lack of long-term investment in AI
  • India risks being dominated by foreign firms as happened with smartphones and social networks
• Can India innovate?
  • While Indian manufacturing is increasingly taking on final assembly from China, most of the components in Indian devices still come from outside the country
  • India does not yet have the sort of manufacturing innovations that would enable it to move up the value chain as China has
  • India's labor force is full of contradictions
    • India has the world's largest population of IT engineers, but is completely absent from the race to build cutting edge AI
    • Indian drug manufacturers supply the world with generics, but don't make original drug discoveries
    • IITs train talent for the world but can't even crack the top 100 ranking for published research
  • Indian spending on R&D lags behind
    • In industrialized countries, private spending on R&D is roughly {$\frac{2}{3}$} of total R&D spending
    • In India, private spending only accounts for {$\frac{1}{3}$}
  • While the relative poverty of India and its correspondingly low corporate margins accounts for some of this thriftiness, even profitable firms in India spend far less than their counterparts in the US and China
    • In the US these firms spend almost 9% of revenue on R&D
    • In China R&D spending is roughly 2% of revenue
    • In India, it's 0.3%
    • Indian firms often think they're spending enough on R&D, when, in reality their spending lags far behind their foreign competitors
    • Indian people, and Indian businessmen especially are cheap
    • They will absolutely refuse to spend money on anything that does not have a clear and immediate return
    • Speculative R&D spending on moonshot projects is an anathema
    • Any Indian with an interest in that kind of stuff immediately emigrates to Europe, the UK or the United States
  • Indian academia is no better
    • Indian researchers are rewarded for publication, rather than impact
    • Publish a large number of articles, but India is only ranked #19 when adjustments are applied for how often those articles are cited
  • Indian startups often focus on consumer applications, such as delivery services, than "deep technology" like electric vehicles or semiconductors
    • That's partially a response to funding
    • China has a large number of "deep tech" startups because the Chinese government has poured a vast amount of money into ensuring that these startups have favorable access to bank loans
    • The US, to the extent that it does have "deep tech" startups, manages to have them by virtue of being very rich — a small percentage of a very large pot still manages to be lot of money
  • Indian entrepreneurs reply that India's patchy infrastructure offers much greater returns to consumer applications than it does to deep technology
  • Delivery apps don't require constant, ultra-stable power and water supplies like semiconductor fabs
  • The big exception to this is space
    • ISRO has managed to become a successful space program, despite operating on a relatively shoestring budget
    • Is an example of successful public-private collaboration that should be replicated elsewhere
• Iran announces a third enrichment facility
  • Announcement comes after the UN's atomic energy agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), declared that Iran was no longer in compliance with its nonproliferation obligations
  • Iran currently has two enrichment facilities, at Natanz and underground in Fordow
  • Mohammad Eslami said that Iran was installing centrifuges in a third, undisclosed, location and would soon being manufacturing fissile material there
  • Iran Also announced that it would increase the production of enriched uranium at Fordow
  • US officials say that there is no evidence that Iran has decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, but add that Iran has enough nuclear material that it could acquire a weapon within months if it chose to do so
  • The IAEA finding allows Iran to be referred to the UN Security Council, where a vote could be held to reimpose sanctions
  • Iran says that if sanctions are reimposed, it will leave the Nonproliferation Treaty and expel UN inspectors
  • The Israeli government has said that, if it believes that Iran is about to develop a nuclear weapon, it will act preemptively
• Micron Technologies announces a $200 billion investment in US semiconductor manufacturing
  • Micron will invest $150 billion in domestic memory manufacturing
  • Will build two high-volume fabs in Idaho and four such fabs in New York
  • Will also modernize its existing fab in Virginia
  • The remaining $50 billion will be invested in additional R&D
  • The capacity expansion is to allow Micron to meet market demand while achieving its goal of manufacturing 40% of its chips in the US
  • Construction has already begun on the first Idaho fab, with the facility expected to begin producing chips in 2027
• Mattel announces partnership with OpenAI
  • Collaboration is still in its early stages
  • OpenAI's tools will be used to help design toys, and toys may later feature ChatGPT integration
  • AI tools could be used to make toys like the Magic 8-ball even more interactive
  • Honestly? An AI-powered Magic 8-ball would be pretty cool
• Aerospace startup JetZero announces that it will build a factory in North Carolina
  • JetZero is a startup which aims to lower costs and increase fuel efficiency by developing a blended wing body aircraft
  • Blended wing body design cuts fuel consumption by up to 50% and has a more spacious cabin
  • JetZero has been working with the Air Force to use its blended wing body design for the US Air Force's Next Generation Air-refueling System
  • Announced plans to begin construction on a factory in North Carolina next year
  • A full-scale prototype of JetZero's aircraft is scheduled for flight in 2027, and the aircraft is scheduled to enter production in 2032
• The Chinese government is encouraging development of larger drones for deliveries and passenger transport
  • Shenzhen has kiosks that allow customers to pick up drone-delivered food
  • Numerous start-ups are developing eVTOL "flying taxis"
  • While these technologies are nascent in much of the rest of the world, China is forging ahead with them
  • The Chinese government refers to the development of delivery drones and flying taxis as the "low-altitude economy"
  • "Low altitude" is defined as below 1000 meters above ground level
  • The government has revised airspace regulations to make it easier for small startups to get into the drone business without having to undergo a cumbersome permitting process
  • Local governments have invested in infrastructure, such as landing pads and designated fixed routes for drones, as well as improvements in cell phone infrastructure to allow drones to communicate more easily
  • The delivery company Meituan has more than 100 drones in the air at once during busy periods in Shenzhen
  • China's investments in the low-altitude economy plays to China's existing strengths in battery technology and electric motors, as seen in its gains with electric vehicles
  • However, it is still unclear whether eVTOL companies will be profitable
  • One thing the article doesn't cover is the application this has to defense
  • Low-altitude drones have had a decisive impact on the war in Ukraine, and China is building up the infrastructure to have lots of drones and drone pilots
  • This is similar to how Germany invested in private "flying clubs" in the 1930s in order to build up a domestic aircraft industry and train pilots in advance of World War 2
• The West has stopped losing its religion
  • The proportion of people calling themselves atheist or agnostic has grown from 5% in 1990 to over 30% in 2019
  • However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the proportion of people professing religion has grown, reversing an almost 30-year trend
  • Even in Europe, where religion has declined even faster than it has in the US, the proportion of people saying they're atheist or agnostic has slowed markedly
  • This matches a slowdown in the number of people leaving Christianity, making it unlikely that the decline in atheism and agnosticism in Europe can be explained by Muslim immigration
  • A plausible explanation for the decline in atheism is the COVID-19 pandemic, which isolated Gen-Z just as they were entering adulthood
  • Another plausible explanation is given by Tanner Greer in Culture Wars are Long Wars
  • He points out that each generation is, in some ways, a counterculture to the generation that came before it
  • We've reached the point where atheism is the "mainstream" culture, so the counterculture to that will be religious
  • Religion offered a source of meaning and comfort during those years of tumult
  • However, religious affiliation has persisted after the pandemic subsided
  • People have said that their faith has strengthened after the ending of the pandemic
  • Another surprising factor about the new religiosity is that it's primarily a male phenomenon — historically women have been the more religious gender
  • This is likely because women are increasingly liberal and find traditional religion out of step with their broader political views
  • And young men, conversely, have been becoming more conservative, and thus aligned with traditional religion
  • Many of these new converts are joining religion as adults, driving a spike in adult baptisms
  • The reversal in the decline of religion means that America will be a majority-Christian nation for at least the next 50 years

2025-06-11 Wednesday

• A British court rules that insurers must reimburse AerCap more than $1 billion for planes stranded in Russia
  • After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government prohibited the "export" of aircraft from Russia
  • This was tantamount to a seizure of planes that had been leased to Russian airlines by western leasing firms, notably AerCap
  • AerCap sued its insurers, arguing that this was an insurable event under its policy
  • Today a London court agreed
  • However, AerCap's payout will be less than what it was seeking, because the court ruled that insurers could pay out under a "war risks" policy rather than a "general risks" policy, as the export controls were imposed by the Russian government as part of an act of war
• Ukraine is turning into a leader in drone technology
  • The drones used in Ukraine's attack on Russian airfields featured AI technology to help them fly on pre-planned routes even in the face of Russian jamming
  • Ukraine has already demonstrated autonomous targeting capabilities that allow drones to identify and strike targets that the operator has chosen
  • Now Ukrainians are working on developing interceptor drones to attack Russian long-range Shahed UAVs in order to conserve their air defense resources
  • Ukraine, however, lags behind Russia in the use of fiber-optic drones, which use a hard-wired connection to make themselves immune to jamming
• Nvidia and Perplexity team up to offer "sovereign" AI to European customers
  • Nvidia is working with European companies to build open-source localized AI models for European customers
  • These models will be made available through Perplexity's AI platform
  • These models will allow Perplexity to return search results and summaries in local languages
  • Nvidia sees "sovereign AI" as an important growth sector
  • This is a good example of Nvidia trying to commoditize its complements
  • Nvidia benefits when there are a wide range of AI models, all designed to run on Nvidia GPUs
  • So it's working to ensure that there is as much competition in the AI space as possible and that it isn't dominated by e.g. Google or OpenAI
• L'Oreal partners with Nvidia to scale up its efforts to create AI-generated ads and product recommendations
  • L'Oreal will use Nvidia's AI Enterprise platform, a suite of microservices designed to add AI capabilities to existing applications
  • L'Oreal will use this platform for its internal generative AI content creation tool, which can generate photo-realistic renditions of products from 3D models
  • Currently, this tool uses Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, Google's Imagen and Adobe's Firefly
  • Moving these models into Nvidia's platform will enable L'Oreal to scale up and use the models more cost-effectively
  • The Nvidia collaboration will also be used to create an AI-enabled product recommendation engine that will be used by Noli, a L'Oreal backed beauty startup
  • The recommendation engine will offer customers recommendations based on their skin and hair type
  • More commoditizing of complements
• Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, alleging that Midjourney's AI image generation tool can be used for copyright infringement
  • The lawsuit alleges that Midjourney can be used to create lookalikes of copyrighted characters, such as Darth Vader, Homer Simpson and the Minions
  • The two studios allege that Midjourney misused copyrighted information for its training data and is allowing users to make lookalikes of copyrighted characters
• Tesla tentatively schedules the launch of its robotaxi service on June 22
  • CEO Elon Musk says that the launch could be rescheduled if he thinks the service isn't ready
  • Tesla is racing to catch up to domestic rival Waymo and Chinese rivals Baidu Apollo, WeRide and Pony AI
• The US and China reach deal to restore trade truce
  • Tariffs will remain at the levels agreed to in the trade truce agreed to by the US and China on May 12
  • China will agree to restore exports of rare earth minerals
  • In return the US will lift restrictions on Chinese students studying at US universities
  • It's unclear what other Chinese requests, such as lifting restrictions on chip design software and jet engine parts, the US agreed to
  • Like I said then, it's hard to see this as anything other than a win for China
  • China successfully used its leverage with rare earths in order to get the US to walk back trade and immigration restrictions
• China imposes a 6-month time limit on export licenses for rare earth minerals
  • Gives China leverage if trade tensions flare up again
  • In exchange for China relaxing export controls on rare earths, the US agreed to lift restrictions on sales of jet engine parts and ethane
  • The licenses China will issue immediately will largely involve rare earths used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, consumer electronics and military equipment
  • The US maintains export controls on computer chips required for advanced AI
• Russia says it stands ready to remove highly enriched uranium from Iran should a deal be struck on Iran's nuclear program
  • President Vladimir Putin told Donald Trump in a phone call that Russia could receive Iran's stock of highly enriched weapons grade uranium
  • Russia could then dilute the uranium and send it back to Iran to be used as fuel for nuclear reactors
  • Offer comes in the midst of ongoing negotiations over Iran's nuclear program between the US and Iran
• Gold overtakes the Euro as the second-most valuable reserve asset
  • Gold overtook the Euro as the second largest asset by value in official central bank holdings
  • Accounted for 20% of all reserve holdings last year, ahead of 16% for the Euro
  • The US dollar remains in the lead, accounting for 46% of all holdings
  • The increase in gold's share of value has been driven both by increases in the price of gold, raising the value of existing reserves, and by central banks actively buying gold
  • Large buyers of gold last year included India, China, Turkey and Poland
  • Although gold does not bear interest, it is immune to sanctions and is highly liquid, making it a favored choice for central banks seeking to diversify away from the US dollar
  • The current level of central bank gold holdings, at 36,000 tons, is the highest it has been since the end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates
• Standard Nuclear is developing triso fuel for small modular reactors
  • Based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where uranium for the Manhattan Project was refined
  • Tristructural isotropic, or "triso", fuel packages uranium into small pellets rather than large rods
  • Each pellet contains a poppy-seed sized grain of uranium wrapped with layers of carbon and silicon carbide
  • Triso fuel is used by a new breed of small-modular reactors (SMRs) as it is more resistant to meltdown than traditional fuel rods
  • Current production of triso requires high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU), whose supply is dominated by Russa
  • In 2028, US import licenses for Russian HALEU will expire
  • However, the US has awarded licenses to a number of firms to set up domestic HALEU production
• Texas shipyard deal would bring icebreakers that Trump desires
  • Canada's Davie Shipbuilding seeks to buy a Texas shipyard in order to produce new icebreakers sought by the Trump administration
  • Would simultaneously help with reviving the US icebreaker fleet and help meet Trump's goals for increased domestic shipbuilding
  • Subsidizing domestic shipbuilding is a bipartisan priority
  • The US is prioritizing the construction of new icebreakers in order to monitor Russian activity around the North Pole
  • Davie also owns Helsinki Shipyard, in Finland, one of the leading manufacturers of icebreaking ships, as well as another shipyard specializing in icebreakers in Quebec
  • Would transfer some personnel from those two yards to Texas in order to help build expertise in the US for building icebreaking ships
  • Of course, building ships in the US would be a lot easier if Trump hadn't put 50% tariffs on steel imports

2025-06-10 Tuesday

• Trump says that a deal restoring the trade war truce is "done"
  • Negotiators in London reached an informal agreement to restore the trade war truce initially agreed to in Geneva
  • That agreement had come under fire because of Chinese restrictions on rare earths exports
  • The US, in turn, retaliated against China with restrictions on the sale of chip design software and jet engine parts
  • Also restricted student visas for Chinese students seeking to study in US universities
  • Over the past two days, intensive negotiations between US Trade Representative Greer, Treasury Secretary Bessent, Commerce Secretary Lutnick and a Chinese delegation led by He Lifeng, have resulted in a renewed deal
  • According to Trump, China has agreed to lift its restrictions on the exports of rare earths
  • In exchange the US will restart granting student visas to Chinese students
  • Trump's statement on the truce made no mention of lifting further export controls on chips or chip design software
• Potato prices triple in Russia
  • Russian potato yields fell significantly last year, both due to bad weather and due to sanctions impeding Russia's ability to import fertilizer and machinery
  • Prices for onions, cabbages and beets have also surged
  • The price increases add pressure on the Russian central bank, which has had to increase interest rates to 20% in order to combat war-induced inflation
  • Unfortunately, however, the Russian economy still appears to be far from collapse
• The EU proposes a ban on deals related to NordStream pipeline and a lower price cap for Russian oil in an effort to increase the pressure on Russia's economy
  • Proposed measures would prohibit European natural gas operators from engaging in any transactions related to the NordStream 1 and 2 pipelines
  • Also plan to reduce the price cap at which Russian oil can be legally purchased to $45 from $60 currently
  • The changes would require unanimous approval from all EU member states
  • So it's not happening, in other words; Orban and​/or Fico will block it
• Google's AI tools are crushing traffic to news websites
  • As chatbots replace Google searches, fewer users are clicking through to news websites
  • Have to evolve their business model as traffic from Google dwindles
  • News websites are beginning to plan for a "post-search era"
  • Are also engaging in legal battles with AI startups which they allege have used their content without compensation
  • I think this is a good thing
  • As Ryan Holliday outlined in Trust Me I'm Lying, the effect of Google on news has been pernicious
  • News websites that aren't reliant on Google will hopefully have a lower incentive to over-sensationalize stories in order to attract clicks
• Google expands buyout offers as it seeks to deploy more resources towards AI
  • Google extended voluntary buyout offers to employees in multiple locations
  • Offers went to employees in search and advertising
  • Google conducted large layoffs in 2023, and has conducted smaller layoffs since then
• OpenAI plans to buy computational capacity from Google Cloud
  • Although OpenAI is one of Google's rivals in the AI space, the deal represents a big win for Google Cloud
  • This deal also gives OpenAI the ability to use Google's custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to train its AIs
  • OpenAI has a voracious demand for computational capacity, and, in addition to its original partnership with Microsoft, OpenAI has signed deals with Oracle and CoreWeave for additional compute
  • Is also building its own data centers with Oracle's aid, as part of the Stargate Initiative
• Meta is in talks to invest $14 billion into Scale AI and hire its CEO, Alexandr Wang
  • Meta would reportedly put Wang in charge of its overall AI efforts
  • Would also bring on board other executives from ScaleAI
  • The investment is an alternative to acquiring ScaleAI completely; it is a large minority investment that would give Meta 49% of the company
  • Unlike other AI companies, ScaleAI is not building new models
  • Instead it's focusing on labeling and curating training data, a task that is increasingly becoming a bottleneck for AI training
  • Move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg becomes increasingly frustrated with the pace of Meta's AI development, which appears to be falling behind its rivals, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others
• Uber and Wayve will test self-driving vehicles in London
  • Uber plans to bring self-driving vehicles to the streets of Europe with a partnership with Wayve
  • Has partnered with Waymo in the US to allow users to hail conventional manned taxis and self-driving vehicles through a single interface
  • Will be bringing the same approach to Europe with Wayve partnership
  • Have not announced when self-driving taxis would be available for customers to book
• Analysts pan Apple's AI efforts
  • This year at WWDC Apple's keynote presentation made little mention of its AI efforts
  • Opened up AI framework to third party developers, but didn't announce any new capabilities
  • Apple likely wanted to avoid the trap of announcing features that it couldn't ship on time, as happened with the initial Apple Intelligence announcement, where announced features were unavailable for six months or more
  • On-device AI has not proven to be a compelling differentiator
  • People don't seem to be bothered with the privacy implications of cloud-based AI; this takes away a key differentiator for Apple's products
  • Apple doesn't have any foundation models of its own, and is reliant on partners such as OpenAI
  • This year, Apple is also expected to strike deals with other AI vendors, such as Google, in order to not be as dependent on OpenAI as a sole supplier
  • Without compelling AI use cases, there is little to drive a large increase in iPhone sales, which significantly weakens the bull-case for Apple's share price
• Companies are cutting back on free shipping to offset the cost of tariffs
  • Some online merchants are eliminating free shipping entirely
  • Others are increasing the order value threshold that customers must meet in order to qualify for free shipping
  • Tinkering with shipping charges allows small businesses to pass on the costs of tariffs without affecting headline prices
  • However, reducing free shipping risks harming the conversion rate, i.e. the proportion of visitors to a retailer who actually make a purchase
• The UK plans to invest £6 billion in additional submarine building capacity
  • Money will go to firms like BAE and Rolls Royce, in order to finance additional capital expenditures
  • Goal is to increase the rate at which the UK can build submarines
  • Will support already announced plans to increase the size of the UK's nuclear powered attack submarine fleet to 12
• A cyberattack on a grocery distributors leads to empty shelves at Whole Foods and other groceries
  • United Natural Foods said it detected unauthorized activity on its internal network and took some systems offline as a precaution
  • Following this, there were numerous disruptions to United Natural Foods' operations, with grocery stores reporting that they're unable to place orders
  • The company hopes to restore operations by Sunday
  • United Natural specializes in distributing natural and organic products, and is a key supplier to Whole Foods
  • Is this why my local Aldi was out of salad greens?
• Starbucks plans to accelerate the rollout of a new staffing model across all its stores in North America
  • The new "Green Apron" staffing model will help support new order-handling software that purports to speed up order fulfillment
  • Staff will now include a dedicated barista to handle drive-through orders
  • CEO Brian Niccol is now pushing for the new model to be deployed to all stores in North America by year's end rather than 1/3 of stores
  • Is part of Niccol's turnaround plan for Starbucks, which has posted disappointing earnings lately as consumers have voiced dissatisfaction with the length of time it takes to fulfill orders
  • Niccol's strategy is to re-emphasize the in-store experience and try to wean Starbucks off its pandemic-era dependence on to-go orders
• Trump says he plans to "phase out" FEMA after the current hurricane season
  • Will distribute aid money directly from the White House
  • Also says that states will receive less federal aid to deal with the aftermath of natural disasters

2025-06-09 Monday

• OpenAI expects its recurring revenue to reach $10 billion this year
  • Revenue has doubled to $10 billion on an annualized basis
  • Other AI tools, notably the programming tool Cursor, have also reported steep increases in revenue
  • Anthropic is also reportedly exceeding its revenue forecasts
  • However, all three companies above are still losing money, and are reliant on ongoing cash infusions from venture capital investors in order to train new models
  • OpenAI does not expect to be profitable until 2029
• Apple gives developers access to its Apple Intelligence models
  • Apple Intelligence refers to a series of generative AI models that Apple has designed
  • Developers will initially only be able to use the smaller models that are capable of running locally on iPhones and other devices
• Apple's latest OS, macOS 26 ("Tahoe") will be the last version of macOS to support Intel CPUs
  • Apple began replacing Intel CPUs in its flagship Mac computer with its own Apple Silicon chips in 2020
  • After macOS 26 has been obsoleted, Apple will continue to provide security updates for Intel Macs for a further two years
• Qualcomm agrees to acquire British semiconductor design firm Alphawave for $2.4 billion
  • Alphawave makes high-speed connectivity packages for computer chips
  • Licenses designs; doesn't manufacture its own hardware
• Renault is asked by the French government to set up a drone production facility in Ukraine
  • The automaker will collaborate with smaller drone companies in Ukraine to help them scale up production
  • Marks the first time Renault has made military equipment since World War 2
• The US signals a willingness to reduce export restrictions on a wide variety of products in exchange for China lifting export restrictions on rare earths
  • According to remarks made by Kevin Hassett, head of Trump's National Economic Council, the US is willing to ease export restrictions on jet engine parts, chip design software, and nuclear reactor components
  • In exchange China would increase the volume of rare earth materials that are approved for export
  • The lifting of US restrictions would not apply to high-end AI training chips from Nvidia
  • Even so, it's hard to see this as anything other than a win for China
  • Shows that China can effectively hit back at the US on matters of trade
• The Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning conducts exercises near Japan
  • The carrier was seen operating east of Iwo Jima for the first time
  • Maintaining control of those waters would be critical for China in a Taiwan invasion scenario
  • Japanese forces are monitoring the Chinese ships
  • China's third aircraft carrier, the Fujian, is completing its sea trials and is expected to enter service later this year

2025-06-08 Sunday

• Russian troops have reached the border between Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts in Ukraine
  • According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, troops from the 90th Tank Division have reached the western frontier of Donetsk Oblast
  • According to the Ukrainian military, Russian forces are trying to build a bridgehead to assault Kostyantynivka, a transport hub south of the larger town of Kramatorsk
• Chinese regulators seek to slow the rollout of self-driving features in cars
  • 20% of all cars sold in China have some form of autonomous driving capability, despite there being no clear legal framework governing this technology
  • In March, three people were killed in an accident involving a Xiaomi SU7 sedan with self-driving capabilities
  • Accident led to an outcry on Chinese social media and a debate regarding whether self-driving technologies had been adequately tested
  • China has historically looked abroad for precedents for regulating new technology
  • However, in this case, China is ahead of the rest of the world in deploying self-driving technology
  • Chinese vehicle manufacturers are urging the government to adopt a nationwide testing and verification system for autonomous vehicles
• Taiwan penalizes potential Chinese sympathizers in its government
  • Taiwan has sought to penalize people who hold Chinese identity documents
  • China has issued these documents to Taiwanese residents, purportedly in an effort to encourage investment and foster development
  • However, the Taiwanese government sees this effort as a way to ease the path for annexation, by ensuring that residents of Taiwan are already set up with Chinese identity papers
  • As a result, Taiwan has begun vetting its civil service and military, and is requiring members to disclose whether they have Chinese identity papers
  • Under Taiwanese law, people found to be holding Chinese citizenship could be stripped of their Taiwanese citizenship
• Westinghouse plans to build 10 new nuclear reactors in the US as part of Trump's initiative to bolster nuclear energy
  • On May 23, the Trump administration published a series of executive orders intended to speed construction of nuclear reactors in the US
  • Goal was to deploy 10 new large nuclear reactors by 2050
  • Westinghouse as one of the few companies capable of designing and building large nuclear reactors, has taken the lead on the initiative
  • Has enjoyed success with its AP1000 pressurized water reactor design, several of which operate in the US and China
  • Its primary rival in the US, GE Vernova, has withdrawn from the large reactor market to focus on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) which generate less power, but are cheaper and easier to build
  • Has not built a new reactor in the US in several decades
  • South Korea's Kepko has a US-approved reactor design, but has not built any reactors in the US
  • France's EDF withdrew from the US reactor market a decade ago
  • SMR developers, such as GE Vernova and Nuscale argue that co-locating multiple SMR generating units on a single site can yield the same generating capacity with reduced construction and safety risks

2025-06-07 Saturday

• Trump's increased tariffs on steel and aluminum could be vulnerable to a legal challenge
  • On May 30, Trump announced that he would be doubling his previously announced tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50%
  • The conventional wisdom is that Trump's sectoral tariffs are on firmer legal footing than his "reciprocal" tariffs, which apply wholesale to entire countries
  • However, the steel and aluminum tariffs specifically rely on authority granted by the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the President to impose tariffs on goods if he deems that their import would undercut national security
  • The Commerce Department, in 2018, conducted an investigation which justified Trump's use of the Trade Expansion Act to impose tariffs during his first term
  • Trump has been relying on the same findings in his second term to impose tariffs
  • However, an appellate court ruling from 2018 said that if findings were "stale", the could not serve as the basis for new tariffs
  • This implies that Trump's latest tariffs on steel and aluminum could be vulnerable to legal challenge, and might be suspended by court order
  • They might be temporarily suspended with a court order, but all that will happen is that Trump will once again instruct the Commerce Department to write a report that argues that steel and aluminum imports are undercutting domestic production, and therefore are harming national security
  • I think this is why no one has challenged the tariffs; any tariff reprieve gained thereby would be temporary and would mark the company as a target for retaliation
• Tariff uncertainty is hurting American toy retailers
  • China's low wages and deep experience in consumer manufacturing have allowed them to virtually corner the market on making toys
  • Trump's import tariffs on Chinese products are already resulting in price hikes and reduced inventory
  • Smaller retailers, with less leverage over their Chinese suppliers, are more affected
• Tariff uncertainty is impacting hiring and investment
  • Companies aren't hiring, but are also hesitant to fire workers, fearing that they'll be unable to rehire if economic conditions improve
  • However this situation could change rapidly; if one company starts conducting layoffs, it might trigger layoffs at other firms
  • The housing market has been extraordinarily soft, with over 500,000 more sellers than buyers
  • This could lead to widespread declines in house prices, which could in turn affect consumer spending, as consumers would be less able to tap home equity
  • Businesses are extremely wary of spending money that they might need to pay tariff costs on new equipment and infrastructure
• AESC pauses work on a factory to make EV batteries in the US
  • Automotive Energy Supply Corporation (AESC), a Chinese-owed battery manufacturer, has stopped work on a new battery manufacturing facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky
  • Buildings are complete but interior work to install machinery has halted
  • Its top US executive said that work was halted because economic uncertainty arising from changing federal policies and tariffs
  • AESC would face a large tariff bill for machinery imports under the current tariff regime
  • Tariffs on steel and aluminum further add to input costs for the factory
  • In addition, the Trump administration's rollbacks of the Biden administration's electric vehicle and battery manufacturing subsidies have reduced the potential demand for the factory's output
  • The factory was forecast to create 2,000 manufacturing jobs
  • Tariffs working as designed

2025-06-06 Friday

• Anthropic releases custom versions of its Claude chatbot for national security applications
  • Customized to be more proficient in the jargon used by government and national security reports
  • Claude joins OpenAI and Meta's Llama in competing for government AI contracts
• US trade deficit halved since April by steep drop in imports
  • The trade deficit had increased in recent months as businesses sought to bring in inventory ahead of proposed tariffs
  • After Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs were announced on April 2, imports declined sharply
  • It's unlikely for imports to recover until businesses get more certainty about the final tariff level after trade negotiations have concluded

2025-06-05 Thursday

• Trump says Russia and Ukraine may need to "keep fighting" before making peace
  • Trump says that he's resigned himself to continued warfare between Russia and Ukraine because neither side seemed ready for peace talks
  • While the US still provides Ukraine with intelligence support, and weapons transfers authorized during the Biden administration are continuing, Trump has not sought any new military aid for Ukraine
  • Trump also redirected some anti-drone fuzes from military aid packages for Ukraine towards US forces in the Middle East
  • Trump acknowledged the bill sponsored by Lindsey Graham that would seek to introduce steep secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and gas, but said that he retains final say on whether that bill moves forward
• Thrive Holdings is investing in AI automation for IT services
  • Thrive Holdings is a subsidiary entity set up by Thrive Capital, an AI-focused venture capital firm and ZBS Partners, another venture capital firm, have formed an alliance, Shield Technology Partners to invest in bringing AI to managed service providers
  • Managed service providers (MSPs) offer IT services on a contract basis to other companies
  • Thrive Capital is known for its investments in AI firms, including Wiz, OpenAI and Databricks
  • Shield Technology Partners will actually acquire and manage businesses in an effort to increase efficiency by adding AI
  • In order to do so, it will "embed" software engineers with AI expertise
  • Goal is to build a common AI platform that all portfolio companies can use
  • So, in other words, Shield Technology Partners will operate along the private equity model, where it acquires and actually runs companies rather than investing in them and taking a more hands-off approach
• Trump and Xi Jinping hold a phone call, discuss trade negotiations and rare earth minerals
  • Trump says that he and Xi Jinping have worked out any "complexities" regarding rare earth minerals exports
  • However, China's summary of the call said that Xi Jinping had urged Trump to remove trade barriers and made no mention of rare earths
  • China also urged Trump to lift restrictions on Chinese students coming to study in the United States
  • The two heads of state agreed that their negotiating teams should hold another set of meetings as soon as possible
  • Trump added Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to his negotiating team, in addition to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer
  • Notably, Lutnick is the cabinet secretary responsible for implementing Trump's tariffs, and his addition to the team indicates that he will be empowered to directly negotiate tariff levels on Trump's behalf
  • When negotiations resume, China is likely to press for US to ease export restrictions on chip-design software and jet engines
• Iran orders material from China for hundreds of ballistic missiles
  • Iran has placed orders with factories in China for hundreds of tons of ballistic missile components
  • Notably shipments of ammonium perchlorate, the material used to make the solid rocket motors for ballistic missiles
  • China lately has stepped up shipments of sodium perchlorate, a precursor chemical to ammonium perchlorate
  • Iran has ordered enough to fuel approximately 1000 missiles
  • The Iranian military has also started to repair planetary mixers that were damaged in an Israeli strike
  • These mixers are used to blend the ammonium perchlorate in order to prepare it for use in the missiles
  • Some of the material that Iran previously imported from China has been lost in explosions and fires due to mishandling
  • Iran has placed orders with foreign entities for this material in order to avoid bottlenecks in its own chemical processing facilities
• Inside the collapse of Builder.ai
  • It is increasingly clear that Builder.ai falsified revenues
  • Builder.ai booked the full value of sales while giving customers discounts
  • Would then book discounts as marketing or sales costs, in violation of accounting standards
  • Another common practice was to sign up customers with on large contracts small up-front deposits
  • The full value of the contract would then be booked as a receivable, but often only a small fraction of the book value of the contract would actually be collected
  • Would sign up large contracts from customers, but then would agree to pay the customers back the money from their contracts as sponsorships or partnership fees
  • Builder.ai engaged in a circular trading arrangement with its largest customer, VerSe
  • Billed VerSe for $75 million in services, but then VerSe had charged Builder.ai over $50 million in marketing fees
  • Builder.ai's founder, Sachin Dev Duggal has relocated from the UK to the United Arab Emirates, and has held talks with investors about buying Builder.ai out of insolvency
• Senate Republicans seek to protect NASA programs from cuts
  • The White House has proposed a budget with steep cuts for NASA, with its budget allocation down to $19 billion from a current $25 billion
  • This would result in loss of funding for the SLS rocket, the International Space Station, as well as a number of science programs
  • However, Republicans in the US Senate are working towards restoring some of the funding, directing approximately $10 billion towards programs that are facing cuts
  • Unfortunately, they're only restoring funding for the useless programs, like SLS, rather than the science missions

2025-06-04 Wednesday

• The US redirects anti-drone technology earmarked for Ukraine to US forces
  • Fuzes that allow the Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System to target drones were redirected to Central Command
  • Fuzes had been acquired for Ukraine, but a memo from Secretary of Defense Hegseth instructed the Department of Defense to allocate those fuzes to the US Air Force
  • Supporters of the change argue that the Pentagon has the authority under the 2024 military-spending bill to reallocate defense resources if it sees an urgent need
  • What is the urgent need here? The US announced that it had concluded a cease-fire agreement with the Houthis, so why does CENTCOM needs anti-drone fuzes
• Reddit sues Anthropic, alleging that Anthropic used Reddit's data for training without signing a licensing agreement
  • Reddit said that it found that Anthropic's scrapers were accessing its data by circumventing anti-scraping measures that the site had implemented
  • Reddit has come to licensing agreements for its data with OpenAI and Google
• Russian forces advance on Sumy, widening their attacks in the east
  • Russian forces have launched a series of attacks in Sumy Oblast, in the northeast of Ukraine
  • Have captured several villages, and are within 20-25 km of Sumy city
  • Sumy was a region that Russia attacked in March 2022, but withdrew from as part of its general withdrawal from the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions
• The aviation industry warns that tariffs on aircraft and aircraft parts could put aviation safety at risk
  • The industry faces 10% tariffs on all airline parts
  • Could face higher tariffs depending on the outcome of a "Section 232" investigation conducted by the Commerce Department into the national security risks of imported engines
  • Highlighted the limited number of domestic suppliers of critical aircraft parts, and the long regulatory process required to certify new suppliers for aircraft
  • Also said that tariffs could incentivise suppliers to provide counterfeit parts or cut corners in other ways, potentially compromising safety
• Executives warn that Trump's tariffs on aluminum could hurt overall demand for the metal
  • Producers of aluminum products would not be able to absorb the increased costs imposed by a 50% tariff
  • Would have to pass costs on to consumers, reducing in lowered demand
  • Yep, like I said earlier, it's stupid to think that putting a tariff on the raw materials used by manufactured goods encourages manufacturing
• Trump says that Xi Jinping is "hard to make a deal with"
  • Trump's comments on social media come in response to persistent Chinese delays over approving exports of rare earths
  • Is pressing for a direct call between himself and Xi Jinping in order to resolve the ongoing dispute over whether China is complying with the terms of the trade war truce
  • However, there has been no indication from the Chinese that any direct conversation between Trump and Xi is imminent
• Iran's supreme leader rejects a proposed US nuclear agreement
  • Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in remarks given on the anniversary of his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomenei, rejected a US offer that called for a phased elimination of Iranian uranium enrichment
  • Offer was presented by Steve Witkoff, the Trump administration's special envoy to the region, at talks last week
  • US officials said that the rejection was expected, and are working on a counteroffer
  • Trump has said that he would prefer a negotiated end to Iran's nuclear program, but was prepared to take military action if a deal could not be reached
• North Korea has righted its capsized warship
  • On May 22, a new Choe Hyon-class destroyer capsized upon launch, after failing to slide smoothly into the water
  • Vessel fell onto its side and sustained damage to its bow, which remained on the quay as the stern went into the water
  • North Korea has apparently righted the vessel and has begun repairs
  • North Korea has vowed to have the ship repaired by the end of June, a deadline that has been met with skepticism from experts
• Boeing reaches a deal to avoid prosecution over the 737 Max crashes
  • On May 16, federal prosecutors proposed a non-prosecution agreement with Boeing over the Ethiopian Air and Lion Air 737 Max crashes
  • The non-prosecution agreement superseded a possible guilty plea by Boeing in a trial, after the Alaska Airlines door panel incident invalidated a deferred prosecution agreement between Boeing and the government
  • Today, the non-prosecution agreement was signed and submitted to the court, according to an SEC filing
  • The non-prosecution agreement allows Boeing to withdraw its previous guilty plea over the crashes
  • If approved by Judge Reed O'Connor, it will bring the legal saga over the 737 Max crashes to a close
  • Boeing would have to pay $444.5 million to the families of the victims of the two crashes as well as a further $478.5 million criminal penalty
• The Trump Administration threatens to pull federal subsidies for California's high-speed rail project
  • In a report released today, Deputy Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration Drew Feeley notified Ian Choudri of the California High Speed Rail Authority that it had defaulted on the terms of two federal grants totaling $4 billion
  • In the report, the Federal Railroad Administration found that California had made minimal progress on construction and that there was no viable path for the project to be completed on budget
  • He's right. The rail project was supposed to be completed by now. Instead it has yet to lay a single mile of track and estimated costs have risen tenfold
  • Hopefully this gives the government of California an excuse to kill the project entirely
• Ship carrying hundreds of cars adrift in the Pacific Ocean after catching fire
  • The Morning Midas, a car carrier, is adrift in the Pacific, roughly 300 miles southwest of Alaska's Adak Island, after a deck carrying electric vehicles caught fire
  • All 22 crew were successfully evacuated
  • Ship was carrying vehicles from China to Mexico
  • It's unclear whether the fire was caused by the EVs

2025-06-03 Tuesday

• Russia sets out maximalist demands at peace talks in Istanbul
  • Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange more POWs and return bodies of killed soldiers
  • On the subject of a ceasefire, Russia said that it would only accept a ceasefire as part of a long-term solution to the war
  • Russian demands
    • International recognition of the annexation of Crimea
    • Ukrainian neutrality, which means that Ukraine forever forswears becoming a member of NATO
    • Ukraine makes Russian an official language and takes measures to protect the rights of Russian speakers
    • Ukraine passes a law banning the "glorification of Nazism"
    • Ukraine should either
      • Fully withdraw from Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts
      • Cease accepting foreign aid and hold parliamentary and presidential elections within 100 days
  • Ukraine has rejected these demands and has further added that any peace deal should not include any limits on the strength of Ukrainian forces
• Morgan Stanley builds an AI coding tool to modernize legacy code
  • While modern AI tools are fairly good at writing new code in modern programming languages, they struggle to work with existing codebases written in older programming languages
  • Morgan Stanley trained the tool on its own codebase
  • The tool can translate old code into plain English specifications, determine which sections of old code are relevant for regulatory inquiries, and, in limited cases, translate old code into more modern languages
  • The ability to translate old code into a new language is nascent, and often the translated code isn't as efficient as it could be
• Car companies risk factory shutdowns over rare-earth shortages
  • On April 4, China imposed export restrictions on rare earth minerals, which are used in electronics and the magnets which power electric motors, notably those used in electric vehicles
  • These restrictions required foreign companies to apply for licenses before shipping rare earths, including rare earth magnets out of China
  • Bureaucratic delays in approving these licenses are forcing automakers to seek emergency alternatives in order to avoid factory shutdowns
  • One alternative that automakers are considering is doing motor assembly inside China, since the export restrictions only apply to magnets, not finished products
  • Great job, Trump, you've just enabled China to secure even more of the EV supply chain
• Snowflake to buy Crunchy Data for $250 million
  • Deal comes the wake of Databricks buying Neon for $1 billion on May 14
  • Like Neon, Crunchy Data is a vendor providing database services built on top of Postgres SQL
  • Snowflake and Databricks are competing to provide AI-compatible database and big data products
• Nvidia overtakes Microsoft to become the largest US company by market capitalization
  • Nvidia's shares gained ground today, pushing its market capitalization to $3.45 trillion, above Microsoft's $3.44 trillion
  • Nvidia had the largest market capitalization of US companies last year as well
  • Lost ground because of the late-January selloff in AI stocks
  • Apple is the third largest US company by market capitalization, with an overall value of $3.04 trillion
• Meta agrees to buy the output of a nuclear power plant for 20 years
  • Meta announced today that had signed an agreement with Constellation Energy, the owner of the power plant, to purchase the output of the Clinton Clean Energy Center for 20 years starting in June 2027
  • Would expand the amount of power generated by the facility by 30 MW
  • Is the latest move by large tech corporations to secure long-term agreements for the provision of electricity for their data centers
  • Constellation is the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the US and recently announced plans to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, after reaching a deal with Microsoft for that facility's output
  • The Clinton Clean Energy Center was losing money, and was scheduled to close when state subsidies expired
  • The deal with Meta will allow Constellation Energy to apply for an extension to its federal license to operate the nuclear power plant
  • On January 10, Constellation Energy acquired Calpine, significantly boosting the amount of generating capacity it controls
• Further analysis of Ukraine's drone attack on Russian airfields
  • Ukraine claims that over 40 aircraft were destroyed
  • However, outside experts assess that about 10-12 planes were hit
  • Even the smaller number represents a significant blow to Russian long-range aviation
  • In addition to reducing the number of aircraft capable of carrying the long-range cruise missiles and air-launched ballistic missiles that have presented the greatest challenge for Ukrainian air defenses, the attack might force the Russian air force to disperse these bombers, reducing their ability to launched massed attacks against Ukraine
  • Two of bombers targeted, the Tu-22M3 and the Tu-95 are no longer in production, meaning that Russia has no ability to replace destroyed airframes and a limited ability to repair damaged ones
  • The attack demonstrated Ukrainian resolve in seeking to continue the war, while sending a message that Russia could not protect military assets by placing them far from the front line
• The British steel industry has been exempted from Trump's doubling of steel and aluminum tariffs
  • On May 30, Trump announced that he would double tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, to 50%
  • Today, the administration announced that the UK would be exempt from these levies
  • However, until a free trade deal with the UK can be implemented, UK steel and aluminum imports will still be subject to the original 25% tariff
• Meta will challenge the EU's classification of Facebook Messenger and Facebook Marketplace as "gatekeeper" services
  • The EU initially classified six of Meta's products, Facebook, Instagram, Marketplace, Messenger, WhatsApp, and its marketing businesses as core platforms under the Digital Markets Act (DMA)
  • Meta's lawyers contend that Messenger is an extension of the main Facebook social media application, which is already classified as a gatekeeper, and should not be regulated separately
  • Argue that the classification of Facebook Marketplace as a gatekeeper is erroneous, because Facebook Marketplace is only one of a number of online classified marketplaces
• Lee Jae-myung wins South Korea's presidential election
  • South Korea had called a snap Presidential election, after the former president, Yoon Suk Yeol had been removed from office after being impeached over his declaration of martial law on December 3 2024
  • Yoon's removal from office required elections to be held within 60 days
  • Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party has won the elections
  • President Lee's foreign policy seeks to chart a middle path between China and the United States
  • Lee has stated that Korea will not automatically come to Taiwan's aid if China should attack Taiwan
  • Lee will be taking leadership of South Korea at a fraught moment, as President Trump seeks additional payments from South Korea for hosting US troops and imposes tariffs on South Korean steel and aluminum exports pending the conclusion of a trade agreement between the two countries
• FEMA head confuses staff by commenting that he was unaware that the US had a hurricane season
  • Comment was made by David Richardson, the newly appointed head of FEMA, during a daily briefing
  • Later FEMA clarified that the comment was a joke that had been misinterpreted and taken out of context
  • Richardson has no prior disaster response experience, and was previously the head of a Department of Homeland Security organization focusing on defense against weapons of mass destruction
  • Said he would not be updating FEMA's disaster response plans for this year, as he did not want to contradict the forthcoming findings of a council set up by President Trump to review FEMA's operations and issue recommendations for the future structure of the agency
  • Trump has argued that FEMA should be shrunk or eliminated, with its disaster response functions being delegated to the states
  • Even if was a joke, it's still a weird joke to make

2025-06-02 Monday

• Meta aims to fully automate ad creation using AI
  • Goal is to have a system that can fully automate ad creation online by the end of next year
  • A brand would be able to present an image of the product it wishes to promote, along with a budget, and AI would create an ad, including imagery, video and text
  • It would also suggest targeting decisions on which users to target and offer suggestions on how much should be spent on the campaign
  • Meta also plans on using AI to make variations of an ad in real time, tailoring ads to a user's location and context
• Netic launches an AI-powered service to handle appointments and generate sales for plumbers, electricians and other home services vendors
  • Netic aims to expand the integration of AI in sales and business operations beyond the traditionally white-collar specialties in which AI currently specializes
  • Aims to increase staff efficiency by ensuring that employees of home services firms always have work
  • Remember: increased efficiency = reduced slack
  • Has received a boost from increased investment in home services by private equity firms, who are looking to increase returns from the firms they've acquired
  • Yet another example of PE vultures ruining everything nice; first they came for health care, now they're coming for plumbers
  • Netic's AI will automatically categorize calls, prioritizing calls from customers who have emergency claims or quotes from other companies
  • Aims to reduce the amount of time employees spend on the phone by handling the initial contact between the customer and the home service firm
  • Which, I predict will just lead to increased frustration for both employees and customers, as each will have to deal with this superfluous AI layer interposing itself between them
• An unlicensed law clerk is fired after AI hallucinations are discovered in a filing they wrote
  • A court in Utah discovered hallucinated citations in a filing submitted by Douglas Durbano and Richard Bednar
  • Durbano and Bednar apologized to the court and said that the filing had been authored by an unlicensed law school graduate who was working as a clerk
  • The clerk was fired, although the firm did not have a formal policy on the use of AI
• The number of daily active users of Temu in the US declines by 58%
  • Temu's business model was geared around the fact that small packages, worth less than $800, could be sent directly from China to US consumers tariff free, the so-called "de minimis" loophole
  • However, this loophole was closed as part of Trump's trade war against China, with small packages being subject to 120% tariffs, just like all other Chinese imports
  • Although this rate was reduced to 54% as part of the 90-day truce between the US and China, the fact that tariffs remain means Temu's vendors have to pay fees and submit customs paperwork in order to export to the US
  • Temu has decided to slash its ad spending in the US and switch to fulfilling orders from US-based warehouses
  • Although Shein, Temu's fast fashion counterpart, has been able to increase prices, Temu has struggled to retain users
  • Temu has, instead, focused on user growth in non-US markets, focusing specifically on less affluent markets
• Apple appeals the EU order to open up iOS to third party developers
  • On March 19, the EU issued a pair of orders designed to force Apple to allow third party developers to interoperate with iOS, iPadOS and VisionOS just as well as Apple's own first party software
  • Today Apple submitted a legal challenge to those orders, arguing that they create an interoperability process that is "unreasonable, costly, and stifles innovation"
  • The appeal will take years to play out, and until then, Apple will have to comply with the orders
• The UK plans to increase the size of its nuclear powered attack submarine fleet to 12
  • Plans are part of a set of recommendations given in Britain's Strategic Defense Review, published today
  • Call for expanding the current fleet of 7 nuclear powered attack submarines to 12
• Gautam Adani faces a fresh investigation in the US
  • On November 20, Gautam Adani was indicted in the US on charges that he paid bribes to Indian regulators with money from US investors
  • Today prosecutors are investigating whether Adani's ships illegally purchased Iranian petrochemical products
  • A Wall Street Journal investigation into the behavior of a tanker owned by the Adani group found that it was manipulating AIS data in order to disguise visits to Iran
  • The tanker, the SMS Bros, reported on its AIS data in April that it was visiting Iraq
  • Satellite imagery showed no such visit
  • However, other imagery showed a tanker matching the description of the Bros docked in Tonbuk, Iran at that time
  • The Bros reportedly was carrying a load of liquefied petroleum gas from Iraq
  • Forging paperwork from Iraq and Oman is a common way of disguising shipments out of Iran

2025-06-01 Sunday

• Ukraine launches a massive drone attack on Russian airbases
  • Further coverage
  • Targeted the Belaya, Ivanovo, Dyagilevo and Olenya airbases
  • These bases were located deep inside Russia
  • Attack was carried out by small quadcopter drones smuggled into Russia in trucks
  • Used 117 drones in total
  • The attack targeted the Tu-22M and Tu-95 planes that are capable of launching ballistic and cruise missiles into Ukraine
  • Shoot the archers not the arrows

2025-05-31 Saturday

• Abridge AI, a company using AI to transcribe medical conversations, is seeking to raise $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation
  • Company is raising $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation
  • Funding round doubles Abridge's valuation from earlier this year, when it raised $250 million at a $2.75 billion valuation
  • Abridge was founded in 2018 by ex-cardiologist Shiv Rao, who became frustrated when attempting to transcribe handwritten notes from patient visits
  • Struggled at first, but has gained traction more recently with the increasing acceptance of AI tools such as ChatGPT in other fields
• Builder.ai allegedly faked business with the Indian social media company VerSe to inflate sales
  • Builder.ai collapsed into bankruptcy on May 20, after having to restate its revenues
  • Sources say that the cause of the collapse was fake contracts with an Indian social media firm, VerSe
  • Builder.ai and VerSe billed each other for the same amount, "round-tripping" cash in order to inflate Builder.ai's sales figures
  • The company allegedly inflated its revenues by over 300%
  • US prosecutors have issued a subpoena for financial statements and customer lists
  • VerSe is one of the largest news aggregators in India, reporting more than 350 million daily users for its app, DailyHunt
  • Also owns Josh, a short video service that was released shortly after India banned TikTok
  • However, Deloitte published an opinion that VerSe "lacked appropriate internal controls", before signing off on the company's books as "true and fair"
  • Umang Bedi, VerSe's co-founder, said that, despite social media posts showing him and Builder.ai founder Sachin Dev Duggal together, the two only had a professional relationships, not a close interpersonal one
• Secretary of Defense Hegseth warns of "devastating consequences" should China seek to "conquer" Taiwan
  • Was speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a defense and security summit in Singapore
  • Hegseth said that the Chinese threat to Taiwan could be "imminent"
  • Did not elaborate on how the US would defend against Chinese aggression
  • Hegseth also urged Asian countries to increase their defense spending, pointing out how Europe is increasing its spending on defense, to combat a Russian threat that is less potent than China
  • Although Asian countries welcomed the US's participation in the Shangri-La summit, it's unclear whether they share the US's threat perception with regards to China
• According to the IAEA, Iran has increased its stockpile of enriched uranium by 50%
  • As of May 17, according to the watchdog, Iran possessed 408.6 kg of uranium enriched to a 60% level
  • This represents an increase of of 133.8 kg since February
  • Increase comes as the US and Iran negotiate a deal regarding the disposition of Iran's nuclear program
  • According to experts, Iran now has the ability to manufacture enough fissile material for a bomb in less than two weeks
• The UK invests £1.5 billion in munitions production
  • Investment will pay for six additional munitions factories
  • Will take the UK's spending on munitions to £6 billion over the next four years
  • Additional factories are meant to backfill stockpiles of munitions that have been depleted by underinvestment and support to Ukraine
  • Goal is to create a permanent source of munitions that can be scaled up as necessary in case of crisis
• Waymo logs 10 million total rides
  • Waymo is doing over 250,000 driverless trips a week
  • Is on track to hit 20 million total trips by the end of the year
  • Is currently active in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco
  • Waymo is launching in Austin, in a partnership with Uber, and will be expanding to Atlanta, Miami and Washington DC, with Boston, Nashville, New Orleans, Las Vegas and San Diego further down on the list
  • Waymo's chief competitor in the US is Tesla, which is planning to launch a driverless taxi service later this year
  • The actual competition to Waymo, however, is likely to be its Chinese rivals, Baidu Apollo, WeRide, and Pony.ai
  • Although Waymo is expanding rapidly, it's not even close to profitable, logging a $4.4 billion loss last year
• The judge in Google's antitrust trial considers whether to impose curbs on Google's AI
  • Last August, Google was found guilty of anticompetitive behavior for paying phone and browser vendors to have Google as the default search engine
  • Last November The Justice Department filed a brief arguing that Google should be forced to divest Chrome and Android as a remedy
  • Today, Amit Mehta, the trial judge, asked questions about restricting Google's ability to promote its generative AI product, Gemini
  • Currently Google pays Motorola and Samsung to pre-install Gemini on their devices
  • Mehta says he expects to deliver a sentence in August
• The White House plans to replace Jared Isaacman as its nominee for NASA administrator
  • Reasons aren't immediately clear
  • No! Isaacman was one of the good ones!

2025-05-30 Friday

• Ukraine experiments with motorcycle assaults
  • Last year, Russian forces began using off-road motorcycles in an effort to dodge Ukrainian drones and rapidly assault Ukrainian strongpoints
  • Now several Ukrainian units have also created motorcycle companies with which to counterattack Russian forces
  • These companies face significant risks, as motorcycles are completely unarmored and leave their riders exposed
  • Also criticized for wasting soldiers on attacks when Ukraine needs additional troops for defense
• Trump says he will raise tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to 50%
  • On February 11, Trump announced a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum
  • Today he said those tariffs would be increasing to 50% as of June 4
  • Announcement came as Trump touted the US Steel/Nippon Steel merger at a rally in Pennsylvania
  • I fail to see how increasing the price of raw materials helps revitalize American manufacturing
• US imports fall 20% in April as Trump's tariffs impact trade
  • Consumer goods were hit particularly hard, with imports declining by 32%
  • Americans have grown increasingly wary, with consumer spending going down from a 0.7% month-over-month increase to 0.2%
  • The status of the tariffs has varied wildly recently, with a US trade court ruling that Trump's tariffs were unconstitutional before being blocked by an appeals court
  • Trump has also threatened to end the tariff truce with China, over Chinese export permits on rare earth minerals
• The US-China tariff truce risks collapsing over a dispute regarding Chinese rare earths exports
  • The US accuses China of reneging on its obligations regarding the trade war truce
  • One of the provisions of the truce was that China lift its export restrictions on rare earth minerals, which are necessary for a variety of electronics
  • However, today, US Trade Representative accused the Chinese government of slow-walking approvals for export licenses, a claim that was repeated on social media by President Trump
  • The Chinese slowdown was reportedly caused by a US Commerce Department warning against the use of Huawei Ascend AI chips "anywhere in the world"
  • The US government has been under pressure to get a deal with China by automakers who warn that shortages of rare-earths could lead to pandemic-style factory shutdowns as they run out of necessary components
• Elon Musk leaves his position at DOGE
  • As a special government employee, Musk's term was limited to 130 days, which have run out
  • Role was controversial as Musk enacted deep cuts to government programs, based on shaky legal justifications
  • Trump praised Musk at the press conference announcing his departure

2025-05-29 Thursday

• Republicans in Congress urge Trump to pursue additional sanctions against Russia
  • Comes as reports indicate that Trump is growing increasingly frustrated with Putin's intransigency
  • However Trump has threatened additional sanctions against Putin before only to back down
• A US appeals court blocks the ruling holding that Trump's tariffs are unconstitutional
  • A US federal court of appeals granted a stay on the ruling that held that Trump's tariffs were invalid
  • Allows the tariffs to take effect while the administration pursues appeals
  • Even if the Supreme Court ultimately agrees with the Court of International Trade that Trump overstepped his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Trump's advisors maintain that they can advance tariffs under other legal bases
• Foreign tax provision in Trump's budget bill spooks Wall Street
  • Section 899 of the "Big Beautiful Bill" authorizes the government to impose additional taxes on companies and investors from countries deemed to have "hostile tax regimes"
  • The tax would also apply to American subsidiaries of foreign firms
  • Targets countries such as the EU, UK, Australia and Canada, which the Trump administration holds have "unfair" taxes on US firms
  • Wall Street warns that the provision will act to hurt foreign investment in the US at a time when that investment is necessary to boost domestic manufacturing
• Germany proposes a 10% tax on global internet companies
  • Tax will be implemented as a tax on online advertising revenue
  • Proposed by Wolfram Weimer as a way to recover some of the income that online companies are making by using content created by others
• Meta will partner with Anduril to develop AR headsets for the military
  • Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey, whose previous company, Oculus, had been acquired by Meta
  • Luckey left after political and management disagreements with Mark Zuckerberg
  • Now Meta and Anduril have announced a collaboration to develop a line of ruggedized wearable technologies, including helmets and glasses that provide augmented reality to soldiers
  • If they win the bid, Meta and Anduril would jointly receive $100 million to develop VR headsets as part of $22 billion Army wearables project
  • Anduril is the lead vendor on that project, taking over after Microsoft failed to deliver a ruggedized version of its HoloLens headset
• The New York Times agrees to a content licensing deal with Amazon
  • Deal allows for summaries and excerpts of New York Times stories to be used by Alexa voice assistants and for AI training
  • Comes as the New York Times continues its legal battle of OpenAI over OpenAI's alleged unauthorized use of Amazon stories for training ChatGPT
• Northrop Grumman invests $50 million into Firefly Aerospace to develop a new medium-lift launch vehicle
  • The medium-lift rocket, called "Eclipse" would be capable of launching 16,300 kg into low earth orbit or 3,200 kg into geostationary transfer orbit
  • Will launch from Wallops Island, Virginia
  • Firefly has had a mixed record; its current rocket, Alpha, suffered a strange launch failure on its most recent launch where the first stage exploded after separation and damaged the second stage, preventing it from reaching orbit
• Authorities investigate attempts to impersonate Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff
  • Recently, US Senators, business executives, and other prominent figures have received text messages purporting to be from Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff and close advisor to President Trump
  • Wiles has told associates that her cell-phone contacts had been hacked, allowing attackers to obtain the private phone numbers of influential lawmakers and businesspeople
  • Investigators believe that the attackers are using artificial intelligence to impersonate Wiles' voice
  • The only reason this attack has any chance of working is because the Trump administration does all its business over unofficial channels
  • So it's not surprising when a recipient receives a text message or voicemail from Wiles' personal phone, asking them to do something official for the Trump administration

2025-05-28 Wednesday

• A US trade court rules that Trump's tariffs are unconstitutional
  • Ruling was in response to two lawsuits filed by small businesses and 12 states, respectively on May 11 and May 21 arguing that Trump does not have the Constitutional authority to unilaterally impose tariffs
  • The Court of International trade agreed with the plaintiffs in the two cases that President Trump had exceeded his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in declaring a broad vaguely worded "emergency" over the US trade deficit
  • The ruling invalidates both the baseline 10% tariff and the "reciprocal" tariffs
• Trump orders US firms making chip design software to stop selling to China
  • Order covers electronic design automation (EDA) software that allows engineers to design and virtually test computer chips before they're manufactured
  • Primary vendors of EDA software are Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA
  • Could represent a potential obstacle in talks on a permanent trade agreement between the US and China
  • The order led to increases in the share prices of Chinese EDA vendors, such as Empyrean Technology, Primarius, and Semitronix
• Friedrich Merz announces that German firms will partner with Ukrainian industry to produce long-range weapons
  • Announcement comes during Zelensky's visit to Berlin
  • Falls short of Merz's previous remarks that indicated that he'd be open to supplying the German Taurus missile to Ukraine
  • A priority for investment would be developing interceptor drones designed to attack Russian long-range drones
  • Interceptor drones are more cost effective than using missiles or fighter jets to defend against Russian drones
• Russians continue to support Putin despite a slowdown in the war economy
  • Public support in Russia for the war in Ukraine has been underpinned by a rise in wages and living standards, driven by military recruitment and spending
  • Russians' real incomes have increased, even accounting for the high inflation caused by the war
  • Even though the rate of growth has slowed down recently, most Russians feel that they are better off today than they were before the war started
  • Demand for local production has grown with the departure of Western brands
  • Lately, the Russian economy has been cooling, with wage growth down from 4.2% to 2.2%
  • However, it will still likely be some time before economic stagnation translates into a decline in support for the war
• xAI announces a partnership with Telegram
  • Telegram will receive $300 million in cash and equity from xAI, as well as half the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold within the app
  • In exchange xAI will get preferential access to Telegram's 1 billion users
  • Partnership comes despite Telegram founder Pavel Durov's legal troubles in France, where he has been detained pending an investigation into Telegram's alleged lack of cooperation with law enforcement authorities
  • Durov and Musk have both been recently critical of European legislation and regulation that they view as restricting free speech
• GM will invest $888 million into its Tonawanda propulsion plant to produce new V8 engines
  • Will allow Tonawanda to be the second factory that's capable of producing the latest V8s
  • Represents a further pullback of GM's EV ambitions
• India imposes new hardware and software regulations on surveillance equipment over concerns regarding Chinese espionage
  • Foreign-made surveillance equipment will have to be subject to hardware and software inspection
  • However manufacturers are concerned that these regulations form a de facto trade barrier because of the lack of testing capacity and requirements for government scrutiny of proprietary source code
  • The US has already restricted sales of several Chinese brands of surveillance equipment, citing national security risks
  • The new Indian rules require CCTV cameras to have tamper-resistant enclosures, encrypted data transmission, and malware detection
  • Government labs can ask for source code if the cameras are using a proprietary communications protocol, instead of a standard one like WiFi
  • Enable Indian officials to visit device-makers abroad to conduct factory inspections
  • Indian labs have stated that the new restrictions are creating significant challenges for them, resulting in an increasing backlog of applications
  • Retailers are reporting that they're having to turn down larger orders in order to maintain inventory
  • The Indian regulations make sense, it's just that the Indian government doesn't necessarily have the state capacity to enforce those regulations
• Starfighters International seeks to develop the F-4 Phantom into a space launch platform
  • The company currently flies F-104 Starfighters as boosters to launch small rockets on suborbital trajectories for testing
  • The aircraft would carry payloads at high speed, high into the atmosphere, thus requiring smaller rockets to reach orbit
  • The F-4s would all be acquired from South Korea
  • The process is in very early stages, and it would not be surprising to see delays

2025-05-27 Tuesday

• Nvidia's partners resolve production issues with rackmount servers for its new "Blackwell" chips
  • Production issues were with the GB200 AI rack
  • Includes 36 "Grace" CPUs and 72 "Blackwell" GPUs
  • Units are connected via the NVLink communications system
  • Initial tests with the racks showed communications problems, which Nvidia's partners Foxconn, Inventec and Wistron worked with Nvidia to resolve
  • Also had to resolve issues with overheating and leaks in the liquid cooling system
  • Nvidia has also simplified its next-generation GB300 system, in order to simplify its deployment
  • Has reverted to the same motherboard design in the GB200 instead of a more modular layout
  • However, the modular board has not been abandoned and will be introduced with a future generation of hardware
• Strict data protection laws hamper Germany's ability to increase the size of its military
  • German and EU data protection rules restrict the German government's ability to keep track of information about former conscripts
  • Germany ended conscription in 2011, but ex-soldiers from that era represent a potential source of recruits as Germany seeks to increase the size of its military to respond to the growing threat from Russia
  • While fiscal restrictions on the German military have been lifted by a provision that excludes defense spending from the "debt brake", the German military is still struggling with a shortage of recruits
• SpaceX's Starship launch fails
  • SpaceX launched its Superheavy rocket with the Starship upper stage for the 9th time
  • Was hoping to test different re-entry approaches for both
  • However, the booster failed after its first re-entry burn and the upper stage began tumbling out of control after propellant leaks
• The US declines to renew Chevron's license to operate in Venezuela
  • Chevron was the last US oil company operating in Venezuela
  • License to operate expires today
  • There had been some speculation that the Trump administration would renew the license in order to secure the release of Americans that have been detained by the Venezuelan government
  • Chevron argued that forcing it to depart Venezuela would only strengthen ties between the Venezuelan government and China
  • However, the Trump administration maintains that any work done in partnership with the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, would support the government of Nicholas Maduro and thus was prohibited
• Southwest Airlines faces operational difficulties after ending its free bags policy
  • Starting Wednesday, Southwest will begin to charge $35 for the first checked bag and $45 for the second
  • This could lead to longer check-in lines as customers line up to pay for bags
  • Boarding times could also increase as more people have to gate-check their carry-ons
  • Southwest is positioning extra employees equipped with iPads to speed up the check-in process during busy periods
  • Rolling out apps to allow gate agents to be notified when overhead bins are full

2025-05-26 Monday

• Trump considers additional sanctions against Russia
  • Trump appears confused that Putin isn't responding to his peace overtures
  • Has been unable to get Putin to agree to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine
  • Friedrich Merz said that, as of today, the US, Germany, France and the UK would no longer impose any restrictions on the use of Western weaponry to strike into Russia
  • The US Senate has been considering a bill to impose additional sanctions on Russia, but Senators are waiting to see if Trump would be willing to sign such a bill into law before advancing it

2025-05-25 Sunday

• Russia launches the largest aerial attack of the war against Ukraine
  • Russian forces launched 367 missiles and drones against Ukrainian targets
  • Ukraine reports 12 killed and dozens injured
  • Donald Trump, in response, called Vladimir Putin "crazy" and said he was "not happy" with Putin's actions
  • Russia characterized Trump's response as an "emotional outburst" and said that the attack was "retaliation" for Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian bases
• The US deploys the Nmesis missile system to the Philippines
  • Nmesis fires the Norwegian-made Naval Strike Missile (NSM)
  • NSM was initially designed to be launched from ships
  • Nmesis creates a launcher, mounted on an autonomous vehicle, that can fire the missile from land
  • The Marines conducted an exercise where the practiced hiding Nmesis on Philippine islands that are near shipping routes going to Taiwan
  • Deploying Nmesis on these islands would complicate Chinese calculations regarding a blockade or naval attack on Taiwan
  • The US Marines and Air Force now have a policy of rotating some troops through the Philippines every year in order to maintain military-to-military ties and enhance cooperation in the event of a crisis
• Trump's trade war hurts Southern California's economy
  • Trade and logistics are one of the largest employers in southern California
  • The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together form the highest volume container gateway in the country
  • This makes them vulnerable to any significant drop-off in trade, especially between the US and China
  • Container ship arrivals were down 17% in May, and the ships that did arrive were carrying less cargo
  • Full time dockworkers are working three to four days per week, down from five to six
  • Part time dockworkers are having trouble finding any employment at all
  • Importers had rushed to bring goods in ahead of Trump's tariffs, and many warehouses that had served as short-term transit stops are now being used for long-term storage
  • This reduces employment further
  • The strain on the logistics employees could ease as the truce in the trade war reduces tariffs on Chinese imports from 145% to 30%
  • However even a 30% tariff is still very high by historic standards, and the outlook remains uncertain as the truce will only last until August

2025-05-23 Friday

• The Trump administration will allow the US Steel/Nippon Steel merger to go forward
  • On April 7 Trump ordered a second CFIUS review of the proposed merger between US Steel and Nippon Steel
  • Merger had been opposed by the US Steelworkers union as well as both Biden and Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign
  • However, Trump had also said that he would be open to a revised deal whereby Nippon Steel takes a minority investment in US Steel
  • On May 19, Nippon Steel pledged to increase its investment in US Steel to $14 billion and build a new steel plant in the US
  • Trump defined the agreement as a "partnership", spurring some confusion as the participants consider it a merger
  • Nippon Steel would name a separate board of directors to oversee its US operations
• The Trump administration issues executive orders to fast-track the development of nuclear energy
  • The executive orders instruct the Department of Energy to facilitate the construction of 10 new large nuclear reactors by 2050
  • The orders aim to change an "overly risk-averse culture" in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
  • Gives the NRC an 18-month deadline to approve permits for new reactors
  • Critics warn that an executive order is an insufficient guarantee to spur investment, as it could be reversed by the next administration
  • Environmental advocates say that the executive orders undermine the independence of the NRC and increase the risk of radiological contamination
  • They're wrong and dumb
  • The goal of completing 10 new nuclear reactors is ambitious given that only two new such reactors have been completed in the past 20 years, and they cost double their initial estimates
  • Yes, but how much of that cost was due to having to take steps to comply with excessive regulation
• Trump escalates trade threats against Apple and the EU
  • Trump threatened Apple with a tariff of 25% on any smartphone sold, but not manufactured in the US
  • Also threatened a 50% tariff on the EU
  • On April 25, Apple had announced plans to source all US-bound iPhones from India
  • The irony is, given these latest announcements, Apple might have been better off not moving its manufacturing out of China
  • Trump is narrowly focused on trade and deals; I don't think he has any particular animus against China beyond that
  • I don't think Trump sees China as a geopolitical rival
  • I don't think Trump even thinks about international politics beyond trade, and possibly the war in Ukraine
  • This is why it's a dangerous assumption to think that Trump is particularly committed to the defense of Taiwan

2025-05-22 Thursday

• Anthropic releases Claude 4
  • Released Opus (large) and Sonnet (medium) variants of the model
  • Opus, in particular, is designed to handle complex long-running tasks
  • Anthropic claims that, in conjunction with its programming tool, Claude Code, Opus was able to coherently refactor a codebase for 7 hours
  • Claude 4 models are now able to maintain external files to use as a scratchpad
  • Are also able to use external tools, interleaving reasoning and tool use
  • Github announced that it would use Claude 4 Sonnet as the new default model for its Copilot programming tool, citing its performance in "agentic scenarios"
  • Both models are available through Anthropic's own API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex
• Google debuts virtual reality headsets and augmented reality glasses geared towards integrating AI into everyday tasks
  • Google hopes to re-enter the augmented reality field that it left with the shutdown of Google Glass a decade ago
  • However, other AR and VR hardware, like Oculus/Meta Quest, Meta's RayBan AR glasses and Apple Vision Pro have entered the marketplace
  • This led Google to make Android XR, a variant of its Android operating system geared towards virtual and augmented reality
  • At Google I/O this week, Google debuted new hardware that takes advantage of Android XR
  • Project Moohan is a prototype headset made by Samsung
    • Resembles the Apple Vision Pro
    • Uses Android XR to make Android apps available in a VR setting
  • First-party smart-glasses
    • Resemble Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses
    • However, unlike Meta's offering, Google's smart glasses have a miniature display embedded in the right lens
    • Project semi-transparent information into the user's field of view
  • Both units are integrated with Gemini
• Trump tells European leaders privately that Putin isn't interested in peace
  • Says that Putin isn't ready to end the war in Ukraine because he thinks he's winning
  • European leaders on the call believed that Trump is increasingly of the opinion that the war is a European problem
  • Trump showed no inclination to agree to European and Ukrainian recommendations that he take steps to increase pressure on Russia
  • The other leaders on the call came away with the impression that the US would not halt weapons exports to Ukraine, so long as the weapons were being paid for by the Ukrainians or Europeans
• The Trump administration considers withdrawing US some troops from South Korea
  • The Pentagon is considering options to redeploy 4,500 troops from South Korea to other locations in the region, such as Guam
  • Would not represent a total withdrawal, as the US has 28,500 troops in South Korea
  • However, US Army officials have suggested that even this limited withdrawal could negatively affect readiness against a North Korean attack
  • Elbridge Colby, senior undersecretary of defense for policy, has advocated "reshaping" the US force in Korea to be more focused on China, transferring primary responsibility for defending against a North Korean attack to the South Korean military
• Mozilla shuts down Pocket and Fakespot in order to refocus resources on Firefox
  • Pocket was an archiving and bookmarking service acquired by Mozilla in 2017
  • Fakespot was a tool to spot fake reviews online acquired by Mozilla in 2023
  • Pocket will go into "export only" mode on July 8, with its metadata service continuing until October 8
  • Fakespot's browser extensions will shut down on July 1
• Apple supplier Foxconn announces plans for a new $1.5 billion factory in India
  • Foxconn will build a display manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu, near Chennai
  • Will manufacture display modules for iPhones
  • Represents an important upgrade for India's electronics industry
  • India represented 18% of iPhone production worldwide in 2024
  • By the end of 2025, that figure should be 32% as Apple seeks to diversify its manufacturing base away from China
  • However, Trump is not happy with Apple and Foxconn's expansions in India, arguing that they should be building factories in the US instead
• Has Starlink already won the new space race?
  • On April 29, Amazon launched the first of its long-delayed Project Kuiper satellites
  • Represents the first challenge to SpaceX's exclusivity as the sole provider of high-speed satellite internet
  • SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon's Project Kuiper are expected to be joined by Chinese and European constellations, as neither global power wishes to be dependent on American infrastructure for space-based Internet
    • Eutelsat's OneWeb already has 648 satellites in low earth orbit, making it the second largest constellation behind Starlink
    • Canada's Telesat is developing a smaller constellation that will focus on providing internet for higher-margin governmental and industrial contracts
    • Two Chinese constellations, Guowang and SpaceSail are proposing to fly a total of 26,000 satellites
  • The top 8 satellite internet providers plan to launch over 50,000 satellites
  • Of these Starlink will account for 12,000
  • However, SpaceX has a commanding lead over all of its competitors
  • Vertical integration between Starlink and SpaceX means that SpaceX can design its satellites to fit efficiently into its rockets
  • Starlink pushes complexity into its ground-based antennae, allowing the satellites to be relatively simpler
  • Starlink has over 5 million customers, and generates over $2 billion in free cash flow on $12 billion in total revenue, according to Quilty Space, a consultancy and analysis firm focused on the space industry
  • This cash flow allows SpaceX to defray the capital expenditures required to maintain and expand its constellation
  • Satellites in low earth orbit must be replaced every 5 - 7 years as their orbits degrade and they burn up in the atmosphere
  • Chinese constellations have the advantage of government funding, allowing them to build satellites rapidly
  • However, launch cadence remains a problem; none of China's rockets can launch as rapidly as the Falcon 9
  • Musk's forays into geopolitics, like his refusal to enable Starlink to aid Ukrainian forces attacking Crimea, have given motivation to European and Asian firms seeking to provide their respective hosts with sovereign access to space
  • China, in particular, sees Starlink as a tool of US influence, and is funding SpaceSail as a part of its "digital silk road" as a response
  • Chinese firms may have an advantage over SpaceX as their state-financing allows them to focus on gaining market share without having to focus on revenues or profits
  • Many analysts see a forthcoming price war between SpaceX, Amazon and other players as multiple satellite internet constellations come online
• The Senate votes to end California's EV mandate
  • California had used its ability to set more stringent standards under the Clean Air Act to mandate that all new vehicles sold in the state be zero-emissions, as of 2035
  • With a 51-44 vote, the Senate revoked the waiver that allowed California to enact that mandate
  • Zero-emissions rules were about to begin phasing in in 2026
  • The mandate was opposed by large car companies, such as Toyota and General Motors, who argued that it would force them to manufacture vehicles for which there was little consumer demand
• The US Treasury stops minting new pennies
  • The US Mint will finish using its current inventory of penny blanks, but will stop minting new pennies thereafter
  • Decision comes after rises in the prices of copper and zinc made each penny cost nearly $0.04 to produce
  • The Mint forecasts a savings of $56 million in materials costs as a result of phasing out penny production
  • Note that pennies will remain legal tender, but the number in circulation will gradually drop
• The US military expresses unhappiness with ULA's performance
  • Air Force Major General Stephen G. Purdy stated that problems with ULA's newest rocket, Vulcan, have delayed the launch of several satellites important for national security
  • The Space Force has asked SpaceX to launch a plurality of its next tranche of satellites, whereas in the past, ULA was its favored contractor
• North Korea's new warship capsizes on launch
  • The unnamed 5000 ton Choe Hyon-class destroyer didn't slide smoothly into the water
  • Bow was torn off and the hull was crushed
  • Satellite photos show the hull lying on its side in the water
  • Kim Jong-Un, who attended the launch, lambasted officials for their "absolute carelessness, irresponsibility, and unscientific empiricism"
  • North Korea has been recently working to modernize its naval capabilities, with aid from Russia
  • Heads are going to roll, figuratively, and, given that this is North Korea, quite possibly literally
• OnlyFans is reportedly being sold to a group of investors for $8 billion
  • The sole owner of the adult entertainment focused website is Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman
  • Bought OnlyFans in 2018 and owned the company through a pandemic-era boom
  • Has paid himself at least $1 billion in dividends
  • Its last public filing with British regulators showed it making $6.6 billion in revenue, up from $375 million in 2020
  • Buyers are an investment group led by Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm

2025-05-21 Wednesday

• Ukraine will ask the EU to impose stricter sanctions on Russia, independent of the US
  • The Ukrainian government will submit a 40-page white paper with the EU outlining steps that the EU can take to increase pressure on Russia independent of the US
  • Will ask the EU to make its sanctions apply more forcefully beyond its own territory, such as by imposing secondary sanctions on India and China
  • Will suggest ways for the EU to impose further sanctions via majority vote, bypassing holdouts such as Slovakia and Hungary
  • Publicly, Ukraine has avoided criticizing the US, despite Trump's decision to not impose further sanctions after his phone call with Putin failed to catalyze a ceasefire
  • However, the paper notes that the US has ceases participation in nearly all intergovernmental discussions focused on sanctions and export controls
• Jensen Huang condemns US chip export restrictions on China
  • Says that the only effect of US chip export restrictions on China has been to make Chinese manufacturers better at making AI accelerators
  • Argues that it's better for Nvidia to have a high market share in China
  • For what reason? He keeps saying it's better for the US to have the Chinese dependent on Nvidia, but what good does that do the US?
  • Welcomed the Trump administration's rescinding of the Biden administration's "diffusion rule"
• OpenAI will acquire Jony Ive's hardware startup, io, for $6.4 billion
  • WSJ's coverage
  • Jony Ive was the former head of Apple's design department
  • Was responsible for designing the iPod and iPhone
  • OpenAI had a 23% stake in io
  • Will pay $5 billion for the remainder, bringing its total investment to $6.4 billion
  • Ive's design consultancy, LoveFrom, will continue to remain independent
  • It's unclear what sort of device io was working on with OpenAI, but Sam Altman has said that it is not a phone
  • Rather, it's a different form of device that's meant to be AI-centric
  • Size of acquisition raises questions about OpenAI's cash flow
  • OpenAI is losing lots of money, despite having significant revenue, and is not predicting any profits until at least 2029
• Companies are increasingly turning to AI-powered voice synthesis to drive a new generation of customer service voice bots
  • Automated voice recognition programs are increasingly being upgraded with generative AI
  • Makes the bots more conversational and better able to understand different phrasings
  • Startups like ElevenLabs and Cartesia have made great strides in using AI to improve the quality of speech generation
  • New AI models are "voice native"; can operate directly on audio data without needing to transcribe it to text first
  • Ensuring that the bots don't go off-script or output false information remains a challenge
• Crusoe secures $11.6 billion to fund the construction of a new data center for OpenAI
  • Funding is a mixture of debt and equity
  • Data center will consist of 8 buildings, each with approximately 50,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips
  • Located near Abilene, Texas
  • Development is a key part of OpenAI's plan to reduce its dependence on Microsoft by acquiring its own computing resources
  • This datacenter is the first of several planned facilities to be built for the Stargate initiative
  • Will be operated by Oracle on behalf of OpenAI
• 12 US states mount a legal challenge to Trump's tariffs
  • The Manhattan-based Court of International trade heard arguments in a hearing over a lawsuit brought by 12 states arguing that the President has exceeded his authority to impose tariffs
  • Same court heard a lawsuit earlier, brought by 5 small businesses arguing a similar point
  • The Justice Department says that states lack standing to challenge the federal government's imposition of tariffs and that only Congress can file a lawsuit against the President on grounds that the President has exceeded his authority
• Nike announces price increases and a return to Amazon
  • Nike has announced $10 price increases on products that retail for more than $100
  • Products retailing for less than $100 and childrens' products will not see any increases
  • Nike will also resume selling on Amazon, after a six year hiatus, in a bid to gain market share
• Microsoft touts sales of Fabric, its big-data analysis product
  • Fabric competes with Snowflake and Databricks
  • Integrates PowerBI visualizations
  • Both Snowflake and Databricks are customers of Azure, customers use their products in addition to Fabric
  • Snowflake and Databricks have downplayed the threat from Microsoft, with Snowflake adding that it saw Google as its major competitor, not Microsoft
• US Department of Defense formally accepts the Qatari 747
  • Previous coverage from May 15
  • The US Department of Defense took delivery of the 747 that Trump wants to use as an interim replacement for the VC-25A aircraft that are normally used for presidential transport
  • Will be awarding a contract to make the necessary modifications
  • Details of the contract are classified
  • The Air Force also published some details about the ongoing work that Boeing needs to do on the permanent replacements
    • Flaws in cockpit and passenger window
    • Cracks in fuselage structures
    • How are there cracks? The aircraft that were being refurbished for the permanent replacements were brand new; they were jets that were supposed to go to Russia but were withheld because of sanctions
  • While the Qatari plane comes fully furnished, it lacks the sophisticated communication and protection systems normally equipped on a jet of this type
  • The Qatari plane will likely only get limited upgrades in order to make it available in an expedited basis, which means that it will likely only be deployed domestically
• Boeing has overhauled internal safety reporting tools and practices after the Alaska Airlines door panel blowout
  • In 2019, after the 737 MAX crashes, Boeing implemented an internal safety reporting system called SpeakUp
  • However, employees were wary of using the system because reported safety violations could be investigated by the reporter's direct manager, potentially allowing for retaliation
  • After this week's announced changes, a third-party at the company will investigate claims made through the system
  • SpeakUp also now allows employees to see how their report has been processed
  • Boeing has also changed the reporting chain for workers doing safety inspections on behalf of the FAA
  • Now those workers report to a separate leader trained in jet certification and safety rather than the person heading the particular program they're inspecting, reducing conflicts of interest
• Brembo announces a new brand of brakes that reduce particulate emissions by up to 90%
  • Brembo has developed a new type of brake disk and brake pad
  • The pair are called "Greentell"
  • Meet new EU standards on 10 and 2.5 micron particulate emissions
  • Use laser metal deposition to add a thin coating to brake disks to improve durability and reduce particulates
  • While US vehicles are not subject to restrictions on particulate emissions, the improved durability of Greentell brakes could make them an attractive option for performance cars
• Indian security forces claim credit for the killing of a top Maoist rebel
  • Nambala Keshav Rao was the leader of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI (Maoist))
  • Was a leader of the Naxalite movement
  • Reportedly killed in a shootout with police today
  • Amit Shah, home minister, has stated a goal to make India free of Naxalites by 2026
• Bloomberg terminals suffer an outage impacting government bond sales
  • Bloomberg terminals went down for approximately two hours
  • Caused by an internal problem that Bloomberg is still diagnosing
  • The UK Debt Management Office had to give investors an additional 80 minutes to bid on its bond auction, as a result of the glitch
  • Portugal rescheduled its bond auction into the afternoon because of the problems

2025-05-20 Tuesday

• Marco Rubio insists that the White House is ready to impose new sanctions on Russia if there is progress on peace talks with Ukraine
  • Rubio was speaking with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after a phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin did not result in any progress towards a peace deal
  • Was asked whether Trump would be willing to support a bill imposing 500% secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil and gas
  • Replied that the White House might support sanctions like that eventually, but threatening sanctions too early would simply alienate the Russians and make a peace deal less likely
  • Said that the US had not made any moves to lift the sanctions on Russia and that American arms were still flowing to Ukraine
  • But for how much longer?
  • Senators appeared frustrated with Rubio, arguing that the US was being taken advantage of by Russia
• Google announces the rollout of "AI Mode" to all users
  • Google is rolling out a feature that will allow users to interact with Google Search as if it were an AI chatbot
  • Provides a conversational question and answer experience akin to ChatGPT
  • Google has been racing to catch up to competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity which offer an alternative method of querying for search results
  • However, investors are concerned that Google's efforts will cannibalize its existing search revenue
  • Google will also be rolling out "Project Mariner", an effort to integrate AI capabilities into its Chrome browser
  • This integration will allow Google's AI to take actions on behalf of a user in order to execute tasks such as compiling research reports and booking trips
  • Project Mariner is rolling out after similar "AI agents" from rivals such as OpenAI or Anthropic
  • However OpenAI and Anthropic's agents are glitchy and often struggle with tasks; Google has the potential to gain an advantage if it can leverage its knowledge of user behavior to make AI agents that work with the user more smoothly
  • Google will also be introducing "Astra", a multimodal AI capable of operating on images, audio data and text
• Google embraces the Model Context Protocol for its Gemini models
  • At Google I/O today, Google announced that the Gemini API and SDK will support the Model Context Protocol for allowing Gemini to access outside resources
  • Google said that it was looking at making it easier for developers to deploy MCP servers to allow Gemini to access outside resources without giving further details
  • Google also introduced the Agent2Agent protocol, which it says is a complement to MCP
  • While MCP is about connecting AI agents to sources of data and tools with which they can take actions, A2A is about connecting AI agents to each other
• Microsoft-backed AI firm Builder.ai collapses into insolvency
  • Builder.ai, one of the UK's best known technology firms, is entering insolvency proceedings after restating its earnings
  • Was attempting to build AI-enabled systems that would make it easy for ordinary users to make websites and apps
  • Founder and CEO, Sachin Dev Duggal, had stepped down as CEO earlier this year, but had retained his board seat
  • Replacement CEO Manpreet Ratia said that creditors had seized all of Builder.ai's financial assets and it was unable to make payroll as a result
• Marco Rubio says that the US lifted sanctions on Syria in order to prevent the country's collapse into civil war
  • Last week, in a surprise announcement, Donald Trump announced that he would lift all US sanctions on Syria
  • Announcement took US lawmakers by surprise, as many in the US had questioned the new Syrian leaders' links to al Qaeda
  • Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the decision to lift sanctions came after US analysts concluded that without economic support, the Syrian government was likely to collapse into civil war in a matter of weeks
  • After the shift last week, White House officials are now examining which sanctions can be lifted quickly and which would require Congressional approval to remove
  • In the wake of Trump's decision, European leaders are also moving to lift their own sanctions on Syria
  • A priority is lifting sanctions on Syria's central bank, in order to allow the Syrian financial system to reintegrate with global trade
• Home Depot announces that it will keep prices steady despite tariffs
  • Says that it is working with suppliers to negotiate price discounts in response to tariffs
  • Is looking for suppliers outside of China
  • But will having suppliers outside of China actually help? Trump might well restore tariffs against alternatives to China like Vietnam or Indonesia
  • Home Depot's strategy is in contrast with Walmart, which announced that prices would be increasing, resulting in an attack by Trump on social media
  • Perhaps they've announced that they're going to keep prices steady, but will be increasing them slowly, citing generic causes like "market conditions"
• Ford will share its battery plant with Nissan, in latest EV pullback
  • In 2021 Ford constructed two large battery factories, in collaboration with Korean battery manufacturers SK On
  • US demand for electric vehicles has been lower than anticipated, leading one of the factories to sit idle while the other runs at less than full capacity
  • Nissan will now also manufacture batteries at the active factory, increasing its utilization
  • Manufacturing batteries in the US allows Nissan to avoid tariffs
  • General Motors recently sold its stake in a battery manufacturing joint venture with LG Energy Solutions
  • Last year Ford took a $1.9 billion writedown after it canceled a 3-row-electric SUV
• CATL shares surge 16% after its Hong Kong IPO
  • CATL is the largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries in the world
  • Company supplies Tesla and Volkswagen
  • CATL was already listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, but founder Robin Zheng listed additional shares in Hong Kong to make it easier for foreign investors to buy shares
  • However, because CATL filed its listing under a "Reg S" filing rather than a US-standard "144A", US investors will require offshore accounts to buy shares in CATL
• The EU plans to impose a flat €2 tax on small packages
  • The "handling fee" will be imposed to offset the costs associated with inspecting packages from overseas being sent directly to people's homes
  • The €2 fee will be assessed on packages sent directly to consumers
  • Packages sent to warehouses will be assessed a €0.50 fee
  • As part of this process, the EU will be ending its own de minimis exemption on tariffs for parcels worth less than €150
  • The EU's effort mirrors a similar effort by the US to crack down on the de minimis loophole
  • The fee will mostly impact Temu and Shein, who have built their businesses around sending packages directly from Chinese suppliers to customers in the US and EU
• France orders five leading VPN services to block sports streaming sites
  • The Paris judicial court ordered five leading VPN services, NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Proton VPN, CyberGhost, and SurfShark, to block access to 203 domains linked to pirate sports streams
  • The blocked sites were used to rebroadcast English Premier League and Champions League streams
  • This is the first time that a French court has targeted VPNs
  • Until now, enforcement of anti-piracy regulations has focused on DNS providers, ISPs and content-delivery networks
  • VPNs have provided a way to skirt DNS and ISP restrictions on access to sports streams
  • 29% of all Internet users in France used a VPN last year
  • VPN providers reply that they do not host or rebroadcast illegal content, and they should not be held responsible for the behavior of their users
  • The EU's Internet landscape increasingly resembles China

2025-05-19 Monday

• A phone call between Trump and Putin does not result in a breakthrough
  • Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held a two hour phone call, as announced on Saturday
  • After the phone discussion, Trump announced that Ukraine and Russia would hold direct talks
  • Hinted that the US might step back from its role as mediator if talks falter
  • Trump said that some progress had been made, and believed that Putin wanted peace
  • Did not suggest that new US sanctions on Russia were immediately forthcoming
  • Trump also spoke to EU leaders, France, Italy, Germany and Finland after the phone call with Putin
• Finland will use the interest on frozen Russian assets to supply ammunition to Ukraine
  • Finland will supply €90 million worth of ammunition to Ukraine by using proceeds from interest on frozen Russian assets
  • The EU decided last year that proceeds from Russian assets frozen by sanctions could be used to fund aid to Ukraine
• The UK and EU sign a new trade and security deal, years after Brexit
  • Deal doesn't undo Brexit, but improves integration between the UK's and EU's markets
  • Gives UK firms access to the EU's €150 billion defense fund, pending a final agreement on the UK's contribution to that fund
  • Makes it easier to move British troops across Europe
  • Harmonization of regulations on food
  • UK will allow EU boats to fish in its waters for a further 12 years
  • Limited increases freedom of movement for young people
  • UK still is outside the EU customs zone and UK citizens will not be allowed to settle permanently in the EU without going through the standard immigration process
  • Opposition politicians call the deal an "abject surrender" to the EU
• Polish officials seize 5 metric tons of aircraft tires that were reportedly going to Russia in violation of sanctions
  • The bill of lading for the tires indicated that they were car and bus tires
  • However, upon inspection, it was discovered that the tires were for Boeing planes, and were subject to sanctions
• Microsoft will offer xAI's Grok model to its cloud customers
  • Developers using Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry will be able to access xAI's Grok model under the same terms as OpenAI's equivalent products
  • Signals a further distancing between Microsoft and OpenAI
  • Microsoft's VP of Azure AI, Eric Boyd, stated that Microsoft's priority is to ensure that customers use Azure, regardless of which specific model they're interested in using
  • Microsoft has injected over $13 billion of funding into OpenAI
  • However, relations between Microsoft and OpenAI have cooled more recently as OpenAI has sought ever more computing power
  • Microsoft also announced that it will adopt the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a protocol developed by Anthropic to allow LLMs to access outside information in a standardized way
  • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says, in the long run, AI models will become commodities, and the real value will be in applications that bring the benefits of those models to customers
• Nvidia announces that it will license its proprietary inter-chip communication technology to outside vendors
  • At the Computex trade show in Taiwan, Nvidia announced a new version of its inter-GPU communications systems, NVLink, titled NVLink Fusion
  • NVLink Fusion will be licensed to outside vendors, like Marvell Technology and MediaTek, who wish to integrate their chips with Nvidia's GPUs
• Nvidia announces a marketplace to connect developers with GPU resources
  • Service is called DGX Cloud Lepton
  • Will act as an aggregator and reseller of GPU resources across a variety of cloud providers
  • The service will be made available to developers directly, instead of being provided through an existing cloud provider
  • Reflects Nvidia's priority to reach end customers directly, rather than working through intermediaries, such as AWS or Azure
• Regeneron to buy 23andMe assets out of bankruptcy for $256 million
  • On March 25 23andMe filed for bankruptcy
  • The once valuable genetics testing company struggled to establish recurring revenue
  • A bid by CEO Anne Wojcicki take the company private fell through and the company filed for bankruptcy
  • The company has been purchased out of bankruptcy by the biotech firm Regeneron
  • Regeneron has developed treatments for a variety of diseases, including eye and immune system conditions
  • Regeneron has pledged to continue the genetic testing service, and will abide by 23andMe's privacy policy regarding the data it has collected
• Nippon Steel pledges to invest $14 billion in US steelmaking as part of a revised bid for US Steel
  • On April 7 Trump ordered a second CFIUS review of the proposed merger between US Steel and Nippon Steel
  • Merger had been opposed by the US Steelworkers union as well as both Biden and Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign
  • However, Trump had also said that he would be open to a revised deal whereby Nippon Steel takes a minority investment in US Steel
  • Nippon Steel has increased its investment pledge to $14 billion, up from an initial $1.4 billion
  • Is promising to build a new steel mill in the US, as well as invest significantly into modernizing US Steel's infrastructure
• JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon indicates that investors have not fully accounted for the impact of tariffs
  • Says that even the scaled back level of Trump's tariffs were extreme by historical standards
  • Argues that the full impact of tariffs has not yet been felt, as companies have not yet updated forecasts and consumers have not yet felt price increases
• The Trump administration allows the resumption of construction of an offshore wind project in New York
  • The Empire Wind project was under construction by the Norwegian energy company Equinor
  • Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum passed a stop-work order on the project, suggesting that the Biden administration's analysis hadn't been sufficient when approving the project
  • Equinor stated that a stop-work order after the project had been approved was unprecedented and likely unlawful, but had held off on taking legal action against the Trump administration
  • Today, the company announced that it was informed by the Interior Department that work could continue on the project
  • Equinor credited lobbying by New York governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Eric Adams with persuading the Trump administration to lift its stop-work order
  • A key point in favor of the wind energy project is the number of jobs involved in its construction, both directly in New York and at suppliers across the US
• Subaru increases prices in the US, citing "market conditions"
  • Subaru will be increasing prices on its vehicles to offset "increased costs"
  • Move is likely a response to tariff pressure
• Klarna's losses widen as more consumers fail to repay loans
  • Net loss is up to $99 million, up from $47 million a year ago
  • Klarna is a fintech company which offers zero-interest loans to consumers to allow them to buy products on an installment plan
  • Makes money through fees charged to retailers who offer Klarna as a payment option and late-payment fees charged to customers
  • Has been focused on growing aggressively in the US
  • Argues that the short-maturity of its loans, and relatively low overall nonpayment rates will allow it to weather this storm
  • Is investing heavily in AI-based technology in order to cut costs
• Microsoft open-sources WSL
  • WSL is a tool that allows Windows users to run Linux programs seamlessly inside Windows
  • Was originally introduced for Windows 10, in 2016
  • Now, Microsoft has open-sourced almost all of WSL
  • Two components, p9rdr.sys and p9np.dll, which handle filesystem access between Linux and Windows remain closed source
  • Recently, Microsoft also announced Fedora and Arch Linux as officially supported WSL distributions, joining the default, Ubuntu
• A Russian court fined Apple for violating the "LGBT Propaganda" law
  • A Russian court has fined Apple 7.5 million rubles ($93,500) for 3 separate breaches of Russian rules on "LGBT propaganda"
  • The root cause of the disputes is not known as Apple requested the hearings be closed to the public
• The US Space Force seeks to increase its use of commercial satellites
  • The Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office are seeking to capitalize on capabilities being developed for commercial satellites
  • Are taking a more hands-off approach
  • Rather than coming up with detailed designs, they're setting requirements and having companies compete to meet those requirements
  • The National Reconnaissance Office awarded a contract worth $4 billion to three companies, BlackSky, Planet and Maxar, to provide imagery from privately owned satellites
  • Also started launching its own commercially developed imagery satellites, based off SpaceX's design for its Starlink satellites
  • The new commercial procurement strategy is forcing Space Force to rethink some of its secrecy requirements so that it can disclose essential requirements to potential bidders without having to sign a contract with them first
  • In the case of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP), the Air Force and Space Force rethought the requirements for the satellites, accepting a lower level of capability in return for being able to solicit bids from multiple vendors
  • The new program's unclassified requirements also enable vendors to sell the satellites to other countries
  • The Space Force's "Resilient GPS" program seeks to leverage commercial satellite vendors to supplement the existing GPS constellation at a cost of $50 to $80 million per satellite, as compared with $250 million per satellite for the current constellation
  • The new GPS satellites will operate in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as opposed to the existing constellation, which is in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO)
  • Will have fewer capabilities than existing GPS satellites, but lower altitude and better antennae will enable them to be more resistant to jamming and spoofing
  • Space Force awarded contracts to four companies: Astranis, Axient, L3Harris and Sierra Space to come up with designs for the resilient GPS satellites
  • Overall, this is a promising development for the space industry
  • It's mature enough now that the government can be more hands-off
  • Just as the Air Force doesn't design its fighter jets, Space Force and the NRO shouldn't be designing satellites

2025-05-18 Sunday

• Chancellor Friedrich Merz seeks to cool a diplomatic tiff between Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni over Ukraine
  • Meloni had traveled, as part of a delegation of 40 European leaders, to a European Political Community summit in Albania
  • Did not join Merz, Macron, Keir Starmer and Donald Tusk in a breakout session where they discussed the outcome of Russia-Ukraine peace talks
  • The group of leaders initiated a phone call with presidents Trump and Zelensky
  • Meloni feels that, as a staunch supporter of Ukraine and the leader of a major European nation, she should have been invited to the discussion
  • Says that she was excluded only because of her refusal to commit Italian soldiers to an eventual peacekeeping mission in Ukraine
  • However Macron says that no troop deployments were discussed during the meeting, whose topic was confined solely to seeking an immediate ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine
  • Has led to accusations that Meloni has allowed her personal antipathy towards Macron to cloud her judgment
  • International relations is high-school drama with guns, sometimes
• Chinese restrictions on rare earths exports threaten to disrupt electronics and electric vehicle supply chains
  • In April, China imposed export restrictions on a number of rare earth minerals, notably dysprosium, a rare earth mineral used to make the powerful permanent magnets used in electric vehicle motors
  • The restrictions require exporters to apply for a license with the Chinese government before they can send refined rare earth minerals overseas
  • After weeks of delays, Chinese authorities have begun allowing licenses for exports to Europe, but the volume of licenses granted has been far too few to meet demand
  • Unclear whether China has begun to allow exports to the US
  • What appears to have happened is that the Chinese export control bureaucracy was overwhelmed by the suddenness of the export controls and the volume of license applications
  • China appears to have excluded US defense companies, such as Lockheed Martin, from purchasing rare earths
  • Lockheed says that it has enough inventory to last a year and expects to be prioritized when the US unlocks additional sources of rare earths
  • Customers of Chinese rare earths complain about the opacity of the process, stating that it's not clear how they're supposed to prove that their purchases of rare earths won't be redirected to weapons suppliers
  • Many importers expect export restrictions to ease, now that the US and China have agreed to a 90-day tariff truce
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatens "maximum tariffs" against countries "not negotiating in good faith"
  • Said that countries that aren't offering enough concessions will receive letters warning them that their tariffs will rise back to the "reciprocal tariff" level announced on April 2
  • Joined Trump in denouncing Walmart for its plan to raise prices
• A Mexican Navy tall ship crashes into the Brooklyn Bridge, killing two
  • The ARM Cuauhtémoc, a training vessel used by the Mexican Navy, was on its way to Iceland after stopping at New York City's South Street Seaport
  • After departing the seaport, the ship appeared to lose power, and drifted into the Brooklyn Bridge, snapping its masts in the collision
  • 2 sailors were killed, and two others were seriously injured
  • The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash

2025-05-17 Saturday

• President Trump says he will speak with Vladimir Putin directly by phone; is hopeful about the prospect of a cease-fire
  • After calling for peace talks in Istanbul, Putin decided not to attend
  • Has not considered Trump's proposal for an unconditional 30-day cease-fire
  • Actually intensified attacks on Ukraine even as negotiations between low-level officials were taking place
  • European leaders are arguing that Putin has clearly shown his disinterest in any kind of peace negotiation by his refusal to attend meetings with Zelensky
  • The proposed summit in Istanbul allows European leaders to show Trump that Putin is the actual obstacle to a peace settlement, not Zelensky
• Trump attacked Walmart for tariff-related price increases
  • On Thursday, Walmart warned that prices would increase as a result of Trump's tariff policies
  • Trump attacked Walmart on social media, arguing that it should absorb the tariff costs
  • In which Trump continues to adopt the worst leftist policies

2025-05-16 Friday

• OpenAI launches a new coding assistant: Codex
  • Is built on top of codex-1, a fine-tuned variant of its o3 reasoning model
  • OpenAI is increasingly looking to automating programming as a way to compete with Anthropic, as well as startups, such as Anysphere, developer of the popular AI-assisted programming editor, Cursor
  • OpenAI is also reportedly in talks to acquire, Windsurf, another AI coding startup
  • While OpenAI is the leader in the generalist AI space, many developers prefer Anthropic's model, Claude 3 Sonnet, for programming tasks
  • OpenAI says that Codex is better at understanding an organization's programming guidelines and writing code that fits with those guidelines
• Nvidia plans to open a R&D center in Shanghai
  • The center will serve as a communications channel between Nvidia's Chinese customers and its headquarters in the United States
  • Will help design products that are competitive in China while maintaining compliance with US export controls on advanced semiconductors
  • Translation: will help find loopholes that allow China to have access to competitive GPUs
  • However, the actual process of designing semiconductors will remain in the US, in order to comply with complex requirements governing the transfer of intellectual property into China
  • In addition, the Shanghai team will work on applications for Nvidia's GPUs, such as autonomous driving
  • Nvidia is also using the research center as a way to attract top AI talent residing in China
  • Nvidia argues that it's better to have Chinese companies using US GPUs than it is to cede the market entirely to China's homegrown competitors, such as Huawei
  • Nvidia's market-leading GPU programming software, CUDA, is helping it maintain marketshare in China, even though the chips it's allowed to sell there are inferior to locally manufactured ones from Huawei
  • Companies are having to make a difficult choice between continuing to use existing CUDA code, running on lower-end Nvidia hardware, and rewriting the code to take advantage of locally manufactured AI accelerators
• How the UAE managed to secure an agreement to access millions of Nvidia GPUs
  • The UAE used a combination of ties with American executives, announcements of investments in the United States and personal connections with Trump
  • The agreement, which is a broad framework with many details yet to be negotiated, gives the UAE access to millions of Nvidia and AMD chips
  • Puts the small Gulf nation at the cutting edge of AI
  • Deal was championed by White House crypto czar David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
  • Some lawmakers in the US are concerned about the UAE's ties to China and worry that the deal will result in China being able to access advanced AI chips that would have been denied to it via normal trade
  • In exchange, the UAE promised $1.4 trillion worth of data center investments in the US
  • Also sent $1.5 billion into an investment fund controlled by Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law
  • Earlier this month, the UAE also invested $2 billion in a stablecoin controlled by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial, in order to complete an investment in a crypto exchange
  • The deal would allow Group 42, a UAE state-owned AI company to purchase up to 500,000 Nvidia GPUs a year
  • By comparison, Elon Musk's xAI datacenter in Memphis has 200,000 GPUs
• Israel carries out further strikes against the Houthis
  • Struck the ports of Hodeidah and Salif, which it said were being used to transfer weapons
  • Threatened to assassinate the leader of the Houthis, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, if the Houthis persisted in carrying out rocket attacks on Israel
  • Israeli intelligence, long focused on Hamas and Hezbollah is working to gather more data about the the Houthis
• House Republicans block President Trump's tax and spending bill
  • Four Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the bill in the House Budget Committee
  • Republican holdouts want to reduce spending on social safety net programs
  • Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington says he agrees with the holdouts' concerns and is working to amend the proposed legislation to address their concerns
  • Republican lawmakers are negotiating with holdouts on the Budget Committee and with legislators from New York, New Jersey and California who want a higher cap on the State And Local Tax (SALT) deduction
  • Other Republicans have expressed hesitation about the withdrawal of clean energy subsidies
  • Few Republicans have expressed wholehearted support for the bill; most who have spoken out publicly say that they'll be voting for the bill because the good outweighs the bad
• The Justice Department wants to spare Boeing from having to file a guilty plea over the 737 MAX charges
  • The story so far
    • After the 737 MAX crashes attributed to the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, the US Department of Justice entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing
    • Agreement stated that if there were no safety violations for three years, charges related to the MCAS crashes would be dropped
    • However, just before the deferred prosecution agreement was set to expire a door panel on a 737 flown by Alaska Airlines blew out
    • This led Justice department prosecutors to file criminal charges against Boeing
    • Boeing was expected to plead guilty and pay a substantial additional fine
  • Instead of having to file a guilty plea, which would have made it more difficult for Boeing to seek government contracts, prosecutors are giving Boeing a nonprosecution agreement
  • Attorneys for the families killed in the Lion Air and Ethiopian Air crashes spoke out against the agreement, saying that the nonprosecution agreement would allow Boeing to escape accountability
• MIT withdraws support from a widely circulated paper on the effects of AI
  • Last December, a paper by Aidan Toner-Rogers investigated the impact of AI on knowledge work
  • Found that AI enhanced productivity, but did so in an unequal manner
  • Today, MIT has withdrawn its support from the paper after questions were raised about the provenance and veracity of the data
  • MIT says that Aidan Toner-Rogers is no longer at the university
• Travelers are taking steps to avoid Newark airport
  • On April 28, an air traffic control radar and telecommunications outage grounded all flights at Newark airport
  • As a result, on May 11 Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that Newark would be operating at reduced capacity
  • This has led travelers to take steps to route their itineraries away from Newark, even if it causes their trips to take longer
  • The capacity reduction has especially impacted United Airlines, which uses Newark as a hub
  • United has said that it would have to reduce its flights by approximately 10% in order to adjust to the limitations on flying into and out of Newark
• Charter and Cox are merging amid greater competition between cable and wireless
  • Charter and Cox are merging in a $21.9 billion deal
  • Have lost large portions of the cable TV market to streaming
  • Facing increasing threat from broadband provided by cell phone carriers
  • The combined company will change its name to Cox communications
  • Spectrum will be the consumer-facing brand
• Questions remain around whether social media can swing elections
  • Five months ago, the Romanian Supreme Court annulled a presidential election, citing the impact of a Russia-backed influence campaign run on TikTok
  • The campaign brought to prominence, a far-right candidate, Calin Georgescu, who voiced skepticism of NATO and appreciation of Romania's fascist past
  • The Romanian intelligence services declassified reports purporting to show that the TikTok campaign was orchestrated by Russia
  • However, questions remain about whether such an influence campaign can significantly impact voters' intentions
  • The European Digital Media Observatory says that while correlations can be observed, causality is difficult to prove
  • A 2024 paper published in Nature found that "sweeping claims about disinformation are inconsistent with much of the empirical evidence"
  • Many concerns were raised about the effect of Russian disinformation on the US 2016 Presidential campaign, but conclusions have been difficult to prove
  • Much of the Russia-sponsored troll content in that election merely sought to reinforce voters' existing views
  • A 2019 study on Russian electoral interference in the US found that the accounts that were most enthusiastic about sharing disinformation were conservatives who were likely to vote for Trump regardless
  • Studies in other countries have demonstrated similar results
  • In the UK, an investigation by the data protection regulator into Cambridge Analytica found that it had no role in the referendum beyond some preliminary inquiries
  • In 2018, French investigators began a probe into Russian influence on the "yellow vests" protest campaign; after 7 years there have been no updates
  • Walter Quatrociocci, author of a paper on social media echo chambers, argues that the echo-chamber effect, where users cluster into like-minded bubbles, insulates most people from misinformation
  • However, others, such as Sander van der Linden, author of Foolproof: How Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity suggests that disinformation is having an impact that may not be easily captured with existing statistical instruments
  • Points to a University of Tennessee study that showed that Trump's polling correlated with likes and retweets of Russian misinformation
  • In Romania the lack of messaging around the decision to annul the vote created space for people to speculate that the decision was made because authorities didn't like the outcome
  • Has bolstered support for an ally of Georgescu, George Simion, who is running in his stead

2025-05-15 Thursday

• Zelensky arrives in Istanbul as Putin decides not to attend
  • Zelensky arrived for a meeting with Recep Tayyip Erdogan
  • Russia sent a low-level delegation, headed by culture minister Vladimir Medinsky
  • Zelensky compared the Russian delegation to "theater props"
  • However, a meeting between lower-level Ukrainian negotiators and the Russian team is still possible
  • The Russian contingent seeks to renew negotiations based on proposals submitted in 2022, which call for large cuts in the size of Ukraine's armed forces, restrictions on Ukrainian weapons and a Russian veto over Ukrainian elections
  • Were originally put forward when Russian tanks were on the outskirts of Kyiv, and Ukrainian surrender was a real possibility
  • The proposal was firmly rejected by the Ukrainians then, and would be rejected again today
  • Although Marco Rubio will be in Turkey on Friday, he won't be attending the talks either, saying that a member of the US team at a "more appropriate level" will attend
  • Senators are reportedly readying a bill to impose additional sanctions on Russia, but are waiting for a signal from Trump before they send the measure to the White House
• Meta is delaying the rollout of its latest AI model
  • Meta is working on the next iteration of its "Llama" language model: Llama 4: Behemoth
  • Behemoth was initially scheduled to be released in time for Facebook's developer conference in April
  • Now the release of the model has been delayed to fall, or later
  • Sources inside the company say that the model is having trouble exceeding the capabilities of flagship models from OpenAI and Anthropic
  • OpenAI and Anthropic have also delayed the releases of GPT-5 and Claude 3.5 Opus, respectively
  • Meta's AI research group has seen a number of high-profile departures lately, with 11 of the 14 researchers that worked on the original Llama model having left the company
  • Meta is contemplating management changes to its AI group in order to speed up progress
• Walmart warns that prices will rise in the coming weeks, despite the truce in the trade war
  • Despite the 90-day tariff reduction announced on May 12, tariffs remain much higher than historical levels
  • Walmart warns that, even at reduced levels tariff charges will be passed on to consumers, as Walmart does not have the margin to absorb an average 40% tariff
• Trump opposes Tim Cook's plan to build iPhones in India
  • On April 25, Tim Cook unveiled a plan to source all US bound iPhones from India
  • During his overseas trip, Donald Trump announced his unhappiness with that plan
  • Said that he wanted Apple to do final assembly of iPhones in the US
  • Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick added that Apple would use robotics to replicate the precision that it gets from workers in China
  • Says that Americans will be "technicians" overseeing the robots
  • So in other words, even in the best case, the manufacturing will come back to the US, but the employment won't
• Shein has taken out a lease on a large warehouse in Vietnam
  • Shein's business model has long been predicated on shipping clothes directly from China to consumers in the US
  • However, restrictions on the de minimis exemption and the ongoing trade war with China have severely strained that approach
  • Now Shein is seeking to diversify its supply chains, and is seeking suppliers from places like Turkey and Brazil
  • Is seeking to ship from locations that still retain a de minimis exemption, such as Vietnam
  • However, the de minimis exemption could disappear entirely, putting additional pressure on Shein
• The Trump administration targets the EU's digital regulations
  • The US State Department is highlighting the possibility of spillover as the EU seeks to regulate digital platforms
  • Suggest that the EU's Digital Services Act, which seeks to regulate the spread of misinformation and illegal content, could be used as a speech suppression tool worldwide
  • Also suggest that the DSA unfairly targets US technology companies
  • EU officials reply that the DSA only applies within the EU and protects freedom of expression
  • However, many tech company executives, such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg state that the DSA institutionalizes censorship and makes it more difficult to build innovative services
  • I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Trump administration here
  • The EU has, in the past, suggested that it could use its regulatory power and access to its market in order to push for changes to the behavior of online platforms
• Trump says that the US and Iran are close to a nuclear deal
  • Says that talks have made progress over the past several weeks
  • However, Iran has not signaled any willingness to give up its ability to enrich uranium
  • The Trump administration's position is that Iran can continue to have a civilian nuclear program, so long as it buys its nuclear fuel from overseas
  • Says that a deal would also require Iran to stop sponsoring terrorist groups abroad
  • All but one Republican Senator has signed a letter to the Trump administration stating that an Iran nuclear deal must not allow Iran to retain its ability to enrich uranium
• Trump proposes a new "F-55" fighter aircraft and upgrades to the F-22
  • Trump says that the US is examining creating a new twin-engine fighter jet to replace the F-22, which will be known as the F-55
  • Referred to the F-55 as both a new fighter aircraft and an upgrade to the F-35
  • Also said that the US will upgrade its existing F-22s into an "F-22 Super" configuration
  • The fate of the F-22 has been in question, as some have called for retiring the aircraft early in order to free up funds to buy more F-47s
  • It's not clear how Trump's announcements fit with known aircraft development programs
  • It's a possibility that Trump is referring to the Navy's F/A-XX program as the F-55, which the previous reporting stated the Trump administration was seeking to delay
  • It's also possible that Trump has no idea what he's talking about and is making stuff up, just like he did with the Boeing deal with Qatar Airways
• The Qatari 747 that Trump is examining for use as a presidential transport will need fighter escorts and would be limited to domestic travel
  • On May 1, frustrated by Boeing's delays in commissioning replacements for the existing VC-25A presidential transport aircraft, Trump began looking at turning a Qatari 747 into an interim presidential transport
  • Plan raised legal questions around whether this would violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prevents the President from accepting personal gifts from foreign nations
  • Also raised practical questions about whether the plane could be secured against trackers and listening devices
  • The short timeline (Trump wants L3Harris to conclude the work to refurbish the plane by this fall) means that the interim aircraft will not have the electronic countermeasures or missile detection systems that the current VC-25s have
  • Electronics will not be hardened against EMPs
  • For this reason, any use of the interim aircraft will likely require a fighter escort and would be limited to travel inside the United States
  • However, Trump could acknowledge these risks and waive the requirements, using his Presidential authority
• Coinbase receives a ransom demand in exchange for global customer data
  • Coinbase received an email threat asking for a ransom payment in order to prevent the release of confidential customer data
  • Threat appears to be credible
  • The data appeared to be obtained by bribing support employees outside the US
  • Data includes personally identifying information such as names, masked social security and bank account numbers, government ID images, and account data such as balances and transaction histories
  • Coinbase says it's working with US law enforcement to mitigate the incident and will be moving support operations into the US
  • Will not be paying the ransom
  • Has estimated expenses to run between $180 million and $400 million for remediation costs and reimbursing affected customers
• Listening to articles instead of reading them results in shallower comprehension and negativity bias
  • Consumers were asked to read or listen to an article about the health benefits and risks of a shampoo ingredient
  • Those who listened to the article emphasized its risks and were less willing to try shampoos with the ingredient or recommend such shampoos to others
  • When reading, we can pause and reflect on the content of text we're reading
  • Listening does not offer the same opportunities; words come at us one after the other, whether we're ready for them or not
  • Therefore, our brains take shortcuts when listening, filtering content more aggressively
  • This filtering process emphasizes risks over benefits
  • Listening to news stories thus leaves us with a more negative understanding of the world than reading the news
  • In theory, this selectivity could be mitigated by listening in an environment where the listener can pause and take notes, etc
  • However, doing so would give up the benefit of listening to the news, i.e. being able to listen simultaneously while doing other activities, and would emphasize the shortcomings of audio content over written content (e.g. lower information density, slower listening speed as compared to reading speed)
• Dick's Sporting Goods To Buy Foot Locker for $2.4 billion
  • Dick's will pay $24 per share, nearly double Foot Locker's share price over the past few days
  • Alternatively, Foot Locker shareholders can elect to receive 0.1168 shares of Dick's Sporting Goods for every share of Foot Locker they hold
  • Foot Locker's valuation dropped sharply as investors feared it faced tariff pressures and pricing pressure from Nike, one of its largest vendors
  • Foot Locker's share price increased roughly 80% on the news
  • Dick's shares are down roughly 16%
  • My interpretation of this is that Dick's management sees Foot Locker as a bargain right now, as it's getting hammered by the tariff news
• Harvard's copy of the Magna Carta turns out to be an original
  • Harvard paid $27.50 80 years ago for what was advertised as a copy of the Magna Carta
  • $27.50 80 years ago is approximately $500 today
  • However, British researchers now believe it to be an original copy of a later edition of the document
  • The Magna Carta was originally signed in 1215 by King John
  • The one that Harvard possesses is a later edition, reissued in 1300 by King Edward
  • British scholars gained interest in Harvard's Magna Carta in 2023, when David Carpenter, a history professor at King's College in London noticed that Harvard's copy of the Magna Carta started with "Edwardus", and was dated to 1300
  • In 2024, special imaging techniques, and third party experts were commissioned to examine the document to see whether it was authentic
• Apple's Vision Pro customers regret their purchases
  • Many say they rarely use the device
  • Cite its weight and lack of applications as reasons they no longer use the device
  • Also state that social disapproval played a significant role in their abandoning the device
  • Others around them ignored them; for example a Vision Pro customer reported using the device on the plane and being ignored by flight attendants, who treated the Vision Pro as if it were a sleep mask
  • The Vision Pro is like the Segway; it's an overhyped invention that has some limited application but is nowhere near the revolutionary change that it was promised to be
• The EU seeks to cap data center water usage
  • The EU is investigating the water usage of data center cooling systems as it seeks to develop mitigation strategies for climate change
  • The EU's Water Resilience Strategy will call for a study examining the water usage of data centers, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and hydrogen production
  • Wants to ensure that data centers don't overuse possibly shrinking water resources

2025-05-14 Wednesday

• Databricks to buy Neon for $1 billion
  • Databricks is a startup that provides analytics capabilities
  • Increasingly provides AI capabilities for businesses that want to analyze their own data
  • However, these AI agents often need new databases of their own
  • Neon provides a programmatic way to provision databases in the cloud
  • Databases are SQL databases based on Postgres
  • I never thought I'd see a company providing cloud hosted Postgres to get acquired for a billion dollars, but here we are
• Trump downplays his likelihood of attending the talks between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey
  • Indicates that he'll only go to Istanbul if Putin also decides to visit
  • The Kremlin has not yet named its delegation
  • The US is planning to send Secretary of State Rubio, as well as Trump's senior envoys to Ukraine and Russia respectively, Keith Kellogg and Steve Witkoff
• Trump administration officials seek to delay acquisition of the Navy's new advanced fighter
  • The Trump administration is seeking to delay the F/A-XX program, the Navy's competition to find a successor to the F/A-18, by 3 years
  • Is seeking to shift $454 million already allocated to the jet to other programs
  • Is asking Congress to cancel $500 million in funding included in a pending budget reconciliation bill
  • The F​/A-XX is supposed to replace the F​/A-18? I thought that was what the F-35C was for
  • While the Navy wishes to move forward with the contract, other Pentagon officials are concerned about engineering and production capacity at Boeing and Northrop Grumman, the two firms still in contention for the award
  • A three year delay, however, would mean effectively restarting the program from scratch, as existing agreements regarding contracts and pricing would expire during that time
• Trump courts another constitutional crisis by firing the head of the Library of Congress
  • Trump has fired the head of the Library of Congress, Carla Hayden
  • Has named Todd Blanche, a former attorney of his, as the new Librarian of Congress
  • However, the Librarian of Congress reports to Congress, not the President
  • It's unclear whether Trump has the authority to fire the Librarian
  • Democrats, and even some Republicans argue that Trump's move usurps powers reserved to Congress by the Constitution
  • The Library of Congress holds the Congressional Research Service, an independent research arm devoted to publishing reports commissioned by members of Congress
• Trump announces that he will be lifting all sanctions on Syria
  • Trump says that the change of regime in Syria meant that it was time for a fresh start
  • Decision was made after discussions with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
  • Announced a meeting between Marco Rubio and the Syrian foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani, to discuss next steps in the normalization of the relationship between the US and Syria
• Trump meets with the new Syrian president in Saudi Arabia
  • Trump met with Ahmed al-Sharaa the revolutionary leader who overthrew Bashar Assad
  • Photos showed the two shaking hands in the presence of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman
  • Trump urged al-Sharaa to join the Abraham Accords and normalize ties with Israel
  • Meeting was controversial as al-Sharaa had ties with Al Qaeda in the past
  • Okay, but pretty much all the opposition to Assad had ties to Al Qaeda
• Even with the tariff reprieve, small businesses are pressured by Trump's policies
  • Even during the 90-day pause, tariffs remain high by historical standards
  • 90-days allows businesses to bring over existing orders, but doesn't allow much time to place new orders
  • Consumers still face an average tariff charge of 17.8%, the highest level since 1934
  • Prices will still be higher during the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons
  • Even businesses that manufacture in the US are affected, as Trump's 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum affects their ability to source raw materials cheaply
• The deal with Boeing is actually $96 billion for 210 jets
  • Original numbers were from Trump's statements given during a press conference
  • It's clear that Trump grossly exaggerated the numbers
  • The deal, according to the White House, is for 210 jets, consisting of a mix of 787 and 777X airliners, using GE Aerospace engines
  • Worth $96 billion
  • Is Boeing's largest order for both wide-body and 787 models
• Qatar Airways signs deal for 160 Boeing jets during Trump's visit
  • Deal is worth $200 billion
  • Largest order of jets in Boeing's history
  • No details regarding what planes Qatar Airways is looking to buy
  • Not sure whether the order is firm
• What happens if Congress actually cancels the SLS
  • On May 2, the Trump administration revealed a NASA budget that phased out the SLS, Orion and Lunar Gateway programs
  • It is increasingly likely that Congress will go along with this plan
  • The existing rockets will be used for the Artemis II and Artemis III missions, but will be phased out for Artemis IV and beyond
  • The budgeting process for NASA has not been led by NASA officials
  • Instead, it has been led by Russell Vought, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget
  • The budget has steep cuts that don't always make sense from a practical perspective
  • For example, funding for the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope has been cut, even though the telescope has been completed and is awaiting launch
  • NASA's new administrator, Jared Isaacman, and a new National Space Council, led by Vice President JD Vance, will likely provide some pushback against Vought's budget proposals
  • If the SLS and Orion programs are canceled after Artemis III, NASA will likely revive the a "Lunar COTS" (Commercial Orbital Transportation System) proposal that it explored a decade ago
  • NASA would seek commercial bidders for an "end-to-end" round-trip moon mission, using rockets and landers developed entirely by private industry
  • The proposed budget increases funding for a manned mission to Mars
  • This will likely be accomplished using a "Mars COTS" that follows the Lunar COTS model
  • In addition, the Mars Sample Return mission is being canceled because the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers want to encourage NASA to construct more standardized lander and rover designs that can be reused from mission to mission rather than developing bespoke systems for each mission to Mars

2025-05-13 Tuesday

• China portrays Trump's tariff pullback as a victory
  • China didn't announce any major concessions, but received tariff relief anyway
  • Chinese commentators are portraying China as the upholder of global stability, contrasting it with the capricious policies of the Trump administration
  • The tariff relief will reduce pressure on China's government to provide fiscal stimulus
• Trump reduces the de minimis tariff in small shipments from China
  • Previously, the tariff of parcels valued at less than $800 was 120%
  • After the US and China reached a deal to suspend tariffs for 90 days, the Trump administration also reduced its tariff on small parcels to 54%
  • The reduction in the de minimis tariff could allow retailers like Shein and Temu to restart imports into the US directly from China, as that tariff level is still compatible with the profit margins of many goods
• Zelensky says that he'll attend negotiations in Istanbul only if Putin attends as well
  • Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine on a peace deal to end the war are scheduled for Thursday in Istanbul
  • Zelensky says that Putin's presence is necessary to show that Russia is serious about seeking peace
  • However, Putin has questioned Zelensky's legitimacy as leader of Ukraine, so it is not clear whether he'll show up
  • Trump's senior envoys to Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg and Steve Witkoff, respectively, will travel to Istanbul as well
  • Trump himself has also offered to take part
• Emmanuel Macron says that he is open to stationing French nuclear weapons in other countries
  • Macron says that France is willing to extend its nuclear deterrence "umbrella" to other countries
  • Is a response to European worries that the US is planning to abandon its longstanding defensive commitment to Europe
  • Macron said that France would provide extended deterrence if three conditions were met:
    • The countries receiving the extended deterrence pay for it
    • Any foreign deployment of French nuclear weapons must not dilute France's ability to defend itself
    • Any decision to use the nuclear weapons would remain solely in the hands of the French President
  • The current nuclear sharing agreement between the US and NATO ensures that warheads remain under US control, but, once authorized for use, can be used by European aircraft stationed in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey
  • Few in Europe desire the US to withdraw its security guarantees; however Macron's proposal provides the outlines of a backup plan should Trump withdraw the US nuclear commitment to NATO
• Microsoft plans to lay off thousands of employees
  • Microsoft announced layoffs affecting approximately 3% of its workforce, or 6,800 employees
  • Target mostly management roles
  • Say that the layoffs are a result of attempts to streamline the organization
• Trump begins a foreign trip visiting several Middle Eastern countries
  • Four-day trip visiting Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates
  • The three countries plan to announce numerous business deals with the United States
  • Trump is not scheduled to stop in Israel, something many are interpreting as a snub
  • Is expected to announced several weapons sales, including a Qatari purchase of advanced versions of the F-15
  • Trump might also seek to revive a sale of F-35s to the UAE that was blocked by the Biden administration
• Republicans raise concerns over the gift of a Boeing 747 by Qatar as Trump heads to the Middle East
  • Republican lawmakers raised security concerns about the Qatari aircraft that Trump is seeking to refurbish as an interim replacement for the VC-25 presidential transport
  • Worry that the plane may have trackers or listening devices in it
  • Wonder whether the expense of stripping the plane down, securing it, and rebuilding it would be worthwhile for something that is intended to be used only temporarily
• The US sanctions companies shipping Iranian oil to China
  • The sanctions target a number of companies based in Hong Kong
  • The US alleges that the companies are a front for Sepehr Energy, which is affiliated with the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff
  • Also target CCIC Singapore, a Singaporean testing and auditing firm, with the administration says worked to obfuscate the Iranian source of the oil being shipped to China
• Nissan to cut its global workforce by 15%; almost halve its number of factories
  • Nissan will cut 20,000 jobs, approximately 15% of its global workforce
  • Will reduce the number of factories it operates to 10, down from 17 today
  • Nissan has been hard hit by US tariffs, and expects to take a ¥450 billion ($3 billion) tariff hit; however it will be able to offset approximately 30% of these costs through various measures
• China is building port infrastructure in South America in order to reduce its dependence on US agriculture
  • Most recently, the Chinese state-owned agricultural conglomerate, Cofco, is building a large new export terminal in the Brazilian city of Santos
  • The port is the latest in a series of ports and infrastructure investments China has made in South America in order to allow South American countries to export more of their agriculture
  • As a result of these port investments, Chinese officials state that they can meet GDP growth targets without relying on US agriculture
  • Brazil was a major beneficiary of the trade tension between the US and China during the first Trump administration, with its soybean exports to China increasing by 35%
  • Now, Brazil supplies 70% of Chinese soybean demand
  • However, further infrastructure investments need to be made in Brazil if it is to export more
    • The port needs to be connected to rail infrastructure, so that bulk commodities can be more efficiently loaded onto ships
    • Brazil also needs more fertilizer, as its clay soils are quickly depleted of nutrients
• ESPN will launch a streaming service this fall
  • Will be named "ESPN", just like the cable channel
  • Will cost $29.99 a month
  • Contains all the content shown on ESPN's channels, including professional and college football and basketball
• Elon Musk strikes a deal with Saudi Arabia to allow Starlink to be used for aviation and maritime shipping
  • Deal is part of the $600 billion in investment commitments that Saudi Arabia announced as part of Trump's visit
  • SpaceX also received permission from the Democratic Republic of Congo to operate Starlink within its borders
  • Qatar, Bahrain and Jordan are other countries in the Middle East that allow the use of Starlink

2025-05-12 Monday

• The US and China reach an agreement to suspend the majority of their tariffs for 90 days
  • US and Chinese negotiators reached an agreement in Geneva to lower tariffs
  • US will lower tariffs on Chinese goods to 30%, down from 145%
  • China will lower tariffs on US goods to 10%, down from 125%
  • China will also suspend non-tariff trade restrictions imposed on the US
  • Deal is a significant step towards a permanent revised trade deal between the US and China
  • Combined with pre-existing duties, the average US tariff on Chinese goods will be about 40%
  • For China, it would be about 25%
  • US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that the Chinese had also pledged to take steps to reduce the export of fentanyl to the United States
  • Okay, well, let's check back in August
• Trump says he could join Zelensky in Turkey for a meeting with Putin
  • After Zelensky indicated that he would be in Turkey on Thursday, Trump said that he might join him to see if a deal could be made with Vladimir Putin
  • Zelensky welcomed the prospect, as a way to put additional pressure on Putin
  • Putin has resisted negotiating directly with Zelensky, as the Russian position is that Zelensky's government is illegitimate and must be replaced in order to secure a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine
• Trump's tariffs drive growth in foreign trade zones
  • Foreign trade zones are areas into which goods can flow tariff free
  • Are only subject to tariffs when they leave the zone
  • After Trump's tariff announcements, there was a large spike in demand for warehouse space in foreign trade zones, as companies sought to defer tariffs on goods that were imminently arriving in the US
  • Foreign trade zones also allow companies to spread out tariff payments over a longer period of time, as they can pay tariffs piecemeal on goods as they depart the zone to customers, rather having to pay tariffs for the entire shipment at once
  • However, under current rules, goods in foreign trade zones pay the tariff that was in place when they entered, not when they left
  • This means that companies that imported goods when the tariff was 145% cannot take advantage of today's reprieve
  • The foreign trade zone program was created in 1934 as a way to mitigate the impact of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs
• Prime Minister Keir Starmer unveils strict new immigration requirements for the UK
  • Immigrants will need to spend at least 10 years in the UK before they can apply for permanent residency
  • Can apply for permanent residency sooner if they can show that they're making a "real and lasting contribution to the economy and society"
  • Skilled worker visas would be limited to jobs requiring a university degree
  • Salary thresholds and language requirements will be tightened
• Congressional Republicans insert a ban on AI regulation into the budget reconciliation bill
  • The language prohibits state and local governments from imposing restrictions on AI for the the next ten years
  • The legislation will prohibit, e.g. California from requiring health care providers to communicate whether they're using generative AI to create patient communications
  • Will also undermine a New York effort to screen AI for bias
  • Also prohibits a separate California effort aimed at improving transparency into the training data that AI models are built on top of
• The PKK announces its intent to end its armed struggle against Turkey and disband
  • The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) will disband following calls from its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, to end their insurgency
  • The group was initially founded to pursue an independent Kurdistan
  • Fought a long guerrilla war against the Turkish government
  • Announcement that the group would disband comes after a cease-fire announced in March
  • I guess now we'll see if they free Ocalan
• Americans are embracing secondhand shopping
  • Thrift stores, used clothing stores, and resale websites, like ThredUp, are reporting increases in traffic
  • The stigma against buying used is going away as people reckon with the impact of inflation and tariffs
  • Is Trump going to be the first degrowth President?
• Argentina's Supreme Court finds 83 boxes of Nazi materials in its basement
  • The materials were confiscated by Argentinian authorities who worried that accepting such a large shipment of material could invalidate Argentina's status as a neutral country
  • The boxes contained thousands of notebooks belonging to the Nazi party
  • Were sent to Argentina aboard a Japanese steamship
  • The boxes have been transferred to a room with extra security and staff from the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires have been invited to inventory and preserve the contents
• Perplexity conducts a second funding round, this time at a $14 billion valuation
  • Had conducted a fundraising round last December which raised funds at a $9 billion valuation
  • Perplexity was reportedly seeking to raise funds at an $18 billion valuation, but investors did not think the value of the company had doubled
  • The $500 million funding round is being led by Accel
  • In addition to its current AI enhanced search engine offering, Perplexity plans to create an AI enhanced browser, which it's currently referring to as "Comet"
  • The majority of Perplexity's revenues come from subscriptions
  • Its annualized revenues grew from $5 million in January to $35 million in August
  • It has a $14 billion valuation, and only $35 million in revenue? This company is pure froth
• A power outage caused disruptions for the London Underground
  • A "fault" in the electric grid led to a brief power cut that affected power supply to the London Underground
  • As a result several train lines were delayed or suspended, leading to long delays and disruption during rush hour
  • The London Underground's signaling systems are not designed to be turned off unexpectedly, so after power was lost, they had to be inspected and restarted manually
  • Transport For London (TfL) also had several IT systems that crashed when the power went out

2025-05-11 Sunday

• The US and China reach a deal to cut the US's trade deficit
  • US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer reported that a deal had been struck to reduce US trade deficit with China, after talks with Chinese representatives in Geneva, Switzerland
  • US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also attended the talks, did not provide any details, but said that substantial progress had been made
  • More details will be provided on Monday
• Trump's tariffs face their first legal test
  • The Court of International Trade, based in New York, will hear a lawsuit brought by wine importer V.O.S. Selections and four other small businesses that argues that only Congress can impose the sorts of broad tariffs that Trump is attempting to enact
  • Argues that the interpretation that Trump is using of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not allow him to impose tariffs across virtually the entire economy
  • The businesses are being represented by Liberty Justice Center, a libertarian public-interest litigation firm
  • There are other legal challenges to Trump's tariffs making their way through the federal courts; this is the first case to come up for hearings
  • Challenges are all being filed by small businesses; large businesses wish to avoid becoming particular targets for the Trump administration
  • The most disturbing thing about the Trump administration is how obsequious large businesses have been, even when he takes steps that hurt them directly
  • IMO the businesses are right: a straightforward reading of the Constitution states that only Congress can impose tariffs
• Small businesses are being crushed by Trump's tariffs
  • Many small businesses and retailers import parts from China
  • Don't have the financial resources to deal with an unexpected 145% rise in prices
  • Have asked the Small Business Administration for assistance but say that little help is forthcoming from the SBA
  • Don't have the ability to quickly reconfigure supply chains like larger corporations
  • Don't have access to large amounts of warehouse space in which they could store inventory ahead of the tariffs
  • Face the choice between paying punishing tariff costs and running out of inventory
• Zelensky agrees to immediate negotiations regarding the Ukraine War
  • Zelensky's position had previously been that any negotiations towards a permanent end to the war in Ukraine could only begin after a cease-fire had been declared
  • However, Trump despite initially appearing to endorse that approach, switched his position towards demanding immediate peace talks
  • Zelensky seeks to meet Putin in Istanbul in order to begin negotiations, and has called on the Russian president to not find "excuses" to avoid attending
• US negotiators report "progress" with Iran on nuclear talks
  • In early March, Trump issued a 2-month deadline for the US to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran
  • Halfway to that deadline, while some progress has been made, the two sides remain very far apart
  • The US position is that Iran may retain a civilian nuclear program, but cannot enrich its own uranium
  • The Iranian position is that they should be allowed to enrich uranium under UN supervision, up to reactor grade, but not weapons grade
  • Also wants guarantees that the US won't back out of the deal as it did in 2018, when Trump took the US out of the JCPOA negotiated between Iran and the Obama administration
  • The Iranians have agreed to the talks in order to bring relief from sanctions that have placed the Iranian economy under significant pressure
• Donald Trump has caused a large shift from dollar to euro denominated assets
  • Investors made the largest ever cut to US equity allocations, while Europe saw the largest influx of capital since 1999
  • The vast capital inflow into the US market over the past several years has begun to reverse
  • Even US-based funds, like those of the California State Teacher's Retirement System, are starting to sell US assets and move into European securities
  • Cite the uncertainties caused by the impact of the trade war
  • However, investors are being cautious about how quickly they move assets out of the US, given the possibility of a US recovery
• India appears to acknowledge that it lost some aircraft in its operation to strike Pakistan
  • Pakistan claims to have shot down 5 Indian aircraft, including 3 Rafales
  • Until now, India had not made any statements one way or another regarding whether it had lost aircraft
  • Now, the Indian military put out a statement saying that, "losses are part of combat," and stated that all pilots are back home
• India accuses Pakistan of cease-fire violations
  • Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance led a diplomatic effort to get India and Pakistan to agree to a cease-fire
  • However, later in the day yesterday, Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Mirsi said there had been repeated violations of the agreement by Pakistan
  • The Pakistani government denied that any Pakistani troops were firing at their Indian counterparts
• OpenAI negotiates with Microsoft as it seeks to restructure
  • Microsoft is the chief obstacle to OpenAI restructuring its for-profit component into a public benefit corporation
  • Has invested $13 billion into OpenAI
  • The key point of negotiation is how much equity in the restructured entity Microsoft is entitled to
  • Negotiations are complicated by OpenAI attempting to distance itself from Microsoft, by seeking cloud computing resources from Oracle, as well as building out its own datacenters under the "Stargate" initiative
  • Elon Musk is another potential obstacle
  • Although Sam Altman has stated that OpenAI's nonprofit arm will remain the majority shareholder in the for-profit public benefit corporation, Elon Musk has vowed to proceed with his lawsuit, arguing that any conversion to a for-profit entity violates OpenAI's original nonprofit vision
  • OpenAI must also convince the attorneys general of Delaware (where it is registered) and California (where it is headquartered) that the revised restructuring plans will uphold the entity's original mission to bring AI benefits to the broader public
• Russ Vought, head of Trump's Office of Management and Budget, seeks to cap military spending at current levels
  • Vought seeks to take over Elon Musk's cost-cutting agenda as Elon cuts back the time he's devoting to government
  • Insists that the Pentagon only receive one-time budget increases through the reconciliation procedure
  • Republican members of Congress were surprised by the amount in the budget devoted to the military, as they'd received assurances from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that the administration would seek to increase military spending
  • Vought argues that restricting Pentagon budget increases to only that which can be provided by the reconciliation process sidesteps Democratic demands for parity between military and non-military spending
  • However, members of Congress argue that the supplemental funding provided through reconciliation does not provide the military with the stable long-term funding it requires to efficiently fund acquisition programs
  • Vought's OMB partnered with Elon Musk's DOGE to cut the government's workforce and trim agencies that Trump believed had outlived their purpose
  • In the future, Vought is expected to refocus DOGE towards deregulation
  • The White House is expected to ask Congress to pass a $9.3 billion rescissions package which will seek to enshrine DOGE's cuts in law
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says that Newark airport faces several weeks of reduced capacity
  • The glitches in air traffic control at Newark have led the FAA to propose limiting the airport to no more than 56 total operations per hour
  • Duffy says that, while new equipment is brought in to address the root cause of the glitches, safest thing to do is to slow down operations at Newark
  • Will be asking Congress for additional funding to build additional resilience in the air traffic control system
  • Wants to construct six new air traffic control centers and replace 600 radars as well as obsolete telecommunications equipment
• Finland wants to help the US build icebreakers
  • Finland has helped design or build 80% of the world's icebreakers
  • Trump has signaled a willingness to buy icebreakers from Finland after meeting with Finnish president Alexander Stubb
  • Because of its willingness to design icebreakers for foreign partners, Finland has built up deep expertise in the specifics of designing ships to cut through ice
  • The Biden administration struck a deal with Canada and Finland, the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort Pact (ICE Pact) to coordinate on the construction of a new set of icebreakers to allow the US and Canadian navies to challenge Russia
  • Trump has shown a willingness to continue the pact
  • While the US Navy and Coast Guard are mandated by law to construct their ships in the US, Finland hopes to provide equipment and technical assistance
  • Finland had previously collaborated with Russia on icebreakers; however after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that collaboration stopped, and Finnish shipyards have begun to work with their Canadian counterparts
• The plan to create an interim Air Force One from a Qatari 747 raises legal questions
  • On May 1, Trump announced that he had commissioned L3Harris, a defense contractor, to begin turning a 747 formerly owned by Qatar into an interim presidential transport aircraft
  • Frustrated by Boeing's delays in making replacements for the VC-25As which normally serve as Air Force One
  • However, this may violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits a President from accepting foreign gifts without the permission of Congress
  • Trump is attempting to sidestep the legal question by structuring the deal as a temporary loan, saying that the plane is merely being transferred from the Qatari Ministry of Defense to the US Department of Defense on an interim basis while Boeing finishes its work on the permanent replacements to the VC-25As

2025-05-10 Saturday

• Europe threatens further sanctions on Russia in an attempt to pressure Putin into a cease-fire
  • One of the proposed sanctions is a permanent block to prevent the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from ever operating
  • Sanctions are also meant to pressure the Trump administration into taking additional steps against Russia
  • The Russian government has said that it will only accept a 30 day cease-fire if the West stops arming Ukraine during that period
  • The EU also unveiled a plan to wean itself off Russian gas by 2027, which it plans to go ahead with regardless of whether Putin responds to the demand for a 30-day cease fire
  • If the EU is going to wean itself off Russian gas by 2027 anyway, the threat to permanently sanction Nord Stream 2 loses its effect
  • The entire purpose of Nord Stream 2 is to bring Russian gas to the EU; if the demand for that drops to 0, the pipeline isn't viable to operate even if it hasn't been banned from doing so
  • The Nord Stream pipelines were blown up by Ukrainian divers in 2022; by the time they fix the pipelines, it'll be 2027
• India and Pakistan agree to a cease-fire
  • Cease-fire was announced by Donald Trump in a Truth Social post
  • Confirmed by the Pakistani foreign minister
  • Confirmed by the Indian Foreign Secretary, saying that the cease-fire will take effect from 17:00 IST
  • Cease-fire announcement came after reports that the Pakistani body overseeing its nuclear weapons had scheduled a meeting
  • India and Pakistan have scheduled further talks on May 12

2025-05-09 Friday

• Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost is elected Pope Leo XIV
  • Leo XIV is the 267th pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church
  • Born in Chicago, but leads the archdiocese of Lima, Peru
  • Worked as Pope Francis' chief official for the appointment of bishops
• Chinese exports rise 8% in April
  • Exports grew 8.1% in comparison with the same period last year
  • This was below the previous growth rate of 12.1%, but far outpaced analysts expectations, which had expected growth to be around 2%
  • Exports to the US dropped 21%
  • Largest increases in outbound shipments were to Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia
  • I wonder how many of those outbound shipments were sent to those locations for "place of origin washing"
  • The strong trade figures put Chinese negotiators in a better position going into the formal negotiations over a trade deal with the US
• Trump says that 10% will be the baseline tariff unless countries make "exceptional" offers during trade negotiations
  • Insisted that 10% will be the minimum before revising himself
  • Says that a reduction in the tariffs on China from 145% to 80% is possible
• The Trump administration opens an national security probe into the risks of imported aircraft engines and parts
  • The investigation could form the basis of even higher tariffs on aircraft components
  • Under the 1979 Civil Aircraft Agreement, airlines aircraft manufacturers enjoyed tariff free imports on aviation supplies
  • The aviation industry argues that it should be exempt from tariffs because the US enjoys a trade surplus in aviation
• Elliott examines investments in a pipeline carrying Russian gas
  • Elliott Investment Management is looking to buy a package of infrastructure assets, including a stake in a pipeline that carries Russian gas
  • Talks on the deal are in their initial phase and it's not clear whether the deal will go through
  • The pipeline is the Bulgarian extension of the TurkStream pipeline
  • Elliott will be buying its stake in the pipeline from the Bulgarian state-owned natural gas operator, Bulgartransgaz
  • In addition to its investment stake, Elliott is looking into a deal to refinance Bulgartransgaz's debt
  • However, Europe is simultaneously trying to wean itself off Russian gas, although Slovakia and Hungary have objected
  • For this reason, Elliott is investing in a package of infrastructure assets, not just the gas pipeline
  • Other assets include data centers and data transmission cables
  • Bulgarian officials welcome the investment, hoping to boost their standing with the Trump administration and insulate the pipeline from possible sanctions
• Substack reaches 5 million subscribers, as the election of Donald Trump accelerates the platform's growth
  • Substack offers journalists and podcasters the ability to collect subscription revenue directly from their audiences
  • Has benefited from an influx of traditional media personalities, such as Jim Acosta and columnists who have left the Washington Post, who have brought their own personal audiences with them
  • New media groups, such as Bari Weiss' The Free Press, have built their businesses on Substack's infrastructure
  • Substack's co-founder Chris Best states that the biggest competition for Substack is YouTube, given a secular shift towards online creator-led journalism
  • By April 2024, over half of Substack's 250 highest revenue creators were using its audiovisual tools
  • So this is why Substack has been focusing so hard on its podcasting and video hosting tools
  • Substack declined to share further financial information, stating that it was focused on growth, rather than profitability
  • So this means that Substack is great now, but in two or three years, once the bills come due, the enshittification process will begin
  • Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess
• The Linux kernel drops support for the Intel 486
  • With kernel 6.15, the Linux kernel mandates support for instructions that the 486 lacks
  • Dropped support for the 386 in 2012
  • Linus Torvalds argues that Linux should go 64-bit only, dropping support for all processors before the Pentium 4

2025-05-08 Thursday

• Trump announces a free trade deal with the UK
  • Most UK goods will still pay the baseline 10% tariff
  • UK steel and aluminum will be exempt from the 25% import duty
  • UK car imports will pay a 10% tariff for the first 100,000 vehicles and 25% thereafter
  • In exchange, the UK promised to reduce non-tariff barriers to American agricultural products, most notably American ethanol
• The EU targets American aircraft and car parts for possible retaliatory tariffs
  • The European Commission released a list of approximately €95 billion worth of trade that could be targeted by retaliatory tariffs if negotiations with the US break down
  • List includes American aircraft, cars, car parts, chemicals, electrical equipment and machinery
  • Also includes consumer goods, such as whiskey, that had been removed from an earlier list of potential targets
  • The potential for tariffs on aircraft are a particular concern for Boeing, which is already facing significant tariff barriers in exporting aircraft to China
• Trump plans tax increases on wealthy Americans, in order to pay for broader tax cuts
  • Proposed increasing the marginal tax rate on Americans earning more than $2.5 million a year to 40%
  • The proposal was critiqued by some on the right, who likened it to a Democratic policy
  • The proposal would also increase the cap on the amount of state and local taxes that could be deducted from one's federal tax bill, to $30,000
• A senior Apple executive testified that Google web searches via Safari declined over the last two months
  • Eddie Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, testified that search traffic to Google through Safari fell for the last two months, consecutively
  • Said this hadn't happened in over 20 years
  • Attributed the drop to generative AI services, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, taking market share from Google
  • Cue's remarks had a large impact on Google's share price, sending it down by 7%
  • According to data from StatCounter, Google's share of web searches was 89.3%
  • This is down from 93% in late 2022
  • Google hasn't been below 90% in over a decade
  • Google is the only big tech firm whose stock is discounted relative to the overall S&P 500
• US officials state that a Chinese-made J-10 shot down two Indian aircraft during India's strikes against Pakistani targets on Tuesday
  • According to these officials, at least one of the aircraft shot down was a Rafale
  • Pakistani F-16s were not used in the shootdowns
  • Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, maintains that all three Rafales that were shot down were brought down by J-10s
  • India has not acknowledged losing any aircraft
• India and Pakistan accuse each other of drone attacks on military targets
  • India said it had launched strikes against Pakistani air defense systems in response to drone strikes on its military sites by Pakistan
  • Earlier, Pakistan had accused India of targeting Pakistani soldiers with Harop loitering munitions
  • Both India and Pakistan are seeking to limit escalation after Indian strikes on Pakistani targets on May 6
• Boeing proposes accelerating delivery of its replacements for Air Force One to 2027
  • Darlene Costello, acting secretary of the Air Force, told the House Armed Service Committee that the Air Force was working with Boeing to revise requirements in order to accelerate delivery
  • The government has lifted some security requirements at the production facility for the VC-25 replacements, allowing Boeing to work more efficiently
  • This comes in the wake of Trump engaging L3Harris to examine refurbishing a Qatari plane, as Boeing's original estimate for delivering the VC-25 replacements was 2035
• Coinbase acquires crypto derivatives trading platform Deribit in a $2.9 billion deal
  • Deribit, headquartered in Dubai, offers options, futures and spot markets on a variety of cryptocurrencies
  • Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency market in the US
  • Offers options trading in the US, and futures markets outside the US
  • Acquisition comes in the wake of Kraken's $1.5 billion purchase of NinjaTrader in March, which gave Kraken similar capabilities
• Alex Mashinsky, founder of the Celsius cryptocurrency bank, is sentenced to 12 years in jail
  • Celsius was a bank-like cryptocurrency firm that took customer deposits in cryptocurrency and offered extremely high rates of return
  • However, as crypto prices declined in the spring of 2022, Celsius fell into bankruptcy and halted withdrawals, leaving customers with no way to access their deposits
  • Mashinsky plead guilty to engaging in market manipulation of Celsius' own crypto token, CEL, making $48 million in profits
• UPS stands by its decision to reduce the package traffic that it takes from Amazon, despite the changes in the broader economic environment
  • On January 30, UPS announced a plan to reduce the number of packages it takes from Amazon by more than half
  • Amazon package traffic, while offering significant volume, did not offer the level of profit margin that UPS desired
  • However, since then, Trump's tariffs have injected significant uncertainty into the logistics market
  • On April 29, UPS announced a plan to cut 20,000 jobs, in response to the prospective reduction in package volume and incoming tariffs
  • However, UPS's CFO stands by the decision to cut the package volume from Amazon, arguing that it gives UPS more control over its financial future
  • UPS is cutting costs (like with the layoffs mentioned above) and trying to find new areas for growth
  • One promising area is health-care logistics
    • On April 24, UPS agreed to buy Andlauer Healthcare, a specialized logistics firm offering temperature-controlled transportation
    • On September 10, 2024, UPS agreed to buy Frigo-Trans and BPL, two healthcare logistics firms in Germany
  • UPS is also trying to increase the traffic that it receives from small and midsize businesses
  • However these businesses are disproportionately exposed to Trump's tariffs
  • UPS's rival in the package delivery space, FedEx, went through a similar process in 2019, as Amazon was building up its own delivery and logistics network
  • UPS's plan to increase margins has been motivated by a new contract with the Teamsters, which lifts annual pay for drivers and delivery workers
  • Amazon likely rejected the higher per-package prices that such a contract would have required, resulting in the split
• Marketers are starting to adapt to the increased use of generative AI
  • People are increasingly using AI-enhanced tools to search for product information
  • Has led to a small, but noticeable decline in click-through rates
  • As a result marketers have begun optimizing their sites so that they can be parsed more easily by the bots that AI systems use to gather information
  • Marketers are increasingly contending with "zero-click searches", where the user searches for a term, reads an AI-powered summary and doesn't click on any of the links
  • However, the transition is still nascent: Google handles 100x as many searches as ChatGPT
  • Also, it's not clear that ChatGPT can profitably serve as many searches as Google

2025-05-07 Wednesday

• More details emerge about the Indian strikes against Pakistan
  • Pakistan claims to have shot down 5 Indian aircraft: 3 Rafales and two Russian-made aircraft
  • The rumors I've heard say it's 3 Rafales, a MiG-29 and a Su-30
  • The death toll from the attacks has risen to 26 killed and 46 injured
• The US and China will begin formal trade negotiations
  • Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet their Chinese counterparts
  • China's delegation will be led by its top economy official, vice-premier He Lifeng
  • The initial negotiations will be centered around a de-escalation from the current 145% US and 125% Chinese tariffs on each others' imports, which Bessent has called "unsustainable"
  • Chinese analysts expect a final deal to take months, and require signatures from both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping
  • Initially China had said that the US needed to reduce its tariffs before negotiations could begin; this represents a softening in its position
• Trump will rescind and replace Biden-era semiconductor export restrictions
  • The Biden administration had enacted a 3-tier system of increasing restrictions on US chip designers' ability to export their chips: the "diffusion rule"
  • Many Middle Eastern countries had disliked being placed into Tier 2 (moderate restrictions) under that regime
  • Trump has indicated that he would like to replace that system with a more streamlined one that allows US chip designers greater flexibility in finding customers abroad
  • Chip export restrictions will be more narrowly focused on restricting exports to China
  • Repeal of the Biden-era diffusion rule would also be welcome news for countries like India and Malaysia
  • The Trump administration also plans to revise rules around exporting AI model weights
  • Jensen Huang just keeps winning
• Shippers are skeptical of the Trump administration's deal with the Houthis
  • Container shipping firms are assessing the deal announced yesterday, but have no immediate plans to resume using Red Sea shipping routes
  • Note that the agreement with the Houthis makes no specific mention regarding container ships, only US naval vessels
  • The duration of the agreement is also unclear; Houthis might choose to resume attacks if Israel continues its military operations in Gaza
  • Traffic through the Red Sea is down by 60% as the Houthis have disrupted navigation with drone and missile attacks
• Arm suspends its annual revenue forecasts, citing tariff uncertainty
  • Arm licenses chip designs to other electronic manufacturers, such as Apple and Samsung
  • Given the tariff uncertainty around electronics, Arm was unable to forecast what its annual revenue might be this year
  • Arm joins companies such as Ford and General Motors in suspending forecasts because of tariff uncertainty

2025-05-06 Tuesday

• India conducts military strikes on Pakistan
  • India struck 9 sites in Pakistan in retaliation for the terrorist attack on April 23
  • Pakistan's army chief, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, said that Pakistan had shot down 2 Indian aircraft
  • Pakistani officials say that at least 8 were killed and 35 injured as part of the attack
• Friedrich Merz wins vote to become the German chancellor on the second ballot
  • Merz's CSU/CDU party won a plurality in the German election, with 28.5% of the vote
  • Formed a coalition government with the SPD
  • However, his majority in the Bundestag is slim, and in the anonymous ballot for chancellor, Merz failed to secure a majority on his first attempt
  • Won only 310 votes, even though his coalition has 328 seats
  • Indicates that Merz's coalition is does not wholeheartedly support him
• Donald Trump says the US will end its bombing campaign against the Houthis
  • Announcement came as a surprise during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney
  • Says that the Houthis have agreed to stop firing at merchant shipping in exchange for the US stopping its bombing campaign
  • Israel, whose air force had just destroyed the Sanaa airport in retaliation for a Houthi drone attack against its Ben Gurion Airport, was reportedly taken by surprise by the announcement
• Pete Hegseth orders the a reduction in general officers and instructs the Army to divest itself of "obsolete" equipment
  • Hegseth has issued a memo ordering the Army to refocus on deterring China
  • In order to do this, the Army should achieve "electromagnetic and air littoral dominance"
  • "Air littoral" refers to low-altitudes, below 1000 ft, which are the domain of drones and helicopters
  • Calls for the Army to invest heavily in drones and anti-drone systems
  • In order to find the budget for this Hegseth proposes ending purchases of Humvees, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (the Humvee's successor) and the M10 light tank, arguing that they're too vulnerable in a high-intensity conflict
  • Will reduce the acquisition of crewed attack helicopters in favor of more drones
  • In addition to the hardware cuts, Hegseth has ordered a reduction in the number of general officers, seeking to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy
  • Some of these cuts are okay
  • I'm not sure about cutting the M10; that system just reached operational capability, and cutting it without giving it a chance to succeed seems foolish
  • I'm also not so sure about his insistence that the Army has to refocus on China
  • The China fight is naturally a Navy and Air Force fight; forcing the Army into it doesn't make a whole lot of sense
  • I'm also not sure about his focus on drones; drones are great but they're also limited in a lot of ways, as we're seeing in Ukraine
  • If I were Secretary of Defense, I'd look at cutting the Army's new helicopter programs
  • The Future Long Range Assault Aircraft looks like a boondoggle in the making and will add little capability beyond what the Army possesses with its existing Blackhawk fleet
• Burger King must face lawsuit over misleading advertising
  • Burger King is accused of materially overstating the size of its offerings in both online and in-store advertising
  • Judge Roy Altman denied Burger King's request to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that the misrepresentations went beyond "mere exaggeration or puffery"
  • Specifically, Burger King is accused of showing that the Whopper patty extends beyond the bun in its advertising, when in reality it does not
  • A similar lawsuit against Subway is pending in New York
  • That lawsuit claims that Subway's advertising shows sandwiches containing more than three times as much meat as they actually contain
  • False advertising lawsuits against McDonald's and Wendy's were dismissed in 2023
• Minnesota fails to pass a bill liberalizing housing regulations after city councils expressed opposition
  • The bills, called the "Yes to Homes" package, would have mandated changes to city zoning and housing regulations with the aim of allowing more homes and greater density
  • Would have set minimum lot sizes at the state level and made it easier to create mixed-use developments combining residential and commercial
  • Would have required cities to allow duplexes and townhomes in addition to single family developments, and removed minimum parking requirements
  • While the bills were received favorably initially, they faced increasing opposition from the League of Minnesota Cities, which argued that they eroded local control and imposed a one-size-fits-all housing policy statewide
  • A one-size-fits-all housing policy is necessary, because otherwise every city restricts housing, expecting its neighbors to take up the slack, and no housing gets built
  • I guess these progressives are okay with Minnesota losing more of its congressional votes to Texas and Florida
• The EU lays out a plan to wean itself off Russian gas completely by 2027
  • The actual plan
  • The EU executive will impose a ban on all imports of Russian natural gas, both pipeline and LNG, in June
  • The measure will take effect by the end of the year
  • Then existing gas supplies will be phased out, with a complete severing of the natural gas supply to the EU occurring by 2027
  • Countries will be required to submit individual phase-out plans by December
  • To enforce the ban, the EU will require companies to disclose their gas contracts
  • The plan also calls for European countries to phase out imports of Russian nuclear fuel and reactor parts

2025-05-05 Monday

• OpenAI scraps plan to convert itself into a for-profit corporation
  • Comes in the wake of a judge allowing Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI to go forward
  • However, OpenAI raised a significant amount of money conditional on it becoming a for-profit entity
  • Under the revised plan, the OpenAI nonprofit foundation would retain control over the for-profit subsidiary
  • The for-profit subsidiary would reincorporate as a public benefit corporation, removing the capped-profit structure that it had been previously organized as
  • Chief executive Sam Altman argued that this revised approach simplifies OpenAI's structure, meeting the goal of the original transformation, without attracting as much legal resistance
  • Stated that Softbank's investment would still go forward under the revised approach
• Microsoft remains a significant obstacle to OpenAI's restructuring plans
  • OpenAI has revised its plans to become a for-profit corporation after facing significant resistance from former employees, Elon Musk, and the attorneys general of Delaware and California
  • However its restructuring plans have still not earned the blessing of its largest shareholder, Microsoft
  • Microsoft is still actively negotiating its role in OpenAI's restructuring to ensure that its $13.5 billion investment won't be diluted
  • Microsoft also has licensing and revenue-sharing agreements with OpenAI, which are also being negotiated
• Pakistan conducts missile tests and India orders preparedness drills amid ongoing tensions over Kashmir
  • Pakistan carried out a second missile test in three days
  • India's interior ministry ordered several states to carry out preparedness drills on May 7
• Microsoft formally shuts down Skype
  • Microsoft announced the shutdown in February
  • Users are being redirected to Microsoft Teams, which has subsumed Skype's features
  • Skype was the first provider of video calls over the internet to reach widespread adoption
  • However, development of Skype stagnated after its acquisition by Microsoft in 2011
• More details emerge about the Newark air traffic control outage
  • On April 28, an air traffic control outage caused all departures to be halted and significant arrival delays at Newark Liberty International Airport
  • Problem was caused by glitches that led to air traffic controllers' radios and radar displays going dark
  • The FAA traced the cause of the failure to a multiplexer box that was responsible for relaying radar and radio signals from the New York area to Philadelphia
  • Component had reached the end of its life cycle and was due to be replaced when it failed
  • Problems are Newark were exacerbated by staffing shortages that are present across the entire air traffic control network
  • Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said that his office is working on a plan to overhaul and modernize air traffic control systems
• Ford's first quarter profit drops 64%, and it suspends its profit forecast for the year
  • Profits were impacted by production halts and Ford's struggling electric vehicle business
  • Ford suspended its guidance for the full year, saying that it would be impossible to forecast with the uncertainty swirling around tariffs
  • General Motors suspended its profit guidance on Tuesday
• Lockheed's F-35 production could face challenges from tariffs
  • American defense contractors, such as Lockheed and General Dynamics have developed globalized supply chains
  • The F-35, for example, is dependent on parts from more than a dozen countries
  • Also exposed to price increases for steel and aluminum as a result of Trump's tariffs on imports of those materials
  • Lockheed has said that it can mitigate the impact of tariffs through provisions in its contracts that allow it to charge more for jets when its costs increase
  • Other defense contractors have refused to comment on the potential impact of tariffs, saying that it's not clear what the final version of Trump's tariffs will look like
• US oil producers cut back on capital expenditures as OPEC production increases lower oil prices
  • Diamondback Energy and Coterra Energy have cut back on new fracking
  • Oil prices are forecast to be significantly lower because of OPEC production increases and the impact of tariffs on the US economy
  • The reduction in capital expenditure could mean a reduction in US oil production, as a smaller number of new wells are drilled

2025-05-04 Sunday

• Ukrainian naval drones equipped with missiles shoot down Russian fighters over the Black Sea
  • According to Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian intelligence, sea drones equipped with AIM-9 "Sidewinder" missiles shot down two Su-30 jets
  • The shoot-down occurred near the Russian port of Novorossiysk
• Chinese exporters increase efforts to launder products through third countries in order to avoid tariffs
  • Chinese social media contains many ads for services that offer "place of origin washing"
  • These services offer to transship Chinese products through third-party countries such as Malaysia, South Korea or Vietnam, and mark goods as originating from those countries
  • US trade rules require that products undergo "substantial transformation" in a country in order to be marked as being originated from that country, but enforcement of this rule can be lax
  • Chinese sellers are shipping to middlemen goods under "free on board" terms, in which the middlemen take legal responsibility for the goods once they've left the buyer
  • This reduces the legal exposure of sellers to place of origin washing
• Disney plans on making fewer Marvel movies and TV shows
  • Disney had sought to create a larger number of new Marvel movies and TV shows in order to create content for Disney+, its streaming service
  • Now, Kevin Feige, head of Marvel Studios, acknowledges that this may have led to overproduction
  • Feige is leading an internal overhaul that will get Marvel Studios to focus on quality over quantity
  • In hindsight it was a mistake to make theatrical movies be dependent on shows released on Disney+, as it led to theater audiences not really knowing what was going on in the movies
  • Marvel executives worried that by interlinking so many movies and shows together, they'd created a franchise that was impenetrable to new audiences
  • Realized that overinvesting in TV was diluting the quality of the movies, which were the main draw for the majority of people
  • As a result, Marvel executives have cut back significantly on TV production, and are ensuring that the TV shows tell more standalone stories set within the Marvel universe
  • Rehired Robert Downey Jr., who had been very successful as Iron Man, this time as a villain: Dr. Doom
  • Marvel's priority is now to ensure that the next two Avenger's movies, its tentpole franchise, continue the success it found with Avengers: Endgame
• TeleMessage Signal has been hacked
  • TeleMessage Signal is, infamously, the variant of Signal being used by Mike Waltz during a cabinet meeting
  • The anonymous hacker contacted 404 Media and showed that they were able to access TeleMessage records, including recorded Signal conversations
  • The incompetence of these people is truly amazing

2025-05-03 Saturday

• Warren Buffett announces plans to step down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway
  • Buffett, 94, says that he will be stepping down as CEO at year's end
  • Vice Chairman Greg Abel will be taking over
  • Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile company into an industrial conglomerate with a market capitalization of $1.16 trillion
  • Became one of the world's most wealthy people in the process, with a personal fortune estimated at $168.2 billion
• The new German government calls for meat to be served with every school meal
  • The new agriculture minister, Alois Rainier, is a butcher by training
  • Says he's going to work to lower meat prices
  • Calls for every school meal to include meat as part of a balanced diet

2025-05-02 Friday

• Temu stops all shipments directly from China into the US
  • Instead of shipping to consumers directly from China, Temu is now only selling products that it has imported in bulk and stored in US warehouses
  • Move comes as the Trump administration ends the de minimis exemption that Temu had been relying on to ship to US customers duty free
  • However, the need to warehouse products in the US means that Temu no longer has as much of a price advantage over Amazon
• The US adds 177,000 jobs in April
  • Jobs report was better than expected, with the consensus forecast being a gain of 133,000 jobs
  • Unemployment held steady at 4.2%
  • However, the jobs report reflects economic activity that took place prior to Trump's tariffs going into effect
  • Furthermore, employers stung by pandemic-era difficulties in hiring and retaining talent may be reluctant to conduct immediate layoffs
  • Instead, they may be taking a wait-and-see approach, pausing hiring, but retaining employees while they wait to see what the final version of Trump's tariff policy looks like
• China quietly diversifies away from US treasury bonds
  • US government bonds have formed the bulk of China's foreign exchange reserves
  • No public indications of changes in that policy despite the trade war
  • However, as Trump publicly criticizes the Federal Reserve, the safety of US treasuries is coming into question
  • The Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) is examining a shift away from treasuries into gold and other short-term assets
  • SAFE is concerned by the prospect of a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" that would persuade foreign governments to accept a weaker dollar and swap their current holding of short term treasuries for 100-year zero coupon bonds
  • SAFE would regard that as a US default
  • Another reason for Chinese diversification away from treasury bonds is hedging against inflation
  • The relatively low yield of treasuries was acceptable in the 2010s, but now that inflation has started rising, it is eroding the value of older US bonds
  • The Chinese government is also worried that the US might freeze its assets in the event of a conflict over Taiwan, much as it froze Russian assets after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine
  • SAFE is examining agency bonds, bonds issued by quasi-governmental agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as a potential target for diversification
  • Is also looking at private equity
  • Reserves are being moved outside the US into jurisdictions where it would be more difficult for the US to freeze them
  • Experts have seen no sign that SAFE's holdings of treasuries are being used as a weapon in the trade war
  • One problem with China's attempts to diversify is that few other asset markets have the liquidity of the US treasury bond market
  • Means that any major move out of would have to be performed gradually in order to avoid market instabilities
• Judge allows Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman to move forward
  • Musk alleges that OpenAI's plan to restructure itself as a for-profit entity constitutes fraud and a breach of contract
  • Says that he donated funds to OpenAI on the basis that it would maintain a non-profit structure
  • Argues that Sam Altman always intended to convert OpenAI to a for-profit venture, and thus obtained Elon's funding under false pretenses
  • While a request for a preliminary injunction preventing OpenAI's conversion to for-profit entity was denied, the judge did allow the case to go forward and expedited trial
  • This ruling rejects OpenAI's counter-claim to have the case dismissed
• Mike Waltz was using a version of Signal with reduced security
  • Yesterday, Reuters published a photo of former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz appearing to use Signal during a Cabinet meeting
  • However, closer examination of the photo shows that the app was not Signal, but a different app called TM Signal
  • TM Signal is a modified version of Signal called TeleMessage Signal
  • Made by an Israeli company
  • Captures Signal chats and records them for data retention purposes
  • TeleMessage apps are not approved for use by the federal government
• Is it possible to run a company as a free market?
  • Disco Corp, a manufacturer of precision semiconductor cutting equipment runs itself as an internal marketplace
  • Workers earn a currency, Will, depending on the tasks they complete
  • Managers put tasks up with Will bounties attached
  • Will is generated by sales of Disco's machines
  • Will is distributed to sales staff who use it to fund other tasks in the company
  • Every employee starts the month with a negative Will balance, which they must attempt to raise above zero by completing tasks
  • An employee's Will earnings over the year determines 40% of their annual bonus, which can be a significant sum
  • In addition to generating Will from sales, the CEO, Kazuma Sekiya, can generate will himself, acting as a sort of central bank, in order to fund special projects
  • This seems like the sort of system that can only work inside an extremely high-trust society, such as Japan
  • Importing the Will system into a US firm would be a disaster: people would learn to game the system in order to accumulate Will
  • Even in the original Will system, ex-employees of Disco state that necessary activities that don't contribute directly to sales (such as R&D) are often neglected, which is why Sekiya has to assume the role of the central banker in the first place
  • This is actually more like the planned economy with "virtual prices" which mathematician Leonid Kantorovich came up with as an alternative model for the Soviet Union, than a true free market system
• The White House's new budget ends funding for SLS, Orion and Lunar Gateway
  • Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25% funding cut
  • Some of these cuts come from cuts to science missions, most notably the Mars Sample Return mission, which will be replaced by an eventual crewed mission to Mars
  • However, the larger portion of the cuts are paid for by canceling SLS, Orion and the Lunar Gateway, significantly restructuring NASA's path to the moon in the process
  • The SLS and Orion rockets had cost $3 billion a year, showing little progress in the meantime
  • The new NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, likely wants to phase out the SLS and Orion programs, replacing them with cheaper commercial rockets

2025-05-01 Thursday

• Ukraine and the US sign minerals deal
  • Establishes a joint investment fund for Ukraine's reconstruction
  • Gives the US preferential access to new minerals deals
  • Ukraine retains control over deciding what minerals to extract and where they'll be extracted
  • Ukraine does not have any debt obligations to the United States under the agreement
• Trump ousts Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor
  • Waltz was the one who had invited Atlantic chief editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the Signal chat where classified war plans were shared
  • Will be appointed UN ambassador
  • Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, will serve as interim National Security Advisor until Trump nominates a permanent replacement
  • Waltz's deputy, Alex Wong, is also being removed from his role on the National Security Council because he's seen as a Waltz loyalist
• E-commerce sellers brace for the end of the de minimis exemption
  • The Trump administration had attempted to end the de minimis exemption in February
  • However, the abrupt end to de minimis caused packages to pile up at points of entry into the US
  • This forced the government into restoring the exemption until May 2, to allow Customs and importers to develop procedures to properly document and assess duties on imports
  • The end of de minimis will subject all shipments from China to 145% duties (unless they're electronics)
  • Retailers such as Shein and Temu are most likely to be affected by the end of de minimis
  • Other small retailers are reorganizing supply chains to ship orders from US warehouses rather than from overseas
  • Storing inventory in the US ensures the inventory is valued at wholesale prices when it enters the US rather than retail prices, reducing the tariff burden on retailers
• Trump examines refurbishing a Qatari 747 to serve as a new "Air Force One"
  • At the start of his first term, Trump placed an order with Boeing to replace the VC-25As (modified 747s) that the US president uses as his state aircraft
  • However, the Boeing effort has been severely delayed, with Boeing's latest estimates indicating the planes won't be ready until 2035
  • Frustrated by these delays, Trump has commissioned L3Harris, a defense contractor, to refurbish a Qatari 747 with additional communication systems to serve as an interim replacement for the VC-25As
  • Trump is aiming to have the modifications completed by autumn
  • I don't understand the logic behind this
  • There's no way that this interim jet will be as capable as a real VC-25A
  • So why bother? Either we don't actually need all the capabilities of the VC-25, in which case the Boeing contract should be canceled, or there's no way this Qatari jet will be up to standards
• Trump signs an executive order allowing deep-sea mining
  • Trump's executive order allows American companies to ignore International Seabed Authority guidelines which prohibit seabed mining
  • Notably, it allows US companies to mine in international waters, outside the US's Exclusive Economic Zone
  • The EU insists that the International Seabed Authority's guidelines, issued under the UN Convention on the Law Of the Sea (UNCLOS), are customary international law, and are therefore binding even on countries that haven't signed the UNCLOS, such as the United States
  • Trump's order, however, has galvanized the ISA into creating its own regulations for deep sea mining that take into account interests of member states and environmental groups
  • Deep sea mining collects nodules, small rocks approximately the size of goose eggs, off the seabed
  • These rocks are rich in minerals such as manganese and cobalt
  • Some estimates suggest that one area of the Pacific Ocean, the Clarion Clipperton Zone, contains four times as much cobalt as all known reserves on land
  • Mining companies have developed specialized equipment to retrieve these nodules from the great depths at which they lie
  • Environmentalists are concerned about damage to little-known deep sea ecosystems
  • However, miners point out that land-based cobalt sources are often also located in ecologically sensitive zones, and deep sea mining is preferable to, e.g. cutting down a rainforest
• Cracker Barrel updates its decor and menu, provoking a backlash from some customers
  • Decor is being updated to a brighter "more modern" feel
  • Menus are being changed, with simplified cooking processes for items such as green beans and bacon
  • Redesign is an effort to reach "new" customers, which analysts interpret to mean younger and higher income
  • Cracker Barrel's "traditional" customer base, over-65 customers, has been slow to return to in-person dining after the pandemic
  • However, pushback is building on social media from customers who preferred the previous decor
  • Cracker Barrel is more exposed to tariffs than its competitors, as its restaurants contain attach stores where customers can buy candles, mugs, and other small items
  • Many of these are sourced from China
  • Retail sales represent approximately 20% of the firm's revenue
  • However, Cracker Barrel executives counter that the company's low prices give it greater room for price increases than other casual dining chains
  • Ugh, yet another stupid "millennial gray" redesign
• Alimentation Couche-Tard and 7-and-i move forward with merger negotiations
  • Last October, Alimentation Couche-Tard submitted a $47 billion merger offer for 7-and-i
  • Then, in November, Ito-Kogyo, an investment firm representing 7-and-i's founding family submitted a $51.8 billion rival offer, in an effort to keep 7-and-i in Japanese hands
  • However, on February 27, Ito-Kogyo's bid fell through as it was unable to secure financing, opening the way for the merger with Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard and 7-and-i signed a nondisclosure agreement permitting ATC to examine 7-and-i's financial records
  • Agreement also includes a "standstill" clause protecting 7-and-i from a hostile takeover while this deal is being negotiated
  • 7-and-i and Alimentation Couche-Tard have been working to find buyers for 2,000 stores that they plan to divest in order to clear antitrust hurdles
  • The Japanese government can also object to the merger, as 7-and-i has been designated a company that is "core to national security"

2025-04-30 Wednesday

• The EU has a plan to maintain sanctions on Russia if the US should withdraw from the Ukraine peace process
  • EU countries are concerned that the US could abandon the peace negotiations with Ukraine and pursue economic rapprochement with Russia
  • The EU's high representative for foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, says that there is a "plan B" to maintain sanctions pressure on Russia, even if the US withdraws
  • This could involve individual EU countries adopting sanctions against Russia individually, in order to bypass a Hungarian veto on sanctions imposed at the EU level
  • The EU could work to help Ukraine financially, but American military support would be hard to replace
  • The EU is not prepared to recognize Crimea as Russian territory; this is as much a red line for the EU as it is for Ukraine
• Windows' remote desktop protocol (RDP) allows users to log in with revoked passwords
  • Security researcher Daniel Wade discovered that changing a user's password does not cut off RDP access using that password
  • Previous passwords appear to work indefinitely to allow logins
  • These logins are recorded as normal logins and don't raise any flags in endpoint threat detection software
  • Microsoft replies that this is an intentional design decision
  • Is the result of the machine caching login credentials after they've been verified once
  • The goal is to ensure that a user is always able to log in to their device, even if the device has been offline for an extended period of time
  • Microsoft has updated its documentation to highlight this counterintuitive behavior, but has not shared what admins need to do in order to force revoked passwords out of the local credential cache
• Tesla board had opened a search for a CEO to succeed Elon Musk
  • Board members said that unless Elon Musk reduced his commitment to DOGE, they would start looking for a new CEO
  • Said that Musk's absence from Tesla was hurting decision-making at a critical time for the company
  • Musk didn't argue, and last week he agreed to step back from DOGE in order to focus more attention on Tesla

2025-04-29 Tuesday

• Firefly Aerospace suffers a strange launch failure
  • Anomaly occurred with Firefly's "Alpha" rocket
  • Rocket took off and first stage fired successfully
  • However, after stage separation, there appeared to be some kind of explosion in the first stage that impacted the nozzle of the second stage
  • The loss of the second stage nozzle severely impacted the performance of the second stage motor and, as a result, the payload, an experimental satellite developed by Lockheed Martin, did not reach orbit
  • The Alpha rocket is designed to lift payloads up to 1,030 kg into low-earth orbit
  • Higher payload than small rockets like RocketLab's Electron (300 kg payload to low-earth orbit), but a far lower payload than a Falcon 9 (22,800 kg to low-earth orbit)
  • Although Alpha has successfully delivered payloads to orbit, its track record is mixed as only two out of six launches have been complete successes
• GM pulls profit guidance, citing tariff uncertainty
  • GM reported quarterly earnings this morning, showing a 6.6% decline in net income on a 2.3% gain in revenue
  • However, it has delayed its call with analysts until Thursday, and is declining to provide profit forecasts for the rest of the year, citing the uncertainty of Trump's tariffs
  • GM is analyzing the impact of yesterday's new tariff exemptions on autos and auto parts on its future earnings
  • GM has yet to announce any prices changes or production shifts in response to the tariffs
• UPS cuts 20,000 jobs
  • Job cuts are a response to tariffs and a phased reduction in package volume from Amazon
  • UPS is also planning to close 73 leased and owned buildings this year
  • UPS CEO Carol Tome says that moves to cut costs and boost profit margins, although planned prior to the tariff announcements, will be accelerated in order to help UPS weather tariffs
  • Move comes as part of a broader cost-cutting trend among American corporations in response to the Trump administration's tariffs
• Canada's Liberal Party stages a comeback electoral win
  • Liberals captured 168 electoral seats as compared with the Conservatives' 144
  • However, the Liberals fell short of their goal of an absolute majority, which would have required them to win 172 seats out of 343 total
  • The Liberals had been trailing badly in the polls until the election of Donald Trump, whose tariffs and comments about making Canada into the US's 51st state provoked a backlash against the Conservative Party, whose leader, Peter Poilievre, had aligned himself with the MAGA movement
  • Liberals also pulled support from the NDP, whose leader, Jagmeet Singh, said he planned to resign as party leader after failing to hold on to his own parliamentary seat
  • Election result means that Mark Carney, who had succeeded Justin Trudeau as an interim prime minister, will be able to serve a full term
• Trump argues that US-flagged ships should be able to use the Suez Canal for free, in exchange for carrying out its bombing campaign to suppress the Houthi threat
  • Houthi attacks have sharply cut ocean-going traffic through the Red Sea, diminishing the use of the Suez Canal
  • This has hurt one of the Egyptian government's primary sources of foreign currency
  • The US has initiated a bombing campaign against the Houthis, and Trump is looking for ways by which the US could be compensated for it
  • Trump claimed that the Suez Canal would not exist without the United States, which is false; the Canal was dug by a French firm and the US played little to no role in its creation
  • US-flagged ships make up only a small fraction of Suez Canal traffic, so the benefit to the US would be limited
• Spain and Portugal restore power after massive outage
  • Power has been largely restored to Spain and Portugal after yesterday's outage across the Iberian peninsula
  • Trains and metros are operational, as are airports, however, some delays have been reported as systems resume operations
  • Although the Spanish grid operator, REE, ruled out a cyberattack, the cause of the outage remains under investigation
  • Many restaurants have had to throw out ingredients as a result of refrigerators being off for more than 8 hours
• Amazon launches the first operational Project Kuiper satellites
  • Project Kuiper is an Amazon initiative to provide worldwide satellite internet
  • Is widely considered as a rival to SpaceX's Starlink
  • The first 27 satellites were lofted by an Atlas V rocket operated by United Launch Alliance
  • Mission to deploy the first operational satellites was been delayed by more than a year
  • Amazon has a mid-2026 deadline to deploy half its total proposed constellation of 3,236 satellites
  • Given that it has only begun launching satellites now, it is likely to seek an extension from the FCC
  • Amazon founder Jeff Bezos argues that there is sufficient demand for more than one satellite Internet provider
• Waymo and Toyota announce strategic partnership on self-driving technologies
  • Goal is to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform using Toyota's experience as an auto manufacturer and Waymo's self-driving technology
• Starbucks announces new technology to help baristas fulfill orders more quickly
  • New software enables baristas to complete most orders in four minutes or less, meeting Starbucks' goal for order fulfillment time
  • The software allows orders to be completed out of order for greater efficiency
  • This algorithm had been announced earlier this year, and is now rolling out in certain test locations
  • The sequencing algorithm is rules based, but is flexible enough to increase in complexity if necessary
• Big marketers, such as MasterCard, Pepsi, and Nissan are rethinking Pride participation
  • Many larger marketers are pulling back their spending on Pride related marketing
  • Reflects pressure on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs by the Trump administration, as well as a broader public backlash
  • Loss of large corporate sponsors has forced Pride organizations to work harder to solicit individual donations
  • Brands that pull back on Pride marketing have to be careful to avoid political risk while not simultaneously alienating young consumers who support the LGBTQ community
  • Do young consumers support the LGBTQ community? Many indications show that Gen Z is more politically conservative than Millennials

2025-04-28 Monday

• Trumps tariffs are poised to unleash a supply shock on the US economy
  • Right now, the effect of Trump's tariffs has yet to be felt
  • Many retailers brought in additional inventory before tariffs went into effect
  • However, those stocks are forecast to run out by mid-May
  • Shipment volumes from China are down significantly, by over 60% in some cases
  • Executives from retailers such as Walmart and Target told Trump administration officials in a meeting recently that consumers are likely to see higher prices and empty shelves as a result of the tariffs
  • If an agreement is reached and tariffs are lowered, then there will be a snarl in supply chains as everyone attempts to bring over inventory at once
  • Cargo companies have drastically cut the number of ships they're sending to China, and that capacity cannot be instantly redirected
  • If the trade war continues, retailers will have to make hard decisions about what goods they'll be keeping in stock for the holiday season
• Trump adds additional tariff exemptions for automakers
  • Trump exempts foreign made cars from having to pay additional reciprocal tariffs or the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports
  • This means that the duty on foreign-made cars will be 25%, and won't stack with the other tariffs
  • In addition, domestic automakers will receive a phased discount on tariffs on foreign-made auto parts, which will gradually reduce over the next three years
  • The steps are designed to limit the increases of new car prices and give automakers time to move supply chains into the US
  • Step comes after intense lobbying from the auto industry which argued that it needed time to move supply chains
  • However, the 25% tariff on foreign vehicles is still significant, and is expected to raise the price of a new car by approximately $6000 on average
• Russia and North Korea publicly acknowledge the presence of North Korean troops in Ukraine
  • In a public message, Russian President Vladimir Putin praised the efforts of North Korean soldiers in helping Russian forces oust Ukrainian troops from their incursion into Kursk
  • North Korean state media reported that the troops had been deployed under the terms of a mutual-defense alliance signed between North Korea and Russia last year
• Spain and Portugal are hit by a massive power outage
  • Officials are still investigating the cause, but initial reports have blamed "grid oscillations" caused by imbalances between supply and demand
    • A cyber attack has been ruled out, and the cause is likely due to a technical fault
    • As a result, Spain and Portugal needed to perform a "black start", where they bring up generating capacity gradually and restore current to the grid in phases
    • One advantage is that both countries have significant hydropower resources, which require very little or no outside energy to restart
    • In addition, their significant solar resources can play a part (during the day) in helping to stabilize the grid once it starts coming back online
  • In both countries airports and hospitals are operating off backup power, as is the Spanish stock market
  • However trains and streetcars are shut down, and drivers were asked to stay off the roads as many traffic lights were nonfunctional
  • In addition, cell phone service was disrupted across both countries
  • Many stores closed as, without electricity, they had no way to take payments
• Air traffic control outage grounds planes at Newark Liberty International Airport and causes delays nationwide
  • Problem was due to telecommunication equipment issues at the Philadelphia air traffic control facility that handles traffic for New Jersey
  • The FAA instituted a ground stop at Newark and Teterboro airports, preventing all departures
  • Slowed arrivals into Newark for much of the afternoon
  • United Airlines, which has Newark as one of its hubs, said it had to divert more than 35 flights and delay numerous others
  • Was issuing travel waivers to passengers to help them manage their travel plans
• Why is it so difficult to make products entirely in the United States?
  • Article uses Decked, a manufacturer of organizer trays for pickup trucks as a case study
  • Decked has sought, from its inception, to support American manufacturing
  • Estimates that 95% of its spending goes to US suppliers
  • However, the last 5% involves components such as ball bearings, which have few or no affordable sources in the US
  • Other manufacturers who have sought to move supply chains back to the US have found that many parts or materials are only available in small quantities or at high prices
  • Manufacturers that specialize in low volume specialty equipment have found it easier to repatriate production, as they are more able to hand-finish products in the US
  • However, bringing large volume supply chains back to the US will be a challenge

2025-04-27 Sunday

• Huawei unveils a new AI chip, the Ascend 910D
  • The 910D is a successor to Huawei's previous AI-focused chips, the 910B and 910C
  • The 910D is positioned as a competitor to Nvidia's H20, which the US banned Nvidia from exporting to China earlier this month
  • Previous Huawei chips have struggled to match the performance of their Nvidia counterparts, with the 910C falling short of the Nvidia H100
  • However, Chinese firms have sought to compensate for this disparity by using greater numbers of Huawei chips in order to match the overall performance of a smaller number of their Nvidia counterparts
• More gadgets will likely use a subscription-based model to offset tariffs
  • While major electronics vendors have largely been spared, thanks to the exemption for electronics from China, many smaller vendors who make consumer products will be hit by the 145% tariff
  • As a result, many vendors are raising prices and are implementing subscription systems in order to offset higher costs
  • Some smaller firms are importing into the US but storing products in bonded warehouses which assess customs fees only when products are removed, in the hopes that by the time those inventories need to be tapped, a tariff deal will have been struck
  • Subscriptions offer small firms recurring revenue that helps offset drops in sales due to tariffs
  • Over time product quality could drop as producers contract with manufacturing firms in places like Vietnam and Malaysia, whose workforces don't have the same skills with manufacturing as those in China
• Saudi Arabia and Qatar will repay Syria's debt to the World Bank
  • Step helps the new government access international funding and pay government salaries
  • Syria's central bank governor and finance minister attended World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington for the first time in two decades
  • Syria's post-Assad government is seeking to rebuild ties to regional and global powers in order to secure funding to rebuild the war ravaged country
• Kansas farmers hope to market sorghum stranded in the US by the trade war
  • China had been a major buyer of sorghum, which it used to feed hogs and produce baiju, a strong liquor
  • In the US most sorghum is used as animal feed and for ethanol
  • Farmers are hoping to market sorghum as the next quinoa
  • However, even in Kansas, sorghum is difficult to market for human consumption, as many associate it with its role as hog or cattle feed
  • Over the longer term, many Kansas farmers are replanting sorghum fields with corn
  • Leopards eating faces: these people voted for Trump, and now they're discovering the downsides of starting a trade war with China when their main customer is China

2025-04-26 Saturday

• Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky hold "productive" discussion while attending Pope Francis' funeral
  • Meeting was the first face-to-face meeting between the two leaders since their disastrous press conference in February
  • Zelenksy posted on Twitter that the discussion was "productive" and thanked President Trump for taking the time to see him
  • An informal meeting was also held between Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer
• China applies export restrictions on dysprosium
  • Dysprosium is a rare earth mineral used for making strong permanent magnets
  • More than 90% of the world's supply of refined dysprosium comes from China
  • Used to make the permanent magnets in the motors used by electric vehicles
  • US companies have stockpiled enough magnets to last until the end of May
  • Auto-makers can choose to manufacture vehicles with electromagnet motors instead of permanent magnet motors, but electromagnet motors are less efficient, and would have a lower range for the same battery capacity
  • The US has only one dysprosium mine, and its production wouldn't be able to meet US demand
  • Furthermore, China has a lead in the refining and processing technologies used to separate rare earth minerals from their ores
• Republicans plan to scrap US audit regulator
  • The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was set up in the wake of the Enron scandal
  • Under draft legislation, the PCAOB will be shut down and its responsibilities will be transferred to the SEC
  • Employees of the PCAOB will be allowed to transfer to the SEC, but they would have to take pay cuts
  • The bill is currently being considered by the House Committee on Financial Services
• A battle 2000 years ago resulted in permanent ecosystem change in southern China
  • Underneath the farmland of the Pearl River Delta lies the remains of a huge forest
  • Most of the trees died at around the same time
  • Scarring and black marks indicate that the cause of the destruction was fire
  • At around this time there was a major battle in the area between the Nanyue Kingdom and Han Empire
  • The Han Empire sent an army numbering between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers to conquer the Nanyue Kingdom
  • The army converged on the Nanyue capital of Panyou, in the Pearl River Delta
  • A commander named Yang Pu set fires to force the city to surrender
  • These fires ran out of control and spread into the surrounding swamp cypress forest
  • The cypress trees largely burned to the waterline, resulting in the remains that are found today
  • After the forest burned, farmers moved in and converted the land to farmland, permanently changing the ecosystem
  • The fire and subsequent conversion to farmland destroyed the entire population of swamp cypress in Southern China; while the area is still technically good habitat for swamp cypress, the only swamp cypress trees today are found in Vietnam
  • The remaining population in Vietnam is itself critically endangered

2025-04-25 Friday

• Documents highlight differences between European and American positions on a potential peace settlement in Ukraine
  • Key differences include
    • Territorial questions
    • Conditions for lifting sanctions on Russia
    • Security guarantees
    • Size of Ukraine's military
  • The US proposal was sent to Europe by Steve Witkoff, Trump's envoy to Russia
  • The European proposal was the result of talks between EU and Ukrainian diplomats
  • US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that both proposals are the start of negotiations and purpose of the two documents is to find areas of disagreement and negotiation
  • Witkoff's proposal calls for de jure recognition of Russian control over Crimea, while the European proposal defers all discussions of territory until after a cease-fire has been negotiated
  • The European proposal calls for Ukraine to receive a robust "Article 5-like" security guarantee, while Witkoff's proposal merely says that Ukraine will have a "robust" security guarantee with European states acting as guarantors
  • Furthermore, Witkoff's proposal calls for sanctions on Russia that have been in place since 2014 to be lifted
  • In other words, Witkoff's proposal is Putin's wish list
• Russian general killed in explosion in Moscow suburb
  • Russian general Yaroslav Moskalik was killed in an explosion
  • Russian sources say that the explosion was deliberate, and the attack carried the hallmarks of the Ukrainian security services
  • Attack comes as Russia has also stepped up its attacks on Ukrainian cities, launching missile attacks at Kyiv and Pavlohrad
  • Putin has also announced plans to increase arms production, keeping the Russian economy on a war footing as it seeks to gain additional territory
• Russian satellite linked to nuclear anti-satellite weapons program likely spinning out of control
  • Russia's Cosmos 2553 satellite, which US officials have stated is connected to the development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon, appears to be spinning uncontrollably
  • The satellite is believed to be a radiation testing platform and radar satellite focused on space surveillance
  • Although Cosmos 2553 itself is not a weapon, US intelligence officials believe that it's a platform for testing weapons related technology
  • The private satellite tracking firm LeoLabs has used Doppler radar data to determine that Cosmos 2553 appears to be tumbling in orbit
  • This data has been supported by optical data from Slingshot Aerospace, which determined that the satellite's brightness was changing rapidly
  • However, Slingshot states that, more recently, the satellite appears to have stabilized
  • US officials have not made any comments on the latest developments with Cosmos 2553
• Cargo shipments from China to the US dwindle
  • The executive director for the Port of Los Angeles expects a 35% drop in import volumes next month
  • Says that scheduled deliveries from China have "virtually ceased"
• Trump says there will not be another pause in tariffs
  • Says that the prospect of another 90 day pause is unlikely
  • Won't drop tariffs on China unless Beijing offers "something substantial" in return
  • Didn't say what sorts of concessions he was looking for, however
  • Trump also said that free trade agreements are forthcoming with many US trading partners and would be signed in the next three to four weeks
• China may exempt some goods from retaliatory tariffs
  • The Chinese government is considering suspending its 125% retaliatory tariff on certain goods, such as medical equipment and industrial chemicals
  • Are also discussing suspending the tariff for plane lease payments, as these would disproportionately impact Chinese airlines
  • The exemptions being discussed by China mirror the Trump administration's strategy, which also exempted certain goods, notably electronics, from the 145% tariff on Chinese products
  • The Chinese government is also examining removing tariffs on semiconductor manufacturing equipment; however memory chips remain subject to the tariff
  • List of exempted products is still in flux
• Apple aims to source all US-bound iPhones from India
  • Apple is seeking to move final assembly of all US-bound iPhones to India by the end of 2026
  • iPhones have earned a reprieve from Trump's 145% tariffs on Chinese goods thanks to the exemption on electronics
  • However, they are still subject to a general 20% tariff on all imports from China
  • India has been subject to a 26% "reciprocal" tariff, but that is on hold pending the negotiation of a free trade agreement between the US and India
  • iPhone imports from India are still subject to Trump's general 10% tariff on all imports
• Trump's tariffs inflict pain on his right-wing allies in Europe
  • Many right-wing leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Robert Fico in Slovakia, have aligned themselves closely with Donald Trump
  • However, that alignment is now being questioned, as Trump seeks to impose tariffs on the EU
  • Many of these leaders are facing questions about whether their loyalty to Trump outweighs their loyalty to their countries
  • These questions are exacerbated by the fact that many of these leaders have significant support among farmers, and agriculture has been a key target of Trump's tariffs
  • In addition, Orban's Hungary has a significant automotive sector, making it even more vulnerable to tariff pressure
  • This, combined with persistent high inflation, has led to Orban's government facing significant political pressure ahead of elections next year
• The EU rebuffs the UK's bid to widen access to the single market
  • Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, sought a mutual recognition agreement that would have certified British product standards as being compatible with the EU
  • However, this request was rejected by France
  • EU diplomats say that this is a more favorable agreement than what Switzerland has; Switzerland has a similar agreement with the EU, but also pays into the EU budget and accepts free movement from EU nations
  • The UK is also negotiating better access to the EU for British musicians and performing artists
  • The EU has also signaled a willingness to allow UK citizens to use automated electronic gates when traveling to the EU, cutting down on time spent in immigration
• Microsoft rolls out Windows Recall to end users
  • Windows Recall is a new Windows feature that takes periodic screenshots of the user's screen and analyzes them with AI to determine what the user is working in order to help them find old work and resume where they left off
  • Only available on "Copilot+" computers, that feature a NPU capable of running a local AI model
  • Microsoft had announced a delay to the rollout of Windows Recall after serious privacy concerns were raised with the initial implementation of the feature
  • Now, after making changes to better ensure that private data won't be collected and doing more testing, Microsoft is rolling out Recall to end users
  • Recall is also now an opt-in feature, rather than opt-out
  • In addition, Microsoft is launching a feature called "Click To Do", which allows users to use local AI models to extract text from images and quickly summarize or rewrite on-screen text
  • The only current CPUs that support Recall are Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite (ARM), Intel Core Ultra 200V (x86), and AMD Ryzen AI 300 (x86) CPUs
  • Of these, the Snapdragon X Elite has the most capable NPU and thus some features, such as Click To Do are only available for those CPUs
• xAI allegedly violated air quality standards in building its new datacenter
  • xAI has a permit to run up to 15 natural gas-powered turbines in order to power its "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis
  • When xAI was discovered to have far more turbines on site, it said that only 15 would be powered on at a time
  • However, drone-based thermal imaging shows that at least 30 and possibly more turbines are operational
  • xAI replies that its turbines are equipped with state-of-the-art emissions control technology and thus don't contribute to air pollution
  • This is the reply to people who allege that AI datacenters will soon run short of electricity
  • If they run short of electricity, they'll build their own powerplants, just as steel and aluminum mills do

2025-04-24 Thursday

• Ukraine states that the missile that killed 12 in Kyiv was of North Korean origin
  • President Zelensky says that the missile was a North Korean KN-23
  • Missile was fired by Russia at Kyiv, where it struck a residential building, killing 12
• Trump issues a public appeal to Putin to "STOP" striking Ukraine
  • Trump stated that the Russian attack was "not necessary" and was "very bad timing"
  • When asked whether he believed that Putin would listen to his appeal, Trump replied, "I do"
  • The appeal is a rare public rebuke of Putin by Trump
• The US will demand that Ukraine be allowed to maintain a substantial military under any peace agreement
  • One of Russia's war aims has been the demilitarization of Ukraine
  • However, the Trump administration's peace proposal involves guarantees that Ukraine be allowed to maintain its military and defense industry
  • The proposal also calls for Russia to return the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to Ukrainian control
  • The proposal will be presented to Putin by Trump's Russia envoy Steve Witkoff at their next meeting
• Chaos in the top leadership at the Pentagon under Pete Hegseth
  • Hegseth has reportedly lost trust in many of his top advisers after details of a planned classified briefing for Elon Musk were leaked
  • The chaos has raised questions about Hegseth's ability to effectively lead the Department of Defense
  • Hegseth has little experience with managing large organizations prior to being appointed to Secretary of Defense
  • Instead of leaning on experienced officers and civilian staffers, he has often fired them for obscure reasons
  • Has sought to reinforce support from outside the Department of Defense by attacking critics in media appearances and social media posts
  • In other words, Hegseth is behaving exactly like Trump, but on a smaller scale
  • Still, it's concerning, because the relative stability of the Department of Defense is one of the advantages the US has over China; unlike in the PLA our top generals didn't fear getting purged for obscure political reasons
  • Plus, the opportunity cost is huge; Hegseth is wasting time and effort that he could be using to implement needed reforms
• South Korea indicts former President Moon Jae-in
  • President Moon was indicted on bribery charges
  • The indictment of Moon means that every South Korean President elected in the 21st century has been charged with corruption or committed suicide while under a corruption investigation
  • Prosecutors allege that Moon received a bribe equivalent to $150,000 in the form of salary and housing assistance provided for his son-in-law, who was then an executive at a South Korean airline
  • The article doesn't detail what the bribe giver expected to receive in return
• South Korea opens trade talks with the Trump administration
  • Korea seeks to negotiate agreements on shipbuilding, natural gas purchases, and additional payments for the deployment of US troops to its territory in exchange for a revised free-trade agreement
  • Korea might also be persuaded to invest in the development of an natural gas project in Alaska
  • Korean automakers face a 25% tariff on imported cars, specifically
  • This is significant, because the US counts for 49% of Korea's total auto exports
• India vows revenge for the Kashmir attack
  • Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that Indian security forces would pursue the perpetrators of yesterday's terrorist attack in Kashmir "to the ends of the Earth"
• Pakistan closes its airspace to Indian airlines
  • In response to India suspending a water sharing agreement after the terrorist attack yesterday, Pakistan closed its airspace to Indian airlines, forcing them to take longer routes
  • Narendra Modi has called an all-party meeting in order to brief them on the government's response to the attack
  • Pakistan has also stated that it will "hold in abeyance" the 1972 Simla Agreement, signed after the 1971 war between the two countries, which established the "line of control" separating Indian and Pakistani troops in Kashmir
• Trump offers Saudi Arabia $100 billion arms package
  • Package involves military equipment offered by Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop and other major US defense contractors
  • The deal will be officially announced during Donald Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia in May
  • It's unclear how many of the deal are new as opposed to extensions of previous equipment sales
  • Saudi Arabia has also expressed interest in buying F-35s, something that the US may be reluctant to allow, as US law requires US policy to ensure that Israel retains a "qualitative military edge"
  • This has been interpreted as ensuring that, of US allies in the Middle East, only Israel is authorized to purchase the United States' most advanced weapons
• Apple reorganizes its AI division, stripping its AI chief of responsibility for robotics
  • Apple had hired John Giannandrea from Google and centralized all AI development under a new division led by him
  • However, after disappointments in the pace of development, Apple has begun divesting his team of responsibilities
  • Tim Cook, CEO of Apple had earlier moved Siri, its voice assistant, under Mike Rockwell, who previously ran development of Apple's Vision Pro augmented reality headset
  • The robotics team, focused on secret projects to use AI to enable smart devices, is being moved under Senior Vice President John Ternus, who oversees all hardware engineering
  • Apple had a separate team focused on robotics hardware that was already under Ternus
  • This moves consolidates the two aspects of Apple's robotics efforts, hardware and software, under a single leader
  • These shifts are aimed at freeing up Giannandrea's team to focus on development of the underlying AI models that will be used by a wide variety of Apple devices
  • The moves might also herald Tim Cook becoming less patience with Giannadrea's lack of delivery, and might be a prelude to Giannadrea's firing
• The increased prospect of high-intensity conventional warfare is bringing new attention to cluster munitions
  • More than 124 countries, including the UK, have ceased producing, transferring or stockpiling cluster munitions after signing a treaty prohibiting their use
  • America, China, and Russia never signed onto the convention
  • Lithuania announced that it would be withdrawing from the convention
  • Cluster munitions have proven their worth in Ukraine, where some reports indicate they were four times more effective at stopping assaults than conventional artillery
• Shopping malls make a small resurgence in the United States
  • Today about 900 shopping malls are still operating in the US, down from a peak of several thousand
  • Many shut down as the rise of e-commerce and the decline of the traditional department store deprived them of their anchor tenants
  • However, the survivors, in desirable locations, have seen foot traffic rebound to pre-pandemic levels
  • Online retailers are recognizing the limits of e-commerce: the share of e-commerce as a percentage of total retail peaked in the second quarter of 2020 at 16% and has yet to rise above that level
  • High quality retail locations are in short supply, and high-end shopping malls are taking advantage of that to attract new tenants
  • Are attracting younger shoppers by offering in-person experiences
  • However, the prospect of an economic downturn caused by tariffs presents a further challenge that shopping malls have to navigate
  • This article talks about shopping malls as if they were a particularly endangered species
  • There used to be thousands, but habitat loss changes in consumer spending habits have caused their population to dwindle to hundreds
  • However, the survivors have found a new, smaller niche, and have good prospects for survival, if they can survive the next challenge
• UPS agrees to buy Andlauer Healthcare for $1.6 billion
  • Andlauer is a specialized supply chain provider which provides temperature-controlled transportation for the healthcare industry
  • Andlauer will retain its own headquarters in Vaughan, Ontario and will operate as a subsidiary of UPS
  • The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2025, and is supported by the founder of Andlauer Logistics, Michael Andlauer

2025-04-23 Wednesday

• Trump pressures Ukraine to recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea
  • Trump described Ukraine's position as "dire", saying that President Zelensky has "no cards to play"
  • Trump's remarks come as the US floats a peace proposal which includes recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea and acknowledging Russian de-facto control over the portions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts that it has occupied
  • Vice President Vance said that the US had presented a proposal freezing the war at its current front lines, and beginning negotiations over territorial swaps
  • Zelensky has said that while Ukraine might consider acknowledging Russian de facto control over Crimea and the four oblasts that it has occupied, the Ukrainian constitution prohibits it from formally recognizing the Russian annexation
  • Ukrainian officials say that any formal recognition of Russian annexation would represent a significant reward to Russia for launching its war of aggression and undermine the post-World War 2 rules-based international order
• The Trump administration considers lowering tariffs on China
  • The White House is considering multiple options
  • One possibility is a tiered approach, similar to a House of Representatives proposal from last year, which would impose a 100% tariff on goods deemed essential for national security and 35% tariffs on everything else
• The Trump administration exempts car parts from tariffs on steel and aluminum
  • Steel and aluminum imports are subject to a 25% duty
  • Cars and car parts are also subject to a 25% duty
  • This meant that car parts, which are often composed of steel and aluminum would be double-taxed
  • This order "destacks" the tariffs, exempting car parts from the steel and aluminum tariffs, leaving in place the tariff on auto parts
• Apple is fined $570 million and Meta is fined $228 million for breaches of the EU's Digital Markets Act
  • Apple is being fined for implementing a Core Technology Fee assessed on developers who wish to implement their own payment processing in lieu of using the App Store's payments and subscription system
  • Meta is being fined for a "pay or consent" system which only allowed users to opt out of targeted advertising if they paid a monthly subscription fee
  • The companies have two months to comply with EU orders or risk further daily fines
  • I don't know why Meta just doesn't shut down Facebook in the EU; if they're not allowed to show targeted advertising, then the serving average EU user is no longer net profitable, is it?
• Neuralink raises $500 million at an $8.5 billion total valuation
  • Firm was valued at $3.5 billion as of November 2023
  • Founded by Elon Musk
  • Is one of several firms attempting to develop brain-computer interfaces
• Weight Watchers prepares to file for bankruptcy
  • Weight Watchers International has been struggling under a significant debt load and reduced demand as a result of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic
  • Company wants to execute a "pre-packaged" Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that will allow it to restructure its debts and exit bankruptcy quickly
• OpenAI staff and AI experts join Elon Musk in seeking to block OpenAI's transformation into a for-profit entity
  • Geoffrey Hinton, Margaret Mitchell, and Stuart Russell, three leading public experts on AI, as well as 10 former OpenAI staffers submitted a letter to California and Delaware attorneys-general urging them to oppose OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit public benefit corporation
  • OpenAI argues that it needs to convert its current complex structure, where a nonprofit foundation controls a for-profit entity whose profits are capped, into a simpler and more conventional corporate structure in order to unlock additional investment
  • This investment will allow it to compete effectively with rivals such as Google and Meta
  • However, the letter argues that OpenAI's role is not to compete, but rather to ensure that AI benefits humanity as a whole
• A terrorist attack on tourists in Indian Kashmir kills 26, injures 17
  • Attack was carried out by a little-known group called "Kashmir Resistance"
  • Indian security agencies allege that Kashmir Resistance is a front for Pakistan-based militant organizations Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahadeen
  • Airlines began operating extra flights in order to accommodate tourists who wished to return home early after the attack
  • In response, India has suspended a key water sharing agreement, the Indus Waters Treaty, that governs the sharing of Indus river waters between the two countries
  • India has also declared all Pakistani defense attaches persona non grata and has expelled them from the country
• How Xi Jinping seeks to reinforce China's economy against US tariffs
  • Xi Jinping has centralized power and emphasized loyalty in key posts
  • Has sought to find and keep officials in posts over the long term, providing continuity
  • Wants to preserve unity among leadership in order to avoid the indecisiveness that allowed the Tiananmen Square protests to gather momentum
  • However, there are questions whether widespread layoffs caused by a significant decline in exports to the US could result in protests
  • In order to suppress these protests Chinese leaders have built out a vast surveillance machinery
    • Human and AI-powered censorship of online platforms
    • Monitoring to preempt dissent
    • Facial recognition cameras that automatically track persons of interest
  • The protests over China's COVID policy provided a trial run for this monitoring and censorship machinery
• Colombia's former foreign minister accuses its president of being a drug addict
  • Alvaro Leyva, Colombia's former foreign minister, has accused Colombia's president, Gustavo Petro, of being a drug addict
  • Did not say which drug Petro was addicted to
  • Petro has displayed erratic behavior as of late, sometimes showing up late to important meetings or missing them entirely
  • Leyva says that Petro is being taken advantage of by his inner circle, some of whom have resigned after admitting to being addicted to drugs
  • Petro denies all of the accusations, saying, "The only addiction which I have is to the coffee I have every morning"
• Elon Musk cuts back the time he's devoting to government work
  • Pledges to devote more time to Tesla, as Tesla has faced increasing headwinds from tariffs and declining sales
  • Tesla says the launch of a new, lower cost, model later this year is still on track
  • Robotaxis are also still scheduled for next year
• CATL and BYD demonstrate higher-speed charging for electric cars
  • CATL and BYD announced fast-charging batteries that are capable of adding hundreds of miles of range in 5 minutes
  • The high-speed charging is only possible at charging stations capable of supplying sufficient power
  • CATL also announced a line of sodium-ion batteries, which could help reduce the amount of lithium required for electric vehicle and grid-storage batteries
  • Announcements reflect the increasing Chinese technological lead in electric vehicles and battery technologies, something the Beijing government has made a priority
  • CATL and BYD are the largest battery manufacturers in the world
  • Have pioneered lithium-ferrophosphate chemistries that don't require expensive cobalt
  • Analysts say that while the superfast charging is a real breakthrough, overuse of the feature is likely to wear out battery cells
• The US states that it would be open to Iran continuing a civilian nuclear program
  • US Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated that the US would be open to Iran retaining its civilian nuclear program
  • Steps back from the "full dismantlement" line that the US had taken earlier with regards to Iran's nuclear activities
  • However, Rubio stated that Iran would have to give up its ability to enrich uranium
  • This would leave Iran dependent on foreign sources for fuel for its nuclear reactors
  • Rubio stated that the US was open to allowing Iran to import uranium enriched to a 3.67% level
  • US analysts believe that Iran has already enriched enough uranium for 6 nuclear weapons

2025-04-22 Tuesday

• Trump say he has no plans to fire Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell
  • Trump says that he merely wanted Powell to be more active in lowering interest rates
  • Says that he has no intent to fire powell
  • Statement came after Trump's attacks on Powell caused large drops in the stock and bond markets, as Trump seemed to threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve
  • Trump also noted that tariffs against China could come down from their present 145% level, though, "not to zero"
• The EU fines Apple and Meta
  • Apple was fined €500 million
  • Meta was fined €200 million
  • Both fines were for violations of the Digital Markets Act
    • Apple was fined for discouraging developers from offering users ways to pay or subscribe to applications that bypassed the App Store
    • Meta was fined for making a paid subscription the only way to avoid ad tracking
  • Apple's fine is smaller than previous penalties imposed by the EU for blocking developers from offering payment options outside the App Store
• Vladimir Putin offers to halt Ukraine invasion along current front line
  • Offer might be a way to pressure Ukraine and the US into offering additional concessions
  • Zelensky says that he wants to see an official proposal before answering
  • It's very cute that he's offering to give up claims to territory that he doesn't yet control as a "concession"
• Zelensky says that Ukraine will not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea
  • One of the points of negotiations in the peace proposal presented last week was Ukraine recognizing the Russian annexation of Crimea
  • Territorial concessions like that are prohibited by the Ukrainian constitution
  • A parallel British and French peace proposal would only require Ukraine to recognize Russian occupation in a de facto way
  • Zelensky said that a cease-fire should be brokered first, before talks advance
  • US officials also said that Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO
• JD Vance provides more details on the US negotiating position with India
  • US will seek to increase co-production of defense equipment with India
  • Will also seek liability law reforms to enable US firms to participate in the Indian nuclear power sector
• Treasury Secretary Bessent says that the tariff situation with China is unsustainable
  • Remarks came in a closed-door investor summit
  • Argued that the current situation was unsustainable for both sides
  • However negotiations with China have not started yet
• OpenAI signals a willingness to buy Chrome from Google
  • Remarks were made by Nick Turley, OpenAI's lead manager for ChatGPT
  • Turley was testifying as a witness for the government during the sentencing phase of Google's anti-trust trial
  • The Justice Department is seeking to force Google to sell off Chrome and Android
  • Remedy is being sought after Google was found guilty of abusing its monopoly in internet search to maintain its dominance in internet advertising
• The challenges of creating a transparent can
  • Orka sells its energy drink in cans made of transparent plastic, rather than aluminum
  • Faced significant challenges in making its plastic cans compatible with commercial canning equipment
  • Most canning equipment is designed to handle cans made entirely out of aluminum, whereas Orka's cans had a plastic body and aluminum top
  • Getting equipment to press down hard enough on the top to seat it correctly but without pressing so hard the plastic body deformed or cracked was a challenge
  • Took two years to figure out how to manufacture the can at scale

2025-04-21 Monday

• Pope Francis dies
  • Pontiff passed away after suffering a stroke and heart failure
  • Had been recovering from a severe pneumonia infection
• The US and India announce that they have begun negotiations on a bilateral trade deal
  • US will seek broader market access and lower trade barriers
  • The Trump administration has notified Congress that it is negotiating a trade agreement with India
  • It is unclear whether the negotiations will result in a full free-trade agreement that would require Congressional approval
• Stocks and bonds resume their decline as Trump continues attacking Jerome Powell
  • Trump called on Powell to lower interest rates, calling him "Mr. Too Late"
  • Trump's chief economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, argued that Trump was justified in considering his options to fire Powell
  • The uncertainty around Powell's status has caused the US dollar to behave more like an emerging market currency

2025-04-20 Sunday

• Putin's war economy can't escape Trump's trade blitz
  • Russia was not on the list of countries that Trump announced tariffs on with his "liberation day" announcement on April 2
  • However, the Russian economy is still vulnerable to the wider economic fallout from the tariffs
  • Russia is even more dependent on oil revenue than it was in the past, due to sanctions restricting its ability to export other products
  • Therefore a global economic recession, weakening demand for oil, would hurt Russia disproportionately
  • However, the oil price would need to remain low for an extended period of time in order to threaten the Russian government's ability to pay for its war in Ukraine

2025-04-18 Friday

• An explosion destroys a Northrop Grumman building in Utah
  • No injuries or fatalities reported
  • The Utah site manufactures solid rocket engines for the SLS program
  • No cause has yet been determined
  • The building was not the test stand for the SLS boosters
• Tariffs trigger price hikes at Shein and Temu
  • The Trump administration has imposed a 145% tariff on most goods shipped from China
  • In addition, it has eliminated the "de minimis" exemption applied to orders $800 and below
  • As a result, Shein has announced that it will begin making price adjustments as of April 25
  • Temu has cut back on advertising, but has not announced any details regarding price adjustments
• Marco Rubio warns that the US will pause efforts to find a resolution to the Ukraine War if no progress is made soon
  • Rubio has presented a framework for a potential deal to halt fighting to the Ukrainians, the Russians and EU negotiators
  • Stated that if no progress is made in the next few weeks, the US will abandon efforts to negotiate a cease fire
  • Ukraine has said that it is willing to abide by a comprehensive cease-fire if Russia also agrees to it
  • Trump has said that he is willing to apply economic pressure to Russia if it doesn't agree to a cease-fire, but has not outlined any concrete steps along those lines
  • The question is, what do Trump and Rubio mean by that?
  • Do they mean that they'll allow the status quo to continue, where Ukraine is allowed to draw down the remainder of the weapons it has received from the US and get additional weapons from the US?
  • Does it mean that the US will seek to normalize relations with Russia and halt further weapons shipments to Ukraine, potentially sanctioning the EU countries if they continue to support Ukraine?

2025-04-17 Thursday

• Trump is reportedly considering firing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell
  • Powell's term ends next year
  • The Federal Reserve Chairman is an independent position, and it is questionable whether Trump has the legal authority to fire Powell without cause
  • Trump has asserted that he could fire Powell at any time

2025-04-16 Wednesday

• US government restores funding for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database
  • In an 11th hour move, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) extended its funding to MITRE to maintain the CVE database
  • CISA's contract extension will last 11 months
  • MITRE has said that it will spin out the CVE database into its own non-profit organization to enable it to seek funding from private sources as well as the government

2025-04-15 Tuesday

• US funding running out for critical cyber vulnerability database
  • The nonprofit MITRE Corporation says that funding for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database will run out tomorrow
  • Database establishes a common numbering scheme and terminology for cybersecurity vulnerabilities
  • Federal funding for the database was handled through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which had been targeted for cuts by DOGE
• Boeing hit from all sides in trade war
  • Boeing has a significant market in China, and, in retaliation for Trump's tariffs, Chinese officials have instructed domestic airlines to cease placing orders for new planes with Boeing
  • Other countries may place retaliatory tariffs on Boeing's aircraft as well
  • Boeing exports rougly 80% of its aircraft and is the US's largest exporter by dollar value of goods sold
  • Trump's tariffs have ended a 45-year old duty-free agreement between the US, the EU, China, Canada and other countries that ended duties on aircraft and aircraft parts
  • As a result, Boeing might face tariffs both coming and going: tariffs on parts it imports to build the aircraft and retaliatory tariffs on finished aircraft that it seeks to export

2025-04-12 Saturday

• Trump exempts electronics from tariffs
  • Tariff exemption applies to smartphones, computers, and other electronic components
  • Exemption applies to both the 10% baseline tariff and the 125% reciprocal tariff on Chinese products
  • Huge W for Apple, Nvidia, Dell, and the rest of the electronics industry
• European travelers are increasingly skipping vacations to the US
  • Caused by political and economic tension due to the Trump administration's economic and immigration policies
  • Is also caused by generalized fears of a recession
  • The US is largely being perceived as being less welcoming
  • Travel from Canada has declined severely as Canadians skip out on winter travel to the US

2025-04-11 Friday

• China increases retaliatory tariffs on US products to 125%
  • China had previously imposed an 84% levy on US goods
  • The move comes after the Trump administration raised the tariff on Chinese products to 145%
• Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI) raises $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation
  • Was founded after Sutskever left OpenAI after an attempted boardroom coup against CEO Sam Altman
  • Had raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation last year
  • SSI is secretive, and has disclosed few details about what it's working on
  • Sutskever has said that he wishes to build an "aligned superintelligence" directly, without releasing interim products
• US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff indicates that the US would be open to compromising with Iran
  • Witkoff says that the Trump administration's red line was the preventing Iran from being able to produce a nuclear weapon
  • Says that the opening demand would be the complete dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program, but that the US would be willing to negotiate from there
  • If Iran refuses to completely dismantle its nuclear program (as is likely), the Witkoff said that he'd put the issue before President Trump to see how much Iranian nuclear activity would be tolerable to the United States
  • Any agreement would require substantial verification activity
  • Iran is negotiating for an easing of sanctions and restoration of business ties with the US
  • Trump has sought to increase the economic pressure on Iran by imposing additional sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program and threatening secondary sanctions against foreign buyers of Iranian oil
  • The most frustrating thing about this is that the deal that Trump is proposing is structurally similar to the JCPOA, which he called the "the worst deal in the history of deals"
  • Note how Trump has dropped any thoughts of negotiating a broad deal that encompasses Iranian ballistic missile programs or support for proxy forces; this proposed deal is narrowly focused on the Iranian nuclear program, just as the JCPOA was

2025-04-10 Thursday

• The Trump administration clarifies that its tariff on Chinese goods is actually 145%, not 125%
  • The previously reported 125% figure only takes into account the "reciprocal" tariffs just imposed
  • Didn't account for a previous 20% tariff imposed over China's role in the fentanyl trade
• EU pauses tariff retaliation in response to Trump's reprieve
  • Yesterday, the European Commission voted to approve retaliatory tariffs on a wide variety of US products, in response to tariffs on US steel and aluminum imports
  • Those tariffs are now on hold, as the EU weighs how to respond to Trump's pause
  • The EU is still considering how to respond to Trump's tariffs on cars and his baseline 10% tariff
  • Warns that retaliatory tariffs could still be imposed if negotiations with the Trump administration don't lead to a satisfactory outcome
• Chinese sellers on Amazon are preparing to either leave or hike prices
  • The new 125% tariffs on Chinese goods totally overwhelm the cost structure of low-cost sellers
  • Some sellers are planning on price increases, while others are looking at non-US markets
  • Also saving money by lowering inventory levels (which will probably lead to longer shipping times) and reduced advertising spending
  • Chinese sellers on other platforms are exploring raising prices by up to 70%
• Shein's business model faces significant pressure from tariffs
  • The forthcoming end of the de minimis exemption places significant pressure on Shein's fast-fashion business model
  • Shein's US orders have fallen by 20-50%
  • Under the tariffs, apparel imported from China could face duties approaching 150%
  • Suppliers to Shein are investigating setting up factories in other countries, such as Vietnam, for whom the de minimis exemption still applies
  • Shein's sellers are also looking at expanding into other markets
  • However, that might be difficult, as the EU also looks to end its version of the de minimis loophole
  • All of this places pressure on Shein's potential IPO, which had already been moved from New York to London because of regulatory issues
• Apple brings in 600 tons of iPhones from India in advance of tariffs
  • Six cargo jets with a capacity of 100 tons each have flown out from Chennai in March, carrying iPhones, according to Indian government officials
  • In total, they could carry up to 1.5 million iPhones
  • Apple has stepped up iPhone production in India, adding a Sunday shift to its factory there
  • Has worked with Indian officials to speed customs processing for iPhone exports, reducing the time it takes shipments to clear customs to six hours, down from 30 hours
  • Foxconn, Apple's primary assembler, increased the value shipped to the United States to $770 million per month, up from more typical levels of between $110 and $331 million per month
• China retaliates against US tariffs by restricting imports of Hollywood movies
  • Hollywood's Chinese revenue had already been declining before this latest move
  • Hollywood films today only account for 5% of box office revenue in China
• Companies stung by tariffs explore lawsuit against Trump
  • Trump is imposing tariffs using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1970s-era law
  • The proposed lawsuit would argue that the IEEPA does not permit the broad tariffs that Trump is imposing
  • Argue that Trump's tariffs are too tenuously connected to the emergencies that he's declared over fentanyl trafficking and other matters
  • Furthermore, the tariffs could be subject to the Major Questions Doctrine, a Supreme Court precedent that limits the ability of the executive branch to enact policy changes without the approval of Congress
• Trump's trade math ignores services
  • While the US has a trade deficit in goods, it has a trade surplus in services
  • Countries can't easily impose tariffs on services, but they can tax or fine American companies doing business abroad
  • This is intentional
  • Trump's supporters don't benefit from service exports, so he doesn't care about them
• Supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. turn on him after he endorses the MMR vaccine
  • Robert F. Kennedy, prior to his appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, had been a prominent vaccine skeptic
  • Opposed mandates forcing people to vaccinate their children
  • Was concerned about potential side-effects from vaccine, despite numerous studies indicating that vaccines were safe and effective
  • In response to the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas, RFK Jr. put out a statement endorsing the MMR vaccine
  • This prompted a backlash from many of his supporters, who felt that he should have emphasized parents' retaining the personal choice over whether to vaccinate their kids
• The AUKUS submarine sales comes under scrutiny amid trade tensions and US shipbuilding shortfalls
  • Trump administration officials have stated that selling submarines to Australia is potentially risky because Australia has not committed to using the submarines in a deterrence role against China
  • The Australian Submarine Agency says that its submarines will be equipped for intelligence, surveillance, undersea combat and strike missions, but declined to commit to their use in a contingency involving Taiwan
  • The Australian government is also disappointed that its deal to acquire US submarines did not result in any special consideration by Trump with regards to tariffs
• Trump's tariff pause leaves CEOs puzzled as to what will happen in 90 days
  • Stocks reversed course today, posting large declines, as businesspeople digested the details of Trump's tariff pause and new tariff schedule on Chinese goods
  • Constantly changing policies make it risky for businesses to invest in the US
  • Volkswagen announced a tariff surcharge on cars it's exporting to the US
  • European companies subject to long-term contracts state that they may have to slow down production or lay off workers

2025-04-09 Wednesday

• Trump pauses most tariffs but raises tariffs on China to 125%
  • The 10% baseline tariff already announced will still take effect
  • However the higher "reciprocal" tariffs will be paused for 90 days
  • China, will, however get hit with further tariffs, raising the overall levy on Chinese goods to 125%
  • The move appeared to take even White House insiders by surprise, with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer learning of it while he was giving testimony to the US House of Representatives defending the tariffs
  • Markets reacted positively to the news, with the S&P 500 up by 9.5% and the NASDAQ up by 12%
  • Trump seemed to indicate that he was concerned by declines in US Treasury bond prices in reaction to the tariffs
• China increases tariffs on US imports by another 50%
  • Increases total levy on US goods to 84%
  • Added 12 companies to an export blacklist including
    • Laser manufacturer American Photonics
    • Medical device manufacturer Novotech
    • Boeing's drone subsidiary, InSitu
  • Unlike other countries in Asia, such as Vietnam, South Korea and Japan, China has not opened negotiations with the Trump administration over tariffs
• EU member states approve initial response to Trump's steel tariffs
  • A large variety of goods, from soybeans to orange juice will be hit with retaliatory tariffs
  • Retaliatory tariffs are designed to be approximately equal in value to the tariffs that the US imposed on steel and aluminum imports
• The Trump administration revises its plan to impose port fees on Chinese-owned ships
  • The revised port fee schedule sets the additional fee based on the capacity of the vessel, with reduced fees for the smaller vessels that service second-tier ports like Savannah, GA
  • Revisions come after farmers and dockhands objected strongly to the imposition of the fees, saying that restricting the ships allowed to make US port calls would needlessly hurt exports
  • Two European containership companies have stated that they are moving their orders from Chinese shipyards to Korean shipyards in an effort to avoid the fees
• How are the Trump administration's new tariffs implemented?
  • US companies must file electronic documentation with US Customs and Border Protection about the goods they're importing
  • Once the shipment arrives, customs inspectors review the paperwork, noting the time at which the goods arrived in the US
  • After the cargo has passed any random inspections, it is sent to a warehouse where it is stored for anywhere between 10 and 30 days, to give the importer time to pay its customs bill
  • Importers either pay Customs directly, or pay their freight broker, who then forwards the payment to Customs
  • Payments are spot-checked by customs officials, and occasional audits are carried out to ensure that proper payments have been made
  • The actual calculation of the tariff payments is done using specialized software that captures varying duty rates depending on
    • The location of manufacture
    • The origins of raw materials used
    • Trump's tariffs on aluminum and steel have made this more complicated because manufacturers now have to account for the specific value of aluminum and steel in their products
  • These calculations have been further complicated by the Trump administration's vacillation with regards to tariffs: tariff plans are announced, and then sometimes are rolled back before they're implemented, causing chaos at the firms whose job it is to calculate tariff payments
  • Importers who weren't normally subject to tariffs often don't have the necessary equipment to collect and submit tariff payments
  • In addition, many companies don't have the financial reserves in place to pay tariffs at the level that the Trump administration has imposed
  • Most retailers have said that they will increase prices for consumers in order to pass along the increased tariffs that they face
• The battlefield lessons North Korea has learned fighting in Ukraine
  • North Korean soliders distinguished themselves with their ideological fervor and physical endurance
  • Pressed forward even as they took heavy casualties
  • Initially, North Koreans relied on shouted orders, rather than radios (as if they were fighting in World War 2)
  • North Korean troops have sustained approximately 5,000 casualties, with approximately one third of those killed, according to US estimates, mostly sustained in the fighting to displace Ukrainian forces from their incursion into Kursk
  • Tests of North Korean troops captured by Ukrainian forces show that many have scurvy, indicating nutritional deficiencies
  • Ukrainian troops have trouble taking North Koreans prisoner because many choose death over capture
  • Russian troops are contemptuous of their North Korean allies, using racial slurs to refer to them in radio messages
  • The North Koreans, despite their initial inexperience with drones and other features of the modern battlefield, have adapted quickly
  • Initially, they just stared at drones, not comprehending that they could be a threat
  • Now they send out soldiers in small groups to act as bait, while others shoot at drones sent to attack them from sheltered positions
  • Captured documents show that North Koreans are carefully noting battlefield movements and equipment usage
  • In exchange for the troops, Russia is likely providing drone technology to North Korea
  • After initial problems with integration, North Korean troops were withdrawn for a time, before returning with a new command structure that was better integrated with their Russian counterparts
  • The North Koreans seem like the German stormtrooper battalions that almost turned the tide at the end of World War 1
• The US revokes more than 500 student visas
  • Universities are often unaware of the revocations, and thus can offer their students little support
  • Students whose visas are revoked have to leave the country and reapply
  • Processes for appeal are unclear
  • Increased uncertainty has led a growing number of faculty and students to apply to universities in Europe
• Delta Airlines abandons its financial forecasts for the year
  • Consumers are putting off travel bookings because of concerns about rising prices and general economic uncertainty
  • Government travel has plummeted as a result of DOGE-driven cost-cutting
  • Demand from affluent customers is in doubt as declining stock prices eat into their wealth
• The Trump administration threatens to cancel consulting contracts after finding consultants' cost-savings proposals to be "insulting"
  • The government accuses the consultants engaging in "financial sleight-of-hand" to hide cost increases and falsely claim savings
  • Faults them in particular for not finding savings in generic line-items like "services" or "call center support"
  • The administration could use "termination for convenience" clauses to prematurely end consulting contracts
  • In some cases, the administration might also be able to claim that promised services weren't adequately provided
  • I actually support this: one of the reasons costs have grown and service quality has declined is because the government has increasingly relied on consultants, and has paid whatever those consultants have charged, without question

2025-04-08 Tuesday

• Zelensky says that Chinese citizens fighting for Russia have been captured in Ukraine
  • It's not clear whether the Chinese men were volunteers who joined Russia's army independently or whether the Chinese government has lent covert military support to Russia
  • Officially, the only foreign military in the war is North Korea
  • The energy-infrastructure cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia shows signs of faltering, as Russia continues to launch attacks against Ukrainian towns far behind the front lines
• China braces for 104% tariffs
  • Although Trump has said that he is open to negotiating with China, the Chinese leadership has remained defiant
  • Trump announced negotiations with Japan and South Korea
  • US clothing retailers are delaying purchases
  • The EU is considering counter-tariffs on US soybeans, nuts and meat products
• China remains defiant in the face of Trump's threats to impose further tariffs
  • Says that if Trump imposes the additional 50% tariff, China will retaliate further
  • One possible route for Chinese retaliation is a forced devaluation of the yuan
  • China's financial regulators and state fund managers vowed to take measures to support the Chinese stock market
  • China appears to be staking out a position as the leader of the opposition to Trump's tariffs
• Trump agrees to tariff negotiations with Japan
  • Highlights Japan's status as the largest foreign owner of US Treasury bonds
  • Negotiations were agreed after a phone call between Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Donald Trump
  • US negotiating team will be led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
  • Japan's chief representative will the minister for economic revitalization, Ryosei Akazawa
• Chipmaker Micron Technologies announces a tariff related surcharge that will take effect on April 9
  • States that while Trump's tariffs do not apply to semiconductors, SSDs and flash storage are not exempt
  • Asian manufacturers of flash memory also state that they intend to pass along the tariff burden to customers
• Elon Musk expresses muted disagreements with Trump's tariffs
  • Posted a video of free-trade enthusiast and tariff opponent, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman
  • Said that his opinion on tariffs was more valuable than Peter Navarro's because, while Navarro had a degree from Harvard, Musk had actually built successful companies
  • Argued in favor of a zero-tariff free trade zone between the United States and European Union, something that the EU leadership also declares that it supports
  • Navarro played down Musk's opinions on tariffs, arguing that Musk's views were biased because of his ownership of Tesla and that his remit as head of DOGE does not include trade policy
  • Disagreement highlights the differences of opinion on tariffs in Trump's team; some want high tariffs to be permanent in order to restore manufacturing to the United States, while others are more open to negotiation, using the current high tariff levels as a bargaining tactic to force others to reduce their tariff barriers to American products
• Mexico finds itself in an advantageous position under Trump's tariff regime
  • Trump's new tariff regime will hit China with 34% levy on top of existing tariffs
  • Will impose a 46% tariff on Vietnam, another popular offshoring destination
  • Although Mexico is subject to 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum, and automobiles, these tariffs are lower than those imposed on Asian countries
  • Tariffs on Mexico could further be lowered, to approximately 8% on average, depending on the outcome of negotiations over Mexican actions to stop fentanyl trafficking
• Canada's economy starts to shed jobs as a result of trade war pressure
  • The Canadian jobs report indicated that 33,000 Canadians lost their jobs
  • Losses have been largely attributed to economic pressure from Trump's trade war
  • Canadian businesses have significantly increased their estimate of recession risk
  • Canada has been hit especially hard by Trump's tariffs because of its disproportionate exposure to the auto industry
  • The Canadian government is considering giving subsidy payments to automakers to keep production in Canada
  • The Canadian central bank, however, is reluctant to cut interest rates, as tariffs seem likely to fuel inflation
• Framework pauses some shipments of its laptops as a result of tariffs on components from Taiwan
  • Says that its pricing would result in selling some SKUs at a loss with the new tariffs
  • Unclear whether Framework will bring back those SKUs at higher prices, or will concentrate on selling higher-end SKUs which it can still sell at a profit
• Trump's tariffs will result in higher shrimp prices
  • More than 90% of the shrimp consumed in the US is imported
  • Most of the shrimp comes from India, Ecuador, Indonesia and Vietnam, all of whom have faced tariff increases
• Apple users rush to upgrade their phones ahead of tariffs
  • Apple is expected to introduce new phone models in September
  • However, according to outside analysts, Apple doesn't have enough inventory of its current phones to last until then
  • Although Apple is planning on sending more phones from India to the US, Apple is still heavily reliant on China for its manufacturing
  • As a result, many customers are expecting price increases in the near future, which is prodding them to upgrade their phones now
• An audit by Panamanian officials casts doubt on the Blackrock purchase of CK Hutchison's Panama port operation
  • Blackrock had struck a deal to purchase the operations license over the Panama Canal from CK Hutchison
  • However, an audit by Panamanian officials has found that CK Hutchison owes over $300 million in unpaid fees
  • Audit was conducted by the Office of the Comptroller General after the deal was announced
  • Found that Panama Ports, the CK Hutchison unit that was responsible for operating the Panama Canal, did not secure the necessary operating licenses and illegally used tax-exempt subcontractors to lower the fees that it'd have to pay the Panamanian government
• The Supreme Court rules that outside groups lack standing to contest Trump's firing of federal employees
  • Unsigned ruling in response to an emergency request
  • Overturns an injunction issued by the US District Court judge William Alsup which had ordered the government to reinstate probationary employees
  • Injunction stated that the mass layoffs did not comply with federal rules which only allow firing probationary employees for specific performance related reasons
• Zipline debuts uncrewed delivery aircraft
  • Zipline is planning on starting drone-deliveries in the Dallas area
  • Have been certified by the FAA for operation beyond line-of-site, distinguishing them from commercially available drones
  • Aircraft fly autonomously, using pitot tubes to detect bad weather and route around it
  • Zipline has two aircraft, the P2 and the P1
  • P1 is a long-range fixed wing aircraft
    • Approximately 120 miles of range
    • Drops cargo via a parachute
  • P2 is a short-ranged quadcopter-style drone
    • Maximum payload capacity is approximately 8 pounds
    • Range is approximately 10 miles
  • Both the P2 and P1 are electric
  • The P1 has been proven in Africa, where Zipline got its start delivering medical supplies to remote locations
  • Zipline deliveries will initially be through a dedicated app
  • Currently Walmart is Zipline's only partner, but Zipline plans to add additional retailers as partners soon
  • Amazon is also conducting tests of its drone delivery program in Texas and Arizona
• The Chinese Communist Party is encouraging students to go into vocational school to help the manufacturing sector
  • Chinese youth unemployment is rising as new college graduates are having trouble finding work suitable for their qualifications
  • At the same time, factory owners are having trouble hiring skilled machinists
  • This has led Chinese Communist Party officials all the way up to Xi Jinping to encourage students to go to vocational school instead of a 4-year college
  • CCP officials are trying to rebuild the pipeline of skilled labor that made China a manufacturing powerhouse
  • Are fighting a stigma that suggests that vocational schools are an inferior choice, suitable only for underachieving students

2024-04-07 Monday

• Shopify says no new hires unless AI can't do the job
  • Managers will only be able to hire new employees if they can show that an AI can't do the job
  • Employees will be assessed on their level of AI usage
  • How much of this is just a hiring freeze in disguise?
  • Shopify's customers are very exposed to Trump's tariffs; a large number of them are small Internet storefronts without the werewithal to pursue a "China+1" strategy
• Trump threatens an additional 50% duty on Chinese goods
  • Additional levy would be in response to China's retaliatory 34% tariff
  • However, Trump has left the door open to negotiations with Japan, Israel and other countries
  • The EU is moving forward with its plan to retaliate, but has dropped some politically sensitive products from its retaliatory tariffs, such as Kentucky bourbon
  • Supporters of Trump's tariffs are urging him to not back back down in the face of market turmoil and political pressure
• Apple states that it will source more iPhones from India in response to Trump's tariffs
  • Trump's tariffs impose a 56% total levy on electronic goods from China, while goods from India face a lighter 26% tariff
  • Apple makes approximately 25 million iPhones in India
  • Normally approximately 10 million of those go to the Indian domestic market
  • However, if Apple redirected all Indian production to the US, it could meet approximately half of US demand with Indian production
  • Phones are still made from Chinese parts, but because all final assembly takes place in India, Apple can claim that the parts have been substantially transformed (i.e. turned into a phone) in India and therefore India is the country of origin
  • Adjustments are a short-term stopgap as Apple seeks to win an exemption from Trump's tariffs
  • Apple has said that even with tariffs, it's cost prohibitive to do final assembly of iPhones in the US
• White House officials state that negotiating tariff reductions is not a priority for Trump
  • Although Trump has signaled a willingness to talk with foreign leaders about tariffs, this should not be taken to mean that he's willing to negotiate exceptions to his tariffs
  • State that Trump understands that, in order to have their effect of bringing manufacturing back to the US, tariffs would need to be high, and permanent
• China considers accelerating stimulus measures to counter US tariffs
  • Stimulus measures will focus on export subsidies and consumer spending
  • Some measures had been in progress even before the latest tariffs were announced
• The EU will drop bourbon from retaliatory tariffs
  • France, Italy and Ireland sought to shield their alcohol industries from the trade war, after Donald Trump threatened 200% tariffs on EU wine and spirits
  • The EU had threatened retaliatory tariffs on US alcohol in response to the US tariffs on steel and aluminum
  • Germany's economy minister criticized the move, arguing that the EU should present a united front on trade policy
  • EU nations are also at odds over how much they should subsidize industries that have been affected by tariffs
  • Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will be traveling to the US within the next few weeks in order to try to negotiate a new free trade agreement between the EU and the US
• A top Honda executive resigns after allegations of inappropriate conduct at a social event
  • Shinji Aoyama was Honda's #2 executive
  • Resigned after the Board of Directors opened an investigation into his conduct during a social gathering
  • In light of the seriousness of the allegations, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe will return 20% of monthly pay
  • Honda declined to provide details about the specifics of the allegations
• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will travel to Panama
  • A consortium of US investors, led by BlackRock have agreed to a deal with Hong Kong port operator CK Hutchison to take over the running of the Panama Canal
  • However, Chinese authorities are reviewing the deal, and may block it
  • Hegseth will be traveling to Panama to attend the Central American Security Conference, and will meet with Panama's president, José Raúl Mulino
  • US soldiers have been conducting joint exercises with their Panamanian counterparts
  • Panama's comptroller has been conducting an audit of the deal that saw CK Hutchison take over canal operations, as local lawmakers have alleged irregularities
• Trump says that he will conduct direct talks with Iran
  • Announcement came during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
  • Trump did not specify who would be on the negotiating team
  • Iranian officials continued to say on Monday that they would only be willing to host indirect talks mediated by a third party
  • Netanyahu indicated that he would like Iran to give up its stock of fissile material like Libya did
  • And the obvious Iranian retort to that is, "And look at what happened to Gaddafi!"
• Trump orders a second review of the US Steel/Nippon Steel merger
  • The merger, announced on December 18, 2023 had been blocked by the Biden administration in January over national security grounds
  • Trump has ordered a second review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US
  • New review would be de novo, not bound by the findings of the previous review conducted by CFIUS
  • The United Steelworkers union, which opposed the merger and welcomed the initial block by the Biden administration continues to be opposed
  • Second review comes in the wake of Trump announcing that he would be open to a revised deal between US Steel and Nippon Steel that whereby Nippon Steel would take a minority ownership stake in US Steel, rather than acquiring the company completely

2025-04-06 Sunday

• China's retaliation against US tariffs could mark the start of a tit-for-tat trade war
  • Although China had been cautiously optimistic about Trump at the start of his presidential term, this optimism had soured as Chinese officials found that the administration was increasingly unresponsive to their attempts to negotiate
  • However, their response to Trump's initial tariff increases on Chinese goods was cautious
  • Did not retaliate when Trump imposed his initial 10% tariffs
  • Chinese officials, however, were reportedly stunned by Trump's levying of an additional 34% tariff; combined with previous tariffs from the Trump and Biden administrations, this increases the tariff on Chinese goods to 76%
  • Beijing is reportedly waiting to see whether a unified global backlash develops against the United States
  • Although Trump has indicated that he would be willing to negotiate person-to-person with Xi Jinping, Chinese officials have indicated that it is unlikely that Xi Jinping would visit the US in the near future
  • The Chinese government operates through formal protocols and strict hierarchies, something that makes it hard to deal with the Trump administration, which expects deals to be agreed to in principle by senior officials before the details are hammered out by underlings
  • Another factor causing the Chinese government to take hard line on tariffs is their belief that, in the long run, the West, and especially the United States, is in decline and China is the rising power
  • Their belief is that these tariffs could be an accelerant in that decline
  • They might be right
  • Taking a hard line against US tariffs could turn China into a champion of anti-Americanism and allow China to gain allies
  • Chinese officials were caught off guard by Hong Kong port operator CK Hutchison's decision to sell its stake in the Panama Canal to a US consortium
  • They had been planning on using the port deal as a bargaining chip over tariffs
  • The loss of that leverage is likely to make them more intransigent over deal to prevent TikTok from shutting down
  • It's likely that TikTok will shut down in the US, in my opinion
• Taiwan proposes eliminating tariffs on US imports
  • Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te proposed a deal where Taiwan eliminates tariffs on US imports
  • Said that Taiwan will not immediately retaliate against the 32% tariff imposed on exports from Taiwan to the US by the Trump administration
  • Also says that Taiwan could encourage investment by Taiwanese companies in the US, as part of a potential trade deal
  • Taiwan is also looking at making major weapons purchases from US defense contractors
  • Notably the US tariffs exclude semiconductors, which is one of Taiwan's major export sectors
  • Basically, the Taiwanese government is offering Trump the chance to announce a series of wins exchange for tariff relief
• The recession risk for the US economy has increased dramatically
  • Tariffs will weaken household spending
  • Companies will hold off on moving production back to the US as they wait to see if foreign countries can negotiate tariff relief in the coming months
  • There will be limited support from the Federal Reserve, as the impact of tariffs could result in simultaneously higher prices and slower economic growth
• Microsoft unveils an update to Copilot that adds "memory"
  • Upgraded Copilot is able to store user preferences and incorporate them into actions
  • Microsoft also previewed a "vision" feature that allows Copilot to incorporate information from phone and webcam cameras
  • Microsoft has sought to distance itself from OpenAI in recent months, focusing on commercializing AI rather than pursuing increased performance
  • Has also widened its AI investments, investing in France's Mistral and Abu Dhabi's G42 in addition to OpenAI
  • Microsoft's profit sharing and access agreement with OpenAI runs until 2030
• Jaguar Land Rover has suspended all car imports into the US for a month
  • British automaker has suspended shipments to the US as it works out a response to a 25% tariff on autos and auto parts, scheduled to take effect in May
  • Move highlights the chaos that Trump's new tariffs are causing in automotive supply chains
  • Nissan has announced that it will stop taking new US orders for some of its Infiniti brand luxury vehicles that are made in Mexico
  • In addition, Nissan has reportedly begun the process to move production of some of its vehicles out of Japan into its factory in Smyrna, Tennessee
  • This decision could be politically sensitive at home, as the Japanese auto industry has also come under pressure due to rising wage costs
  • Toyota has announced that it will seek to reduce manufacturing costs in an attempt to keep its vehicle prices from increasing
  • Yeah, but how are they planning on reducing manufacturing costs by 25%?
  • Japanese and Korean automakers are wary of making further investments in the US, as US factories have higher costs and lower availability of labor than factories at home or in Mexico
• The UK relaxes its target to eliminate sales of new gas powered vehicles by 2030
  • Move is designed to help UK-based automakers cope with Trump's tariffs on foreign vehicles
  • Under the new rules, sales of purely gas powered vehicles will still be phased out by 2030, but automakers will still be allowed to sell hybrid vehicles until 2035
  • Small-volume manufacturers such as McLaren, Lotus, and Caterham will be exempted entirely from the ban, in order to protect British sports cars and supercars
• Starbucks slows expansion plans in India
  • India is undergoing an economic downturn, due to the hangover from a credit boom and higher inflation
  • As a result, Starbucks, which operates in India as a joint venture with Tata's consumer business, has cut its plans to expand to 1,000 outlets by 2028
  • The slowdown in India coincides with a global slowdown for Starbucks; announced a decline in same-store sales worldwide for a fourth quarter
  • Starbucks also faces increased competition from local chains in India and China, its two largest growth markets

2025-04-05 Saturday

• Trump's 10% baseline tariff increases take effect
  • This is the baseline 10% tariff that's applied to almost everyone
  • Higher country-specific tariffs will take effect on Wednesday
• Vietnam's leader, To Lam, agrees to meet with Trump with the goal of striking a deal on tariffs
  • Vietnam has been hit with a 46% tariff
  • Separately, Cambodia has also asked for a postponement of the 49% tariff that is scheduled to take effect against it, pending negotiations
• Senate Republicans advance a plan to make Trump's tax cuts permanent
  • The Senate's budget bill would allow for up to $5.3 trillion in net tax cuts, enough to extend the Trump tax cuts that were scheduled to lapse on December 31, plus Trump's plan to exclude tips and overtime pay from taxes
  • However, Senators have deferred their plan to pay for the tax cuts into a subsequent bill, that hasn't been advanced to the Senate floor
  • Republican Senators Rand Paul and Susan Collins broke with their party to vote against the bill
  • Democrats forced a series of votes to get Republicans on the record with votes supporting Trump's agenda with regards to tariffs, cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, and other issues
  • Many Republican senators are wary of cuts to Medicaid, which is relied upon by many of their constituents

2025-04-04 Friday

• Markets continue to decline as traders process Trump's tariffs
  • Stocks lost approximately $6 trillion in value as almost every company declined
  • Economic forecasters have significantly increased their probability of a recession this year
  • Companies planning for an IPO, such as Klarna and Stubhub were forced to postpone their plans to go public in order to wait out the stock market turbulence
• China retaliates with a 34% tariff on US products
  • Chinese tariffs will have a significant impact on US agricultural exports
  • In addition, it announced bans on the export of rare earth minerals to the United States
  • Added US companies to an "unreliable entities list", which bans Chinese suppliers from selling components to them
• The math behind US tariffs
  • Tariffs are based on the ratio between exports from the US to the target country and imports
  • Do not take into account the tariffs that foreign countries charge on US products
  • Do not take into account whether the US will be able to effectively substitute imports from those countries with local production
• The EU may assess a $1 billion fine against Twitter
  • The fine is due to Twitter violating the Digital Services Act, by establishing a system of paid verification
  • The EU argued that this system was deceptive, as it allowed anyone who paid to establish themselves as a "verified" account, which violated users' expectations that verified accounts were authoritative accounts representing organizations or public figures
  • The fine would be the first issued under the DSA, and the EU has an incentive to make the fine large in order to deter future violators
  • There is still a possibility that the EU and Twitter could reach a settlement whereby Twitter makes changes to its service in order to satisfy EU regulators
  • The large size of the fine is due to the EU considering Musk's privately held companies, such as SpaceX, Twitter, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and others, as being part of a single conglomerate
• Nintendo announces that it is pausing pre-orders of its new Switch 2 console as it assess the impact of tariffs
  • Originally Nintendo had planned to start taking pre-orders on April 9
  • The eventual launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged

2025-04-03 Thursday

• Wall Street suffers a rout in response to Trump's tariffs
  • S&P 500 dropped over 4%
  • NASDAQ Composite dropped almost 6%
  • Worst single day performance since March 2020
  • The wide-ranging tariffs are largely seen as being catastrophic for corporate America
  • Retailers and hardware companies, both of whom are extensively dependent on supply chains running through China, were hit especially hard
• The White House publishes a list of tariff exemptions
  • Canada and Mexico are exempted because they're subject to a different tariff regime, consisting of a flat 25% tariff on most products
  • Steel and aluminum are likewise exempt
  • Copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors and lumber are excluded, but the White House has warned that they might be subject to future tariffs
  • Energy: oil, gas, etc.
  • Other minerals not available in the US are exempt; not clear what this means, but might exclude rare earths and other minerals used to produce electronics
• Boeing and Airbus lose the duty-free exemption that allowed them to import aircraft parts without tariffs
• South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol is removed from office
  • Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on December 3rd, citing influence from unnamed "communist forces"
  • Martial law declaration was rapidly reversed after lawmakers scaled fences to enter Parliament and held a vote condemning the declaration
  • Yoon was impeached by the South Korean parliament on December 14
  • Today, in unanimous decision, the South Korean Constitutional Court agreed that President Yoon had exceeded his authority in declaring martial law and should be removed from office
  • Yoon is removed from office with immediate effect, with Prime Minister Han Duck-soo replacing him
  • Snap elections are to be held within 60 days
  • The expected frontrunner in these elections is Lee Jae-Myung, from the opposition Democratic Party

2025-04-02 Wednesday

• Trump announces a minimum of 10% tariff on all imports, with higher tariffs on most countries
  • Notable tariff levels
    • 54% aggregate tariff on China
    • 47% tariff on Vietnam
    • 27% tariff on India
    • 32% tariff on Taiwan
    • 20% tariff on the EU
  • Also announced 25% tariffs on autos and auto parts
  • The autos tariff also includes computers
  • Goods from Canada and Mexico that are compliant with the USMCA free trade agreement remain exempt
  • Dubbed the announcement "liberation day"
• Google's DeepMind drug discovery spin-off Isomorphic Labs raises $600 million
  • Isomorphic Labs is a drug-discovery startup spun out of Alphabet's AI division, DeepMind
  • Spun out in 2021, and has partnerships with Eli Lilly, Novartis, and other large pharmaceutical companies
  • Led by Demis Hassabis, who is also chief of DeepMind
  • Alphabet is still the majority shareholder
  • Total valuation of the company was not disclosed
• Trump to Review Preliminary TikTok Deal as Deadline Approaches
  • Donald Trump will be briefed on a proposal to keep TikTok operational
  • Oracle, along with several other owners, will make an offer to TikTok owner Bytedance
  • Andreesen-Horowitz is reportedly a lead investor in the group
  • Once the general structure of the deal is agreed upon, negotiations will commence to provide a valuation for the company
  • Chinese authorities have signaled that they're open to a deal, but include TikTok as part of overall negotiations on tariffs and other economic matters
• Pennsylvania developers demolish a large coal-fired powerplant to make way for a natural-gas powered datacenter campus
  • The coal-fired powerplant in Homer City, PA was once Pennsylvania's largest
  • Will be demolished to make way for a 4.5 GW gas-fired powerplant and a datacenter campus
  • Pennsylvania has significant shale gas reserves, raising interest among datacenter operators who would like to access the cheap energy that provides
  • Construction will start this year, and the powerplant is scheduled to become operational in 2027
  • The site also has the ability to draw up to 1 GW of power from the grid
  • It's unclear whether datacenter operators would be able to buy electricity directly from the new powerplant, in a "behind the grid" arrangement
• Trump's Loyal Farmers Stung by His Funding Cuts and Tariffs
  • Farmers, a core Republican constituency, are surprised and bewildered by Trump's policies
  • Cuts and funding freezes to the USDA have made it difficult for farmers to receive compensation under various agricultural aid programs
  • Tariffs make it difficult for them to import equipment
  • Farmers, as one of the country's main exporting groups, are vulnerable to retaliatory tariffs and boycotts of US products
  • Leopards eating faces
• Susan Crawford wins the election for Wisconsin's Supreme Court
  • Although the race is technically nonpartisan, Elon Musk had endorsed Crawford's opponent, Brad Schimel, and had spent over $20 million on the race
  • Crawford's victory ensures that the Wisconsin state Supreme Court retains its 4-3 liberal majority
  • Crawford won by a healthy 54% - 46% margin
  • However, Republican candidates won two special elections in Florida, albeit by a narrower than expected margin
• Kanye West's former home sells for $30 million
  • The 4,000 square foot house was designed by Ando, a prominent Japanese architect, for Richard Sachs, a wealthy investor
  • Was gutted and left in disrepair by Kanye West, who paid $57.3 million for it
  • Bo Belmont, real estate developer who uses crowdfunding to finance his purchases, bought the property for $21 million
  • Belmont started refurbishing the house, but has sold it before the repairs were totally complete
  • Final selling price hasn't been disclosed, but Belmont has stated it's between $30 million and $34 million, below his $39 million asking price
  • House has been sold to Andrew Mazella, another prominent developer, who plans to finish the restoration work and re-list the house near its original $57 million selling price
• Carmakers fined €458 million over European recycling cartel
  • The EU found that automakers colluded over whether and how much to pay recyclers for scrapping cars
  • Companies fined include Volkswagen, Renault, Stellantis, BMW, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Jaguar Land Rover, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, Opel and Volvo
  • So pretty much every automaker was included in the cartel
  • The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) was also fined for facilitating meetings around this scheme
• Stablecoin operator Circle files for IPO
  • Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that seek to maintain parity with the US dollar
  • Are a way of making dollar-denominated funds easily accessible to cryptocurrency transactions
  • Circle operates the second largest stablecoin, behind Tether
  • Has $60 billion worth of tokens in circulation, as compared with Tether's $144 billion
  • Has benefited from high interest rates, as it keeps its dollar reserves in money market funds whose returns have gone up
  • However, net income has declined recently, and expenses have increased as Circle has worked to make its cryptocurrency available on popular exchanges, such as Coinbase
  • Push for a public listing comes as cryptocurrency operators seek to take advantage of a more favorable regulatory environment under President Trump
• The UK floats a plan for a joint European supranational fund to stockpile weapons
  • The informal paper calls for a "coalition of the willing" to jointly borrow at favorable rates in order to support defense spending
  • Fund would lend money for defense production and finance the acquisition of hardware
  • The fund would be an off-balance-sheet investment vehicle that would allow governments to finance the acquisition of additional military assets without necessarily requiring large immediate expenditures
  • Countries would only be obligated to pay the fund back after they actually received the military equipment that had been purchased
  • Could also potentially finance defense exports, enabling purchasers of European weapons to do so at favorable rates
• Tesla's sales decline by 13% in the first quarter
  • Sales decline is seen as evidence of a burgeoning backlash against the brand, in response to Elon Musk's political activities
  • Although analysts had expected a sales decline, they underestimated its magnitude

2025-04-01 Tuesday

• OpenAI and Anthropic unveil the Model Context Protocol, a standardized protocol for allowing AIs to interact with external data sources
  • Royalty-free protocol was first developed by Anthropic
  • Released in November 2024
  • Last week, OpenAI added support for MCP, and Sam Altman pledged to support it in OpenAI's products
  • MCP allows AIs to query external data sources for information that they can then use during inference
  • Developers have built MCP interfaces for many popular services, such as Google Drive, Slack, Github and Postgres databases
  • This potentially allows AIs to query these sources for data and summarize them for users
  • By standardizing the format in which AIs ingest data, MCP could make it easier for companies to use multiple models or switch models, as they wouldn't have to change how their data is presented to the AI
• European nations seek to broaden the definition of defense spending in order to more easily meet American demands for increased spending on security
  • The US is pushing other NATO members to agree to a goal of spending 5% of GDP on defense, up from the current goal of 2%
  • NATO is building a consensus for a new spending target of 3.5%
  • Many countries are having trouble even hitting the 2% target
  • As a result, some are pushing for spending on civilian infrastructure that could be repurposed for military ends to count as defense spending
    • Transportation infrastructure
    • Infrastructure resiliency initiatives
  • Argue that increasing spending before production capacity is in place will just drive up prices, rather than result in additional capabilities
  • While NATO current has strict rules for what qualifies as defense spending, those rules could be relaxed if NATO members reach consensus on a new definition
  • However, European nations are wary of being seen as meeting American targets via gimmicks
• Trump signs off on Chagos Island deal between the UK and Mauritius
  • UK will be handing sovereignty over the Chagos Islands (British Indian Overseas Territory) to Mauritius
  • Will lease back the island of Diego Garcia for 99 years, with an option to extend it for another 40 years
  • The UK and US run a joint military base on Diego Garcia, which gave the US a potential veto on the deal
  • However, Trump indicated in a meeting with Keir Starmer in February that he would not oppose the deal
• The Trump administration begins layoffs at public health agencies
  • The administration defends the cuts as necessary to streamline a bloated bureaucracy
  • However, critics suggest the cuts will slow down drug development and product approvals
  • Also suggest that cuts will weaken the US's ability to respond to emerging pandemics
  • Fired staff were notified by security guards at their buildings that they'd been let go and were given a ticket with numbers to call to retrieve personal belongings that they'd left at their desks
• Zuckerberg Tries To Enlist Trump in Fight Against Meta EU Ruling
  • The EU has ruled that forcing users to choose between allowing Meta to track their data or buying a subscription was illegal
  • This move would severely undercut Meta's profitability, which is based on showing personalized
  • Zuckerberg is lobbying the Trump administration to regard this ruling as a form of protectionism and retaliate against it with tariffs
  • The Meta head has been frustrated by what he regards as growing regulations which "institutionalize censorship" and make it difficult to innovate in the EU
  • The EU continues to be an Ayn Rand villain
• American academics are beginning to emigrate in response to Trump's attacks on universities
  • US academics are considering emigrating because of
    • Restrictions on academic freedom
    • Disagreements with RFK Jr. as head of the Department of Health and Human Services
    • Immigration crackdowns, especially on student visas
    • Sudden funding freezes that have made it difficult to plan hiring and spending
  • Canadian and European institutions are working to secure additional funding in order to host American scientists who wish to go into exile
• BYD sales soar as Tesla struggles in Europe
  • BYD's vehicle sales soared by 58% in Q1 2025
  • Analysts expect Tesla's sales in Europe to drop by more than 10%
  • It's unclear whether the decline in Tesla's sales has been driven primarily by consumers choosing to wait for an updated Model Y, Tesla's bestselling vehicle, or by a backlash against Elon Musk's political activities
  • Tesla recently warned that it could be a target of retaliatory tariffs against the US
• Attorney General Pam Bondi directs federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty when trying Luigi Mangione
  • Luigi Mangione was arrested for the murder of United Health CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan
  • Has been held on both state murder charges and federal firearms charges, which are eligible for the death penalty
  • They really are intent on turning Luigi into a martyr, aren't they?
• Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams go into more detail about the Starliner mission
  • Orbital insertion burn was excellent; Atlas V performed impeccably
  • Starliner did well on the first day of testing
  • Spaceship was unexpectedly cold; both Butch and Suni ended up putting on their spacesuits for warmth so they could sleep comfortably
  • As Starliner approached the ISS, it loses two crucial thrusters, leaving it without adequate redundancy as it completes it final maneuvers
  • At this point standard procedure called for an abort and for Butch and Suni to fly home without docking
  • However, NASA mission controllers did a quick analysis and decided that it would be less risky for the astronauts to complete the docking maneuver
  • As Wilmore continued with the docking procedure, Starliner loses two more thrusters
  • Fortunately, these thrusters are along the same axis as the already failed thrusters, which meant that Wilmore still retained control, although the spaceship was more sluggish to respond
  • At this point, NASA asked Wilmore to take his hands off the controls so that they could send a reset signal to the thrusters
  • This reset signal succeeded in bringing two of the failed thrusters back online, which was fortunate, because shortly thereafter a fifth thruster failed
  • NASA then performed a second reset, which succeeded in bringing back all but one thruster, allowing the docking to proceed
  • After docking, Wilmore and Williams were both fairly certain that they would not be going home in Starliner
• Dominion Energy proposes raising prices by 14%
  • Provides electricity to customers in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina
  • Is the electricity supplier to Loudon County, which hosts the US's highest concentration of data centers
  • One of the largest utilities in the United States
  • Says that the rising cost of materials, labor and upgrades to the grid requires price increases
  • Dominion will also be asking institutional customers, such as data centers, to buy power in 14-year increments, assuring steady revenue even if those customers use less electricity than anticipated
• Alimentation Couche-Tard and 7-and-i encounter an obstacle in their planned merger
  • ACT and 7-and-i are attempting to divest stores ahead of a planned merger in order to ameliorate antitrust concerns
  • However, they are struggling to find buyers
  • Other convenience store chains are wary of taking the stores because that might trigger antitrust investigations for them
  • Most bids for the divested stores are coming from private equity firms, which the FTC frowns upon as private equity firms are not usually long-term owners
  • ACT and 7-and-i are divesting stores early in order to avoid the fate of the Kroger-Albertsons merger, which was stopped by the FTC despite Kroger and Albertsons deciding to divest some stores to C&S Wholesale Grocers, a grocery wholesaler
  • 7-and-i has already received a warning from the FTC regarding the merger with ACT; it's rare for the FTC to issue such warnings before a deal has been signed
  • However, the warning was issued by the FTC under the Biden administration; perhaps a Trump administration FTC would be more willing to countenance this deal?
• Yahoo hires new marketing chief
  • Yahoo has hired Josh Line, formerly of Paramount Global, as it seeks to revive its brand
  • Yahoo is currently owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which bought the unit, along with AOL from Verizon in 2021
  • Although Yahoo is nowhere near its dot-com bubble highs, it still draws a decent amount of traffic: approximately the same number of people visit Yahoo each month as visit Amazon
  • The surprising thing to me here is that Yahoo still exists

2025-03-31 Monday

• OpenAI plans to raise $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation
  • Funding round will be led by Softbank, which will provide 75% of the funding
  • Remainder will come from Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Altimeter Capital and Coatue Management
  • In order to secure the full funding round, OpenAI must complete its transition to a for-profit entity by the end of the year
• Marine Le Pen has been convicted of embezzling funds and banned for standing for office for five years
  • Le Pen was convicted of misappropriating EU funds for her personal political activities
  • Was given a 4 year prison sentence
  • 2 of those years are suspended, and she can serve the remainder of her sentence on parole
  • Banned from standing for office for five years
  • Although her prison sentence will only begin after all appeals have been exhausted, the ban on running for office takes effect immediately
  • Le Pen has stated that she will appeal the ruling, and seek to have the ban overturned
  • Stated that she will not resign her seat in the French parliament nor will she withdraw from politics
  • Right-wing leaders all over the world, including Donald Trump and Viktor Orban expressed support for Le Pen
• AMD closes a $4.9 billion purchase of ZT Systems
  • Deal was announced last August
  • ZT Systems is a designer of servers and other equipment for data centers
  • Privately held firm
  • ZT Systems will be folded into AMD's Data Center Solutions unit
  • AMD will be selling ZT's manufacturing business, retaining only the design team
  • Acquisition was one of AMD's largest in recent years, comparable to Nvidia's acquisition of networking firm Mellanox in 2020 for $7 billion
  • Goal is to more effectively compete with Nvidia's expertise in creating holistic solutions for AI training needs
• Chinese state media say that China, Japan and South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs
  • The three countries held an economic dialogue for the first time in 5 years
  • Japan and South Korea expanded on initiatives to import semiconductor raw materials from China
  • China, in turn, expressed interest in buying finished chips from the two countries
  • All three countries pledged to increase cooperation with regards to supply chains and export controls
  • Trade ministers met in advance of Donald Trump's major tariff announcement scheduled for April 2
  • Good job driving our allies into the arms of our enemy, President Trump
• France fines Apple €150 million for "excessive" pop-ups related to its App Tracking Transparency system
  • The French competition authority argues that Apple's App Tracking Transparency system unfairly penalizes ad-supported apps by showing the user numerous pop-ups related to data collection
  • Says that Apple's own data collection requires only a single consent, while third party apps require double consent
  • Weird that the EU, on the one hand, is saying that ad-supported tracking is bad, but, here France is saying that it's good
  • More Ayn Rand villainy from the EU
• AI-generated video startup Runway announces Gen4 model
  • One persistent criticism of AI-generated videos is that current generation AIs have difficulty maintaining consistent characters and objects across scenes
  • Runway says that its new model achieves this temporal consistency
  • Runway has a deal with movie studio Lionsgate that allows Runway to train its model on Lionsgate films in return for custom AI-generation tooling
• The UK rail regulator supports competition in the cross-channel rail market
  • Transportation companies, such as Richard Branson's Virgin Group are attempting to build their own cross-channel rail services
  • These plans were given support by a report from the British Office of Rail and Road which said that there was adequate space at the Temple Mills rail depot for other companies
  • Other potential competitors to EuroStar include Evolyn and Gemini
• Brands spend nominal sums on Twitter in order to keep Musk happy
  • Brands are allocating nominal sums towards advertising on Twitter in order to avoid being seen as boycotting the social media service
  • Comes in the wake of Musk waging legal action against brands a coordinated pull-back of advertising money from Twitter, arguing that it was anti-competitive behavior
  • Advertisers are not expecting much, if any return to their investment
  • It's a tithe to Trump and Elon
• Freight startup Flexport misses profitability deadline
  • Ryan Petersen, CEO, says that Flexport missed its profitability target date because of weaker than expected demand growth for ecommerce fulfillment services
  • Company was briefly profitable during the pandemic, when increased ecommerce buoyed the transportation and logistics sector
  • However, many transportation companies have struggled since then as freight demand has cooled and borrowing costs have increased
  • Petersen says that the new target date for profitability is the end of 2025
  • Still aims to take Flexport public eventually, but is considering a secondary tender offering in the meantime
• Minnesota police are using AI-enhanced cameras to detect distracted driving
  • The South Lake Minnetonka police department has deployed the Acusensus Heads-Up Camera Enforcement System along Highway 7
  • Uses infrared imaging to detect when a driver is looking at their phone while driving
  • Has detected 10,000 violations of Minnesota's distracted driving law, leading to 300 additional citations
  • Camera cannot send out tickets on its own
  • Forwards violations to police, who can then choose to stop the driver
  • If the driver is not stopped within a few minutes, the photographs of the driver are deleted
• The FTC expresses privacy concerns over the 23AndMe bankruptcy
  • 23AndMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 24
  • The FTC has expressed concerns about the potential sale or transfer of genetic data
  • Argues that any purchaser of 23AndMe's assets should agree to abide by 23AndMe's existing privacy policy
• SpaceX launches a private astronaut mission over the poles
  • The "Fram 2" mission is led by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Chun Wang, a Chinese-born citizen of Malta
  • Named after Fram, a ship used by polar explorers such as Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen
  • Mission will be the first crewed space mission to go over the poles in low-earth orbit
  • Is SpaceX's sixth private astronaut flight
• Donald Trump signs executive order targeting ticket scalping
  • Directs the FTC to ensure that competition laws are correctly enforced in the concert industry
  • Also directs the Treasury Department to ensure that ticket scalpers are paying all appropriate taxes
  • Comes in the wake of a lawsuit by several states' attorney generals against Live Nation and Ticketmaster for the way they've handled ticket sales

2025-03-30 Sunday

• The United States restores military aid to Ukraine after Ukraine agrees to a 30-day cease fire
  • The Trump administration says that the US will immediately lift its pause on military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after Ukraine agreed to a 30-day cease fire proposal
  • Proposal calls for an immediate 30-day cease-fire, and the beginning of negotiations on a framework of security guarantees
  • Cease-fire is contingent on Russian acceptance of the proposal
• Donald Trump expresses anger at Putin; says Ukraine peace talks going in wrong direction
  • Donald Trump has reportedly expressed anger at Putin for not agreeing to a cease-fire
  • Said that Putin's call for Zelensky to step down and for Ukraine to be ruled by an "interim government" were not helpful
  • Has said that he could impose secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil
• Isar Aerospace suffers a failure on its first rocket launch attempt
  • Spectrum rocket tipped over and crashed within a minute of lift-off from Andøya, Norway
  • The Spectrum rocket is designed to deliver 1 ton to low-earth orbit
  • ISAR has a license for up to 15 launches

2025-03-29 Saturday

• The Real Story Behind Sam Altman's Firing From OpenAI
• Corning unveils stronger glass for phone screens
  • Called Gorilla Glass Ceramic
  • In testing, the glass withstood 10 drops from 1 meter onto surfaces that resemble asphalt
  • Other aluminosilicate glass would typically fail after the first drop
  • Corning doesn't say how much better Gorilla Glass Ceramic is compared to its previous flagship offering Gorilla Glass Victus 2
  • Smartphones are increasingly using glass on both the front and the back, in order to accommodate magnetic charging and increase phone rigidity
  • No phones have yet been announced with Gorilla Glass Ceramic, but it is expected to debut soon on high-end Android phones
• Trump commutes Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson's 10 year prison sentence
  • Watson was found guilty last year of lying to investors about deals with Oprah Winfrey and Google
  • In one case, he persuaded one of his executives into impersonating a YouTube executive during a conference call with Goldman Sachs

2025-03-28 Friday

• Strong earthquake hits Myanmar
  • Thousands feared dead, damage extensive
  • Earthquake was magnitude 7.7
  • Epicenter was just west of Mandalay
  • Was felt as far away as Bangkok
  • Damages could exceed Myanmar's annual GDP
• Trump pardons Nikola founder Trevor Milton
  • Milton had been convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for misleading investors about his hydrogen truck company, Nikola
  • Sold roughly $400 million in Nikola stock before being arrested for securities fraud and wire fraud
  • Milton's lawyer, Brad Bondi, is Attorney General Pam Bondi's brother
• Efforts to weed out bots for online advertising fall short
  • Ad companies pay 3 companies to filter out bot traffic
    • DoubleVerify
    • Integral Ad Science
    • Human Security
  • A report from Adalytics, an advertising analysis firm, argues that these three companies regularly miss bot traffic
  • Often show ads even when the visitor's user agent clearly indicates that it is a bot
  • This makes me feel less bad about running an ad blocker
  • Ad companies are not only evil, they're incompetent too
• Automakers will be forced to pass on the price of Trump's tariffs to consumers
  • Most automakers have only 6-8% profit margins
  • A 25% tariff would wipe that out
  • This means that automakers will have to either raise prices or cut costs
  • Might lead to the removal of features
  • Automakers will face a choice between raising prices and attempting to ride out the tariff, or spending more money to bring supply chains into the United States
  • A 25% tariff would raise the price of new vehicles by between $5000 and $10,000
  • Stellantis, Tesla and Rivian are better positioned to withstand the tariffs, as more of their production is US-based
• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seeks to reassure US allies in Asia
  • Visit was partially overshadowed by the text messages scandal
  • Hegseth defended himself, arguing that the operation to carry out strikes against the Houthis was carried out successfully
  • Promised that additional US military assets would be deployed to Asia, including an anti-ship missile system
• US orders French companies to comply with rule prohibiting DEI programs
  • Letter says that foreign companies have to comply with US rules if they're a supplier to the US government
  • Seems fair: if the Europeans can impose the DMA and GDPR on US companies, then why can't the US impose anti-DEI regulations on European companies?
• xAI merges with Twitter
  • All stock deal valued at $45 billion, including assumption of Twitter's debt
  • Musk is doing the same thing with Twitter that he did with SolarCity: papering over a bad acquisition by merging it with one of his more successful companies
• ICE detains an international graduate student studying at the University of Minnesota
  • The University of Minnesota had no prior knowledge of the enforcement action
  • Student was detained in off-campus housing
  • Identification of the student has not been disclosed
• Judge Orders Trump Officials To Resume Work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
  • Federal judge orders the Trump administration to rehire fired workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
  • Also enjoins the Trump Administration from destroying data
  • Russell Vought, head of the CFPB had ordered a halt to all enforcement action and closed the bureau's office on 2024-02-09

2025-03-27 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • US pushes for an expansive new minerals deal with Ukraine
    • Goes beyond the tentative agreement negotiated last month
    • Would not offer Ukraine any security guarantees
    • Sets up a jointly-controlled economic fund to oversee mineral development
    • Would apply to all mineral resources, including oil and gas, across all of Ukraine's territory
    • US would retain 3 out 5 board seats on the fund, giving it an effective veto
    • Projects covered by the fund would include those carried out by the Ukrainian government, including infrastructure projects related to the exploitation of natural resources, such as roads, railways and pipelines
    • Funds generated by projects sponsored by the funds would have their revenue converted directly into foreign currency
    • US would receive royalties from the fund before Ukraine, at a 4% premium
    • Offer does not include US ownership of Ukrainian nuclear power resources
    • I wonder if the Ukrainians could accept this and then say, "Okay, so when we agreed to a deal that applies to all of our territory, we mean the parts under Russian occupation, too"
• Donald Trump announces 25% tariffs on vehicle imports
  • Will be part of a broader tariff package that will be announced on April 2
  • Auto parts that are compliant with USMCA trade rules will remain tariff free until the Commerce Department determines how to assess their non-US content and charge tariffs
  • The 25% tariff would be imposed in addition to existing levies
  • Would affect nearly half of all vehicles sold in the United States
• Donald Trump indicates that he would be willing to cut tariffs on China if China allows TikTok to be acquired by an American company
  • ByteDance, TikTok's current owner has an April 5 deadline to find a US buyer
  • Deadline was imposed under a law passed in 2024, and was initially scheduled to take effect in January
  • However Trump used a provision in the law that allowed him to grant a 90-day extension
  • Although the April 5 deadline is a provision of the law, there is a possibility that Trump could issue an executive order postponing enforcement of the law in order to allow TikTok additional time to make a deal
• CoreWeave plans to reduce the size of its IPO
  • CoreWeave is now planning on selling roughly 37.5 million shares at around $40, for a total raise of around $1.5 billion
  • Initial offering was supposed to be 49 million shares sold at between $47 and $55 (up to $2.7 billion)
  • The reduction in the IPO size is due to concerns over the long-term demand for AI datacenters
  • Plus the stock market overall has been on a rollercoaster due to Trump's tariff threats
• Even $14,000 Government Handouts Can't Get Koreans to Marry
  • South Korean local governments, churches and businesses are all offering cash incentives to couples to get married and have children
  • However, the impact of these incentives is limited
  • Appeal more to men than they do to women
• Finland's government seeks to extend a law banning migrants at the Finno-Russian border from seeking asylum
  • Finland has accused Russia of seeking to "weaponize" migration by encouraging migrants from third countries to cross Russia to seek asylum in the EU
  • Law was passed after 1,300 migrants from countries such as Syria, Yemen and Iraq sought asylum in Finland after entering from the Russian border
  • This flow stopped after Finland closed down the official border crossings in 2023
  • The Finnish non-discrimination ombudsman says that this law is in violation of EU asylum rules and international human rights rules
  • However, Interior Minister Mari Rantanen argues that such a law is necessary in order to block "instrumentalized migration"
  • In order to actually extend the law, the government needs a 75% majority in Parliament
• Brazil's Global Eggs seeks to acquire Hillandale Farms for $1 billion
  • Global Eggs is one of the largest egg producers worldwide
  • Hillandale Farms is a major American egg producer
  • Acquisition comes as egg prices are near historic highs in the wake of the avian influenza pandemic
  • Takeover will double Global Eggs' total production
  • Highlights the growing global power of Brazil's agricultural sector
• German nuclear fusion startup Marvel Fusion raises $112 million
  • Series B funding round
  • Funded by Siemens Energy, EQT, and the European Innovation Fund

2025-03-26 Wednesday

• Follow up to The Atlantic article from Monday regarding sharing confidential war plans in an unclassified Signal chat
  • Trump Administration officials stated that no confidential data had been shared
  • Included specific launch times and indicated that launches were timed to coincide with a Houthi high-value target being in a particular location
  • Secretary of Defense Hegseth posted a specific timeline of events for the airstrikes with timestamps
  • There were follow-up messages indicating specific battle-damage assessments
• Greenlanders are concerned about a visit by JD and Usha Vance
  • Visit was originally supposed to be a PR trip
  • However, with Trump and Vance increasing rhetoric around buying the island, Greenlanders are concerned about the purpose behind the trip
  • Trip has been repurposed to a tour of the US military base on Greenland
  • Greenlanders are confused as to why the US would wish to acquire the island when it already has basing rights there
  • Although a majority of Greenlanders want further autonomy from Denmark, this does not translate to a desire to be part of the United States
  • I still have no idea what Trump actually wants to do with Greenland
  • It really seems like an old-person obsession

2025-03-25 Tuesday

• Genetics testing firm 23AndMe files for bankruptcy
  • 23AndMe is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
  • CEO Anne Wojcicki is stepping down
  • 23AndMe popularized at-home genetic testing
  • Struggled to establish recurring revenue, as few people wished to take its test more than once
  • Was not able to parlay its repository of genetic data into new drugs
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued an advisory reminding users that they have the right to request that 23AndMe delete their genetic data

2025-03-24 Monday

• Top Trump Officials Debated War Plans on Unclassified Chat Shared With Journalists
  • Atlantic article
  • Chats were discussing strikes against Houthi leaders
  • Took place over the Signal encrypted messaging app
  • Chat group mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic magazine
  • The National Security Council verified the authenticity of the chat
  • Chats included sensitive information, such as the timing and precise weapons used to conduct strikes
• Mark Carney calls for Canada to have "internal free trade" by July
  • Reduce taxes on inter-provincial trade
  • Build infrastructure to move oil and critical minerals more efficiently
  • Reduce labor mobility restrictions
• ChatGPT and the Supreme Court: Two Years Later
  • Two years ago SCOTUSBlog asked ChatGPT a panel of 50 questions about the history of the Supreme Court and prominent Supreme Court decisions
  • Then, ChatGPT only got 21 out of 50 questions correct
  • Two years later, they repeated the experiment
  • ChatGPT did better, depending on the model used
    • ChatGPT 4o got 29/50 answers correct
    • 3o-mini got 36/50 answers correct
    • o1 got 45/50 answers correct
  • Although ChatGPT 4o is theoretically more sophisticated than 3o-mini, the fact that 4o wrote much longer answers to questions meant that it had more opportunities to introduce errors or hallucinations
  • However, sometimes 4o's tendency to go above and beyond the question asked worked to its advantage as it brought in additional citations and formatted its responses in a more usable manner
• OpenAI Expands COO's Role as Altman Focuses on Research and Products
  • COO Brad Lightcap will take on greater responsibilities regarding day-to-day operations
    • International expansion
    • Corporate partnerships
  • Mark Chen and Julia Villagra have been promoted to Chief Research Officer and Chief People Officer, respectively
  • Altman has folded the Chief Technical Officer role, formerly occupied by Mira Murati, into the CEO's mandate
• Force de l'Europe: How Realistic Is a French Nuclear Umbrella
  • If the US decides to withdraw its "nuclear umbrella" from Europe, relying more heavily on France's nuclear arsenal could help prevent a wave of proliferation
  • However there are several concerns about the viability of a French nuclear guarantee
    • Authority to use weapons
    • Willingness to defend allies if deterrence fails
    • Overall size of the arsenal
  • While concerns exist, they are manageable, and many of the same considerations exist with current US nuclear commitment
  • The US President currently holds the final decision-making authority over the US nuclear arsenal
  • NATO does have a nuclear consultation group, but it is unlikely that a US President would consider the decisions reached by that group to be binding
  • Similarly, while the French president retains ultimate decision-making authority over the French nuclear arsenal, it wouldn't be difficult for France to pursue a similar consultative approach as the United States
  • France's proximity and greater economic integration with Europe would give France more of an incentive to extend nuclear protection over Europe
  • However, France would likely have to create additional types of nuclear weapons and improve delivery mechanisms in order to provide a credible deterrent for other European countries
    • Improve airborne delivery mechanisms
    • Develop lower-yield nuclear weapons
  • France would have to be compensated for the additional costs entailed by these developments
  • This could take the form of direct payments or additional offsetting payments on e.g. the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) fighter jet, on which many European nations are already collaborating
  • Although European countries have begun to rearm, Europe cannot rely solely on conventional deterrence
  • There are three primary critiques concerning the viability of a French nuclear umbrella over Europe
    • France will never hand nuclear decision-making to its allies
      • This also applies to the current US nuclear umbrella
      • NATO sanctioned nuclear use requires the approval of the NATO Nuclear Planning Group
      • However, the US has never expressed a firm commitment to be bound by the outcomes of NPG deliberations
      • The ability of US allies to force the US to use nuclear weapons (e.g. to retaliate against Soviet/Russian first use) is even less than their ability to restrain the US from using its nuclear weapons
      • Only a portion of the US's weapons are subject to the nuclear sharing agreement: the US is free to do what it wants with the remainder
      • A French nuclear guarantee over Europe could use similar, if not identical, structures
      • While France has been reluctant to join the NATO nuclear planning group, a separate Europe-only nuclear planning committee could be set up, fulfilling long-held French aspirations for strategic autonomy
    • Is the French government willing to use its nuclear arsenal to defend its allies?
      • This argument has long applied to the US nuclear commitment to Europe
      • If France isn't willing to trade Paris for Tallinn, then why should the US be willing to trade Washington for Tallinn?
    • Is the French nuclear arsenal sufficiently large and flexible to provide effective deterrence?
      • Most substantive critique
      • France has 290 nuclear warheads, all of which are maintained at a high level of readiness
      • Combined with the UK, the total European nuclear arsenal is approximately equal to China's
      • The French nuclear deterrent relies exclusively on sea and air forces
        • Land and carrier-based aircraft
        • Submarine-launched ballistic missiles
      • France can develop new low-yield air-launched cruise missiles that could allow for a more flexible response in the case of nuclear escalation
      • This development could either be paid for directly by other European countries or paid for via increased offsetting investments in joint projects such as the FCAS
  • France should take the lead over the UK on a European nuclear arsenal
    • The UK is the most US-dependent state in Europe
    • UK's nuclear warhead designs and missiles are the same as that of the US and the UK relies on the US to perform maintenance on its nuclear arsenal
    • UK relies exclusively on submarine-launched missiles, which are more suited to a "last-resort" response against a state-ending attack
    • Failed missile tests have raised questions about the reliability of the UK's nuclear response
  • There are few alternatives to a French nuclear umbrella over Europe, given the recent questions about the American nuclear guarantee and the general erratic behavior of the Trump administration
• Dealing With Social-Security Is Heading From Bad To Worse
  • Social Security Administration (SSA) officials acknowledge a reduction in services that will lead to longer wait times for people calling on the phone and visiting field offices
  • The reduction is the result of staffing cuts pushed through by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
  • These staffing cuts are likely to exacerbate existing strains in the SSA's customer service systems
  • Changes are designed to push more people to complete tasks online or in person at a field office
  • However, field offices require appointments in advance; stopped taking walk-in visits during the Biden administration
  • In addition, DOGE is planning to close up to 50 of the SSA's approx. 1200 field offices
• Farmers, dockhands and shipowners object to increased port fees on Chinese ships
  • Argue that the increased fees will raise shipping prices for exporters, especially exporters of agricultural commodities
  • Say that the US does not have the shipbuilding capacity to build its own ships for foreign trade
  • The fees would result in Chinese-built ships limiting their port visits to the largest US ports, reducing work for dockhands and truckers servicing those ports

2025-03-21 Friday

• Boeing wins the contract to build the US Air Force's next generation manned fighter
  • New aircraft will be known as the F-47
  • Boeing and Lockheed were the finalists
  • The final decision on whether to proceed with the program had been left to the Trump administration by the outgoing Biden administration
  • The Air Force argues that manned fighter aircraft are still relevant when paired with unmanned systems
  • Expects the F-47 to be in service by the end of the Trump administration
  • We'll see about that
  • Will be paired with drones developed by Anduril Industries and General Atomics
  • The number of F-47s the Air Force plans to acquire hasn't been disclosed, but Air Force secretary Frank Kendall stated that the number of F-47s would exceed the number of F-22s
  • The F-22 program was curtailed in 2011 after 180 aircraft, due to rising costs and a shift to counterterror operations
  • I didn't realize we were building F-22s all the way up to 2011; I thought the program had been canceled before then

2025-03-20 Thursday

• Crypto exchange Kraken strikes a $1.5 billion deal to acquire NinjaTrader
  • NinjaTrader offers a futures trading platform for cryptocurrency
  • Kraken is a cryptocurrency exchange
  • The acquisition would allow Kraken to offer crypto futures in the United States, as it would gain NinjaTrader's registration as a Futures Commission Merchant
  • This also allows NinjaTrader greater access to UK, European and Australian markets
  • NinjaTrader is expected to continue as a standalone platform inside Kraken's suite of trading applications

2025-03-19 Wednesday

• Apple is ordered by EU regulators to open up iOS to outside developers
  • The EU issued a pair of orders under the Digital Markets Act that forces Apple to ensure that third party developers can interoperate with iOS, iPadOS and VisionOS as well as Apple's first-party software
  • If Apple is found to be out of compliance with the orders, the EU can assess fines that amount to 10% of Apple's global annual sales
• QXO acquires Beacon Roofing Supply
  • Building products distributor QXO has signed an acquisition agreement with Beacon Roofing Supply
  • Deal values Beacon at roughly $7.7 billion
  • Beacon is the largest publicly traded supplier of roofing supplies in the US and Canada
  • QXO is seeking to expand its share of the commercial building supply market as it anticipates growth in the US housing market
  • QXO is led by serial dealmaker Brad Jacobs, who previously turned XPO Logistics from a small freight-services provider into one of the largest logistics companies in North America
  • Jacobs says that the impact of Trump's tariffs on the deal will be minimal, as Beacon's products are both manufactured and sold in the US

2025-03-18 Tuesday

• The interesting home life of the blue-ringed octopus
• Twitter obtains $44 billion valuation
  • A "secondary deal" where some existing investors sold their stakes in Twitter to third parties, reportedly valued the company at $44 billion
  • This is nearly the same as Musk's original price for the company
  • The valuation is surprising given the departures of many prominent advertisers from Twitter, and a Fidelity Investments disclosure that valued the company at less than $10 billion
  • There are signs that layoffs have significantly reduced costs
  • Investor interest in Twitter has also increased because of Twitter's close association with xAI: Musk's AI company
  • Twitter is also planning on launching a payments service: X Money, a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payments system
  • However, the EBITDA figures used to generate this latest valuation have been described as "wildly adjusted"

2025-03-17 Monday

• The Federal Maritime Commission recommends assessing fees on Chinese-built ships stopping at US ports
  • Louis Sola, the chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, commented in support of the proposal by the US Trade Representative to assess million dollar fees on Chinese ships making port visits in the US
  • Says that the revenue raised from those fees should go towards subsidizing the US shipbuilding industry
  • However, experts say that the US is unlikely to become a major shipbuilding power in the near future, given that only 0.2% of the new tonnage being constructed is done so in US yards
  • Sola also said that the US could manufacture its own dock-side cranes for unloading ships
  • The presence of Chinese-built cranes in US ports has become a point of concern, amid concerns that the cranes could be controlled remotely or shut down to cause disruption in US ports in the event of a conflict with China
• Roku tests autoplaying ads before users access its home screen
  • The new ad plays before users are able to access the Roku home screen
  • Roku insists that it hasn't finalized a decision on whether to use this capability and the ad is just a test
  • Roku users have taken to the forum calling the ad "unacceptable" and "intrusive"
  • Roku has increasingly leaned on advertising to supplements its revenue, as it is the lowest-cost of the streaming hardware providers

2025-03-15 Saturday

• Why most companies shouldn't have an AI strategy

2025-03-12 Wednesday

• Intel names Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO
  • Lip-Bu Tan was formerly the CEO of Cadence Design Systems, a firm making chip design software
  • Had served on Intel's board for two years before stepping down to take the role at Cadence
  • Tan succeeds David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holtaus, who had been running Intel as interim co-CEOs in the wake of Pat Gelsinger's departure

2025-03-07 Friday

• Apple delays the rollout of AI features
  • Apple has taken steps to integrate Siri with ChatGPT
  • However, other AI features have been delayed
  • Apple has also had to remove an AI news summaries feature, after the AI summaries were found to contain errors
  • There is little evidence that nascent AI capabilities have boosted sales of the iPhone 16

2025-03-06 Thursday

• The Trump administration is planning to revoke temporary protected status from 240,000 Ukrainian refugees
  • Approximately 240,000 Ukrainians fled the war and settled in the United States
  • Were granted temporary protected status by the Biden administration
  • Rollback of temporary protected status was in the planning phases even before the Trump-Zelensky meltdown
  • The Trump administration has also revoked permission for Afghan refugees who worked with US troops
• Sam Bankman-Fried appears on Tucker Carlson's podcast
  • Gave interview from prison, where he's serving a 25 year sentence for his role in the $2 billion collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange
  • Said that the Biden administration's regulation of crypto had been a "nightmare"
  • Hopeful about Trump's lighter-touch regulation of cryptocurrencies
  • Says he spends his time in prison reading novels and playing chess
  • It seems like he's angling for a pardon
• Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick announces that the tariff exemption will be extended to all goods that meet USMCA requirements
  • Expands the previous exemption announced yesterday, which applied only to automakers
  • Exemption still only applies for one month
• Trump wants the Baseball Hall of Fame to induct Pete Rose
  • Pete Rose, who died last year, was a star baseball player, whose record for most career hits still stands
  • Was permanently banned from baseball when, as manager of the Cincinnati Reds, he was found to be betting on baseball games
  • The permanent ban made Rose ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame while he was living
  • Trump is arguing that, now that Rose has passed away, the ban no longer applies and that he should be eligible to be inducted posthumously
• Parents in tech want their kids to go into the arts
  • Many parents are concerned that AI will erode the entry-level programming jobs that have been a stepping stone into technology careers
  • Fear that tech jobs are getting flooded, much like finance or law
  • Encouraging children to pursue arts and vocational programs
• 7-and-i announced a restructuring and leadership change as it continues to try to avoid being taken over by Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • Lead outside director Stephen Dacus will take over as CEO from current CEO Ryuichi Isaka
  • Isaka had been criticized for overpaying for the Speedway gas station chain
  • 7-and-i's grocery store business will be sold to Bain Capital in order to improve 7-and-i's balance sheet and allow it refocus on its core convenience store business
  • In addition, 7-and-i will pursue share buybacks
  • Will pursue a separate stock market listing for its US subsidiary in 2026
  • Some analysts think that the divestiture of the grocery business will make 7-and-i a more attractive takeover target for Alimentation Couche-Tard, as ACT was primarily interested in the convenience store aspect of 7-and-i's operations
• Emmanuel Macron states in an address that France is open to providing extended deterrence for other European countries
  • Emphasized that the French nuclear deterrent is sovereign to France
  • However said that he is open to pursuing talks with British and German governments to provide nuclear coverage for Europe in the event that the US retreats from its nuclear commitment to Europe
  • Also announced that France would seek to increase defense spending, in a move that parallel's German efforts
• South Korean air force jets drop bombs on homes in a training mishap
  • Bombs hit several houses and a church
  • 8 500-pound bombs fell outside the training range during an exercise conducted by Korean Air Force F-16s
  • 15 people were injured, 2 seriously, by debris thrown up from the impacts
• The Trump administration drafts an executive order to shut down the Department of Education
  • Executive order instructs incoming Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take the maximum steps permitted by law to shut down the Department of Education
  • Fully unwinding the Department of Education would require a 60-vote majority in the Senate
  • Most of the programs that the Department of Education administers are codified in law, and would require congressional action to repeal
  • However, many functions can be shifted to other departments, shrinking the Department of Education
    • Move Office of Civil Rights to the Justice Department
    • Place responsibility for student loans within the Treasury Department
• Boeing's recovery at risk after fire destroys a key supplier's factory
  • Plant was operated by SPS Technologies, a subsidiary of Precision Castparts
  • Made bolts and other precision fasteners used in Boeing's 737 and 787 aircraft
  • Factory was responsible for approximately 15% of the aerospace industry's fastener supply
  • Boeing has enough parts on hand to prevent immediate disruption
  • Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg says that his recovery plan for the company anticipated possible supply chain disruptions and Boeing is working to secure additional suppliers to provide it with the necessary fasteners
• Microsoft drops commitments to CoreWeave ahead of CoreWeave's IPO
  • CoreWeave is a supplier of GPU compute to Microsoft
  • Filed for an IPO on February 27
  • Microsoft has an agreement to spend $10 billion on CoreWeave services by 2030
  • Represents 62% of CoreWeave's total revenue
  • However, Microsoft has reduced some of those commitment, citing delivery issues and missed deadlines
  • A significant reduction in Microsoft's spending on CoreWeave services could pose a risk to the company, which has a significant debt burden
• SpaceX suffers another Starship upper stage failure
  • Starship spun out of control before exploding
  • Another successful catch of the first stage

2025-03-05 Wednesday

• The United States pauses intelligence-sharing with Ukraine
  • US intelligence data had been vital in helping Ukraine find and strike Russian forces
  • Gives Ukraine warning of incoming Russian air raids
  • The US has also banned its allies from transferring US-originated intelligence to Ukraine
  • This is kind of ridiculous because gathering intelligence is cheap and sharing it is free
• The Supreme Court upholds order forcing the Trump administration to resume foreign aid payments
  • Order represents a setback to the Trump administration's goal of gutting USAID
  • States the temporary restraining order forcing the government to continue the payments was valid
  • Dismisses the government's jurisdictional concerns
• The Trump administration exempts US automakers from tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods
  • One month exemption granted for vehicles that comply with the USMCA's rules on country of origin
  • These rules require 75% of the vehicle to be manufactured in North America
  • Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (owner of Chrysler) are the primary beneficiaries
  • Also likely to benefit are Toyota and Honda, which have large production facilities in North America
• The Trump administration disbands two committees advising on economic statistics
  • The two committees that have been disbanded are the
    • Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC)
    • Bureau of Economic Analysis Advisory Committee (BEAAC)
  • FESAC had some prominent economists serving on it in the past, including Daron Acemoglu, John Taylor and Alan Krueger
  • These committees advised the government on how best to collect economic statistics and ensure transparency
  • Without them, there is concern that the data quality of economic statistics could suffer
  • Which is exactly what Trump wants: unreliable economic statistics are a standard tool of populist and authoritarian governments
  • Modi has done much the same with Indian economic statistics
  • And, of course, China has repeatedly altered the economic statistics that it publishes and the definitions used to calculate those statistics, to the point where no one takes Chinese GDP growth figures seriously
• Tariffs could force a greater shift towards digital-only video game releases
  • The discs for most video games are pressed in Mexico and imported into the US
  • The new 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico would significantly increase the price of physical discs
  • As a result video game publishers have a choice between increasing the price of games or moving to a digital-only release
  • Publishers try to maintain price parity between physical and digital versions of a game when both are released, so a tariff that affects only physical releases could prompt them to forego physical releases entirely
  • Physical releases of video games are already somewhat niche, as the trend over the past decade has been increasingly towards digital distribution
• Trump calls for ending CHIPS Act subsidies
  • The CHIPS Act is a large subsidy program for semiconductor manufacturers to set up manufacturing facilities in the United States
  • Was passed by a bipartisan majority and signed by President Biden in 2022
  • Trump argues that tariffs would have the same effect, while providing additional revenue for the government
  • However, many GOP districts, including JD Vance's home state of Ohio, have won significant grants from the CHIPS Act
  • Trump was unclear as to what he meant when he called for CHIPS Act subsidies to be ended
    • Claw back already disbursed funds
    • Renege on existing subsidy contracts
    • Stop new contracts from being issued while still honoring existing contracts
  • Companies such as TSMC and GlobalWafers have stated that they would revisit expansion plans in the US if CHIPS Act funding were revoked
• China appears to be doubling down on manufacturing-led growth
  • At the recent Politburo meeting, Xi Jinping indicated that "building a modern industrial system is more important than boosting domestic demand"
  • Highlights his priority of maximizing robustness against US sanctions over economic growth
  • This is the main indicator that China is planning to go to war over Taiwan in the medium-term
  • Xi Jinping could have issued another round of fiscal stimulus in order to boost consumer demand
  • Instead he's doubling-down on manufacturing subsidies, focusing specifically on the areas where China is still dependent on Western products
  • Has noted the economic hardship that Russia encountered after launching its war to capture Ukraine and wants to ensure that China's economy will be better prepared
• Judge denies Musk's request for an injunction to prevent OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit entity
  • Musk filed the lawsuit against OpenAI last August
  • Amended the lawsuit last November to add the antitrust complaint being ruled on here
  • The judge disagreed with Musk's claim that an immediate injunction preventing OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit entity was necessary
  • However, the court did agree to expedite the trial on those claims to this autumn

2025-03-04 Tuesday

• The case for and against creating a military cyber force
  • A US military cyber force would be a separate branch of the US military dedicated to cyberwarfare and cybersecurity
  • The US military already has a Cyber Command, but it's not a separate branch
  • Draws manpower from other branches
  • A separate cyber force would have its own recruitment criteria
  • Proponents of a cyber force state that, currently, cyber command isn't able to staff itself with the best talent because it's drawing from a pool of personnel selected by other branches, which prioritize combat skills
  • Opponents of a cyber force cite the costs
  • Would also divert skilled personnel from other services
  • The current National Defense Authorization Act contains funding for an independent study to examine the costs and benefits of creating a cyber force
  • The problem with this proposal is the same problem I have with Space Force: if a Cyber Force needs substantially different personnel than the military, it shouldn't be a part of the military
  • The report that this proposal cites states that there are no cyber functions specific to the other warfighting domains
  • So then why should the cyber force be part of the military at all?
  • We already have a "cyber force", it's called the NSA
  • We also already have a perfectly fine "space force" in the NRO; there's no need for the military to have its own
• Tracing the ownership of Russia's shadow fleet
  • Russia relies on a "shadow fleet" of tankers that use various deceptive tactics to evade sanctions on Russian oil
    • Ship-to-ship transfers at sea
    • Hiding location data by turning off AIS transponders
  • 60% of the ships in this fleet were sold to Russia by Western shipowners
  • Most of the European sellers to Russia were Greek
  • The remaining 40% of the Russian fleet comes from the rest of the world, with India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam being notable contributors
  • Most of the capacity of the shadow fleet, however, comes from former Greek tankers
  • Russia has been able to materially undercut efforts to keep a price cap on its oil by purchasing and operating its own tankers
  • As a result, Western governments should ban the sale of tankers to Russian entities
• Germany plans fiscal reforms to increase infrastructure and defense spending
  • €500 billion special fund for housing and infrastructure development
  • Constitutional amendment to exempt defense spending from the "debt brake"
  • Friedrich Merz, the new Chancellor is seeking to get these measures passed by the current Parliament, before the AfD and the Left Party gain a blocking majority n the next one
• The Chinese government is expected to release policy guidance encouraging the use of RISC-V
  • RISC-V is an open-source instruction set and chip specification
  • Is not tied to Western companies like the x86 or ARM instruction sets
  • Is geopolitically neutral - open source nature makes it immune to sanctions
• Trump and TSMC announce a $100 billion investment in US chip manufacturing
  • Expansion plan in the US includes 3 additional chip fabrication plants, 2 advanced packaging facilities, and a major research and development center
  • No timeframe given for the investments
  • Last year, TSMC agreed to bring its 2nm fabrication process to the US, with production scheduled to begin in 2028
  • TSMC has already begun producing 4nm chips in the US
  • Previous attempts by TSMC to expand US manufacturing have been plagued by delays and higher costs
  • Increasing US production would reduce supply chain risks for companies like Apple and Nvidia, who are reliant on TSMC to actually fabricate the chips they design
  • The increased investment comes even as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has paused subsidy grants approved under the CHIPS and Science Act by the Biden administration
• GOP Leaders Tell Lawmakers: No More In-Person Town Halls
  • Republican party leaders are telling representatives and senators within their party to avoid holding in-person town halls
  • Advice comes after Republican lawmakers faced hostile crowds t town-hall forums
  • Mike Johnson, House Speaker, said that in-person Q&A sessions were just generating sound bites for Democrats
  • Republicans allege that town-hall attendees are organized protestors and don't reflect their constituency as a whole
  • One could say the same thing about the Tea Party protestors, but Democrats didn't cease holding town halls because of them

2025-03-03 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Trump renews attack on Zelensky over US backing against Russia
    • Zelensky claimed in an interview that it would not be possible to end the war in the short term
    • Disagreed with Zelensky in a Truth Social post, arguing that the war could be ended quickly
    • Will have a meeting soon with top advisers to discuss canceling aid to Ukraine
  • The US has stopped financing new weapons purchases for Ukraine
    • With no new military aid, Ukraine has enough supplies to keep fighting until the middle of this year, according to experts
    • Although the EU could make up some of the shortfall, Ukraine's most sophisticated weapons systems come from the US
      • HIMARS
      • ATACMS
      • Patriot missiles
    • The last major weapons package, worth roughly $1.22 billion, was sent over in the closing days of the Biden administration, in December 2024
    • There are $3 billion in authorized funds that the administration has not allocated to Ukraine
    • But meanwhile Israel gets $3 billion in additional weapons
• Ireland moves to ease restrictions on deploying troops abroad
  • Currently the deployment of Irish troops abroad is guarded by a "triple lock"
    • UN approval
    • Government approval
    • Parliament approval
  • The proposal would modify the triple lock so that Irish troops could be deployed under EU authorization, in addition to the UN
  • This would prevent e.g. Russia from vetoing the deployment of Irish peacekeeping troops
  • This move is seen as a response to the possible loss of American support for Ukraine
• Trump indicates that 25% tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico will begin on March 4
  • Says that there's no more room to strike a bargain that would forestall tariffs in exchange for additional action taken against fentanyl trafficking
  • Trump has opened a national security investigation into Canadian softwood lumber imports, opening the way for additional tariffs to be imposed there
• Honda will shift Civic production to Indiana in response to tariffs
  • Had initially planned to produce its new Civic Hybrid model in Mexico
  • However Trump's proposed tariffs on Mexican imports caused Honda to move its planned production to the US
  • Production is scheduled to begin in May 2028
• Nvidia and Broadcom are reportedly testing Intel's 18A process
  • Tests are preliminary, and neither company has committed to contracting its manufacturing to Intel
  • Last year Intel failed quality assurance tests in a separate test with Broadcom
  • Intel has also reportedly signed agreements with Amazon and Microsoft to manufacture AI accelerators, but details on those agreements are scarce, and they are not expected to result in significant revenue in the short term
• Zachtronics announces a new game: Kaizen: A Factory Story
  • Takes place in Japan in the '80s
  • Puts the player in the place of a factory manager seeking to develop more efficient workflows for his production line
  • Sticks to familiar themes of automation and optimization
  • However, unlike previous Zachtronics games, Kaizen will offer the player additional tools to diagnose and correct mistakes
• Publishers are increasingly skipping publishing nonfiction books in paperback
  • Hardcovers have retained their margins while e-books and audiobooks have eaten into paperback sales
  • As a result, fewer hardcovers are getting reissued in paperback
  • Another factor increasing the longevity of hardcover books is the fact that online retailers don't need to worry about shelf space in the same way that bookstores do
  • Online retailers don't have to worry about shelf space, but I do
• Walgreens nears deal to go private
  • Walgreens is nearing a deal with private equity company Sycamore Partners to go private
  • Sycamore will reportedly by Walgreens for around $11.40 a share, or around $10 billion total
  • Walgreens has struggled recently after a merger with Alliance Boots, a European drug store chain
  • Walgreens also attempted to purchase Rite-Aid in 2017
  • Sycamore partners was previously known for its purchase in order to make the purchase easier to finance

2025-03-01 Saturday

• The PKK declares a cease-fire in its long-running insurgency against Turkey
  • The cease-fire comes after the PKK's jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan called for the group to disarm and disband
  • Said that the group had outlived its purpose
  • In recent years, Turkish military actions had significantly degraded the PKK's ability to carry out its insurgency
  • Turkish warplanes had bombed PKK bases in Iraq and Syria
  • Turkish leaders have said that they will consider commuting Ocalan's life sentence if the PKK disbands

2025-02-28 Friday

• White House meeting between Trump and Zelensky devolves into acrimony
  • Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky had planned to sign a mineral rights deal between the United States and Ukraine
  • However, just before the agreement was scheduled to be signed the meeting grew fractious, as Zelensky urged Trump not to trust promises made by Vladimir Putin
  • Vance, who was attending the meeting, retorted that Zelensky had been insufficiently grateful for US assistance
  • Trump ended the meeting early, without signing the agreement
  • After the meeting Trump called upon his senior officials to review US aid to Ukraine

2025-02-27 Thursday

• Ito-Kogyo pulls its buyout offer for 7-and-i after failing to secure financing
  • Ito-Kogyo had announced a $51.8 billion buyout offer for 7-and-i last November
  • Was a response to Alimentation Couche-Tard's $47 billion bid for 7-and-i
  • Ito-Kogyo is an investment firm representing the founding family of 7-and-i, and the bid was seen as an effort to keep 7-and-i in Japanese hands
  • Now that the bid has fallen through, it is expected that Alimentation Couche-Tard will be able to go through with its merger with 7-and-i

2025-02-26 Wednesday

• UN analysts believe that Iran has enriched enough uranium for 6 nuclear warheads
  • According to a confidential report, the Iranian government has sharply increased its stockpile of enriched uranium
  • The amount of uranium that Iran has enriched to a 60% level, just short of weapons grade, would give it enough fissile material for 6 nuclear warheads
  • The increase in Iran's stockpile comes even as Iran has signaled an increased willingness to negotiate with the US over the status of its nuclear program
  • US intelligence reports indicate that Iran still hasn't made a concrete decision to actually build a nuclear warhead
  • Israel has warned that it will take military action if Iran actually starts building a warhead
  • The EU has also begun a process to reimpose sanctions that were lifted after the 2015 nuclear deal

2025-02-24 Monday

• The US plans to impose additional port fees on Chinese-built ships
  • Fee would be $1 million per port call
  • Would be an additional fee of up to $1 million depending on whether the owning corporation had orders for future ships at Chinese shipyards
  • Chinese shipping companies, such as COSCO, would face a third fee of up to $1 million
  • Proposed by the office of the US trade representative
  • The proposal would also mandate that a certain percentage of US exports be moved on US-flagged vessels
  • As if the Jones Act wasn't bad enough

2025-02-23 Sunday

• Friedrich Merz is expected to become the next chancellor of Germany, after his Christian Democrats secure a lead in German elections
  • Merz's CSU/CDU came first, with 28.5% of the vote
  • The far-right AfD came second, with about 21%
  • The Free Democratic Party and the far-left Sara Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) failed to secure any seats in the incoming parliament
  • Merz will need at least one coalition partner in order to form a government, most likely the party of outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz

2025-02-14 Friday

• Bollywood music labels seek to join copyright lawsuit against OpenAI
  • Music labels seek to join lawsuit filed by ANI, an Indian news agency
  • Argue that OpenAI used sound recordings without authorization
  • OpenAI argues that Indian courts lack jurisdiction, as OpenAI is based in the US, with none of its servers in India
• Reddit announces plans to put some content behind a paywall
  • Paywalls will only apply to new types of subreddits
  • Open question as to how users will be compensated for content in paid subreddits
  • Might also monetize subreddits focused on sales and trading
• ChatGPT can now write erotica
  • Content like erotica and gore can now be generated in "appropriate contexts"
  • Allows ChatGPT to handle e.g. crime descriptions
  • Certain types of illegal content are still banned
• The DOGE website appears to be running on insecure infrastructure
  • The Department of Government Efficiency's website appears to be hosted on insecure Cloudflare Pages infrastructure
  • Allowed unauthorized users to edit the site
• AI used to design a multi-step enzyme that can digest some plastics
  • Paper link (paywalled)
  • Enzyme attacks ester bonds
  • Ester bonds are widely found in biology
  • Also found in many plastics
  • Research team used multiple AI tools chained together to model different steps in the chemical reaction
• OpenAI rejects Elon Musk's $97 bn takeover offer
  • Board says that being taken over by Musk is not in the best interests of OpenAI
  • Argues that Musk's willingness to drop the bid if OpenAI remains a nonprofit is proof that the bid wasn't made in good faith
• Blue Origin to lay off 1000 employees
  • Layoffs impact approximately 10% of Blue Origin's total workforce
  • Will be spread across all roles, including engineering
  • CEO Dave Limp says that Blue Origin is still on track to launch a lander to the moon this year
• Federal judge orders halt to Trump's cuts at the CFPB
  • CFPB must have cause to fire employees
  • Cannot transfer reserve funds back to the Federal Reserve
  • Halts Trump administration's plan to gut the CFPB by firing all its workers and transferring its funding back to the Federal Reserve
• Businesses are struggling to find small warehouses
  • The overall vacancy rate for warehouses is 6.7%
  • However, the vacancy rate for warehouses under 100,000 sq. ft. is 3.9%
  • Vacancy rate for warehouses > 100,000 sq. ft. is 10.1%
  • During the pandemic, developers focused on adding large distribution centers for e-commerce
  • Smaller warehouses were less attractive to build because customers wanted them in cities, where land was more expensive
• Indonesia seeks to acquire an aircraft carrier
  • Unclear what the carrier would be used for
  • Doesn't have the budget to run the carrier and the escorts it requires
  • Is a bad idea in general
  • But the push to acquire a carrier is coming from the President, so it might happen anyway
  • This is almost like something you'd see in a satire of defense acquisition

2025-02-13 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donald Trump announces that he will begin peace talks "immediately" with Vladimir Putin
    • Trump and Putin held a 90 minute phone call
    • Announced a summit meeting in Saudi Arabia
    • Called President Zelensky after his call with Putin; indicates that Trump may be willing to push a deal through over Ukrainian objections
    • A further indication is that Trump's emissary to Ukraine, Keith Kellogg was left out of the negotiating team going to Saudi Arabia
    • EU leaders are concerned at being cut out of the process
• Amazon's push to have all workers return to the office has run into glitches
  • Not enough seating in its offices to accommodate all workers
  • Not enough parking
  • The more flexible attitude regarding remote work that people had prior to 2020 appears to have gone as well
• Gold dealers are flying bullion from London to New York
  • Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on imports from the EU and UK have thrown the gold market into disarray
  • Most gold futures contracts are bought and sold in New York
  • However physical bullion is largely traded in London
  • Usually the prices in New York and London move in lockstep
  • However proposed tariffs have caused prices to diverge, opening an arbitrage opportunity
  • Further motivating arbitrageurs is the fact that many futures contracts in New York would be underwater if tariffs go into effect
  • As a result, many banks are buying physical bullion in London and are having it shipped to New York in order to settle contracts that are normally rolled over
  • Complicating the transfer is the fact that gold futures and physical bullion used different sized bars: gold traders sometimes have to have the gold shipped to Switzerland to have it recast
  • The rush to ship bullion out of London has caused long lines at the Bank of England, whose vaults are used to store bullion
• Friedrich Merz warns that Elon Musk will face consequences for meddling in Germany's election
  • Elon Musk has repeatedly advocated for Germans to vote for the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) party
  • Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party says that this advocacy will not go unchallenged
  • The CDU is leading in the polls for Germany's early election , and, as a result, Merz is likely to become the next Chancellor
  • Says that Musk should be investigated to see whether his advocacy for AfD could be characterized as an illegal campaign donation
  • Also says that Germany and the EU will respond to potential US tariffs
  • Response could take the form of regulations or tariffs on US services, such as those provided by US technology companies
• Arm announces Meta as a customer for its own in-house chips
  • ARM plans to launch its own CPU this year
  • Reflects a transition at ARM from designing parts of chips that it license to others to designing entire chips
  • Puts ARM in competition with some of its own customers, such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Apple
  • Production will be outsourced to a manufacturer like TSMC
  • Let's be real: it will be TSMC
    • Intel is useless
    • Samsung is backlogged
    • Global Foundries tapped out at 14 nm
    • Who else can actually manufacture a modern CPU?
  • Softbank, ARM's owner, is also acquiring Ampere, another designer of ARM-based CPUs for the server market
  • As part of this effort, Arm is recruiting executives from its customers
• The Trump administration prepares to renegotiate CHIPS Act grants
  • Sources say the White House is concerned about terms encouraging the use of unionized labor and provision of on-site child care
  • The White House is also reportedly frustrated by the fact that several recipients of CHIPS Act funding also announced significant overseas expansion plans
  • Some of this concern is well-justified: the labor, environmental and DEI provisions of the CHIPS Act are significantly slowing implementation
• What will AI do to research?
  • Economist used AI to write a paper in one hour
  • Paper was a "real" paper, and passed peer review to be accepted in a journal
  • Argues that research in its current form is dead: instead doing research, we will ask the AI to give us the current state knowledge on demand
  • This is similar to an argument I made for AI-driven programming: AI generated code doesn't need to be maintainable because it will be cheaper to have the AI rewrite it from scratch when requirements change
  • This will upend the scholarly community: a lot of work that researchers currently do is redundant
  • Will this disincentivize the creation of future knowledge? The AI can always give us an answer, but will anyone bother to check if the answer is right or wrong? And how will that data be incorporated into the AI's model?
• Corporations are looking to astrology in attempting to determine whether candidates will be good fits
  • Literally astrology in some cases
  • Also using graphology (i.e. analyses of handwriting)
  • Personality tests with poor replicability, such as Meyers-Briggs, etc
  • I wonder if the end of DEI enforcement (and the disparate-impact tests that accompanied it) will lead to an increase in this kind of woo
• NASA selects SpaceX to launch a small exoplanet observing satellite
  • Task order is through the Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch contract
  • Indicates that the satellite could be launched as part of a rideshare mission
  • Spacecraft is equipped with a small optical telescope that will observe 20 stars known to have exoplanets
  • Will attempt to see whether exoplanet atmospheres contain hydrogen or water
• Stoke Space reveals its reusable Andromeda upper stage
  • Integrates a stainless-steel heat shield into its base
  • Heat shield is integrated with the engine, allowing it to use the same regenerative cooling infrastructure that protects the engine during ignition
  • Uses numerous small ports on the outside of the upper stage rather than having a large bell nozzle
  • Allows for hot-staging without requiring an inter-stage heat shield as the thruster ports are naturally located on the outside of the first stage
  • Upper stage has been designed so that the engine can be rapidly serviced or replaced

2025-02-12 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Secretary of Defense Hegseth says that it is "not realistic" for Ukraine's 2014 borders to be restored
    • Ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine
    • Says that any durable peace must include security guarantees
    • However, these guarantees must be enforced by European troops
    • So, in other words, the guarantees won't be robust
• US and UK refuse to sign AI summit communique
  • Summit was led by French President Emmanuel Macron
  • US VP J.D. Vance warned Europe against adopting overly precautionary rules governing AI development
  • Commitment was non-binding, and US had signed previous iterations of the declaration
  • US was put off by language advocating for multilateral ism in AI development, as that could imply sharing AI technology with China
  • At the summit, European firms unveiled €200 billion in planned investments in data centers
• J.D. Vance signals possible Trump administration support for the CHIPS Act
  • Said in his speech at the AI summit that the most powerful AI chips in the world will be designed and manufactured in the United States
  • CHIPS Act contains significant subsidies for US-based chip manufacturing
• Deloitte asks consultants to US government to remove gender pronouns from e-mails
  • Deloitte USA has asked its consultants working on government contracts to remove gender pronouns from e-mail signatures
  • In addition Deloitte USA announced that it would "sunset" its diversity goals and DEI programs
• Trump signs executive order announcing loosening enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
  • The FCPA made US-based companies liable in the US for bribery carried out overseas
  • The White House alleges that the FCPA makes US companies less competitive
  • Has asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause prosecutions brought under the FCPA
  • So this means that the case against Gautam Adani is dead?

2025-02-11 Tuesday

• Trump imposes 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports
  • Tariffs do not include exemptions for US allies such as Japan, South Korea, Canada or Mexico
  • Will go into effect as of March 12
  • Unlike other tariffs, the duties on steel and aluminum are not likely to be easily negotiated down, because the steel and aluminum industries are important constituencies for Trump
  • However, the tariff is likely to hurt US manufacturing by raising the price of raw materials
• ASDA loses an "equal value" lawsuit
  • Lawsuit argued that women were receiving lower pay for "equal value" work
  • Court agreed and will force ASDA to increase pay for numerous positions
  • So the UK now has a de-facto wage board, in the form of the courts
• Tiger populations are recovering in India
  • In 2006 Indian tiger populations bottomed out at around 1,600
  • Since then the population has more than doubled, to approximate 3,600
  • India is now home to 75% of the world's tigers
  • Tigers have thrived in protected reserves
  • However, they have also managed to coexist with humans
  • Indian government officials have compensated farmers for lost livestock
  • Consensus across political parties on tiger protection, due to tigers' cultural symbolism
• CATL files for Hong Kong listing
  • World's largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries
  • Is a major supplier to several EV manufacturers, including Tesla
  • CATL is currently listed in Shenzhen
  • Listing is being underwritten by US banks, even though CATL is on a US blacklist for working with the Chinese military
  • CATL is seeking to raise additional funds from international investors to finance overseas expansion plans

2025-02-08 Saturday

• USDA freezes farmer funding for some programs and conservation contracts
  • USDA programs aiding farmers have frozen payments
  • Affected by the Trump administration's sweeping review of government spending
  • Although the administration indicated that payments to farmers would be unaffected by the review, some programs having to do with environmental protection were affected
  • Leopards eating faces
• Disney vacations are becoming increasingly unaffordable

2025-02-07 Friday

• Trump signals that he is open to a revised deal between US Steel and Nippon Steel
  • Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel had been blocked by the outgoing Biden administration
  • Deal was also initially opposed by Trump
  • However, Trump recently stated that he would be open to a revised deal whereby Nippon Steel would invest in US Steel and take a minority ownership position

2025-02-02 Sunday

• Trump announces tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China
  • Effective Tuesday 02/04, the United States will assess 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, as well as an additional 10% tariff on top of existing duties for imports from China
  • Tariffs do not have any exemptions
  • Trump has imposed the tariffs under an emergency economic authority, arguing that tariffs are justified as a means to counter illegal fentanyl imports
  • The executive order also ends the de minimis exemption which allowed packages valued under $800 to enter the US duty free
• Google ends diversity targets in hiring
  • In 2020, amid the calls for increasing diversity as a result of the George Floyd protests, Google announced a goal of having 30% of its leadership come from underrepresented groups by 2025
  • In an email sent to employees on January 29, Google rescinded that goal
  • Google also announced that it would take a broader look at its diversity and hiring programs in response to Trump's executive order banning DEI in government contracting

2025-01-30 Thursday

• UPS announces a plan to deliver fewer packages for Amazon
  • Will phase out about half of its Amazon-sourced delivery volume
  • As a result, expects a 2.3% revenue decline, to $89 billion
  • UPS says that while Amazon is its largest customer, deliveries for Amazon have a lower profit margin than deliveries for other customers

2025-01-21 Tuesday

• OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank announce a $500 billion initiative to invest in AI infrastructure in the United States
  • Venture is dubbed the "Stargate Initiative"
  • Was announced jointly at the White House by Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, Masayoshi Son, head of Softbank, and Larry Ellison, chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Oracle
  • Stargate will have a separate board of directors and CEO than OpenAI
  • Masayoshi Son will be chairman
  • Microsoft, Nvidia and Arm were named as "technology partners" for Stargate, indicating that they will be involved in building out the infrastructure for the data centers
  • Stargate's first data center will be in Texas
  • Construction on the site started last year
  • Site will be owned by Oracle and used by OpenAI

2025-01-28 Tuesday

• Starbucks earnings and same-store sales fall
  • Starbucks profit per share dropped by 23%, as the chain invested in making its cafes more welcoming for customers to linger
  • Profit and revenue beat analysts' expectations
  • Last year, sales had the steepest decline since the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Customers are frustrated with rising prices and increasing waits
  • CEO Brian Niccol has implemented some changes aimed at improving customer satisfaction, such as restoring the condiment bar and allowing free refills of regular coffee and tea
  • Improved order handling software to speed up order fulfillment will be coming later this year

2025-01-19 Sunday

• TikTok shuts down in the US
  • TikTok shut down in response to a law that would have forced its owner, ByteDance, to divest its ownership of the social media company
  • Law is the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act
  • However, Donald Trump has indicated that he would give TikTok a 90-day reprieve after his inauguration on Monday 2025-01-20

2025-01-10 Friday

• Constellation Energy agrees to acquire Calpine for $27 billion dollars
  • Constellation Energy and Calpine are the two largest electricity generators in the US
  • Constellation specializes in nuclear power plants, while Calpine's generators are mostly natural gas and geothermal
  • Calpine operates primarily in Texas and California, two markets where Constellation was seeking to increase its presence
  • The deal could kick off a broader wave of consolidation in the energy industry

2025-01-09 Thursday

• Americans are getting tired of tipping
  • Restaurant tips are at the lowest they've been in six years
  • The proportion of restaurant patrons who tipped 20% or more has declined from 56% in 2021 to 38%
  • Decline in tipping is driven by increasing menu prices, and added service charges
  • The omnipresence of tip prompts on order tablets in places that normally didn't ask for tips, such as convenience stores and fast food, has led to people cutting back on tipping in general
• Fintech startup Stenn collapses
  • Stenn was a financial startup focusing on the business of trade financing
  • Business collapsed after HSBC, one of its banking partners, discovered falsifications in Stenn's customer lists
  • Stenn was one of a new breed of non-bank startups who sought to securitize traditional banking activities, like trade finance
  • Stenn's collapse raises the concerns about the level of due-diligence conducted by Stenn's other partners
  • Stenn's founder, Greg Karpovsky, had previously founded another trade finance firm in Russia, Eurocommerz Holding Ltd, which had also collapsed under mysterious circumstances and allegations of fraud
  • The collapses of Stenn and Greensill capital have led some in the industry to question whether greater regulatory oversight is necessary

2025-01-03 Friday

• The Biden administration blocks Nippon Steel's takeover of US Steel
  • The outgoing administration issued an order instructing the two companies to abandon their merger plans within 30 days
  • The order is justified on national security grounds: President Biden stated that there was credible evidence that Nippon Steel would take actions that would impair the national security of the United States
  • Incoming President Trump also opposes the deal
  • Previous coverage from September 4

2024-12-29 Sunday

• A new paper challenges both optimism and pessimism regarding the impact of AI
  • A new paper by Aidan Toner-Rogers, a doctoral student at MIT examines the effect of AI on research at a materials science lab
  • Materials science research has historically been a time consuming process of trial and error, as scientists manufacture and test different materials in order to find one with desirable properties
  • Aidan Toner-Rogers paper found that, after scientists at the lab were given access to an AI tool to help them, they discovered 44% more novel materials, increased patent filings by 39% and had 17% more product prototypes
  • However, the paper also found that the gains from AI were distributed unequally
  • Experienced scientists, who had a better track record of finding viable materials, were better able to filter the AI's output than scientists with a worse track record
  • Paper has won praise from Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, two prominent labor economists who have studied the impact of AI on the workforce

2024-12-20 Friday

• Donald Trump seeks to raise NATO's defense spending target to 5% of GDP
  • Trump says that he will maintain aid to Ukraine while he negotiates an end to hostilities
  • Some sources close to Trump say that he is willing to settle for an interim goal of 3.5%
  • The administration plans to link favorable trade policies with increased defense spending
  • However, Trump remains adamant that Ukraine not be given an invitation to join NATO

2024-12-19 Thursday

• President Zelensky states that US security guarantees are necessary for the long-term protection of Ukraine
  • President Zelensky has been pushing US and EU leaders to commit to including Ukraine in NATO, something the incoming Trump administration opposes
  • Announcement came in the wake of talks with President Macron of France
  • Macron had proposed committing French troops to enforcing a future peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, but that was met with skepticism from other EU leaders
  • Officials state that security guarantees from EU nations are not credible without a commitment from the US to support the EU if Russia decides to violate the terms of a future settlement
• Perplexity closes its funding round at a $9 billion valuation
  • Had begun talking about raising funding at an $8 billion valuation in October
  • Funding round closed with a $9 billion valuation
  • Round was led by Institutional Venture Partners
  • Previous investors into Perplexity include the Softbank Vision Fund 2, Nvidia, as well as prominent individuals such as Jeff Bezos, Andrej Karpaty and Yann LeCun

2024-12-18 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • US officials state that North Korean forces in Russia have suffered several hundred casualties
• Russia withdraws military systems from Syria to Libya
  • Russia has flown its most sophisticated systems, such as S-300 and S-400 air defense radars, from Syria to Libya
  • Is significantly drawing down its presence in Syria after the fall of Bashar Assad, to whom the Russian military had provided significant support
  • Is negotiating with Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar on docking rights for Russian warships at either Benghazi or Tobruk
  • However, Libya isn't as well positioned as Syria was to support Russian interests in the Middle East and Africa: Russian cargo planes have a lower payload capacity when traveling the greater distance to Libya
• The US considers banning TP-Link home internet routers on national security grounds
  • A report published by Microsoft revealed that a Chinese hacking group maintained a large network of compromised routers, many of them TP-Link devices
  • This network was made available to a number of other Chinese groups to allow them to launch cyberattacks against US targets
  • TP-Link doesn't engage with security researchers and doesn't address security vulnerabilities in its routers in a timely manner, leading to suspicions that it willfully neglecting security
  • TP-Link has gained market share by selling its devices at very low prices, sometimes less than half of what competitors charge
  • This has led officials at the Justice department to investigate whether TP-Link is in violation of anti-dumping provisions that prohibit selling devices for less than what they cost to manufacture
  • Taiwan has already banned TP-Link routers from its government and educational facilities
• The Milan Olympic committee designates Lake Placid as the backup site for sliding sports
  • There are doubts about whether the bobsled, luge and skeleton tracks will be completed on time for the 2026 winter Olympics in Milano-Cortina
  • As a result, the organizers have designated Lake Placid, which hosted the 1980 Winter Olympics as the "plan B" site for sliding sports
  • The organizers were hoping to refurbish the track used for the 1956 winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo
  • However that track had fallen into disrepair and no contractors stepped forward with bids until early this year 2024
• Chinese manufacturer CATL states that it has co-developed 10 new EV models with swappable batteries
  • The first of these models will be launched this month
  • CATL calls its swappable battery module the "choco-swap"
  • Batteries will come in one of two standard sizes to facilitate swapping
  • Swap can be completed in one minute, as compared to 15 minutes or more required for recharging
  • Will build a network of 1000 battery swapping stations, and will work with partners to build more
  • The subscription fee for the battery swapping network will start at 361 yuan ($51) per month
  • CATL chairman Robin Zheng said that the network of battery swap stations could also serve a secondary purpose as grid-scale energy storage, helping stabilize the grid against fluctuations from green energy sources

2024-12-17 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • North of Velyka Novosilka, Russian forces manage to capture Novyi Komar, which they'd first attacked on December 4
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian drone forces strike (alleged) North Korean infantry near Nyadenov
• Honda and Nissan to begin merger talks
  • Nissan had sought outside investment as it wound down its partnership with Renault
  • Honda and Nissan are exploring joining forces in order to invest more in EVs and compete more effectively against Chinese automakers
  • The joint company might also merge with Mitsubishi Motors, as Honda is the largest shareholder of Mitsubishi, owning 24% of the company
• Space One's Kairos rocket fails shortly after liftoff
  • This was Space One's second attempt to launch Kairos
  • Flight lasted approximately ten minutes, with the rocket appearing to lose stability shortly before termination
  • Kairos' debut flight 9 months ago ended in an explosion approximately five seconds after launch

2024-11-21 Thursday - 2024-12-15 Sunday

• I was on vacation, so I had neither the ability nor the inclination to check my news feeds every day
• So, of course a bunch of stuff happened

Ukraine

• Donetsk region
  • Velyka Novosilka
    • Russian forces advance to Rozdolne, putting Velyka Novosilka at greater risk
    • Russian forces launch a major assault towards Velyka Novosilka itself
    • Russian forces reach the outskirts of Velyka Novosilka
    • Russian forces capture Novodarivka, west of Rivnopil, which they captured on November 20
    • Ukrainian forces withdraw from Blahodatne, a town south of Velyka Novosilka which they'd recaptured during the 2023 summer offensive
    • Russian forces attack Novyi Komar, but are pushed back by a Ukrainian counterattack
  • Southern Donetsk
    • Russian forces advance to Yelyzavetivka
      • Emil Kastehelmi wrote about this on November 13
    • Russian forces advance past Yelyzavetivka to Illinka
    • Russian forces enter Trudove, which Russian forces approached on November 20
    • Russian forces capture Romanivka, and advance to Uspenivka
    • Russian forces approach Pushkine
    • Russian forces are spotted in Sukhi Yali
      • This indicates that Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from most of their positions south of Kurakhove
  • Pokrovsk area
    • Russian forces advance to Sontsivka
    • Russian forces capture Daljne
    • Russian forces advance to Zhovte, placing yet more pressure on Pokrovsk
      • I guess this means that Petrivka and Pustynka, which the Russians began attacking on November 12 have been captured
    • Russian forces advance to the outskirts of Dachenske
    • Russian forces advance into Novotroitske
    • Russian forces attack Shevchenko
  • Siversk area
    • Russian forces attack Vyimka and take heavy losses
• Kupyansk region
  • Russian forces launch a major attack near Stelmakhivka, pushing Ukrainian forces back by several kilometers
  • Russian forces advance on Yampolivka
    • Yampolivka had been liberated by Ukraine on 2022-10-05
  • Russian forces make a temporary advance across the Oskil river at Novomlynsk, but are pushed back by Ukrainian forces
  • Ukrainian artillery destroys a Russian armored column near Kolisnykivka
    • Highlights the fact that drones will never replace artillery: two hits with artillery shells accomplished what it would have taken dozens of drones to do
• Kursk region
  • Fighting continues in Darino
  • Ukraine hits Khalino Airfield in Kursk with an ATACMS, exercising the newfound authority to strike inside Russia granted by the Biden administration
  • Russian forces assault Pogrebki, where fighting has been ongoing since November 14
  • Lots of fighting near Zelenyi Shylakh
  • Russian forces recapture Plekhovo
• Kharkiv region
  • Fighting is ongoing in Vovchansk, with the Russians slowly getting pushed back by the Ukrainians
• Zaporizhzhia region
  • Russian forces launch an assault near Novoandriivka
• Ukraine hits an oil depot in Kaluga, south of Moscow
• Ukraine hits either a depot or an air defense system near Simferopol airport, causing a large explosion
• Ukraine hits an oil refinery in Bryansk
• Ukraine hits Taganrog air base in Russia with ATACMS
• More drone vs. drone combat as a Ukrainian FPV drone takes out a Russian fiber-optic drone
• Ukrainian air defense forces defend the Burshtyn power plant against a Russian cruise missile attack
• Ukraine hits an oil refinery near Oryol, Russia
• Two Russian oil tankers sink in bad weather in the Kerch Strait, spilling a large amount of crude oil
• Ukrainian forces destroy a Russian fuel train near Oleksiivka, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast
  • Coordinated multi-stage operation
  • Ukrainian special forces sabotaged the tracks, causing the train to derail
  • This allowed Ukrainian HIMARS units to strike the train, destroying all the fuel cars
• A Ukrainian UAV hits the OMON barracks in Grozny, Chechnya
• Pro-Ukraine partisans blow up a rail line in Ulyanovsk, Russia

Syria

• Bashar Assad flees Syria, as rebel forces capture Damascus
  • Rebel forces had mounted a major offensive that had captured Syria's other major cities in the past week
    • Offensive started on November 28
    • Retook Aleppo on November 30
    • Then retook Hama on December 5
    • Finally captured Damascus on December 8, ending Assad's rule after
  • Assad fled to exile in Moscow
  • Rebels are lead by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
    • Had ties to Al Qaeda
    • Is designated a terrorist entity by the US State Department
  • This isn't as surprising as it seems
    • Iran and Hezbollah, which had supplied most of the effective ground troops, are busy recovering from Israel's attacks
    • Russian forces, which constituted the regime's air power, are busy in Ukraine
    • It just took some time for the rebels to realize that there was no cavalry waiting in the wings to rescue Assad this time
• After the collapse of the Syrian regime, outside powers rushed to secure their interests
  • US launched airstrikes against Islamic State forces
  • Turkey launched attacks on Kurdish forces
  • Israel attacked Syrian chemical weapons depots to ensure that they wouldn't fall into the hands of anti-Israeli terrorists
  • Israeli forces also moved into the Golan Heights to reinforce the buffer zone that Israel captured from Syria in 1967

South Korea

• The South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, declares martial law
  • First time since 1980 when martial law has been declared
  • President Yoon cited unnamed "pro-North Korean" forces
  • Accused the opposition Democratic Party, which has a parliamentary majority, of undermining his government by rejecting his budget requests
  • The South Korean Won dropped to a two-year low against the US dollar
  • Lee Jae-myung, leader of the Democratic Party, has called on citizens to protest the declaration in front of the South Korean parliament
  • After protests and a near-unanimous vote by lawmakers who defied army troops to enter the Parliament building, Yoon Suk Yeol reversed his martial law declaration
• The South Korean parliament votes to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol
  • The national assembly voted to impeach him for his declaration of martial law
  • Vote passed by a margin of 204-85
  • Yoon will be suspended from his duties and will be put on trial by the Constitutional Court

France

• French lawmakers pass a no-confidence motion against Michel Barnier, the Prime Minister appointed by President Emmanuel Macron
  • Vote was the result of an ad-hoc alliance between a coalition of French left-wing parties and Marine Le Pen's right-wing National Rally
  • Macron's government was unstable after he called a snap election, which delivered a closely split Parliament
  • Macron is expected to try to install a new Prime Minister quickly, but will have to compromise with Parliament as his party, La République en Marche, holds only 99 out of 577 seats
• Emmanuel Macron appoints Francois Bayrou as the new Prime Minister of France
  • Bayrou faces an immediate challenge in passing a budget
  • France faces a fiscal deficit of 6% of GDP, but cuts are unpopular with both the right and the left
• Microsoft faces antitrust investigation
  • The FTC will investigate whether Microsoft's software licensing deals unfairly favored its Azure cloud computing unit
  • Will be one of the last investigations authorized by Lina Khan, ahead of her likely departure in January
• Northvolt files for bankruptcy protection
  • Previous coverage from November 18
  • Northvolt was in financial trouble as it faced competition from Chinese battery manufacturers
  • Faced financial trouble after BMW pulled $2 billion contract
  • Had quality control issues as it tried to scale up battery production at its factory in Skellefteå
• China's defense minister is placed under investigation for corruption
• China's high speed rail network may be a white elephant
  • Xi Jinping expanded China's high speed rail system from 10,000 miles of track to 30,000 miles
  • Plans to add a further 15,000 miles of track by 2035
  • In order to do this, the Chinese government has issued significant amounts of debt
  • However, many of the lines and stations see sparse traffic
  • Example: Fushun Station has seating for over a thousand, but during a spot-check there were barely 20 travelers
  • Large sections of the high speed rail system may never become economically viable, especially as China's population ages and shrinks
  • It is politically unpopular to increase ticket prices, which acts as a further constraint on economic viability
  • Xi Jinping's governing philosophy values infrastructure spending over all else
  • However rail investments divert spending away from a social safety net
  • This prompts people to save more, hurting China's overall growth rate
  • Also diverts spending from research and development into advanced technologies
  • High speed rail lines are also passenger-only, which means that freight rail languishes
  • One further consequence of China's high speed rail buildout is that the Chinese countryside might completely implode
  • This is what happened in Japan
  • Japan's build-out of the Shinkansen system in the 1980s enhanced connectivity for many outlying villages
  • As a consequence, it became easier than ever for residents, especially younger residents, to move to cities, esp. Tokyo
  • A similar effect might occur where cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu "drain" large parts of their hinterlands of young workers
• Nissan seeks an "anchor investor" as Renault winds down its partnership
  • Renault still has a significant shareholding in Nissan, but is slowly selling its stake
  • Honda is rumored to be interested in replacing Renault as Nissan's backer, but the Nissan board has stated that this would be pursued only as a "last resort"
  • Nissan has already formed an electric vehicle partnership with Honda
  • Unlike Stellantis, which was a formed through a formal merger between Chrysler and the PSA Group, Nissan and Renault always remained separate companies, but had a partnership and had a cross share-holding agreement
• BYD, China's largest manufacturer of electric vehicles, is also one of the leading assemblers of iPads
  • Working with BYD is a way for Apple to diversify its supplier base beyond Foxconn
  • BYD also works with Samsung to supply components for its phones
  • Highlights the overlap between electric car manufacturing and smartphone manufacturing
• China's exports are raising tensions in the Global South as well
  • China is attempting to increase its exports to the global south to offset tariffs imposed by the US and EU
  • However, those countries are also pushing back on Chinese exports in order to protect their own nascent manufacturing sectors
  • Brazil has been a fast mover at imposing new tariffs on Chinese imports
  • Indonesia has banned Temu, citing it as a vector for "predatory pricing"
  • The leaders of Bangladesh and South Africa have visited Xi Jinping personally to try to persuade him to allow more imports to redress the trade balance with China
  • Many countries expected China to give up on low-end manufacturing as its economy developed, but that hasn't proven to be the case
    • This is further proof that losing manufacturing is a choice: it is not an inevitable outcome that arises as economies mature
  • Complicating these negotiations is the fact that China has extended many loans to developing countries for infrastructure projects
  • China is also a significant importer of raw materials and commodities from the Global South
  • China understands that it needs a vast and deep manufacturing sector in order to support major conventional warfare
  • More important than the machinery is the people: unlike software manufacturing requires significant tacit knowledge that is difficult to document
  • Therefore the Chinese government is subsidizing manufacturing in order to maintain that base of tacit knowledge
• A German company has been fined $14.5 million after being caught attempting to smuggle an entire disassembled chemical plant to Iran
  • Aiotec is a German chemical company that was founded by an Iranian, Mehdi Hassan Nejad, who completed a PhD in Berlin
  • Aiotec tricked its business partners into letting it dismantle an Australian polypropylene production facility and ship it to Iran
  • The plant was owned by an unnamed Australian company, and was scheduled to be decommissioned
  • The Australian company sold the plant to Aiotec, via an American intermediary
  • Aiotec declared that it would set up the plant as a joint venture with a Turkish company in the Turkish city of Van
  • However, the US Treasury's Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC), alleges that the actual destination of the plant was Petro-Iranian Downstream Industries Development
  • Petro-Iranian Downstream Industries Development is a sanctioned entity due to its ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
  • Aiotec resorted to increasingly elaborate lies as the American intermediary grew suspicious about the ultimate buyer
  • The repeated warnings that Aiotec received from its American partner were considered an aggravating factor by OFAC
  • The fine should be higher
  • For a large corporation, a $14.5 million fine is a loss that can be absorbed
• The Russian labor market is hurting too
  • One of the reasons that Putin hasn't called for a second wave of mobilization is that a mass withdrawal of young men from the labor market would spike inflation
  • The central bank's interest rate is 21%, which is slowly strangling the non-defense economy
  • Import substitution hasn't worked
• Russian forces are using electric scooters
• The EU cracks down on Shein and Temu
  • The EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, has proposed new per-package taxes and fees on imports from China
  • Is designed to restrict the flow of packages directly from Chinese retailers like Shein and Temu to consumers in the EU
  • The EU is citing safety concerns caused by counterfeit goods
• The CEO of United Health is assassinated in New York
  • Suspect shot Brian Thompson, who was in New York to attend United Health's annual investor day
  • Was wearing a mask and gloves and rode away on an e-bike and was last seen in Central Park
  • Suspect was proficient with firearms: gun jammed during the attack, but he cleared the jam and kept shooting
  • Suspect is still at large, but police state that he is probably not a threat to others
• Bitcoin hits $100,000
  • Price has increased as investors anticipate that the incoming Trump administration will have fewer regulations on cryptocurrency
  • Latest surge occurred after Trump picked Paul Atkins to replace Gary Gensler as head of the SEC
  • Atkins has a much more crypto-friendly reputation
  • Bitcoin investors have also been heartened by the launch of Bitcoin ETFs
• French government collapses after no-confidence vote
  • A no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier succeeded after Marine LePen's National Rally joined forces with a coalition of left-wing parties, France Unbowed
  • Barnier was ousted just three months into his term
  • The immediate cause of the no-confidence vote was a budget that would have resulted in higher electricity prices, reduced drug reimbursements, and delayed cost-of-living increases to pensions
• NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte states that Russia is aiding North Korea's nuclear program
  • Assistance is being provided in return for North Korea sending troops to aid Russia's counterattack against Ukraine's incursion into Kursk
  • The accusation puts additional pressure on South Korea to send lethal aid to Ukraine
• Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger steps down
  • Gelsinger was named CEO of Intel in February of 2021
  • Gelsinger was brought in to turn around Intel, which had lost its lead in CPU design to AMD and its lead in chip manufacturing to TSMC
  • Strategy was to double-down on manufacturing by opening Intel's foundry business to outside customers
  • However, Intel struggled in this
  • Recently, Gelsinger announced that Intel would be conducting 15,000 layoffs and suspending its dividend in an effort to cut costs in order to build up the capital necessary to expand its manufacturing business
  • Gelsinger will be succeeded by David Zinsner formerly its CFO, and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the former head of its client computing group as interim co-CEOs while the board conducts a search for a permanent replacement
• OpenAI seeks to drop "AGI" clause to unlock additional investment
  • Under OpenAI's current governing charter, products deemed to be artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be exempt from pre-existing licensing agreements
  • AGI is defined as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work"
  • OpenAI is considering removing that stipulation as it seeks to reorganize itself into a for-profit entity in order to make itself more attractive to outside investors
• Lawmakers introduce a bipartisan bill to force insurers to divest pharmacy benefit management businesses
• Azoria Partners announces an "anti-woke" exchange-traded fund
  • Actively managed fund will exclude S&P 500 companies that have diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI) policies
  • Will seek to bias investment away from those companies unless they scrap their DEI policies
  • The ETF will launch under the ticker symbol "SPXM", combining the ticker symbol for the S&P 500 (SPX) with "Meritocracy"
• Romania annuls presidential election after allegations of Russian interference
  • The Romanian Supreme Court annulled the election after a TikTok campaign, allegedly orchestrated by Russia, enabled a politician with pro-Russian views to take the lead
  • The front-runner, Calin Georgescu, rose to prominence last month and won the first round of voting
  • Had expressed nostalgia for Romania's fascist past and expressed "Romania first" nationalism and skepticism of NATO
  • Romanian intelligence services declassified several reports that purported to show that Georgescu was aided by a Russian influence campaign
  • Had been polling at around 5% of the vote before a coordinated influence campaign on TikTok raised his profile
  • The cancellation of the election offers Russia a win-win scenario
  • Either
    • A politician with pro-Russian views is elected
    • Romania is forced to publicly doubt the integrity of its elections
  • Alexander Dugin, a pro-Kremlin ideologue, praised Georgescu as a candidate friendly to Russia and said that the annulment was undemocratic, calling Romania a dictatorship
  • Russia has a history of supporting radical candidates, both left-wing and right, who support isolationism and are hostile to alliances

2024-11-20 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces hit a Russian bunker in Marino with several Storm Shadow missiles
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Rivnopil
      • This is worrying because Rivnopil is to the west of Velyka Novosilka
      • The last news out of this area was on October 25, when Russian forces advanced to the east of Velyka Novosilka at Shakhtarske
    • Russian forces attempt a water crossing near Kurakhove, but are stopped by Ukrainian drones
    • Fighting continues near Trudove
    • Fighting continues in eastern Kurakhove
      • It looks like Kurakhove will be under Russian control pretty soon, especially given the Russian advances on the north side of the reservoir, in Illinka and Berestky
  • Kharkiv region
    • Ukrainian forces launch a large attack near Lukyantsi, with unclear success
    • Kharkiv is interesting, because the Ukrainians have had some success in pushing the Russians back, but it appears to be just as slow going for them as it is for the Russians on Donetsk
  • The Biden administration moves to forgive $4.7 billion worth of loans to Ukraine
    • A funding bill passed in April included $9.4 billion worth of forgivable loans
    • The loan forgiveness can still be blocked by Congress
    • Sen. Rand Paul has put forward a motion of disapproval against the loan forgiveness
  • A profile of Kim Yong Bok, the general leading North Korean troops in Russia
    • Little is known about Gen. Kim
    • Is officially the leader of North Korea's special forces units
    • Has been seen close to Kim Jong Un in official photographs
    • North Korean troops have reportedly been issued with Russian uniforms and fake IDs to try to obscure their identities in Russia
    • Will likely be used to try to expel Ukrainians from their incursion into Kursk
    • The deployment of such an important figure in the North Korean government is a signal from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin that North Korea takes its commitments seriously under their mutual defense pact
• European officials investigate a Chinese bulk carrier in relation with the severing of underwater cables in the Baltic Sea
  • Investigators are examining the movements of the Yi Peng 3
  • The Yi Peng 3 has been stopped by the Danish Navy
  • This ship passed close to both a Swedish-Lithuanian cable and a Finnish-German cable when each was cut
  • German officials have expressed confidence that the cause of the cable breaks was deliberate sabotage
  • However, Finnish officials are expressing caution and are warning against a rush to judgment
  • The Swedish state prosecutor has launched an investigation into the suspected sabotage
• The Department of Justice seeks to force Google to divest Chrome and possibly Android
  • On August 5, Google was found guilty of abusing its dominance in online search to keep itself as the default search engine and Chrome as the default browser on phones and other devices
  • As a remedy for Google's anticompetitive behavior, the Justice Department has proposed that Google be forced to divest Chrome and be prevented from re-entering the browser market for 5 years
  • Google would also have to end payments to Apple and other device manufacturers to be the default search engine
  • If these remedies failed to restore competition in search, the Justice Department also proposes that Google be forced to sell Android
  • I get why the Justice Department is seeking to have Google end its payments to device manufacturers to be the default search engine
  • I don't understand why they're trying to get Google to sell Chrome and Android
  • The antitrust allegations were that Google was securing its dominance in online search by paying device manufacturers and browser vendors, such as Firefox, to make Google the default search engine, unfairly earning a privileged position
  • How does forcing Google to sell Chrome help with that?
• SpaceX launches another Starship test flight
  • SpaceX flight controllers abandoned another attempt to catch the booster with the "chopstick" arms on the launch tower
  • Instead the booster splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico
  • Did demonstrate a re-light of the Starship upper stage engines
• xAI raises funds at a $50 billion valuation
  • Raised $5 billion worth of funds from several VC funds
    • Qatar's sovereign wealth fund
    • Valor Equity Partners
    • Andreesen-Horowitz
    • Sequoia Capital
  • Was previously negotiating with investors to raise funds at a $40 billion valuation
  • Reports that its revenue has reached $100 million on an annualized basis
  • xAI's Grok is competing with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude to capture chatbot users
• nVidia posts strong earnings as the AI boom continues
  • nVidia cites continued high demand for its latest AI processors, codenamed "Blackwell"
  • Although revenue growth is still strong, in percentage terms it has declined because nVidia has already grown so much
  • Trade restrictions that prohibit nVidia from selling its most advanced chips to China remain a persistent headwind
• Crypto entrepreneur Barry Silbert is launching a "decentralized AI" on a blockchain
  • Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group had been a major investor in crypto
  • Was hit hard by the collapse in crypto prices in 2022, when his crypto lending business, Genesis Global went bankrupt
  • Now Silbert is launching Yuma, a "decentralized artificial intelligence company"
  • Company will provide capital for entrepreneurs to build on the Bittensor blockchain
  • I don't know what's AI specific about Bittensor
  • From reading its documentation, it looks like a cheap imitation of Ethereum
• Archegos founder Bill Hwang sentenced to 18 years for fraud and market manipulation
  • Bill Hwang was the founder of Archegos Capital Management, a large fund whose demise caused losses for many banks, notably Credit Suisse
  • Was found guilty on 10 out of 11 counts in July
  • Hwang misled banks about the size of his debts in order to borrow money to buy stocks
  • Large purchases created price increases that inflated the nominal value of his assets
  • However, when the market turned down, Archegos faced margin calls and was unable to meet its obligations
• Gautam Adani, chair of the Indian conglomerate, Adani Group, has been indicted in the US
  • Is accused of scheming to pay hundreds of millions in bribes to Indian regulators
  • The scheme to pay these bribes would have involved US investors, which is why he is being indicted in the US
  • So was Hindenburg Research actually right about the Adani Group?
• Comcast is planning to spin off its NBCUniversal television business
  • Comcast is planning to separate the MSNBC, CNBC, USA, E!, Oxygen, Syfy and Golf Channel television channels into a separate business
  • Will also spin off the Universal Studios film studio and theme parks
  • Will keep NBC, Bravo and the Peacock streaming service
  • Reflects the challenges that cable TV has faced with the rise of streaming and cord-cutting
• Ito-Kogyo announces that it expects to have financing for its buyout of 7-and-i finalized by December
  • Participating banks will be Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho Financial Group
  • The buyout offer was announced on November 13, in response to Alimentation Couche-Tard's increased offer for the company
  • Ito-Kogyo's offer of $51.8 billion exceeds Alimentation Couche-Tard's $47 billion bid
  • Previous coverage

2024-11-18 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces launch an unsuccessful assault near Andriivka
      • Note: this isn't the same Andriivka that's west of Kurakove, that's a different Andriivka
      • This one is south of Bakhmut
    • Russian forces have entered Berestky
      • Russians are continuing their advance westward from Illinka
    • Russian forces are spotted west of Trudove
      • This area has been under attack ever since Russians captured Bohoyavlenka on October 27
    • Ukrainian forces push Russian forces back near Kostiantynopolske
    • Two Ukrainian tanks raid into Novooleksiivka, and fire at Russian positions before retreating
      • Novooleksiivka had been captured on November 4, so the front line is still pretty close to the village
  • Biden allows Ukraine to strike targets on Russian territory with US-supplied long-range weapons
    • While the US had supplied ATACMS to Ukraine, the supply was conditional on Ukraine not attacking targets on Russian territory with those missiles
    • That restriction has now been removed
    • Previously the US had been concerned about escalation, but with Russia's increasing cooperation with North Korea has convinced the Biden administration that Russia has already escalated the conflict
    • Too little, too late, as with all US decisions in this war
  • Russian forces have been fortifying airfields since October
    • The Russian military has constructed a significant number of new bunkers at, e.g. Kursk airbase
    • While these bunkers cannot withstand a direct hit from an ATACMS missile, they can prevent shrapnel from a successful hit from affecting nearby planes
    • Also work to limit the spread of fires
  • Russia launches a major attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure
    • Russia fired 120 missiles and 90 drones at various targets across the country
    • Out of the 210 targets, 144 were intercepted
    • However, the missiles and drones that made it through did severe damage to electricity generation and water infrastructure
    • Attacked cities such as Kyiv and Odesa, which had been spared in recent attacks
  • Ukraine marks 1000 days since Russia's renewed invasion in 2022
  • The Estonian foreign minister argues that EU nations should stand ready to provide peacekeepers to enforce a potential peace deal in Ukraine
    • The best option would be NATO membership for Ukraine
    • However, that appears to be off the table for now, because of opposition from the Trump administration
    • If a peace deal is negotiated, the EU should stand ready to provide peacekeepers to enforce it
    • This is complicated by the fact that the countries that would provide peacekeepers are themselves NATO members
• Spirit Airlines files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
  • Spirit seeks to restructure its debts in bankruptcy
  • Will keep flying in the interim
  • Is planning to exit bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2025
  • Spirit's financial position has been precarious since Frontier dropped a merger bid
• Northvolt faces bankruptcy as it seeks additional funding
  • The European manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries is considering Chapter 11
  • Northvolt was seen, at one point, as Europe's answer to Chinese battery manufacturers
  • However, recently Northvolt has struggled, especially since BMW withdrew a $2 billion contract
  • Is working to scale up production at its factory in Skellefteå, where output remains well below theoretical capacity

2024-11-15 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces have entered Obukhovka
      • Obukhovka is near Darino, which Russian forces entered on Monday
      • The last report from this area was on October 13, where there was fighting south of the town
    • Fighting continues near Zelenyi Shlyakh
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces make a small advance in Toretsk
    • Fighting continues around Yuriivka
    • Russian forces have started to advance into Kurakhove itself
      • Previous fighting in the area was in the fields outside of the town
  • Kupyansk region
    • Fighting continues on the northern outskirts of Kupyansk, with the Ukrainians taking Russian prisoners
• Russia will end natural gas deliveries to Austria tomorrow
  • The cut-off is the result of Ukraine failing to renew a gas transit arrangement with Russia's Gazprom
  • Ukraine argues that it's not in its best interests to renew an arrangement that is helping to finance Russia's war
  • Russia will continue to supply Slovakia and Hungary
  • Austria's largest energy company, OMV, has said that it has been preparing for the end of Russian gas shipments and that its storage facilities are adequately full to supply Austrian homes through the winter
• Elon Musk adds additional claims to his lawsuit against OpenAI
  • Elon had initially filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in February, accusing it of abandoning its founding non-profit mission to make open source AI
  • That lawsuit was dropped on June 12, without much explanation
  • Then Elon re-filed the lawsuit on August 5, adding some additional allegations of racketeering and self-dealing
  • The amendment filed today adds anti-trust complaints to the lawsuit, arguing that OpenAI has pursued a "de-facto" merger with Microsoft
• Microsoft is launching industry-specific language models
  • Working with other companies such as Bayer, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Fidelity and others
  • Provide customized versions of its Phi "small language model" for specific industries
  • Will be available as part of the Azure AI model catalog
  • Models will help answer questions about subject-matter topics specific to particular businesses
  • Examples:
    • Bayer's model will answer questions about crop science and agronomy
    • Fidelity's model will answer questions about financial compliance
  • Goal is to make it easier for businesses to pick up and use off-the-shelf AI models rather than having to spend time and money customizing models
  • I get how this benefits Microsoft: having more and better AI models available on Azure helps drives customers towards Azure
  • But how do Microsoft's partners benefit?
  • Perhaps the benefit for them is that the AI models will help standardize their tools and terminology?
• Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell and KFC, is using AI to improve its marketing
  • Use AI to personalize emails
  • The AI doesn't currently write the emails, but selects from a menu of pre-written messages
  • AI is also being used to customize discounts that are presented to customers at checkout kiosks in restaurants

2024-11-14 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • No specific territorial changes, but fighting continues around Plekhovo, and also near Pogrebki
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Antonivka
      • This isn't too unexpected, unfortunately
      • The neighboring city of Katerynivka had been captured on October 28
  • A Ukrainian soldier writes about Russian operations near Kupyansk (translation)
    • Says that Russians have successfully moved past initial Ukrainian defensive positions in multiple places
    • Ukrainian defenses have become more disorganized and chaotic; not clear why
    • Russian tactics result in severe losses: Russian troops are not allowed to retreat even if they're injured
    • However, Russia has more soldiers and the "no retreat, no surrender" approach allows them to maintain constant pressure on Ukrainian units until weaknesses can be identified and exploited
  • North Korea has sent self-propelled howitzers to Russia
    • The gun is the M1989 Koksan, a 170mm cannon
    • The howitzers are the North Korean counterpart to the Russian 2S7 Pion
    • The 2S7 is the largest self-propelled cannon in the world, currently, with a 203mm bore
    • However, none have been produced since the end of the Cold War, and Russia has lost a substantial fraction of its existing stock in Ukraine
    • Furthermore, the 2S7 uses different ammunition than Russia's other artillery systems, and Russia may not be able to manufacture sufficient 203 mm ammunition
    • The M1989 allows Russia to supplement its 2S7 systems with another system that has similar range and ballistics
    • Also allows Russia to rely on North Korean ammunition supplies
  • Tatarigami writes about whether there's any point in allowing Ukraine to launch ATACMS strikes into Russia
    • Although Russia has moved a large number of planes outside of ATACMS range, there are still plenty of targets should Ukraine be given permission to use ATACMS against Russia
    • Russia has moved the majority of its fighter jets out of range of ATACMS
    • However, helicopters, which have shorter range, are still located at bases that could be struck
    • Russia also has forward arming and refueling points where helicopters can temporarily land, rearm and refuel before proceeding with missions; this infrastructure could be struck
    • There are numerous warehouses and ammunition depots still within ATACMS range
    • Trains carrying ammunition and supplies could also be hit by ATACMS
    • The primary US concern with allowing ATACMS strikes into Russia isn't nuclear escalation, it's that Russia could support US adversaries in other locations, such as in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula
    • However, this "horizontal escalation" has already occurred
      • Russia is providing targeting data to the Houthis
      • Has deep cooperation with North Korea, and is providing assistance to North Korean missile and space programs in exchange for ammunition, equipment, and troops
    • Given that, there are no real downsides to the US allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with the ATACMS
    • There aren't any downsides, but the US still won't give permission
  • The M2 Bradley has been a standout performer in this war
    • There are lots of videos of Bradleys taking on Russian armored vehicles that are supposedly equivalent and winning, even when outnumbered
    • Ukrainian troops also praise the Bradley's durability , specifically noting its ability to withstand explosions from Russian antitank mines
• China displays its newest stealth fighter, the J-35A
  • Aircraft was unveiled at the Zhuhai Air Show
  • The "A" designation indicates that this J-35 is the land based model
  • A naval version is forthcoming
  • The J-35 is thought to be China's answer to the US's F-35, and, like the F-35 is designed to be oriented more towards ground attack
  • However, unlike the F-35, the J-35 has a twin engine configuration
  • China also displayed the latest version of its CH-7 stealth surveillance drone and its HQ-19 missile defense system
• The FTC launches an investigation of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform
  • The FTC is investigating whether Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive business practices by imposing punitive terms for businesses who sought to move their data out of Azure
    • Exit fees
    • Increased subscription fees for businesses who've left Azure
    • Making Office 365 deliberately incompatible with other cloud platforms
  • The investigation comes after the FTC sought feedback from businesses and the public about competition concerns with cloud platforms
  • Feedback highlighted concerns with
    • Egress fees
    • Minimum spend requirements
  • Microsoft was also under investigation with other cloud providers
  • That settlement involved Microsoft agreeing to build a tool to allow its software to run on rivals' infrastructure
• Boeing starts issuing layoff notices as it seeks to cut 10% of its workforce
  • Staff receiving layoff notices will remain on Boeing's payroll until January
  • Notice comes as Boeing is trying to improve its financial position after the strike and ongoing quality issues with the 737 Max

2024-11-13 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Heavy fighting continues near Zelenyi Shylakh
    • The Russians seem to have stepped up their attacks on Zelenyi Shlyakh and Novoivanovka lately
    • Russian forces attack Plekhovo
    • This is worrying because success here could cut off lines of retreat for Ukrainian troops in Kursk
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces launch a major attack on Kupyansk itself, reaching the outskirts of the city
  • Zaporizhzhia region
    • Russian forces launch an attack on Lyubymivka, on the border between Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts
  • Emil Kastehelmi has an update on the overall situation
    • Donetsk
      • Russians are attacking Kurakhove from multiple directions and it seems likely that the town will fall soon
      • The imminent fall of Kurakhove puts at risk Ukrainian positions between Uspenivka and Yelyzavetivka
      • Ukrainian forces in the region are outnumbered and can't easily conduct counterattacks to repel Russian advances
      • Russian attacks are very costly for them, but it's a price they seem capable of paying
    • Kursk
      • Russian forces are attacking the northern and western flanks of the Ukrainian incursion
      • Kastehelmi claims that Pogrebki and Plekhovo have both been captured by Russia, however I'm not sure
      • The Russian government has stated that it will not begin any negotiations until Ukrainian forces have been completely driven from Russian territory
      • This means that either the Russian military is either
        • Prioritizing political goals over military successes elsewhere
        • Calculating that they can drive Ukrainian forces from Russia without taking up so many resources as to jeopardize their offensive operations elsewhere
      • They might be right about that
      • It's not as if Ukrainian forces are having great success fending off Russian attacks in Donetsk
  • Ukraine braces for a Russian assault in advance of Donald Trump's inauguration
    • Russia is seeking to gain as much territory as it can in order to have a more favorable position ahead of anticipated negotiations
    • Ukraine is seeking to blunt Russian offensives in order to prove that it can be a "fighter" and "winner"
    • Western officials anticipate that Russia will soon deploy North Korean troops to the Kursk region, where it is seeking to retake the territory that Ukraine captured in its incursion
    • Ukraine continues to face challenges with recruiting and manpower
    • Western analysts estimate that Russia is taking heavy casualties; the UK's adviser to the Minister of Defense, Adm. Tony Radakin estimated that Russian forces were taking 1500 casualties per day
    • Russia is able to sustain these losses by paying significant sums to volunteers to enlist in its military
• 7-and-i has received a second buyout offer
  • $58 billion buyout offer comes from Ito-Kogyo, a company linked to 7-and-i Vice President Junro Ito
  • Represents a "white-knight" bid from its current management that represents an alternative to Alimentation Couche-Tard's offer
  • Going private with Ito-Kogyo would allow 7-and-i to continue with its current management and would remove shareholder pressure to divest assets
  • The story thus far:
    • On August 19, 7-and-i, the owner of 7-11, was approached by Alimentation Couche-Tard, owner of Circle K, with a takeover offer
    • On September 6, 7-and-i rejected the offer, stating that it didn't value 7-and-i's business appropriately
    • On October 9, Alimentation Couche-Tard returned with a 20% higher offer
    • On October 10, 7-and-i announced that it would be divesting some of its non-convenience store businesses such as supermarkets, specialty stores and the Denny's restaurant chain into a separate company
• The FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Meta over its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp will go to trial
  • Complaint was originally filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration
  • According to the FTC, Facebook paid over market price for WhatsApp and Instagram in order to eliminate them as rivals to its primary social networking experience
  • A related claim, that Facebook had restricted developers' access to Instagram and WhatsApp unless they agreed not to compete with its core services, was dismissed by the judge
  • A date for the trial has not yet been set
• Bitcoin rises above $90,000 as investors expect the forthcoming Trump administration to loosen regulations on cryptocurrencies
• Amazon seeks to build a datacenter in Minnesota
  • Purchased a 348 acres of land near Xcel Energy's power plant in Becker, MN
  • Has not submitted any project applications yet
  • Amazon purchased the land from Elk River Technologies, a privately held firm associated with a different data center developer, Diode Ventures

2024-11-12 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced beyond Hryhorivka and are attacking Petrivka and Pustynka
    • It doesn't look like they've captured any of the towns, but they're advancing in the fields just outside those towns and are mounting attacks from multiple directions into the towns
    • North of Novooleksiivka, which had been captured about a week ago, Russian forces have advanced to Yuriivka
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces are attacking northwards from Kruhlaykivka towards Kolisnykivka
  • Russian forces have are accused of damaging the dam holding the Kurakhove reservoir
    • Kyiv Independent's coverage of the story
    • There were multiple reports of the dam being attacked
    • Russian pro-war Telegram channels accuse Ukraine of damaging the dam
    • The status of the dam cannot be checked because of fierce fighting in the area
• Germany's major parties agree to hold early elections on February 23
  • The German government collapsed on November 7 when Olaf Scholz removed finance minister Christian Lindner from his government
  • Scholz was initially targeting January 15 for a vote of confidence
  • Has agreed to move that vote forward to December 16 after the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party said that the confidence vote should be held earlier in order to prevent uncertainty
• Greg Brockman returns to OpenAI
  • On August 6, the President of OpenAI, Greg Brockman announced that he was taking a sabbatical for the remainder of the year
  • So he's back early?
  • Today Brockman announced that he was returning to his duties at OpenAI
  • Brockman's return comes in the wake of some high profile departures from OpenAI
    • Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati
    • Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever
    • Co-founder John Schulman
• The FAA has barred all US airlines from flying to Haiti for at least 30 days
  • Yesterday a Spirit Airlines planes was struck by bullets as it landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
  • Today American Airlines revealed that one of its planes had also been struck
  • Post flight inspections also revealed that a JetBlue plane had been struck by gunfire
  • The FAA ban prohibits US airlines from flying below 10,000 feet in Haitian airspace for 30 days
• COMAC rebrands its regional jet as the C909
  • Jet was previously called the ARJ21
  • Was the first Chinese airliner to reach production
  • The rebrand brings the naming of the aircraft in line with COMAC's C919 narrow-body jet and C929 wide body
  • There are 124 ARJ21s in service, mostly with domestic Chinese airlines, who receive substantial government incentives to purchase aircraft from COMAC
  • The only overseas operator to use the ARJ21 is TransNusa, an Indonesian regional airline
  • COMAC is seeking to position its 9X9 aircraft as alternatives to Boeing and Airbus, both of whom are struggling to scale-up production to meet increased demand for airliners
  • However COMAC aircraft have not met American or EU airworthiness standards, limiting their appeal in the global market
• Spirit Aerosystems gets a financial lifeline from Boeing and Airbus
  • Boeing has agreed to make $350 million in advance payments
  • Airbus has agreed to make $107 million in advance payments
  • Spirit is an important supplier to Boeing, Airbus, and smaller aircraft manufacturers like Bombardier
  • Was especially affected by the halt in production of Boeing 737, 767 and 777 aircraft caused by the machinists strike
• Spirit Airlines moves towards bankruptcy as Frontier drops its merger bid
  • Spirit and Frontier restarted merger discussions on October 23, after Spirit's prospective merger with JetBlue was blocked on antitrust grounds
  • Spirit's low cost model has come under increasing pressure as other airlines have adopted elements of Spirit's strategy, such as checked bag fees and seat assignment fees
• A New Zealand startup claims a breakthrough with an unconventional fusion reactor design
  • Existing designs for fusion reactors place magnets on the outside of the reactor to contain and channel the extremely hot plasma inside into a ring shape
  • This is difficult because the interactions between the magnetic fields of the magnets and the magnetic field of the plasma itself are complex
  • OpenStar's reactor, by contrast is a levitated dipole design, which puts a superconducting electromagnet in the center of the ring
  • Solves the problem having to design extremely complex magnetic fields to keep the plasma contained
  • However, a levitated dipole design requires a superconducting magnet, chilled to within a few degrees of absolute zero, to be suspended in the middle of a very hot plasma cloud
  • Currently OpenStar solves the problem by pre-chilling the magnet, which gives them about 80 minutes of operation time before the magnet warms up and loses superconductivity
  • Future designs will place batteries and a liquid helium supply inside the magnet in order to improve runtime
  • OpenStar announced today that they had successfully generated and contained plasma in their reactor
  • However, this is still a long way away from achieving fusion reaction that can generate energy
• Jack Teixeira is sentenced to 15 years in prison
  • Teixeira had plead guilty to leaking classified documents related to the invasion of Ukraine on Discord
  • Worked in cybersecurity in the Massachusetts Air National Guard
  • In addition, the Air Force moved to discipline 15 others who it says should have detected and stopped Teixeira's leaks
• Genetics testing company 23andMe reports that its survival is in jeopardy unless it can raise new funds
  • The company reported revenue of $44 million, down from $50 million from the same period last year
  • The company has never reported a profit
  • Announced a restructuring on Monday
    • Laid off 40% of the workforce
    • End in-house drug development efforts, instead focusing on licensing genetic data to existing drug companies
  • Founder Anne Wojcicki has been attempting to take the company private
• The head of Saudi Arabia's NEOM project resigns abruptly
  • Nadhmi Al-Nasr has been head of Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman's project to build a new city on the west coast of Saudi Arabia since 2018
  • Will be replaced by officials from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund
  • Aiman al-Mudaifer has been named acting CEO
  • NEOM has seen repeated delays and cost overruns, forcing it to scale back its developments
  • Most notably, The Line, a pair of long skyscrapers, has seen its first phase downsized from 10 miles to approximately 1.5 miles
  • NEOM is competing for funding with other megaprojects under bin Salman's Vision 2030 umbrella

2024-11-11 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces enter Darino
      • Russian forces in this area had last been spotted west of Nikolaeyvo-Darino, a neighboring village, on September 17
      • This represents a small advance, but an advance nonetheless
    • Fighting continues near Novoivanovka
    • Russian forces attack Pogrebki, without much initial success
      • Ukrainian forces had captured Pogrebki on September 9
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces mount an attack on Dalnje, with unclear success
    • Russian forces take control of Novoselydivka
      • This isn't all that significant because Hirnyk had been captured on October 29 and Tsukurnye had been captured on October 13
      • Furthermore, Russian forces are advancing into Sontsivka
      • It's likely that Ukrainian forces had long since retreated out of Novoselydivka
      • Seems more like a consolidation of positions than an advance
  • Kupyansk region
    • Fighting continues near Kruhlaykivka
    • I think, however, the Russians have largely consolidated their positions here, and it's going to be very hard for Ukrainians to drive them out
  • Ukraine is scrambling to ensure that it has enough electricity generation capacity for the winter
    • Is dismantling power plants that are near areas under occupation in eastern Ukraine to provide spare parts for power plants further west
    • Struggling to deal with the consequences of Russian strikes targeting power plants and energy infrastructure
    • Winter will make Ukraine's power situation worse as more people rely on electricity for heat
    • The way to ensure that Ukraine's grid doesn't collapse is to provide it with adequate air defenses to protect against Russian missile and drone strikes
  • The Russian government denies that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke
    • Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov categorically denied that a phone call had taken place between Trump and Putin
    • Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung said that the Trump campaign does not comment on the specifics of calls between Trump and world leaders
    • So while the Kremlin is categorically denying that the phone call ever took place, the Trump campaign's position is a noncommittal statement
  • A Russian Shahed drone hits a Russian apartment building in Belgorod
    • Probably a malfunction of some sort
• Taiwan considers making large purchases of US defense equipment
  • Taiwan is considering making further purchases US defense equipment, such as Aegis destroyers, E2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft, and missiles for its Patriot batteries
  • May request F-35 fighter jets and retired Ticonderoga-class cruisers
  • Additional spending would serve to convince Trump that Taiwan is serious about its own defense while serving to redress Taiwan's trade deficit with the US
  • The problem is that the big, expensive platforms that Taiwan is considering are not the systems that it would need to defend against China
  • Taiwan needs cruise missiles and fast attack boats to launch them, not large, expensive cruisers which it will never be able to accumulate large numbers of
  • A Ticonderoga-class cruiser is designed to sail halfway around the world and bring a large number of missiles into the fight; it's overkill for a country that just needs to defend its own coastline
  • Unfortunately, the US defense industry specializes in large, expensive systems, so if Taiwan wants to spend more money on US-built defense equipment specifically, it'll have to buy systems that are suboptimal for its needs
  • I would prefer that Taiwan buy a bunch of NASAMs and Naval Strike Missiles than F-35s and Ticonderoga-class cruisers
• The bankruptcy estate of FTX sues Binance for $1.76 billion
  • FTX transferred $1.76 billion to Binance in 2021 to buy Binance out of its ownership stake in Alameda Research
  • FTX's bankruptcy estate says that, because both FTX and Alameda Research were insolvent at the time, this transfer was fraudulent and Binance must pay the money back
  • Lawsuit alleges that, after the buyout, Binance sought to "destroy" FTX as it saw FTX as a market competitor
  • Binance replies that the buyout was conducted legitimately and FTX's claims are meritless
• The story of the scientists and engineers who launched the deep learning boom
• Airlines are now required to issue refunds for canceled or changed flights
  • New rules from the Department of Transportation that took effect on October 28 now require airlines to issue refunds if you do not accept alternative transportation arrangements or travel credits if your flight is canceled or significantly changed
  • Significant changes include changes in departure or arrival times of more than three hours for domestic flights or six hours for international flights
  • Mishandled baggage reports entitle you to a refund of your checked bag fee if the bag is not returned to you within 12 hours of arrival for domestic flights or 30 hours for international flights
  • Refunds must be issued within 7 days for credit card payments and within 20 days for other forms of payment
• US airlines suspend flights to Haiti after a Spirit Airlines plane is hit by suspected gunfire in Port-au-Prince
  • The plane was hit by suspected gunfire while it was attempting to land in Port-au-Prince
  • Diverted to the Dominican Republic where an inspection found damage consistent with gunfire
  • Spirit announced that it was suspending flights to Haiti until further notice
  • American Airlines and JetBlue, the other airlines serving Haiti announced that they were also suspending flights until at least Thursday
  • Haiti has seen persistent unrest since the assassination of President Moïse in 2021
  • The US embassy in Haiti advises Americans against travel to the country

2024-11-10 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting continues north of Selydove, as Russian forces continue to push towards Hryhorivka
    • Ukrainian forces launch another counterattack near Novohrodivka
    • Near Toretsk, Ukrainian forces continue to occupy positions in Druzhba, despite repeated Russian attacks seeking to drive them out
    • Russian forces have advanced further into Sontsivka, which they initially gained a foothold in on November 4
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues near Novoivanovka and also near Zelenyi Shlyakh
    • The intensity of the fighting has picked up, but it's not clear to me that Russian forces have made much more progress here recently than they made in mid-October
  • President-elect Donald Trump speaks with Vladimir Putin regarding the war in Ukraine
    • Phone call took place at Trump's resort in Florida, Mar-a-Lago
    • Trump reportedly warned Putin not to escalate the war
    • Reminded him that the US maintains a sizable military presence in Europe
    • Ukraine denies that it was informed in advance
  • Ukrainian forces attack Moscow with drones
    • Forced airport closures and flight diversions
    • 5 were injured, but drones had little impact otherwise
  • A Ukrainian drone also hits a Russian base in Bryansk
• India defends its purchases of Russian oil
  • India's crude oil imports from Russia have risen significantly over the past two months
  • India's oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri claims that if India is not allowed to purchase oil from Russia, global oil prices would increase significantly
• TSMC's ceasing production of 7nm chips for Chinese customers was reportedly done at the behest of the US Commerce Department
  • After TSMC components were found in a Chinese phone, the US Commerce Department sent TSMC a letter with additional export restrictions
  • As a result, TSMC announced that it was ceasing production of chips at a 7nm or smaller process for all Chinese customers
• China offers tariff relief to US allies in order to reduce diplomatic support for US tariffs
  • China is offering EU countries reduced tariffs if they don't go along with Trump's plan to impose additional tariffs on Chinese imports
  • Has removed visa requirements on citizens of US allies such as South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Finland and Denmark
• Sweden signs a deal with Embraer for military cargo aircraft
  • Sweden will modernize its military transport fleet with the Embraer C-390
  • Is the first northern European country to buy transport aircraft from the Brazilian firm
  • Joins Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Netherlands and Portugal in adopting the C-390
  • Sweden and Brazil share a close defense relationship, with Brazil having bought Saab Gripen fighter jets in the past
  • The C390 is a medium transport aircraft, with a 26 metric ton payload capacity, putting it somewhere between a Lockheed Martin C-130 and an Airbus A400M
  • Uses jet engines rather than turboprops, which is interesting; both the C-130 and A400M use turboprops because they're more suited to operations from unpaved airstrips
  • I'm surprised that Sweden chose to go with the Embraer rather than the Europe-native A400M
• Boeing is close to a funding agreement which will bail out Spirit Aerosystems
  • The machinists strike caused Boeing to call an immediate halt to orders with suppliers for the 737, 767, and 777
  • One of the suppliers most affected was Spirit Aerosystems, which makes fuselages for these planes
  • Spirit had to furlough workers and halt production of 767 and 777 fuselages
  • On Tuesday, Spirit Aerosystems issued a liquidity warning raising doubts about its ability to continue doing business due to insufficient cash reserves
  • Boeing is working out a deal where it will provide financing to Spirit, as it finalizes its acquisition of the company
  • Another possible source of cash for Spirit is selling Fiber Materials Inc, a defense composites manufacturer that it acquired in 2020
• Anthropic partners with Palantir to bring Claude to military and intelligence customers
  • The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment, a system that is certified to handled data classified up to the "secret" level
  • Claude will be used to identify patterns and trends
  • Builds on Claude's integration into AWS GovCloud
  • Conflicts with Anthropic's public image, which emphasizes uses of AI that are beneficial to all
  • Anthropic's terms of service with Palantir prohibit uses such as disinformation, censorship and domestic surveillance
  • Outside observers have concerns about AI hallucinations in analyses of data that may be used to plan military operations
• Amazon seeks to more closely integrate Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh
  • While Amazon has a strong position in online retail, it has struggled with groceries, where shoppers still prefer interacting with products before purchasing
  • Amazon is testing new formats that bring together Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods to allow shoppers to order some goods online and pick the rest up in person
  • Shoppers would also be able to place orders for certain Amazon Fresh items as they shop in Whole Foods and pick up the goods at checkout
  • This "micro-fulfillment center" concept allows Whole Foods, which is primarily a grocery, to carry a greater variety of items and compete more with Walmart

2024-11-08 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces attack towards Kruglenkoe, without success
    • No sign of the North Koreans yet
  • Donetsk region
    • No major territorial changes today, however intense fighting continues in Toretsk, around Shakhtarske and around Terny
  • Zaporizhzhia region
    • Ukrainian forces make some minor advances near Kopani
  • President Putin reiterates his invasion goals, but indicates that he is ready to negotiate with Trump
    • Putin indicated that he is ready to negotiate a conclusion of the war with Donald Trump
    • Putin reiterated the conditions he set out on June 14
      • Ukraine must cede Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
      • Must never join NATO
      • Must pursue "demilitarization" and "denazification"
      • Must forego nuclear weapons
  • The US agrees to send a small number of contractors to Ukraine to help Ukraine maintain weapons systems
    • Contractors will focus on maintenance of Ukraine's F-16s
    • Will also aid with repairs to air defense equipment
    • The presence of on-site contractors is expected to reduce the need for Ukraine to send equipment long distances to Poland or Slovakia for maintenance
  • The strains of war negatively affect training for Ukrainian troops in the EU
    • Ukrainian troops undergo a much shorter training rotation than soldiers in EU and US armies
    • "Train the trainers" approach to build out a native Ukrainian training system is hampered by Ukraine's need to send all available manpower to the front, which means that trainers are often assigned to combat units
    • Ukraine also splits battalions up into component companies and assigns companies piecemeal to units as they're needed, which destroys unit cohesion
    • The quality of incoming troops for EU training varies widely
• China unveils a Rmb 10 trillion package to shore up its economy
  • Will be financed by a bond issuance by the national government
  • Money will be used to restructure the debts of provincial and local governments, which had become heavily overleveraged during the Chinese property boom
  • Follows up on the Chinese central bank reducing interest rates and announcing a funding mechanism for share buybacks in order to increase lending and help boost the stock market
  • While this announcement was long expected, it is suspected that Chinese officials waited until after the US election to announce it in order to reassure Chinese businesses concerned about tariffs from the incoming Trump administration
• TSMC announces that it will cease production of 7nm chips for Chinese customers
  • Announcement comes in the wake of the discovery of TSMC chips in a Huawei phone
  • TSMC is under investigation for not complying with US export restrictions as a result
• Microsoft adds AI-enabled features to Notepad and Paint
  • Notepad is gaining a generative AI feature named "Rewrite" allows the user to use AI to change the length and tone of highlighted text
  • Paint is getting AI features to allow users to erase background objects and fill backgrounds with AI-generated content
  • These AI features appear to use Microsoft's cloud-based service, Copilot, rather than a local GPU or NPU

2024-11-07 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces have reportedly started a major counteroffensive
    • Russian troops are attacking Novoivanovka, which is near Zelenyi Shlyakh, a town that was recaptured by the Ukrainians on October 22
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have advanced to Illinka, just west of Vovchenka, which they captured on November 5
  • The Biden administration seeks to increase the amount of aid sent to Ukraine
    • President Biden has $4.3 billion that was authorized earlier this year by Congress for aid to Ukraine, but which has yet to be spent
    • Biden is looking to transfer as much as he can under that authority before he leaves office and makes way for Donald Trump
    • Donald Trump has been vocally critical of sending military aid to Ukraine, and may choose to not send further aid even if appropriated money is still available
  • Long-range Ukrainian drones attack the Russian Caspian sea flotilla
• Germany's coalition government collapses
  • Olaf Scholz removed finance minister Christian Lindner from his cabinet
  • Lindner was the leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which formed one of the three parties (Scholz's SPD, the Green Party and the FDP) which comprised the German coalition government
  • Scholz said the proximate cause of the dismissal was Lindner's refusal to support a relaxation of the German debt brake to support greater infrastructure investment and support for Ukraine
  • However tensions between the SPD and FDP had been growing for several months as the German economy faces recession for the second year running
  • Scholz will call a confidence vote on the government on January 15
  • He is expected to lose this vote, and will ask President Frank-Walter Steinmeir to dissolve the government and call for early elections
• Australian legislators consider banning all social media for users under 16
  • Australia will require age verification for users seeking to create social media accounts
  • Ban is supported by both the Labor Party, which is in government, and the Liberal Party, which is the leading opposition
  • Ban will not have exemptions for parental consent and will not grandfather in kids who already have accounts
  • Platforms impacted include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and YouTube
  • The details of the age verification system have yet to be published
• Canada dissolves TikTok's local corporate entity
  • The Canadian government has ordered that TikTok's business unit in the country be dissolved
  • Cites national security risks posed by ByteDance, TikTok's owner
  • The app is not banned, but TikTok is effectively banned from investing or expanding its operations in Canada
  • TikTok will challenge the decision in court
• JD Power and Associates expects a large number of used EVs to hit the market in 2026, depressing prices
  • The Inflation Reduction Act revised the IRS's clean vehicle tax credit rules to make leased vehicles eligible for the clean vehicle tax credit
  • This led to a surge in the number of EVs being leased
  • Many of these EVs will come off lease in 2026, and will be available on the used car market

2024-11-06 Wednesday

• Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris and will become the 47th President of the United States
• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Vovchenka
    • The loss of Vovchenka is sadly expected after the loss of Kurakhivka
    • Russian forces mount an attack against Hryhorivka
      • This is expected, unfortunately
      • Russian forces entered Vyshneve on October 27
      • They captured Novooleksiivka yesterday
      • Hryhorivka is the next town along their line of advance
    • Ukrainian forces once again repel an attack near Maksymilyanivka
    • Russian forces attack Ivano-Darivka
      • This area of the front had been relatively quiet since late 2022, compared to Bakhmut and other areas farther south
      • Now the Russians are beginning to press here as well
  • The pace of Russian advances is concerning
    • They're not being held back for weeks or even months at a time over individual towns, instead towns are falling by the day
    • I think this is the fastest the Russians have advanced since March 2022
• Boeing machinists vote to end their strike
  • Machinists accept Boeing's offer of a 38% wage increase
  • Workers will return to their posts on Wednesday
  • However, restarting production and getting back to full production will take weeks
• Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Haiku, at a higher price
  • "Haiku" is the smallest variant of Anthropic's model
  • The previous version, Claude 3 Haiku cost $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens
  • The new version, Claude 3.5 Haiku, will cost $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, a 4x increase
  • Anthropic justifies this price increase by claiming that in testing, Claude 3.5 Haiku outperformed the largest variant of the Claude 3 models, Claude 3 Opus
  • The pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku is significantly greater than that of its competitors, OpenAI's GPT-4o mini and Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash
• Apple will be fined by the EU under the Digital Markets Act
  • Apple did not allow app developers to advertise alternative ways of subscribing outside the app store
  • Penalty comes after Apple was fined €1.8 billion for similar practices involving Spotify under the EU's existing competition rules
  • This would be the first penalty levied against a big tech corporation under the Digital Markets Act
• Donald Trump's favored tariff policy could lead to significant price increases for technology products
  • China is a major manufacturer of electronic components
  • When he was in office, Trump implemented tariffs on many imports from China
  • Biden made these tariffs permanent
  • However, many consumer goods, such as game consoles and laptops were exempted from these tariffs
  • In his second term, Trump has promised that he will implement a 60% tariff on all goods from China
  • This could lead to e.g. laptop prices doubling, as laptop manufacturers often have no alternative to Chinese suppliers for many components, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group
  • Game console prices could rise by 40%
• The European Commission opens an antitrust investigation into Corning
  • The EC is investigating whether Corning abused its dominant position in the manufacturing of aluminosilicate glass ("Gorilla glass")
  • The EC accuses Corning of requiring electronics manufacturers to sign anticompetitive exclusivity agreements if they wanted to buy glass from Corning
  • These intent of these exclusivity agreements was to make it difficult for alternative glass suppliers to enter the market

2024-11-04 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Vyimka and are repelled with heavy losses
    • Russian forces capture Maksymivka
    • Heavy fighting continues in Toretsk
    • Russian infantry were spotted near Sontsivka, indicating a further westward advance from Novodmytrivka
    • Kreminna Balka, Voznesenka and Novoselydivka are all at imminent risk
    • Russian forces capture Novooleksiivka
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces advance near Terny
    • Russian forces advance near Anriivka, just south of Stelmakhivka
    • It's so depressing to see the towns that Ukraine liberated in 2022 come under attack once again
• Russia begins importing butter from Turkey and the UAE
  • The price of butter has risen by 25.7% in Russia since last December
  • Russia is seeking alternative sources of butter after imports from Latin America fell due to increasing US sanctions
  • Russia is also seeking to import butter from Iran and India
• Facebook's plan to build a new data center powered by nuclear energy thwarted by an unexpected obstacle: bees
  • Facebook had planned to become the first big tech company to unveil a datacenter powered by nuclear energy
  • Had struck a deal with an unnamed nuclear power operator
  • However endangered bees were discovered on the land that Facebook had earmarked for the project, leading to the project's cancellation
• France pushes the EU to delay fines on automakers who haven't made sufficient progress on electrification
  • As of 2026, the EU is set to start enforcing penalties on auto manufacturers who haven't met decarbonization goals
  • These goals become increasingly stringent, with new sales of fossil-fuel powered vehicles being banned entirely by 2035
  • However, growth in EV sales has fallen below expectations, based on concerns about high prices and lack of charging infrastructure
  • The fines would be especially damaging to Renault and Volkswagen, the largest automakers in France and Germany, respectively
  • This has prompted the French finance minister, Antoine Armand, to petition the EU to reconsider phasing in the penalties in 2026
• Chinese logistics operators expand their warehouse space in the US
  • The growth of Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu has prompted logistics operators which handle sales on their platforms to expand the amount of warehouse space they hold in the US
  • Another factor is the impending end of the "de minimis" exemption which allowed shipments to come into the US without facing tariffs as long they were valued at less than $800
  • The growth of warehouses related to these two retailers is bright spot in a sector that is still grappling with persistent oversupply caused by the large amount of additional warehouse space that was built during the pandemic
• Twitter changes how blocking works
  • Currently blocking a user prevents them from seeing your posts if they're logged in
  • Twitter will be changing the block functionality so that all users can see public posts, including those that the author has blocked
  • Blocked users will still be prohibited from replying to or interacting with posts
  • This makes sense to me, because blocking was always a low hurdle, as blocked users could always log out and view posts

2024-11-01 Friday

• I wrote an essay, Party on the Bridge: Political Commissars in the Chinese Navy, looking at how the Chinese Navy's command structure is radically different from the US Navy's
• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has not made substantial progress north of Bakhmut, as evidenced by the fact that the Ukrainians still hold Serebryanka
    • Russian forces continue to push forward between Maksymilyanivka and Kurakhove and also near Maksymivka, northwest of Vuhledar
• Microsoft delays rollout of Windows Recall
  • Windows Recall is an AI-powered system that takes periodic screenshots to help the user find old work and resume where they left off
  • The initial launch was delayed after it was discovered that Recall had serious privacy and security problems
  • The furor over those issues led to Recall being delayed until October
  • Now that October has passed Microsoft has announced that Recall is delayed once again, this time until December
• Boeing makes another offer to the machinists
  • The International Association of Machinists rejected the previous offer that Boeing had made in a vote held on October 24
  • That offer had a 35% wage increase
  • The new offer increases the raise to 38%, and further increases Boeing's 401(k) contributions
  • Also restores annual bonuses
  • However, it does not restore pensions, which had been a key demand of the union
  • The vote on the latest offer will take place on Monday and results will be known on Tuesday

2024-10-31 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • According to the US government, 8,000 North Korean troops are now in the Kursk region
      • Troops are currently receiving final training
      • Are expected to join combat shortly
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces capture Kruhlyakivka
    • This is dangerous for Ukraine, because it means the Russians have a crossing point across the Oskil River
    • Also means that Russian forces have rolled back a significant portion of the gains that Ukraine made in their successful Autumn 2022 counteroffensive
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Novoukrainka
    • Since the capture of Bohoyavlenka on October 27, the capture of Novoukrainka was just a matter of time
  • The Ukrainian government places a large order for drones from Texas-based Shield AI
    • Ukrainians generally prefer locally-made drones, as those are better able to withstand the electronic countermeasures used by Russian forces
    • However, even those drones are starting to succumb to ever increasing Russian jamming, with Ukrainian drone losses reaching 10,000 a month
    • This is leading Ukraine to invest in AI technologies to allow drones to fly and seek out targets even when they're cut off from communications with their operators
    • Shield AI's longer-range V-BAT drones can conduct missions that are beyond the capabilities of Ukraine's home-grown UAVs, which often only have a range of 10-15 km
    • The V-BAT, by contrast, has a range of approximately 965 km
    • Has been tested in missions along the front line in Ukraine
    • Funding for V-BAT drones would need to come from the US or EU
    • However the election in the US and softening support for the war in EU nations are raising questions as to whether Shield AI will receive sufficient funding to build a large number of drones for Ukraine
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT with search
  • ChatGPT with Search is an AI-powered search engine
  • Uses ChatGPT to find sources on the internet and present them to users as citations
  • Runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o
  • Pulls data from a blend of sources, including OpenAI's own content partners and Bing search engine results
  • OpenAI has content partnerships with a large number of prominent publishers, such as Condé Nast, News Corp, Vox, The Atlantic, Reuters and Axel Springer
• Perplexity proposes revenue sharing agreements with publishers
  • Perplexity is facing lawsuits from Dow Jones and the New York Post for allegedly copying content and using it to generate AI-powered answers to search queries
  • The New York Times has sent Perplexity a cease and desist stating that Perplexity has been circumventing technical restrictions to scrape copyrighted content
  • Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, vetoed the suggestion that Perplexity enter into OpenAI-style licensing deals where it pays publishers directly for their content
  • Instead he proposed a revenue sharing deal, analogizing it to the deal that Spotify offers artists
  • Perplexity would share advertising revenue with publishers
  • He also suggested that Perplexity could supply AI-powered chatbots to publishers
  • /The problem for Srinivas is that Dow Jones already has a much more lucrative deal /
  • Why would they jeopardize $250 million in guaranteed revenue for a revenue sharing agreement that may or may not amount to anything?
  • This just seems like a cynical ploy by Perplexity to claim that they were trying to be reasonable and that it's the publishers who are actually acting unfairly
• Skydio, a US-based drone manufacturer, faces a supply chain crisis after China imposes sanctions
  • Skydio is the largest manufacturer of drones in the US
  • Also supplies the Ukrainian military
  • The Chinese government has prohibited manufacturers from providing Skydio with critical components, such as batteries
  • Sanctions were imposed in retaliation for the US government's approval of attack drone sales to Taiwan
  • Skydio suspects that it was targeted specifically because it is a competitor to DJI, the leading Chinese drone manufacturer
• Taiwan seeks satellite internet service without Starlink
  • The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the utility of high-speed satellite internet as a tool to aid military communications and logistics
  • The current leading provider of high-speed satellite internet is SpaceX's Starlink service
  • However, Starlink is prohibited from operating in Taiwan
  • Taiwan has regulations that state that all internet service providers must be locally majority owned
  • In addition, Taiwanese officials have concerns about Elon Musk's ties to China and cordial relationships with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin
  • Musk was reportedly asked personally by Putin to not offer Starlink in Taiwan, as a favor to Xi Jinping
  • Instead, Taiwan has sought deals with other satellite internet providers, such as OneWeb
  • However OneWeb's service doesn't have enough bandwidth for Taiwan's military needs in the event of a conflict
  • Taiwan is seeking to supplement OneWeb's service with a small satellite network of its own, consisting of approximately 120 satellites
  • Will launch the first of these in 2027
• Boiling 54 Eggs: China's Approach To Africa
  • It is a mistake to think of China as having a single unified Africa policy
  • Instead, China deals with African states individually, through bilateral arrangements
  • This allows China to have relations with African nations that are at odds with one another
    • China maintained relations with both Ethiopia and Eritrea even when the two were fighting a war against each other
    • China has relations with both Ethiopia and Egypt, even though Ethiopia has raised tensions with Egypt by building a dam on the Nile river and recognizing Somaliland's independence in exchange for port access
  • The US has, in recent years, made progress in checking China's influence in Africa
    • A US sponsored railway infrastructure project, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola's Atlantic port, Lobito, has recently come online
    • Western firms prefer the US project, and, as a result a competing China-sponsored rail corridor from Tanzania to Zambia has been sidelined
  • China has spent a lot of money on African nations, but the piecemeal nature of its investments has limited their cumulative impact
  • China's diplomatic efforts aren't focused on the same countries that Chinese investors are putting money into
  • Chinese firms' approach to Africa, focused on building elite support, has complicated its efforts to build infrastructure when elite interests and local interests conflict
  • Public opinion of China in many countries where Chinese firms are engaged in resource extraction has turned negative
  • The weakening of China's economy, its dependence on African mineral resources and having to negotiate increasingly complicated relations between African nations will limit China's ability to have an impact on Africa
• Dropbox lays off 20% of its staff
  • Layoffs will hit 528 employees
  • Previously cut 500 employees in 2023
  • Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that Dropbox's core business of cloud storage and file synchronization has matured
  • Dropbox is working on an AI-powered search tool, Dash, targeting business customers
  • Houston says that Dropbox needs to execute better, and, as a result he's making cuts in areas where the company is underperforming
  • The enshittification of Dropbox has started
• Nishad Singh, former head of engineering at FTX, is spared jail time
  • Singh pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations
  • Cooperated with prosecutors against the FTX's former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried
  • Also cooperated with FTX's bankruptcy administrator, John Ray III, who stated that Singh's assistance had been valuable in helping recover assets for creditors
  • As a result, he is allowed to serve his sentence under supervised release rather than in jail
  • Will have to give up his share of $11 billion in assets, including shares in an AI company and a home in the San Juan islands
  • Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried's former romantic partner and head of Alameda Research, a hedge fund closely associated with FTX, was sentenced to two years in jail
  • A third FTX collaborator, Gary Wang, will be sentenced later this year
• The Open Source Initiative publishes its Open Source AI definition
  • A new definition of Open Source is necessary for AI models
  • Unlike software, AI models are comprised of multiple interdependent parts
    • Code to run the models
    • Model architecture
    • Model weights
    • Hyperparameters
    • Training data
  • The OSI's Open Source AI requires that the following be open source
    • Code required to train and execute the model
    • Model hyperparameters and other configuration settings
    • Model weights
  • Does not require model training data to be disclosed
  • Instead, model authors only have to release a detailed description of the training data, such that a skilled practitioner could build a substantially equivalent system
  • Allowing open source models to be trained on closed source data is a controversial choice
  • Tom Callaway argues that allowing any proprietary components in an open source system dilutes the meaning of "open source"
  • Stephen O'Grady states that the term "open source" should be restricted to traditional software, and a new term should be coined to describe AI models that have publicly distributed and modifiable components
• Amazon workers speak out against the new RTO policy
  • On September 16, Amazon published a new policy that required all employees to return to the office five days a week
  • This week more than 500 employees signed a letter indicating their opposition to this policy
  • Argue that the return to office mandate is not supported by productivity data
  • If only there were some kind of organization that could allow workers to collectively bargain with management regarding pay and working conditions

2024-10-30 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have advanced into Kurakhivka
    • There is video of a Ukrainian counterattack near Zolota Nyva, however, the date of the video is unclear; might be old footage from around October 7 when the town was taken
    • Emil Kastehelmi has another good thread detailing the overall situation in Donetsk
      • Russians are attacking in two directions
        • Westwards, towards Selydove and Kurakhivka
        • Northwards, between Shakhtarske and Bohoyavlenka
      • Selydove and Hirnyk have been captured in short order; Ukrainian defenses were not well prepared
      • There aren't many natural obstacles in the area, and the Russians are close to breaking past the last of Ukraine's prepared defenses
      • One possible objective for the Russian offensive is to use the offensive from the east to pin forces around the Kurakhove Reservoir while the southern attack moves northwards through relatively unfortified fields to hit Andriivka
      • Attacking towards Andriivka is a relatively high-risk, high-reward strategy
        • If it works, it would cut off a large section of Ukrainian fortifications
        • Avoids a long, grinding battle
        • However, it would require Russian commanders to commit significant forces and continue to have the same level of success that they've had thus far
      • Another possible option for the Russians is for the southern offensive to attack towards Dachne
      • This would still entail the loss of Kurakhove for Ukraine, but would be a better scenario than Russians advancing towards Andriivka, because there would still be some preexisting fortifications for Ukrainian forces to use
      • It's important to note that although the Ukrainians are retreating, the Russians still haven't achieved breakthrough
      • Ukrainian forces are retreating in good order and are still able to stay in front of the Russians
      • Ukraine can still reinforce with reserves
      • However, as the Economist article below points out, Ukraine may not have recruited enough manpower to build a substantial set of reserve units with which to reinforce
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces attack Stepova Novoselivka, as they try to expand the salient around Kruhlyakivka
  • The Economist has another summary on the current state of the war
    • Pokrovsk is holding, but Russia has penetrated the Ukrainian defensive line in other locations
      • Kurakhove is under increasing pressure from two directions
      • Russian forces have crossed the defensive line that Ukrainians drew at the canal just outside Chasiv Yar
      • Vuhledar has been captured
    • However, the main problem for Ukraine is not territory, but manpower
    • New mobilization has not worked well
    • The fact that the Ukrainian military does not have fixed tours of duty means that people are reluctant to sign up for what they perceive to be a one-way trip
    • The Ukrainian military is suffering from a lack of short-range air defense
    • This allows Russian drones to establish persistent surveillance across the front line, which, in turn allows the Russians to find weak points for its motorcycle attacks
    • The war is unsustainable for Russia in the long term
      • Russia is now spending over a third of its national budget on the military
      • While the official rate of inflation is 8%, actual inflation is roughly double that
      • Russia is running low on stocks of Soviet-era vehicles and weapons to refurbish and send to the front
    • However, in the short run, Russia will be able to sustain the war
      • Is recruiting enough to keep its army functional, even though it's taking severe losses in eastern Ukraine
      • Russian supplies of ammunition are boosted by shipments from North Korea
    • The worry in the West is that Ukraine will reach its breaking point before Russia does
    • Western planners have shifted to focusing on Ukrainian survival rather than Ukrainian victory
• Github Copilot adds support for Claude 3.5, with Gemini support forthcoming
  • Github Copilot is Microsoft's AI coding assistant
  • Until now it used OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 exclusively
  • The latest update adds support for Anthropic's Claude 3.5
  • Forthcoming updates will add support for Google's Gemini as well as OpenAI's other model, ChatGPT-o1
  • With support for these additional models, developers will be able to switch models on the fly in order to use the one that's best at whatever task they're trying to accomplish
  • Github also announced Spark, a tool that can build applications from natural language descriptions using AI
  • Multi-model strategy reduces Microsoft's exclusive dependence on OpenAI
  • However, Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant built into Office is still exclusively using ChatGPT-4 and no plans have been announced to add support for additional models
• ARM seeks to build its own AI accelerators to compete with nVidia
  • Masayoshi Son, whose Softbank investment firm still owns approximately 90% of ARM, would like ARM to capture more value
  • Designing and building its own hardware would be a new step for ARM, which has traditionally been a neutral "Switzerland", licensing designs for instruction sets and chip components to a variety of customers
  • However, under Son, ARM has been more aggressive about moving up the chip design value chain
  • Another manifestation of this is ARM's legal dispute with Qualcomm, one of its customers
  • ARM's focus on building energy efficient designs, as a result of its background in making designs for embedded and mobile processors, could prove helpful for AI as AI datacenter power consumption grows exponentially
  • Currently, ARM is a partner for nVidia, which includes an ARM-designed CPU on its AI accelerator boards
  • nVidia had sought to acquire ARM, but that deal was thwarted by regulators for antitrust reasons
  • Many analysts are skeptical of ARM's ability to compete against nVidia to build AI accelerators in the short or even medium term
    • ARM does not have any expertise in designing GPUs or AI accelerators
    • In addition to competing with nVidia, ARM will have to compete with companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, all of whom are also designing their own custom AI accelerators for their cloud offerings
    • nVidia's advantage rests not only with its hardware designs but also its CUDA software and ARM doesn't have any equivalent
• Elon Musk's xAI is in talks to raise funding at a $40 billion valuation
  • xAI was founded about 18 months ago by Elon as a competitor to OpenAI
  • Was valued at around $24 billion in its last fundraising round in May
  • xAI has created Grok chatbot, available to Twitter premium users
  • Elon has diverted resources from his other businesses, including Tesla, to help xAI get off the ground, raising conflict of interest concerns among investors
• Google posts strong earnings, despite increasing its spending on AI
  • Profit jumped by 34% in the third quarter
  • Strong growth in cloud computing and services used to train and operate artificial intelligence models
  • Search and ads revenue was up by approximately 10%
  • YouTube's revenue grew by 12% and subscriber growth was reported as strong
  • However, ever increasing capital expenditures for AI remain a drag on growth
  • Google also faces the prospect of fines or even a break-up of the company as a result of its loss in an antitrust case on August 5 regarding payments it made to device and browser vendors to ensure that Google was the default search engine
  • Google is also in the midst of a second anti-trust case over its dominance of search advertising
• Microsoft posts strong quarterly earnings as well, on the basis of increased demand for its cloud services
  • Azure sales grew by 33% on the basis of increased demand for AI compute
  • Microsoft's share price has lagged that of other big tech corporations, up only 15% compared to a 68% increase for Meta
• Over 25% of new code at Google is AI generated, according to CEO Sundar Pichai
  • Pichai says that AI assistance has made Google engineers significantly more productive
  • Code is still reviewed by humans before being accepted
• Supermicro shares decline sharply as its auditor, Ernst & Young, resigns
  • Supermicro is a manufacturer of servers for datacenters
  • Stock had appreciated significantly on demand for new servers as a result of the AI boom
  • Ernst & Young had raised concerns about Supermicro's governance and financial controls
  • Supermicro has been under scrutiny after a Hindenburg Research report accusing it of "accounting manipulation"
• Florida accidentally bans banks from selling securities in the state
  • Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that was intended to make it easier for banks and hedge funds to sell certain unregistered securities in Florida
  • However, the law, as drafted, would have made it illegal for any bank that had been the subject of an SEC enforcement action to sell securities in Florida
  • Virtually all major banks have been in trouble with the SEC at some point, so, in effect, this law would have prohibited large banks from selling securities in Florida
  • On Sunday, Florida's Office of Financial Regulation invoked emergency powers to suspend the law until it can be formally amended by the Florida legislature
• Starbucks restores the self-serve condiments bar
  • Starbucks has had three consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales
  • Customers are complaining about longer waits and higher prices
  • Also complain that the loss of the self-serve condiments bar requires customers to send drinks back if they have insufficient milk or sugar
  • New CEO Brian Niccol has set a goal of getting most customers their drink in 4 minutes or less
  • Will restore a self-serve bar stocked with milk and sugar

2024-10-29 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Yasna Polyana has been captured
    • It looks like Hirnyk has been captured as well
    • Russian forces capture Oleksandropil
    • Kurakhivka is now looking very isolated
  • Ukraine strikes a Russian base inside Luhansk City
  • Ukraine and Russia are negotiating on whether to halt strikes on energy infrastructure
    • Ukraine is proposing halting attacks on Russian oil infrastructure in exchange for Russia halting attacks on its electricity infrastructure
    • Russia has hit a significant number of Ukrainian conventional power plants, weakening Ukraine's electricity grid ahead of winter
    • Ukraine has hit several of Russia's refineries, damaging at least 9 of 32 major refineries since the start of 2024
    • Negotiations on halting strikes on energy infrastructure had been going on earlier this year, but were derailed by Ukraine's invasion of Kursk
    • The two countries have reduced attacks on each others' energy infrastructure as part of a tacit agreement brokered by their respective intelligence agencies
    • A deal on halting attacks on energy infrastructure could be a prelude to broader negotiations to stop hostilities entirely
  • The US Department of Defense estimates that there are 10,000 North Korean troops training at bases in Russia's Far East , in preparation of a deployment to Ukraine
    • The total number of soldiers is less than 1% of Russia's total force
    • Not expected to fight at the front line; instead will serve in support and logistics roles
    • In exchange, Russia is expected to continue providing space technology to North Korea
• OpenAI partners with Broadcom and TSMC to design custom AI accelerators
  • OpenAI had been looking at a number of options to reduce its dependence on nVidia, up to and including building its own foundries to manufacture custom hardware
  • Instead, the company is partnering with Broadcom and TSMC to design and manufacture custom AI accelerators
  • In the near term, OpenAI will use GPUs from AMD as well as nVidia to train new models
  • OpenAI's chip design team is 20 people, led by engineers who designed Google's TPUs
  • That's pretty small, for a chip design team
• LLM-powered transcription tools, such as Whisper, can insert hallucinated statements into medical transcriptions
  • Several developers working with Whisper, the LLM-based transcription tool from OpenAI, have discovered statements in the transcript that are not present in the source recording
  • These hallucinated statements are especially problematic in medical applications, where they may lead to misdiagnosis
  • Medical centers are rushing to adopt automated transcription tools in order to more efficiently transcribe conversations between patients and doctors
• Boeing announces plans to raise another $19 billion via selling shares
  • Boeing's balance sheet has been strained by the machinists' strike
• The leading Chinese coffee chain, Luckin Coffee, plans a US launch
  • Luckin is the main rival to Starbucks in China
  • Has over 20,000 locations, compared to Starbucks' 7,300
  • However, Luckin's lower prices lead to much lower revenue per store, and Luckin's total revenue only exceeded that of Starbucks in 2023
  • Luckin will target locations with large numbers of expatriate Chinese, such as New York for its initial locations in the US
  • Luckin will face a challenge in the US as the US coffee market is already saturated
  • Expansion into the US comes nearly 5 years after an accounting scandal that led to a $180 million fine and Luckin's delisting from the NASDAQ stock exchange
• China has lost a third of its billionaires
  • According to a list compiled by the research group Hurun, the number of Chinese individuals whose net worth is over a billion dollars has fallen by a third
  • The number of Chinese billionaires hit a peak of 1,185 in 2021
  • Today that number is 753
  • Decline has been driven by government crackdowns, especially on ecommerce, and a weak Chinese stock market
• German workers launch a series of strikes
  • Strikes are conducted by the electrical engineering and metalworking unions
  • Take place ahead of wage negotiations across a variety of industries
  • The German union IG Metall is requesting wage increases of 7%, higher than the 3.6% being offered by business associations
• NASA declines to share details about the Orion spacecraft's heat shield issues
  • On the uncrewed Artemis 1 test flight, the Orion spacecraft's heat shield displayed unexpected cracking and wear during reentry
  • Heat shield was supposed to burn away evenly, but upon examination, there were unexpected divots
  • NASA completed its internal investigation into the heat shield issue two months ago, but wants to perform additional testing before disclosing further details about the root cause of the problem
  • The second Orion spacecraft is already assembled for the Artemis 2 mission, and any changes to the heat shield would require the spacecraft to be disassembled again, jeopardizing the currently scheduled September 2025 launch date

2024-10-28 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Novodmytrivka once again
    • Russian forces capture Katerynivka
    • Russian forces have advanced through Shakhtarske and are now on the outskirts of Yasna Polyana
    • Russian forces are also launching attacks north of Bakhmut, near Vasyukivka
  • No word from Kursk over the past few days
• The war in Ukraine and Israeli strikes on Iran have ruined the reputation of Russian anti-aircraft systems
  • In both Ukraine and Iran, Russian-made anti-aircraft equipment has done a poor job of intercepting incoming missiles and drones
  • Both Ukraine and Israel have demonstrated success in hitting Russia's most advanced air defense systems, the S300 and S400
  • The poor performance of Russian equipment in Ukraine and Iran is causing some of Russia's traditional customers, such as India, to look to other suppliers
  • Compounding this is frustration with the Russian military diverting weapons marked for export to the conflict in Ukraine
  • India has been moving away from exclusive reliance on the S400 towards using the S400 as a long-range interceptor in conjunction with indigenous short and medium range interceptors developed in collaboration with Israel
  • Is working to replace the S400 with an indigenous system as well
• Indonesia bans imports of the iPhone 16
  • Indonesia has passed a rule that stipulates imported electronics must have at least 40% local content
  • The Indonesian government has stated that Apple has not made the necessary investments in Indonesia to meet that threshold
  • iPhones can be brought into Indonesia from abroad for personal use, but cannot be (officially) traded in the country
• Volkswagen moves ahead with plans to close 3 German factories even in the face of union opposition
  • Previous coverage from September 6
  • A set of meetings will take place between Volkswagen's representatives and its union workers on October 30
  • Volkswagen is proposing an across-the-board 10% pay cut, with reductions in bonus payments that would total an up to 18% pay cut for some
  • Will also close 3 factories in Germany, which will result in layoffs
  • Daniela Cavallo, the head of the worker's representative council, says that these measure court an escalatory response from the union, up to and including a strike
• No party receives a majority of seats in the Japanese Diet after parliamentary elections
  • Until recently, Japanese politics had been dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
  • Ruled Japan nearly continuously after World War 2
  • However recently, the LDP has been rocked by a series of scandals which resulted in the resignation of Prime Minster Kishida Fumio
  • Voters have punished the LDP at the polls and the primary beneficiary has been the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ)
  • LDP, and its close ally Komeito, received 215 seats
  • CDPJ received 148 seats
  • 233 votes are required to command a majority
  • The LDP and Komeito will likely look to form informal alliances with smaller parties, such as the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) or the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) which have 28 and 38 seats respectively
• 7-11 customers worry that an acquisition of 7-and-i by Alimentation Couche-Tard will affect the quality of 7-11's food offerings
  • Background
    • On August 19, 7-and-i, the owner of 7-11, was approached by Alimentation Couche-Tard, owner of Circle K, with a takeover offer
    • On September 6, 7-and-i rejected the offer, stating that it didn't value 7-and-i's business appropriately
    • On October 9, Alimentation Couche-Tard returned with a 20% higher offer
  • Japanese customers of 7-11 praise the high quality rice balls and sandwiches offered in 7-11's Japanese stores
  • Much of 7-11's food offerings are manufactured exclusively for it
  • 7-11 worked with chefs and developed special equipment to make e.g. rice balls and potato salad
  • Works with suppliers to develop new recipes, exclusively for 7-11
  • However, in recent years, this practice was leading to higher costs and reduced profitability, which is one of the reasons 7-and-i is seen as an attractive acquisition target
  • Foreign companies often struggle to understand Japanese customer preferences
    • Walmart backed out of an acquisition of Japanese retailer Seiyu after over a decade of struggling to turn a profit
    • Carrefour pulled out of Japan in 2005 after only 4 years
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard has said that it has "tremendous respect" for 7-11's standards of excellence, and will maintain those standards if the merger goes through
  • And if you believe that, I have a deed to Tokyo Tower I'd like to sell you

2024-10-27 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Selydove
    • Russian forces reached the outskirts of Selydove on September 2, meaning that the town held for 56 days
    • Russian forces have advanced into Vyshneve, though the extent of the advance is unclear
    • North of Vuhledar, Russian forces capture Bohoyavlenka
    • If the Ukrainians are smart they'll pull out of Hirnyk and Kurakhivka, as the loss of Selydove makes it very likely that Ukrainian forces in those to towns get pinned against the reservoir behind them and become unable to retreat
    • Arguably they should have retreated when the Russians occupied Tsukurnye on October 13
• Memory chips could be the next bottleneck for AI
  • There is a large difference in demand between demand for AI-related chips and chips for other applications
  • This explains how ASML, which makes chips for the general market, could have disappointing results
  • Similarly SK Hynix reported record profits for disappointing sales
  • The common thread is that TSMC and SK Hynix are focused on the market for AI chips, which is red hot, while Samsung and ASML are more broadly exposed to the semiconductor market as a whole which is suffering from oversupply as a result of pandemic-era capacity build-up
  • SK Hynix is an industry leader in the manufacture of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips, controlling 90% of the production of the most advanced version, HBM3
  • Fast, high capacity memory is key to the efficient functioning of the GPUs on which AI models are trained and run
  • HBM chips are emerging as a bottleneck for future AI capacity, with both SK Hynix and Micron having sold through almost their entire production capacity for next year
  • The US is pressuring South Korea to restrict sales of HBM chips to China
  • I called it on May 26, but unfortunately I backed the wrong horse; Micron hasn't done as well, because SK Hynix has taken a lead in HBM manufacturing
• The US Navy seeks to arm its warships with Patriot missiles in order to defeat hypersonic threats
  • The Patriot's PAC-3 interceptor is more agile than the Navy's SM-6 missile
  • However, the PAC-3 has a shorter range and can't hit targets in space
  • The PAC-3 has not been deployed on any naval vessels but has undergone integration testing with naval systems on land
  • More validation is needed, including testing whether the PAC-3 missile can receive signals from the SPY-1 radar used by US Navy ships
  • I like this
  • Knowing that this capability exists, even if it's not used outside of wartime, gives the US Navy more flexibility in the event of a conflict
  • The precedent for this is the JDAM: it was still undergoing testing when the Kosovo War broke out
  • However, when the Kosovo War strained supplies of precision guided munitions, JDAM was put into production, and helped solve the supply crunch
  • Similarly, having the capability to deploy PAC-3 missiles on Navy ships is a useful insurance policy while the US Navy works to increase its supplies of SM-3 and SM-6 missiles
• Delta sues Crowdstrike
  • On July 19 a misconfigured update to the CrowdStrike Falcon Protect cybersecurity suite caused Windows machines to crash worldwide
  • One of the organizations that was most affected by this outage was Delta, which had to cancel 20% of its flights
  • The mass cancellation resulted in an ongoing Department of Transportation investigation into the robustness of Delta's IT infrastructure
  • Delta claims that Crowdstrike's inadequate testing cost Delta hundreds of millions of dollars
  • Is asking for $500 million in reimbursement for out of pocket expenses, plus unspecified amounts for lost profits and additional expenses
  • Crowdstrike, in turn, has questioned why Delta's competitors, who were affected to a similar degree by the outage, were able to restore service more rapidly
  • I'm only partially sympathetic to Delta's argument
  • Yes, Crowdstrike should have tested its software more thoroughly
  • However, it is still ultimately Delta's responsibility to ensure that its own network is functional and able to serve business needs
  • Delta claims that if Crowdstrike had tested its update on "a single Windows machine", it would have found the problem
  • That's true, but the criticism can be turned against Delta as well: why did Delta apply a patch whose failure could cause potentially catastrophic consequences across its entire network all at once?
• A jury awards Apple $250 in its patent infringement lawsuit against Masimo
  • Apple had sued Masimo for violating two of its design patents
  • The jury agreed that previous versions of Masimo's smartwatches violated those patents
  • However, the jury found that current versions of Masimo's smartwatches did not infringe upon Apple's patents
  • The jury awarded Apple just $250 in damages, the minimum amount allowed by law

2024-10-25 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Ukrainian sources are reporting that Russian troops have advanced from Zolota Nyva to Shakhtarske
      • If confirmed, this advance would put significantly more pressure on Velyka Novosilka
    • John Helin has a good thread analyzing the overall situation at Selydove
      • Currently Selydove is the point at which the Russians appear to be applying maximum pressure
      • Have attempted to cut off logistics from the north and south, with relatively little success in the north and rather more in the south
      • Made advances into the southern and eastern parts of the city
      • City is currently split, with a Ukrainian brigade holding the northern and western portions and the Russians holding the south and east
      • Russian forces are also attempting to advance on Novodmytrivka to the southwest, in order to put additional pressure on the Ukrainian forces in Kurakhivka and Hirnyk
      • The loss of Selydove and Novodmytrivka could allow a Russian breakthrough, as Ukraine does not have the same density of fortifications to the west of those cities as it had to their east
  • North Korean troops aiding Russia
    • Vladimir Putin appears to confirm that North Korean troops are aiding Russia
      • In a press conference, Putin referred to Article 4 of the mutual defense treaty signed on June 19
      • That clause commits Russia and North Korea to assisting each other with "all means at their disposal" if either should be attacked
      • Putin's specific invocation of Article 4 in response to a question about the presence of North Korean troops is seen as tacit confirmation that North Korean troops are aiding Russia
    • The Financial Times reports on how North Korean troops might be used by Russia
      • Western analysts think the most likely use of North Korean troops would be to retake territory in Kursk
      • North Korean troops are reportedly from the "Storm Corps", a North Korean light infantry formation that is reputed to have better equipment and cohesion
      • Kim Jong-Un has long wanted to send troops to Ukraine, in order to gather real-world combat data
      • Sending troops to Ukraine is also seen as a way to secure a long-term security guarantee from Russia, giving North Korea an alternative to China for its security needs
• Russia provided targeting data to the Houthis to enable them to strike Western shipping
  • Russian satellite data was passed to the Houthis via Iran
  • Allows Houthis to track ships even after they've turned off their satellite transponders in an effort to evade detection
  • Shows that Russia has turned decisively in favor of Iran, and away from Israel, a country with which it had previously maintained good relations
• Boeing has lost $1.85 billion on the Starliner program
  • The future of the Starliner program is in question
  • Boeing has committed to providing at least three flights and up to six flights for NASA
  • However, it is unclear that Boeing will be able to meet the six flight commitment before NASA decides to deorbit the ISS
• Boeing is looking into selling its space business, including the troubled Starliner program
  • Sale would include most of the business that supplies NASA, including the Starliner program
  • Comes as new CEO Kelly Ortberg looks to streamline the company in the face of significant financial difficulties
  • Boeing will keep its military satellite business and its SLS contract
  • Sale rumors come in the wake of the departure of Boeing's head of defense and space on September 21
  • Blue Origin is a potential buyer for the space assets that Boeing would be selling
  • This looks to me like Boeing ditching its fixed-cost contracts and keeping the cost-plus contracts
• The US Department of Justice is investigating the Tether cryptocurrency for violating money-laundering laws
  • Tether has the highest trading volume of all cryptocurrencies
  • Maintained by the Tether corporation
  • Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Tether is pegged to the dollar at a 1:1 ratio
  • Backed by a mix of assets, such as government and corporate bonds
  • Is used as a dollar substitute by people who find it difficult to get actual dollars for legal reasons (e.g. because they're drug dealers or arms smugglers)
  • Tether argues that the fact that all Tether transactions are inherently public due to the nature of the blockchain means that Tether is poorly suited for criminal users
• Chinese students are increasingly unable to write Chinese characters by hand
  • The Chinese dictionary contains over 13,000 characters
  • However, the standard for literacy is being able to read and write the 4,000 most commonly used characters
  • Chinese people can still recognize characters when they read, but increasingly they're forgetting how to write the characters
  • Phenomenon is known as "character amnesia" or "lift the pen, forget the character"
  • Exacerbated by digital technologies that automatically translate phonetic representations to characters
  • The Chinese Ministry of Education is responding by mandating the teaching of calligraphy in schools
  • Sponsoring televised calligraphy contests
  • The problem for Chinese (and Japanese) is that the non-phonetic nature of characters means that the actions of speaking, listening, reading, and writing are not mutually reinforcing as they are in phonetic languages (or even partially phonetic languages, like English)
  • Although the Chinese government is treating "character amnesia" as a crisis, to me it seems more like the similar phenomenon of children in the US being increasingly unable to write in cursive

2024-10-24 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting continues in Selydove, with the town under attack from multiple directions
    • Ukrainian forces launch a counterattack around Novohrodivka
    • Novohrodivka fell on August 26, but the front line has stabilized somewhat in that area
  • Other than that, there isn't a lot of news from the front; not many new geolocations from the Kupyansk or Kursk regions
  • Emil Kastehelmi has a thread analyzing the impact North Korean troops will have on Russian operations
    • North Korea has already played a significant role in aiding Russia against Ukraine by enabling Russia to sustain its artillery advantage
    • The arrival of North Korean troops should be seen as a continuation of this preexisting cooperation
    • The use of North Korean troops in Ukraine benefits both the Russian and North Korean governments
      • Is another short-term band-aid solution (like ever increasing sign-on bonuses) that allows the Russian military to plug gaps without having to resort to a second round of mobilization
      • North Korean military gains combat experience against Western equipment
    • The fact that Russia is using North Korean troops now, however, should not be seen as indicative of Russian weakness
    • Although the Russian military is facing many challenges in the medium to long term, in the short term it is still advancing in multiple areas
• Boeing's machinists vote to reject the deal and continue striking
  • New contract was agreed to by union and Boeing negotiators on Sunday
  • Was presented to the membership for a vote yesterday
  • Increased pay by 35% and had increased contributions to retirement accounts
• ARM has given Qualcomm 60 days' notice that it is canceling its IP license
  • ARM designs the instruction set that all smartphone chips implement
  • Also makes and licenses reference designs that implement those instructions
  • ARM and Qualcomm are in a legal dispute over Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia
  • Qualcomm acquired Nuvia to bring more design resources in-house, reducing its dependence on ARM's reference designs and making Qualcomm's relationship with ARM more like Apple, which licenses the instruction set, but does all design work in-house
  • ARM claims that Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia caused Nuvia to breach its own license agreements with ARM
• The EU's antitrust case against Intel has been overturned on appeal
  • The European Commission had found Intel guilty of anticompetitive behavior
  • Issued a €1.06 billion fine for offering discounts to computer manufacturers only if they bought the majority of their processors from Intel
  • The fine was overturned by a lower court in 2022, stating that the EC had not properly conducted an economic analysis before fining Intel
  • The EC appealed to the highest court in the EU, the European Court of Justice
  • The ECJ found in favor of Intel, stating that lower court's ruling was correct
• Google makes its SynthID AI content watermarking tool open source
  • SynthID watermarks AI generated content in a manner that is imperceptible to humans
  • Works by increasing the correlation between certain tokens that would be otherwise uncorrelated
  • These increased correlations act as a watermark
  • However the altered token distribution is close enough to the original LLM distribution that it would be imperceptible to a human
  • Can then perform statistical analysis on a particular piece of content to see if the watermark
• The co-founder of Cerebras, Jean-Philippe Fricker, discusses what might have caused the delays with nVidia's Blackwell
  • Traditional GPUs consist of a logic chip, along with several high-bandwidth memory chips
  • Each of these chips is placed on a substrate, which connects them to the underlying printed circuit board
  • If there are multiple chips on a single substrate, that substrate is known as an interposer
  • Putting multiple chips on a single interposer allows for higher bandwidth connections between them
  • Blackwell is the first nVidia design that has multiple logic chips
  • This requires nVidia to make connections between logic chips, in addition to having connections between logic chips and memory
  • More connections are required to link two logic chips together than are required to link a logic chip to a memory chip
  • Furthermore, having two logic chips and a larger amount of memory means that the interposer must be much bigger
  • In order to manufacture this interposer more cheaply nVidia decided that only the parts of the interposer which are responsible for chip-to-chip connections should be manufactured from silicon
  • The remainder of the interposer could be manufactured out of an organic material (i.e. plastic)
  • The silicon components of the interposer are known as bridges
  • Bridges have to be aligned very precisely, typically to tolerances between 10 and 50 microns, in order to ensure that the various components on the interposer are connected properly
  • It is difficult to ensure that everything remains aligned through the whole manufacturing process
  • The fact that Blackwell is a larger design, with two logic chips, means that alignment must be maintained across longer distances
  • Another problem is that silicon and the organic material have different thermal properties
  • This means that temperatures have to be controlled more precisely in order to ensure that thermal expansion doesn't cause correctly placed components to become misaligned later on
  • Cerebras attempts to avoid this problem by using an entire 300mm² wafer
  • Designs its chips to have redundancy built in so that manufacturing defects can be compensated for and worked around
  • Because Cerebras uses a large silicon wafer to hold both logic and RAM, it can use the same process all throughout
  • Doesn't need an interposer to connect disparate components, because all components are manufactured as a unit
  • Parts don't have to be physically placed, which solves alignment problems
  • Whole thing is silicon, which solves the thermal expansion problem
  • The downside of using an entire wafer is that it has to use the same machinery and the same processes for everything
  • nVidia can rely on, e.g. SK Hynix, to specialize in memory while it specializes in logic: Cerebras gives up on the benefits of that specialization and argues that the benefits of integration make up for not having components that are individually superior
• Cable companies, newspapers and advertising firms sue to block the FTC's "click-to-cancel" rule
  • On October 16, the FTC passed a rule designed to make it easier to cancel subscriptions
  • Rule was designed to make cancellation procedures easier to find and less onerous to go through
  • Notably the rule mandated that it should be possible to cancel service without having to interact with a chatbot or customer service representative
  • Trade groups representing newspapers, cable companies and advertising firms have sued to block the rule, claiming that the FTC was being "arbitrary and capricious" with its rulemaking
  • Argue that they have a First Amendment right to try to persuade a customer to keep their service
  • I don't know how the court will rule, because it's the 5th Circuit, which has a history of somewhat wacky rulings, but it's there are a lot of carve-outs around advertising when it comes to First Amendment protection
  • In general, commercial speech doesn't enjoy the same level of protection as private, or especially private political speech

2024-10-23 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces retake Olgovka
    • This isn't as significant as the attack towards Zelenyi Shlyakh, but it's still not good news
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces occupy Izmailivka, increasing the pressure on Hirnyk
  • Kupyansk region
    • The latest Deep State map shows that Russian forces have made gains in Kruhlyakivka
  • North Korean troops aiding Russia
    • South Korean lawmakers state that 3000 North Korean troops have been sent to Russia to support its war effort
      • New estimate is double that of the previous report from Friday, which stated that 1500 troops had been ferried to Russia by the Russian Navy
    • The US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, confirms that North Korean soldiers have gone to Russia
      • Did not confirm numbers or intentions
  • The US will contribute $20 billion into a G7 loan for Ukraine
    • Loan will be repaid with interest on frozen Russian assets
    • The US has decided to participate even if Hungary does not drop its objection to a longer-term freeze of Russian assets
    • This means that the full $50 billion loan can go forward, rather than the reduced €35 billion loan the EU was preparing to proceed on without US participation
• Turkish defense facility hit in terrorist attack
  • Attack was at the Turkish Aerospace Industries' headquarters, northwest of Ankara
  • At least 4 people have been killed, with 14 injured
  • The attackers were all killed as well
  • In retaliation, Turkey carried out strikes against PKK targets in Iraq and Syria
• Maersk boosts its profit guidance again as Red Sea disruptions continue
  • Persistent disruptions caused by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have led to container ships taking longer routes around the Cape of Good Hope
  • This has increased the demand for container ship capacity
  • Although this has led to increased fuel costs, the lack of surplus container ship capacity has allowed Maersk to pass on those costs to its customers, resulting in increased profits
• Anthropic demonstrates a tool that lets its AI take control of your computer to carry out tasks that require user input
  • Tool is called "Computer Use"
  • Allows Anthropic's Claude model to control the user's mouse and keyboard
  • Operates by taking successive screenshots to determine where input fields are
  • Oh yes, let the AI remote desktop into your machine, what could possibly go wrong?
• nVidia has resolved the production issues it was having with its new Blackwell AI accelerators
  • Earlier this year, nVidia announced that its Blackwell CPUs, previously scheduled to ship in Q2 would be delayed until Q4
  • Delay was due to design issues that caused yields to be unacceptably low
  • Jensen Huang, nVidia's CEO, has stated that the chip has been redesigned and will ship in Q4 as expected
• SK Hynix posts record profit
  • SK Hynix is a leading manufacturers of computer memory
  • Has seen demand for memory increase as ever larger AI models require ever more RAM
  • SK Hynix has a lead in producing the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips most desirable for advanced GPUs and AI accelerators, allowing it to outperform Samsung Electronics and Micron Technologies
• Frontier and Spirit renew merger talks
  • Frontier and Spirit had held merger talks in 2022, which resulted in a preliminary agreement
  • JetBlue came in with a higher offer, causing Spirit to seek a merger with that airline instead
  • The JetBlue merger was blocked on antitrust grounds
  • This led Spirit to explore a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in order to restructure its debts in the face of declining revenue caused by increased competition and a Pratt & Whitney engine recall
  • The new merger talks with Frontier are at an early stage and may not yield a deal
• Boeing posts a $6 billion loss for the quarter
  • Losses were primarily due to the machinists strike of the 737 Max, 767 and 777
  • Company has made a loss of approximately $8 billion for the year thus far

2024-10-22 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces reenter Zelenyi Shlyakh, after successfully repelling the Russian counterattack
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces enter Selydove
    • Although Selydove hasn't fallen yet, once Russian troops get a foothold in a town it's almost impossible for Ukrainians to force them out again
    • Fighting continues between Kostyantynivka and Katerynivka
  • According to the UN, Ukraine's population has declined by 10 million since the start of the war
    • Decline is almost 25% of the population
    • Due to a combination of crashing fertility and emigration
    • Russia has also seen its demographic situation deteriorate, with Russia recording its lowest official birth rate in 25 years
  • NATO officials cannot corroborate large numbers of North Koreans being sent to Russia
    • Confirm that North Korean observers are present to learn from the Russians and assess the performance of North Korean weapons
    • No large infantry formations, however
• The United Kingdom has granted political asylum to the son of Lee Kuan Yew, founder of Singapore
  • Lee Hsien Yang and his wife, Lee Suet Fern, have been in self-imposed exile in London since 2022
  • Under criminal investigation in Singapore
  • Lee Hsien Yang wished to have Lee Kuan Yew's family home demolished, per Kuan Yew's wishes
  • However Kuan Yew's other children disagreed, leading to a dynastic dispute
  • Singaporean authorities claim that Lee Suet Fern tampered with Lee Kuan Yew's will
  • Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Suet Fern argued successfully that these claims are politically motivated in order to ensure that their son, Li Shengwu, will never have a political career in Singapore
• The merger between DirecTV and Dish Network is on the brink of collapse because of bondholder objections
  • DirecTV proposed to exchange approximately $10 billion of Dish Network's bonds for $8 billion of its own debt
  • That is too much of a discount for creditors, who want a $300 million discount instead of DirecTV's proposed $1.6 billion discount
  • Approximately 80% of Dish Network bondholders have formed a cooperation group, agreeing to negotiate with DirecTV as a collective

2024-10-21 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Despite Russian attacks on Zelenyi Shlyakh, Ukrainian forces have managed to hold positions in the area, most notably in Novoivanovka
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Zoryane, south of Hirnyk
    • Continuing their advance out of Kostyantynivka (captured August 27), Russian forces have entered Katerynivka
    • Contrary to the Reuters report from yesterday, it appears that Selydove is still under Ukrainian control
  • Lloyd Austin visits Ukraine and announces a new aid package
    • Announced a new $400 million aid package
    • Includes additional weapons, antitank munitions and armored vehicles
    • Is this in addition to the $8 billion aid package that the US announced on September 25
    • Or is it a specific disbursement of aid from that overall package?
    • Austin has often been criticized for advocating restraint and pursuing an incrementalist approach that critics say has given Ukraine just enough weapons to survive, but not enough to drive Russian troops from the country
• India and China reach a deal on military patrols on their disputed border
  • India and China fought a major war in 1962 over the border between Kashmir and Tibet
  • War was inconclusive, with both sides laying claim to the disputed territory
  • The frontier between the two nations in this area is referred to as the "Line of Actual Control"
  • Recently, in 2020, clashes between Indian and Chinese troops along the Line of Actual Control in the Galwan Valley led to both sides rushing reinforcements to the area
  • In the wake of those clashes, the Modi government banned several Chinese apps and implemented restrictions on Chinese investment into India
  • The Modi government has made de-escalation in the Galwan valley a condition of resuming "normal" relations with China
• Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post file suit against Perplexity
  • Accuse Perplexity of illegally scraping copyrighted content and using AI generated summaries to substitute for the original source
  • Comes in the wake of the New York Times sending Perplexity a cease-and-desist last Tuesday demanding that Perplexity stop scraping the Times
• Prandtl Defense, a new startup, demonstrates an anti-drone weapon that uses ultrasonic sound
  • Uses sound waves that align with resonant frequencies of drone components to destabilize drones and cause them to crash
  • Won a Canadian competition, beating out Boeing, Leonardo, and other established defense contractors
  • Shows how the emergence of low-cost UAVs has created opportunities smaller startups

2024-10-20 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russia launched another major attack towards Kruhlyakivka, which was once again repelled with heavy losses
    • However, Russian forces have already closed in on the Oskil river: it seems like it's only a matter of time before they manage to exhaust and push back the Ukrainians here
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has launched a major assault on Selydove, and according to some sources, has taken the town
    • If true, it would mean that Selydove held for 49 days, as Russian troops began attacking Selydove on September 2
    • Right now, the cities that are most at risk appear to be Hirnyk and Kurakhivka
  • Ukrainian drones hit an ammunition factory in Dzerzhinsk, just west of Nizhny Novogorod
    • Dzerzhinsk is roughly 200 miles (321 km) east of Moscow
    • This might be one of the deepest strikes into Russian territory carried out by Ukrainian drones
  • Ramzan Kadyrov's forces are looting the steel mills of Mariupol
    • Although Azovstal was too damaged by fighting to have much salvageable equipment, the other steel mill in Mariupol, Ilyich Iron and Steel Works, had much less damage
    • The Russian government gave the Kadyrov clan responsibility for governing Mariupol and they're looting the steel works
      • Removing and selling modern equipment to Russian mills
      • Selling inert gases to the Russian space program
    • This mirrors Russian practices in Africa, where the Wagner group was awarded control of mines after securing them from insurgents
  • Ukrainians are building auto-targeting systems into their drones so that even Russian jamming causes the drone to lose signal, it can complete its attack
• Perplexity is in talks to raise funds at an $8 billion valuation
  • Looking for a roughly $500 million funding round
  • Annualized revenue is roughly $50 million, up from $10 million in March
  • Perplexity currently earns money by selling subscriptions, but is exploring ways of adding advertising to its free tier to broaden its revenue stream
  • Perplexity has attracted controversy for scraping content without authorization and using it to make AI-generated summaries and articles
• The International Association of Machinists and Boeing have reached a tentative agreement to end the strike
  • Machinists will vote on Wednesday to accept or reject Boeing's latest offer
  • Boeing will increase wages by 35% over four years
  • Increase contributions to retirement accounts

2024-10-18 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces attacked Kruglenkoe northeast of Zelenyi Shlyakh, however, it doesn't appear that they had much success
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces make an effort to reach the Oskil River at Kruhlyakivka, but are driven back by a Ukrainian counterattack
    • It looks like the prediction I made on September 23 was correct: it does look like the Russians are attempting to make a crossing at Kruhlyakivka
  • Donetsk region
    • Leonidivka remains contested, with Russian forces not able to establish a foothold, despite advancing to the city on September 21
  • North Korean troops aiding Russia
    • A large group of what appear to be North Korean soldiers are spotted on a Russian base in Usuriyssk near Vladivostok, and also near Anastasevka, near Khabarovsk, in Russia's far east
    • According to the South Korean government, Russian navy ships transported 1500 North Korean troops to Russia, where they'll allegedly be given Russian weapons, uniforms and identification papers
    • This is reportedly an initial contingent out of a total deployment of 12,000 troops, but that is impossible to confirm as of yet
• Microsoft and OpenAI begin negotiations on Microsoft's equity stake
  • Microsoft has invested approximately $14 billion in OpenAI
  • However that investment was made when OpenAI still had a complex ownership structure with a nonprofit entity owning a for-profit company whose profits were capped
  • Now that OpenAI is converting itself to a more conventional for-profit public benefit corporation, OpenAI has to decide how much equity Microsoft is entitled to
  • In addition, OpenAI has to decide whether Microsoft gets a say in its governance
  • Microsoft and OpenAI have a close relationship, with Microsoft providing the bulk of OpenAI's computing power through its Azure cloud service
  • However, Microsoft has been lately making its own investments in developing AI that's independent of OpenAI and OpenAI has been seeking other investors and computing providers
• OpenAI and Bain Consulting reach a deal to sell customized versions of ChatGPT to businesses
  • Bain is working with businesses to build custom GPT models
  • Automate document creation
  • Help with planning and forecasting
  • OpenAI has a similar arrangement with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, another accounting and consulting firm
• Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is raising funds for a new AI startup
  • Murati resigned from OpenAI on September 25
  • Murati has reportedly been recruiting OpenAI employees to join her
  • She is able to do this because California doesn't enforce noncompete agreements, so Murati was free to turn around and build a competitor to OpenAI as soon as she left
• Spirit Aerosystems will furlough workers as a result of the prolonged strike at Boeing
  • Spirit Aerosystems makes fuselages for Boeing (including, most notably, the fuselage whose door plug fell off)
  • Boeing has halted production of its 737 Max, 767 and 777 aircraft, because of a strike by the International Association of Machinists
  • As a result, inventory is building up at Spirit
  • As Spirit is running out of storage, it is halting production of 767 and 777 fuselages and furloughing the workers on those production lines
  • 737 Max production is unaffected
  • That's interesting because Boeing has halted production of 737 Maxes, 767s and 777s, but Spirit has only halted production of 767 and 777 fuselages
  • Boeing is in the process of buying back Spirit, a company that it spun out more than 20 years ago
• The International Association of Machinists is indirectly negotiating with Boeing in talks that are being mediated by the federal government
  • These are the first talks since Boeing withdrew a new contract offer for bypassing the normal collective bargaining process
  • Talks are being attended to personally by acting Labor Secretary Julie Su
• The EU may consider Musk's other business in calculating fines against Twitter
  • Further coverage
  • The EU has warned Twitter that it may use revenue from SpaceX, Neuralink and other businesses when calculating fines against Twitter
  • The potential fines are over Twitter's allegedly deceptive use of blue checks (from July 12)
  • The EU's Digital Services Act provides for fines of up to 6% of revenue
  • The reasoning behind including Elon's other businesses is that the fine might be targeted at Elon himself, therefore allowing the EU to consider other businesses under Elon's "exclusive control" as contributing to his revenue
  • This is because the DSA is targeted at the "provider" of online platforms, where provider is defined as the legal entity exercising "decisive influence" over the platform or search engine, regardless of whether it is a corporate or actual person
  • Because Elon himself is alleged to be the person exercising "decisive influence", the EU Commission feels justified in considering all of Musk's privately held companies as a single entity, which it has termed the "Musk Group"
  • This would include Twitter, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company
  • Tesla would be excluded because it is a publicly held company, and therefore not under Elon's exclusive control
  • On the one hand, this is behavior that you'd expect from the villain in an Ayn Rand novel
  • On the other hand, the forcible seizure of cash from Starlink seemed to get Twitter to bend the knee in Brazil, so who knows, this might be persuasive to Musk

2024-10-17 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Luhansk region
    • Ukrainian forces retook territory near Nevske
      • Nevske itself was liberated on October 28, 2022, but since then the front line in that area had barely moved
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Lysivka once again
    • Russian units were also spotted southwest of Selydove, between Tsukurnye, Novodymitrivka, and Selydove
    • Seems like Russian forces are continuing to attempt to bypass Selydove, as they have been trying to do since October 4
    • Russian forces capture Maksymilyanivka
    • This seems like Russians consolidating gains, as they captured Hostre sometime around October 1, and Maksymilyanivka is just south of Hostre
    • No word from the Zolota Nyva area where Russian forces had advanced to on October 7
    • Russian forces make small advances south of Chasiv Yar
  • Tatarigami has a list of reforms that he'd like to see Ukraine carry out in order to maximize its chances of victory
    • Accepts that it is unlikely for NATO to accept Ukraine in the near future
    • Therefore Ukraine needs to become as strong as possible on its own in order to deter further Russian aggression
    • Ukraine should pursue defense production agreements and other joint ventures with Western defense contractors to produce more materiel locally
    • Should pursue a comprehensive strategy of building fortifications informed by battlefield experience
    • Instead of attempting to form new brigades, the Ukrainian military should focus on rearming and restaffing units that have show success on the battlefield
    • Needs to plan for troop rotation, and mobilize sufficiently that troop rotations are possible
    • Remove old Soviet-era attitudes from the military, and enable lower-ranking troops to show more operational initiative
    • The Ukrainian military should create formal structures for taking care of wounded veterans, rather than leaving it to ad hoc volunteer groups
    • This seems a lot like Finland and Sweden's strategies during the Cold War, where they weren't part of NATO, but they did work closely with NATO while maintaining sufficient military capacity to establish conventional deterrence on their own
    • The proposal for pre-planned fortifications seems very Finnish
• The Russian legislature moves forward with a ban on "childfree propaganda"
  • Previous coverage (translation) from October 4
  • The law has cleared its first hurdle in the Russian Duma
  • Authors of content that has been deemed "childfree propaganda" will face fines
  • According to Deputy Duma speaker Anna Kuznetzova, the law is part of Russia's "national security strategy"
  • According to her the goal isn't to "criminalize" women who don't have children, but rather to ensure that they're not subject to "propaganda" that encourages them to remain childless
  • Data released last month showed that Russia's birthrate had dropped to the lowest in 25 years
  • At least 72,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine
  • See also my open question from yesterday, asking what the demographics of Russian volunteers were
• The Open Source Initiative criticizes Meta for calling its models "open source"
  • The OSI states that Meta's license for its Llama models, whose weights are publicly available do not meet the standards for open source
  • Furthermore, Meta only publishes the weights, and does not specify the code or training data
  • Other companies, like Mistral, call these models "open weight" rather than "open source"
  • Next week, the OSI will publish a list of criteria that models need to meet in order to be considered "open source"
• TSMC reports a strong profit, based on high demand for its chipmaking services
  • Profits were up by 54%
  • Full year revenue is up by 36%
  • TSMC has recently increased its forecasts for full-year revenue and has announced additional capital expenditure plans to meet increasing demands for AI chips
• Alimentation Couche-Tard dismisses 7-and-i's breakup plan and urges the board to consider its revised takeover offer
  • A week ago 7-and-i announced plans to break itself up from Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard executives, in Japan, stated that their buyout offers more certainty for 7-and-i shareholders
  • Comments were made in a joint interview with Alain Bouchard, Alimentation Couche-Tard's founder, and Alex Miller, its CEO
  • Miller stated that US antitrust concerns were a manageable problem
  • Believes that the Japanese government will engage in talks about the merger once the current election campaign is over
  • The Japanese government had designated 7-and-i as a company that was "core" to national security on September 13
  • The designation means that any takeover will require affirmative permission from the Japanese government, rather than being subject to a veto after it has been approved by both companies
• Airbus announces 2,500 jobs cut after taking steep losses on its satellite business
  • Job cuts will be complete by mid-2026 after talks with unions
  • Analysts expect the reduction to occur mostly through retirements and voluntary departures
  • Most of the cuts will occur in the struggling Space Systems division, but there will be some layoffs at Airbus' defense headquarters in Germany
  • Airbus has not benefited as much from the increase in defense spending that has occurred as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine
  • Most of the additional spending has gone towards munitions and missiles, not aircraft or other large platforms which are Airbus' specialty
• Amazon debuts a color e-paper Kindle: the Kindle Colorsoft
  • The Kindle Colorsoft will cost $280
  • Replaces the Kindle Oasis, which is now discontinued
  • Allows the user to highlight with multiple colors, just as in the Kindle web and mobile apps
  • The actual saturation levels and responsiveness of the screen remain to be seen
• Twitter's steep declines in ad revenue save it from being considered a "gatekeeper" by EU regulation
  • EU regulations state that social networks and other online services can be considered "gatekeepers" if they provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers
  • Currently there are six companies classified as gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft
  • The EU had been investigating Twitter, for possible inclusion as another gatekeeper
  • However, the EU decided against the designation, as Twitter's revenue in the EU is low and declining
• SpaceX plans to catch Starship with its launch tower arms early in 2025
  • SpaceX demonstrated the ability to catch the Super Heavy booster on Sunday
  • Next year, they're going to attempt catching the upper-stage Starship too
  • Will they come down and be caught by separate towers?

2024-10-16 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • The Ukrainian government has called for a civilian evacuation of Kupyansk, as Russian forces approach the town
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Verkhnokamyanske, but are repelled with heavy casualties
    • Russian forces consolidate their gains in Ostrivske
    • Russian forces also consolidate their gains in Niu York, and begin to advance on Nelipivka to the north
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues near Zelenyi Shlyakh
    • For a general overview of what's going on in Kursk, look at Emil Kastehelmi's thread from Monday
  • The Biden administration announces a $425 million package of air defense missiles, artillery ammunition and Humvees
  • The Russian air force targets a Ukrainian drone operator with a FAB glide bomb in Dyliivka
    • This further highlights the limitations of FPV drones
    • Current FPV drones are cheap, and because they're cheap, they're short range
    • The Russians are learning that it's easier to kill drone pilots than it is to kill individual drones
  • American military officials are skeptical of claims of North Korean mercenaries fighting for Russia in Ukraine
    • These officials do not dispute that North Korea has sent engineers and observers to aid Russian troops in operating North Korean weaponry
    • However, there is little evidence of North Korean infantry participating in the fighting
    • North Koreans have been killed in Ukraine, however, the evidence thus far is that they are volunteers who signed up with the Russian military individually
  • Open question: what are the demographics of Russian volunteers?
    • Russian forces are taking very heavy losses as they advance in Donetsk
    • /Daily Russian casualty rates are often greater than 1000 per day /
    • Even if not all of these are fatalities a significant number of them are going to involve life altering injuries that will permanently reduce the employability and productivity of the victim
    • Is Russia destroying its future productivity with a "free market" approach to making war, which pays anyone who volunteers a hefty signing bonus
    • Is Ukraine's more statist approach to recruitment, where only those above a certain age are eligible for military service, better for its long term demographics?
• China affirms its right to use force to reunify with Taiwan
  • The Chinese military recently concluded a series of exercises in the air and water around Taiwan
  • In response to the international condemnation of those exercises, China's Taiwan Affairs Office issued a statement affirming that China reserved the right to use force to reunify Taiwan with the mainland
• North Korea has started work on a nuclear-powered submarine, according to South Korean sources
  • The size and role of the submarine remains unclear
  • The article argues that a North Korean nuclear powered attack submarine would be more dangerous than a nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine carrying nuclear warheads
  • I don't agree
  • Attack submarines have to place themselves at considerably more risk in order to carry out their missions
  • A single nuclear powered attack submarine, especially one that's likely to be slow and noisy, presents a limited threat
  • While it does pose a limited role to enemy ships, it needs to get close to those enemy ships in order to attack them, placing it at risk of counterattack every time it strikes
  • On the other hand, a ballistic missile submarine poses a grave threat even if it isn't particularly fast
  • A ballistic missile submarine doesn't have to hunt, it only has to hide
  • If North Korea's first nuclear powered submarine is an attack submarine, it would be because North Korea is following the same strategy as China, building an attack submarine in order to gain experience with building submarines first
• Amazon joins the latest financing round for X-Energy, another manufacturer of small modular reactors
  • Similar to Google's deal with Kairos Energy, announced on Monday
  • Amazon and X-Energy will fund the construction of a four-reactor project that will supply 320 MW in Washington State
  • Amazon has also signed a deal with Dominion Energy in Virginia to explore whether it's feasible to build small modular reactors to power its datacenters there
• The FTC passes a rule making it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions
  • Businesses must make cancellation procedures easy to find
  • Customers can't be forced to interact with a chatbot or customer service representative unless they agreed to allow that when they signed up for the subscription
  • If a customer is required to cancel over the phone, they must be able to call within "normal business hours"
  • Businesses that sell products or services using subscriptions must make that clear in their advertising
  • The Republican minority on the commission warns that this could lead to legal challenges
  • In my opinion, this rule doesn't go far enough
  • If a business can process subscription sign-ups online, it should be mandated to process cancellations online too
  • Cancellations by phone should only be allowed if the business doesn't allow online sign-ups

2024-10-15 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces may have captured Spirne
      • Spirne had been occupied by Russia for a short period of time in August 2022 before being liberated again in September
    • Russian forces have also reportedly made advances towards Velyka Novosilka, but the extent of those advances isn't clear
  • The Economist has another overview of the war
    • Russia is continuing to advance, slowly
    • However, there has not been any kind of breakthrough or Ukrainian collapse
    • Russia's artillery advantage may be declining
    • Russia has lost a lot of vehicles, and, as a result, Russian troops are easier now for Ukrainian FPV drones to hit
    • Russia is still a long way away from achieving full control over Donetsk and Luhansk
    • Even if they take Pokrovsk this year, which is increasingly in doubt, there's no way they'll take the two much larger cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk
    • The continued Russian advances, however slow, do make it difficult to make the case for eventual Ukrainian victory
    • Therefore, even if the continued assaults don't make military sense, they may be politically useful for Putin, especially if Trump wins the election
• The New York Times sends Perplexity a cease-and-desist demanding that Perplexity stop accessing New York Times content for its AI search engine
  • The Times alleges that Perplexity's AI generated summaries violate its copyright
  • Says that although they've taken technical measures to block Perplexity's crawler, Perplexity has found workarounds to allow it to keep accessing the Times' content
  • Perplexity has faced similar accusations from Forbes
• ASML cuts its sales forecast for 2025
  • ASML is a Dutch manufacturer of lithography equipment
  • Upstream of chip makers like TSMC and Intel
  • Reduction in sales forecasts may signal a plateauing of semiconductor output
  • However it might also mean that ASML's customers have become better at using its lithography tools for longer
  • ASML's sales have also been affected by the ongoing turmoil at Intel , which has severely cut back on its capital expansion plans in an effort to conserve cash
  • Another factor is that ASML can no longer sell its most advanced (and most expensive) equipment to China, because of export restrictions imposed by the Biden administration
• Boeing raises $35 billion in additional funding in order to weather the financial pressure caused by the machinists strike
  • $25 billion will be raised by selling stock and debt
  • $10 billion will come through a credit agreement with major lenders
  • According to Standard & Poor's, the strike is costing Boeing roughly $1 billion a month in lost production
• SpaceX applies for changes to enable gigabit speeds from its forthcoming Gen2 satellites
  • Lower altitude of satellites from 525 km, 530 km and 535 km to 480 km, 485 km and 475 km to allow for more satellites per orbital plane
  • Change elevation angles of satellites from 25° to 20°
  • These alterations will be necessary to extract maximum performance from the 2nd Generation Starlink satellites which can only be launched by Starship
  • The significance of this story is that SpaceX expects Starship to be operational soon
• Using invisible Unicode to exfiltrate data from LLM users
  • Exploit demonstration
  • Riley Goodside demonstrates a prompt injection attack that instructs Microsoft Copilot to append invisible characters to a URL which it then displays to the user
  • When an unsuspecting user clicks on the link, the invisible characters can be used to exfiltrate data
  • Invisible characters come from the deprecated Unicode Tags block
  • Tags were originally intended to indicate blocks of text in different languages, but were deprecated early on as Unicode moved to other approaches to handle multilingual text
  • As a result, most UIs don't display tags if they're appended to text, which allows an attacker to use them as a steganographic side channel

2024-10-14 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting continues in Toretsk, Makiivka and Selydove, but no substantial advances or retreats
    • Makiivka was liberated almost exactly two years ago
  • Kursk region
    • Emil Kastehelmi has an assessment of the current situation in Kursk
      • Russian forces have launched a successful set of counterattacks against the flanks of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk
      • Opened the land route between Glushkovo and Korenevo on the western flank
      • Recaptured Borki in the east
      • Russian forces have attacked as far as Zelenyi Shlyakh, but it's unclear whether they were able to actually hold on to those gains
      • Ukraine has lost roughly 300 km², or 1/3 of the territory that it captured in August
      • The terrain in the area is unfavorable: mostly open fields that make it difficult for Ukrainians to defend against Russian artillery and drones
      • Although Ukraine has launched further offensive operations towards Glushkovo from its side of the border, it's unclear how much success can be expected, given that Glushkovo can be reinforced from the Russian side from Korenevo
      • Overall, it doesn't look like the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has accomplished anything
  • Kharkiv region
    • Intense fighting continues in Vovchansk
  • Germany warns of increased Russian sabotage efforts in Europe
    • In a recent sabotage attempt, an package caught fire in a DHL logistics center
    • According to German intelligence, the package was intended to catch fire while it was being carried by an aircraft, causing a crash
    • This sabotage attempt follows a series of suspicious fires carried out on warehouses and logistics centers linked to weapons deliveries to Ukraine
• The US sends a THAAD battery to Israel
  • The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system is designed to intercept ballistic missiles
  • One is currently deployed to South Korea
  • This annoys me because it sets a bad incentive
  • The reason that Israel is getting a THAAD and not Ukraine is because Ukraine is under attack by a nuclear power, and Israel isn't
  • In effect, the US has signaled that Iran should get a nuclear weapon ASAP, so that it can leverage the same sorts of threats as Russia
• NASA launches the Europa Clipper mission
  • Mission will travel to Jupiter's moon, Europa, arriving in 2030
  • Europa has a large subsurface ocean (holding potentially twice as much liquid water as the oceans on earth)
  • Europa Clipper will conduct close flybys of Europa in order to determine whether this ocean is capable of supporting life
  • However, NASA has taken pains to point out that the mission is not designed to look for signs of life directly, only its preconditions
• Google orders small modular reactors to power its datacenters
  • Order went to Kairos Energy for 6-7 small reactors
  • Reactors will have 500 MW output in total
  • Reactors will be a molten-salt design using TRISO pellets to encapsulate its fuel
  • The combination of molten-salt and TRISO creates an efficient reactor with reduced chances of failure by foregoing the use of high-pressure water
  • Kairos Energy has received a permit from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a 50 MW prototype reactor in Tennessee
  • Prototype reactor should be ready by 2027
  • Kairos aims to have its first operational reactor ready for Google by 2030
• The Chinese government seeks to extend China's advantage in electric cars into delivery drones
  • China's aviation regulator released new rules that designated airspace under 300 meters as unrestricted, allowing small drones to operate without a permit
  • This is helping drive a boom in drones, many of which are used in agriculture to survey crops and spray pesticides and fertilizer
  • Flights of larger drones, used for deliveries passenger transport still require permits, but the Chinese government has simplified the process
  • China is seeking to leapfrog Western companies by developing eVTOLs, which take advantage of Chinese expertise in both drones and batteries
  • eVTOLs are significantly cheaper to build and operate than traditional helicopters
  • To address safety concerns, the Chinese government has issued the following guidelines for eVTOL development
    • Suburbs before cities
    • Cargo before passengers
    • Isolation before integration
  • And of course, these cargo drones have military applications, which is probably why the Chinese government is so keen on them

2024-10-13 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Ukrainian forces north of Ozarianivka are shelled by the Russian 177th Marine Regiment
      • I'm including this because I'm surprised that Ukrainian forces are still in that area
      • The town of Ozarianivka had been captured in November 2022
      • It seems like Ukrainian forces didn't retreat very far outside of Ozarianivka, and this area of the front line had been quiet until Russian advances in Toretsk made it more exposed
    • Ukrainian forces have pushed back Russian gains near Sukhi Yar and Mykolaivka
    • Russian forces occupy positions west of Tsukurnye, indicating that the town is under Russian control
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces make gains near Kolisnykivka, putting them less than 2km from the Oskil River
    • This adds pressure on Kupyansk to the north and Borova to the south
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues south of Obukhovka
    • Russian forces have recaptured Borki
      • Russian forces began attacking Borki on September 17
    • Ukrainian forces continue to occupy positions near Russkoe Porechnoe
      • Russkoe Porechnoe is near Cherkasskoe Porechnoe, which I mentioned on October 3
• Poland argues that its defense spending should be exempt from EU fiscal rules
  • Poland has raised defense spending to 4.1% of GDP
  • Is planning to raise it further to 4.7% in 2025
  • However, with Poland running a fiscal deficit of 5.7% of GDP, above the EU's 3% limit, the EU has opened a "excessive deficit" procedure against Poland
  • The Polish government is arguing that its defense spending is a necessary contribution to pan-European security, and therefore should be excluded from deficit considerations
  • France and Italy are also subject to excessive deficit procedures
• SpaceX demonstrates Super Heavy reusability on the fifth Starship test flight
  • The Super Heavy booster launched Starship onto a suborbital flight
  • Then it returned to the launchpad where it was caught by mechanical arms extending from the launch tower
  • Demonstrates significant progress in reliability and maturity of Super Heavy
  • Shows how Super Heavy can be reused, like Falcon 9
  • Starship demonstrated a controlled re-entry into the atmosphere
  • SpaceX has developed Starship and Super Heavy using an iterative development process, demonstrating greater success with every flight
• The Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset struggles to attract software support
  • It has been a year since Apple released the Vision Pro mixed reality headset
  • There has been a significant slowdown in the pace of apps being released
  • Most of the apps released for the Vision Pro are versions of existing apps for iOS or MacOS devices
  • Unlike Meta, Apple has not funded app developers or offered any incentives for them to port their apps to Vision Pro
  • The Vision Pro app market has experienced slower growth than the Apple Watch
  • Apple has only sold between 400,000 and 450,000 Vision Pro headsets
  • Game developers have cited the lack of controllers as a significant obstacle to porting their software to the Vision Pro
• Chiquita has developed a new disease-resistant banana, Yelloway 1
  • The previous dominant strain of bananas, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by a fungal disease known as Tropical Race 1 (TR1)
  • The current strain, Cavendish, replaced the Gros Michel
  • This is why banana flavored candy doesn't taste like bananas: the flavoring more closely resembles the flavor profile of Gros Michels
  • However, a new fungal disease, Tropical Race 4 (TR4) threatens the Cavendish
  • TR4 has spread to all continents and could be a major threat to banana plantations by the end of the decade
  • In response, Chiquita has bred a new strain of banana, Yelloway 1, with improved disease resistance
  • Yelloway 1 is not expected to taste like Cavendish, but that might be fixable with further selective breeding
  • Australian researchers have also developed a disease resistant banana by genetically altering Cavendish plants but that plant counts as a GMO and therefore cannot be sold in Europe

2024-10-11 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • No confirmed changes in the front lines but there is intense fighting in Toretsk and Kursk
  • Olaf Scholz announces a new military aid package for Ukraine
    • Includes more air defense, tanks, and artillery
    • Is a joint package that includes assistance from Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Norway
    • However, the package does not include long-range Taurus missiles and Scholz made no mention of Taurus missiles in his remarks on the aid package
  • The Russian news website ura.ru shares an update on Sergey Surovikin (translation)
    • Surovikin had been a supporter of Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner
    • Sidelined from the war in Ukraine after the Wagner Mutiny
    • Was spotted recently leading a Russian delegation to Algeria
  • The EU announces further sanctions on Iran for its transfer of ballistic missiles to Russia
    • Sanctions target 14 unnamed individuals and firms
    • The EU is also working to limit the operations of Iran's state owned airline, Iran Air, in response to Iran's aid to Russia for its war in Ukraine
    • I'm going to assume these sanctions are toothless symbolism until proven otherwise
• AMD unveils a new AI accelerator chip to compete with nVidia
  • More coverage from Ars Technica
  • AMD revealed its MI325X chip
  • Designed to compete with nVidia's current H200 AI accelerator
  • Built using TSMC's 5nm process
  • Performance
    • 1.3 PFLOPs at FP16
    • 2.6 PFLOPs at FP8
    • This compares somewhat poorly with the H200 which reaches 1.9 PFLOPs at FP16 and 3.9 PFLOPs at FP8
  • Will ship to customers in Q4 of this year
  • AMD CEO Lisa Su also previewed the forthcoming MI350, designed to compete with nVidia's new "Blackwell" series
  • The MI350 will ship in the second half of 2025
  • While AMD's market share in AI accelerators is a small fraction of nVidia's, Su believes the market is far from saturated and there are still significant opportunities for growth from new customers
• TikTok owner ByteDance lays off hundreds of workers in offshore content moderation teams as it shifts to greater use of AI
  • Most layoffs in Malaysia
  • Numbers unclear; initial report stated 700 layoffs, but ByteDance has stated that fewer than 500 employees will be affected
• Tesla shares are down sharply in reaction to its "Cybercab" announcement
  • Tesla announced a new robotaxi vehicle, the Cybercab, designed without a steering wheel, which it seeks to roll out in 2026
  • Also announced the Robovan, a shuttle bus designed to carry 20 people
  • Cybercab will be sold for less than $30,000 according to Tesla
  • These schedules are in Elon-years and these prices are in Elon-dollars, respectively, so in reality, I think the cybercab will debut closer to 2030, and it'll cost more like $50,000
  • Investors were disappointed by the lack of details on how Tesla plans to catch up to Waymo's driverless technology in such a short time
• Boeing will cut 10% of its workforce and delay introducing a new plane as it seeks to conserve cash during its machinists strike
  • 17,000 jobs will be cut
  • The 777X, which is already behind schedule, will be delayed further
  • Boeing will also discontinue production of the 767 cargo variant

2024-10-10 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian vehicles spotted driving on the road near Zelenyi Shlyakh, indicating a possible Russian counterattack near Korenevo
    • Does this mean that Ukrainian forces have retreated from near Liubimovka, where they were last spotted on September 23
    • DeepState UA has more details, stating that Russian forces are mounting a major offensive near Liubimovka and Zelenyi Shlyakh, and the situation is becoming increasingly precarious for Ukrainian units to the north, near Kremyanoe
  • Donetsk region
    • A Ukrainian soldier writes about the defense of Novomykhailivka
      • Ukrainian soldiers managed to destroy 320 armored vehicles over the course of six months of defending Novomykhailivka
      • However, Russian forces did manage to capture Novomykhailivka sometime around August this year
  • North Korea has deployed combat engineers to Ukraine to help Russians operate North Korean ballistic missiles
    • Kim Jong-Un is using the war in Ukraine as a means to give his troops combat experience and assess the performance of his weapons in realistic wartime circumstances
    • North Korea has provided Russia with a large supply of ammunition, estimated to be nearly 2 million shells
    • Has also provided Russia with supplies of the short-range KN-23 ballistic missile
  • The United Kingdom considers sending troops into Ukraine to conduct training
    • Small groups of military trainers would go to Ukraine to set up training programs for Ukrainian forces
    • Would solve the logistics issues of bringing Ukrainian soldiers to the UK for training
    • British soldiers would also learn battlefield skills from Ukrainians
    • If the North Koreans can gain experience from Ukraine, why can't NATO?
  • The European Union proceeds with a plan to provide Ukraine with a €35 billion loan, collateralized by frozen Russian assets
    • Previous coverage from September 20
    • Loan gets around Hungarian objections which prevented the EU from committing to a US precondition that Russian assets be frozen for a minimum of three years, rather than having the freeze be reviewed every six months
    • This answers my question from yesterday, where I asked what prevented the EU from proceeding with its own €35 billion loan plan even though Hungarian objections were blocking US participation
    • It turns out that nothing was preventing the EU with proceeding with the plan, and indeed the loan is in progress
• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper
  • Notably Hassabis and Jumper are founders of DeepMind, an AI lab that was bought by Google
  • Prize recognizes AlphaFold, a DeepMind AI model that predicts how proteins will fold
  • Are all the Nobels going to be for AI this year?
  • At this rate, they may as well give the Nobel Prize in Literature to Ilya Sutskever for ChatGPT and the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Sam Altman and Elon Musk for founding OpenAI
• The US Air Force's secretive X-37B will demonstrate novel deceleration maneuvers in Earth orbit
  • Currently the X-37B is in a highly elliptical orbit whose current apogee is 38,600 miles
  • Will carry out a series of controlled aerobraking maneuvers to lower the apogee of its orbit, and make it more circular, without using propellant
  • The purpose of these maneuvers is to enable the X-37B to safely dispose of its service module without contributing to space debris
  • After the maneuvers are complete, the X-37B will conduct some more secret activities in low earth orbit before eventually landing
  • While aerobraking to change orbit had been conducted by some civilian space probes around Mars, according to the Air Force, this is the first time any Earth orbiting satellite has used aerobraking to change orbit
• Boeing withdraws its updated offer to the IAM to end the strike
  • The IAM had already rejected the offer , saying that the timing and method of Boeing's offer bypassed the normal collective bargaining process and didn't give the union enough time to schedule a vote
  • S&P put Boeing's credit rating on notice
  • Any downgrade would cut Boeing's credit rating below investment grade
• 7-and-i announces its final plans to split itself up in order to fend off a takeover attempt from Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • Previous coverage from October 7
  • 31 subsidiary businesses, including supermarkets, specialty stores, and the Denny's restaurant chain will be spun out into a new holding company: York Holdings
  • The companies banking and financial services arm, 7 Bank, will also be spun out separately
  • Confirms that it received a higher bid from Alimentation Couche-Tard, which it could not summarily dismiss as undervaluing the company
  • Lowered its annual income projections, to ¥403 billion from ¥545 billion
  • Also stated that its quarterly income was down by 20% from the same quarter last year

2024-10-09 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Ukraine hits another Russian arsenal, this time in Karachev, Bryansk Oblast
  • Ukraine destroys a Shahed drone storage facility near Oktyabrskii, in Krasnodar Kraii
  • Krasnodar Kraii is the province that was home to another Russian depot, near Tikhoretsk that was hit on September 21
  • Russian Iskander ballistic missiles appear to score a successful hit on a Ukrainian Patriot missile radar, near Novomykolaivka, just south of Dnipro
  • The Hungarian government holds up approval of a $50 billion loan to Ukraine until after the US Presidential election
    • The EU has been pressing forward with a plan to give Ukraine $50 billion in loans collateralized by frozen Russian assets
    • However, US participation in this plan has been predicated on the EU agreeing to review its freeze of Russian assets every three years, instead of having to renew the freeze every six months as is done today
    • The Hungarian government has blocked this change, stating that it wishes to see the direction pursued by a future American administration
    • I'm interpreting this to mean that Hungary wants to see if Donald Trump will be elected, at which point they think that the loan will be a dead letter
    • However, I don't understand why this is a blocker; in theory, on September 20, Ursula von der Leyen announced a €35 billion loan to Ukraine that would not require US participation, and would only require a majority vote of EU members, bypassing Hungary's veto
    • Why can't the EU proceed with that?
  • Russia blocks Discord
    • The Russian government blocked access to the popular Discord messenger service after saying it was in violation of Russian laws
    • This has reportedly caused problems with Russian military units who were using Discord to communicate
• The US awards contracts to six firms to refine HALEU fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors
  • HALEU is "high-assay low-enriched uranium"
  • Traditional nuclear fuel is enriched to approximately 5% Uranium 235
  • HALEU fuel is nuclear fuel that is enriched to between 5% and 20% U235
  • Proponents say that HALEU fuel makes new nuclear reactors more efficient
  • Critics say that the increased enrichment level of HALEU means it poses more of a weapons risk if it falls into the wrong hands
  • The firms that won the contracts to make HALEU are
    • Centrus
    • GE Vernova
    • BWXT
    • Framatome
    • Westinghouse
  • Mix of American and French firms
  • Currently the only country that manufactures HALEU is Russia
• Stocks in high-growth economies underperform
  • Researchers gathered monthly returns of country-specific MSCI exchange-traded funds
  • Normalized returns to US dollars to make comparison easier
  • Compared returns to quarterly inflation-adjusted GDP growth
  • Out of the top 7 fastest growing economies in the last decade, only one, India, had a positive stock market return
  • The others, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia all averaged negative returns
  • One possible explanation is that high growth is driven by weakening the currency, which increases GDP but hurts dollar-denominated returns
• Alimentation Couche-Tard returns with a 20% higher bid for 7-and-i
  • Original $39 billion dollar bid increased to $47 billion
  • The takeover offer, if accepted, will face significant scrutiny from US anti-trust regulators
  • The takeover will also face scrutiny from Japanese regulators, who have classified 7-and-i as "core" to national security on September 13
• SpaceX pressured other providers of satellite internet to cede spectrum rights in exchange for agreeing to launch their satellites
  • SpaceX has pressured competing satellite internet providers, such as OneWeb and Kepler Communications to cede spectrum rights before agreeing to launch their equipment into space
  • These spectrum rights would privilege Starlink, SpaceX's own satellite internet service
  • This is the danger of any monopoly, no matter how benevolent it appears at first
  • Monopolies inevitably use their monopoly power in one market to try to advantage their offerings in another
• Analysts are downbeat on Project Kuiper, Amazon's satellite internet initiative
  • Satellite networks require a large capital expenditure before they generate revenue
  • This poses a particular challenge for Amazon, whose core retail business has slim margins
  • In addition to satellites, Amazon has also been investing heavily in AI, both through its own investments in AWS and through its investments in Anthropic
  • These capital investments could have a long-term negative impact on earnings
• 1.7 million Hondas are recalled over "sticky" gears inside the steering system
  • Improperly manufactured worm gears can cause the steering wheels inside the affected cars to become sticky
  • Affected vehicles include Honda Civics, Honda CR-Vs, Honda HR-Vs and Acura Integras
  • Recall will see the affected vehicles brought back to the dealer, where the faulty gears will be replaced

2024-10-08 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have occupied Zelhanne Pershe, just east of Hirnyk
      • I'm somewhat surprised that it took this long for Russian forces to advance into Zelhanne Pershe, given that they advanced into Memryk, to the northwest, on August 28
      • Furthermore, Ukrainsk, almost directly behind Zelhanne Pershe, has been under attack since at least September 13
  • The Belgorod regional government is offering additional payments of 3 million rubles for volunteers to go fight in Ukraine
    • Exceeds the previous record, the 2.75 million ruble payment offered by the Khanty-Mansi autonomous district
    • Payout will be given to anyone who enlists in Belgorod, regardless of the province of their birth
    • This seems like a way for Belgorod regional authorities to make themselves look better than their counterparts elsewhere
    • However, over the long run, it seems like it'll just result in an inflationary spiral as regions offer ever larger sign on bonuses in order to draw recruits in from other regions
  • The Russian defense-industrial base is experiencing labor shortages as Russian men are going off to fight in the war
    • The defense industry in Russia has over 90,000 job openings, according to data compiled from job search sites by the BBC
    • Shortages appear most acute among certain skilled professions, such as CNC machinists
    • This shortage is exacerbated by Soviet-era regulations that prohibit women from working in certain fields
  • According to South Korea's minister of defense, North Korea will likely send members of its military to support Russia in Ukraine
    • The minister also said that reports of North Korean casualties as a result of a Ukrainian strike near Donetsk city are likely true
    • And yet we still hesitate to give Ukraine permission to use Western weapons to strike into Russia
• AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
  • Were recognized for foundational work behind neural networks
  • Hinton had previously won the Turing Award in 2018 and is known as one of the "godfathers of AI"
  • Its really weird that the Nobel Committee gave the prize in physics for this
  • AI is great, but it doesn't have much to do with physics; it's closer to pure math
• AI startup Cerebras files for an IPO
  • Cerebras is a competitor to nVidia, known for their large "wafer-scale" chips
  • Hardware is designed to scale more efficiently than nVidia GPUs
• Twitter gets approval to resume operations in Brazil
  • On September 22, Twitter reappointed a legal representative in Brazil on September 2
  • Twitter paid fines and complied with court orders to ban accounts that were accused of spreading misinformation
  • Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes said that Twitter had met all requirements to resume operations, and directed Brazilian ISPs to remove their blocks on Twitter

2024-10-07 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced westward to Zolota Nyva
      • It looks like Russian forces are capitalizing on their capture of Prechystivka and capture of Vuhledar to advance westwards towards Velyka Novosilka
      • Velyka Novosilka is another town that had been a bastion of resistance since the start of the war
      • Velyka Novosilka and Vuhledar are both towns whose capture would make logistics much easier for Russians
  • Ukrainian forces hit an oil depot in Feodosia, in occupied Crimea
  • Russian missiles hit two grain export vessels in Odesa
    • The ship that was struck was the Optima, a Palau-flagged bulk carrier
    • Yesterday, Russia hit another ship, the Paresa, another bulk carrier carrying a load of corn for export in the nearby port of Pivdennyi
    • It has been some time since Russia hit ships in Odesa
    • Russia has repeatedly attacked the port, but it usually hasn't hit ships
• The FCC grants SpaceX temporary authority to offer direct-to-cell phone service in storm hit areas
  • SpaceX has been granted a temporary waiver of FCC rules to allow it to offer text messaging service to cell phones in areas affected by hurricane Helene
  • Service comes via a collaboration with T-Mobile
  • SpaceX's constellation hasn't been fully deployed, so service is offered on a "best effort" basis
  • Full approval of the service has been blocked by claims from AT&T and Verizon who argue that SpaceX's satellite service will cause interference with terrestrial cell phone networks
• 7-and-i, owner of 7-11, is exploring plans to sell off side-businesses in an effort to improve its balance sheet
  • On September 6, 7-and-i rejected a takeover offer from Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle-K, saying the offer grossly undervalued the company
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard is expected to return with an improved offer later, potentially after 7-and-i announces Q2 earnings
  • The fact that an offer was made has marked 7-and-i as a potential takeover target for other firms
  • As a result, 7-and-i is looking at selling non-core assets, such as its financial services business or its supermarket arm
  • This will improve 7-and-i's balance sheet and satisfy shareholder pressure for 7-and-i to focus more on its central convenience store business
• The Chinese government is demanding that its employees hand in their passports
  • Passport restrictions stem from a 2003 regulation which established a system to restrict travel for key government personnel
  • However, lately, that regulation has been increasingly applied to lower level government officials, such as schoolteachers
  • To travel abroad, people subject to the restrictions must file applications with the government department they work for (e.g. schools for schoolteachers) and would be restricted to 1 trip per year of 20 days or fewer
  • Focus on schoolteachers appears to be the result of the Chinese government's increasing concern about ideological purity
  • Government is concerned that schoolteachers may encounter subversive ideas abroad and then pass those ideas on to their students
  • Employees and even retired former employees of state-owned enterprises in sensitive sectors, such as aircraft, have also been subject to passport restrictions
• Jensen Huang's personal net worth is now higher than the market capitalization of Intel
  • Jensen Huang is worth $109.2 billion
  • Intel's market capitalization is $96 billion
  • Huang could, theoretically, buy all of Intel (at current prices) and have $13 billion left over

2024-10-06 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have entered Tsukurnye
      • Selydove is looking increasingly dicey
      • On Friday, Russian troops entered Lysivka, which flanks Selydove to the north
      • Today they're attacking Tsukurnye, which flanks Selydove to the south
    • Another area that looks to be at risk is Kurakhivka
      • With the advance to Ostrivske, on Thursday, and Russians moving into Hirnyk, it looks like Kurakhivka could go soon too
    • Over the past year, in the Pokrovsk area alone, Russia has lost 531 tanks, of which 381 have been confirmed as destroyed
      • This is why I remain optimistic for Ukraine
      • Russian loss rates are unsustainable
  • A Russian S-70 stealth drone was shot down by friendly fire over occupied Donetsk
    • The S-70 is a large (almost as large as the manned Su-57 which it is meant to complement) UAV with advanced stealth characteristics
    • Designed to carry large payloads of bombs or air-to-air missiles
    • The S-70 is a rare aircraft, with fewer than ten supposedly built
    • According to Russian sources, the drone had to be shot down because a failure in its command circuitry led operators to lose control over it, and it had to be shot down before it could stray further into Ukrainian territory
    • It seems not to have mattered, because the Ukrainians managed to salvage quite a bit of the drone anyway, even though it landed close to the front lines
  • Ukraine has taken delivery of its first Dutch F-16s
    • The Netherlands has promised a total of 24 aircraft, and says that the remainder will be delivered in the coming months
• Investors question Microsoft's ever increasing investments in AI
  • Although Microsoft has increased revenue substantially and has posted healthy operating margins, its stock lags the rest of the S&P 500
  • This is because Microsoft has massively increased capital expenditures to build its lead in AI
  • Results in lower free cash flow
  • AI chips become obsolete rapidly, which leads to higher depreciation charges
  • Unclear whether all this expenditure on AI will lead to significant revenue in the future
  • Microsoft's close collaboration with OpenAI, which had been seen as an asset, could become a liability as researchers depart OpenAI because of internal turmoil there
• Reddit moves closer to profitability
  • Reddit is already profitable on an adjusted basis, excluding certain nonrecurring charges
  • Close to being profitable on a GAAP basis
  • Revenue is up by 54%, allowing Reddit to narrow its net loss to about $10 million for the year, down from $41 million
  • Improvements in revenue attributed to better ad targeting and licensing deals with AI companies to consume Reddit's trove of user-generated content
  • Costs have been controlled by keeping Reddit's head-count steady
• Chinese hacking efforts cannot be deterred through punishment
  • Cyberattacks require far less commitment than attacks on space infrastructure or nuclear deterrence
  • There is no punishment that the US can impose on China that will make cyberattacks more expensive than the alternatives
  • Therefore the US has to pursue defensive cybersecurity measures, so that we can effect deterrence by denial

2024-10-04 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • I think one of the underreported aspects of the Russian 2024 offensive has been their rollback of the Ukrainian gains of autumn-winter 2022
    • Kyslivka, for example, which had been liberated on December 8 2022, was recaptured by Russia sometime in July
    • Likewise Pischane, which had been liberated around October 28, 2022, was recaptured by Russia on August 30
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced to the outskirts of Lysivka
    • It looks like they're trying to flank Selydove
  • One possible reason that the Russian government has not resorted to a second round of mobilization is because the current system of volunteer recruitment is better at leaving skilled workers in the economy
• The Russian legislature considers a ban on "childfree propaganda" (translation)
  • Ban would be modeled on similar Russian ban on "LGBT propaganda"
  • Would restrict information on "voluntary refusal to have children"
  • So what? Is Russia banning birth control now?
• Meta debuts an AI filmmaking tool to challenge OpenAI's Sora
  • Tool is called Meta Movie Gen
  • Generates videos from text descriptions
  • Can be used to generate videos up to 16 seconds long
  • Can also be used to edit videos to e.g. match sound to video or personalize existing videos with new content
  • Model was demonstrated today, but won't be available for users until next year
  • The focus on movie generation tools comes as part of an effort by AI companies to find more profitable uses for AI
  • Movie Gen will watermark its videos to avoid potential issues with copyright or deepfakes
• AIs lie to us because we ask them to
  • Research paper (open access)
  • LLM-based AIs, such as ChatGPT, are trained with human feedback
  • This human feedback often penalizes "I don't know" answers, where the AI expresses uncertainty about its response
  • This trains AIs to give convincing-sounding but wrong answers which are sufficiently sophisticated to fool human reviewers
  • Researchers asked AIs increasingly difficult questions on a variety of topics, from geography to addition problems
  • AIs rarely responded with uncertainty, even on question categories where they gave correct answers less than 10% of the time
  • These incorrect answers were convincing
  • When presented to humans in a survey, they fooled human raters between 19 and 40% of the time
  • The fact that AI interfaces don't expose the likelihood scores that AI models include with their output makes it more difficult for humans to judge whether an AI is certain of its answer
  • Always verify AI answers
  • AI will be broadly useless as a research tool until we get AIs that can actually cite sources
• Spirit Airlines explores a possible bankruptcy filing
  • Spirit has been struggling with declining revenue and financial losses
  • Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing would allow Spirit to restructure its debts
  • Spirit has been cutting routes in an effort to save cash
  • Budget airlines have not recovered as well from the pandemic as legacy carriers
  • Spirit hasn't turned an annual profit since before the COVID pandemic
  • In addition, Spirit has been affected by a Pratt & Whitney engine recall which grounded a portion of its fleet
  • Spirit had sought a merger with JetBlue, but that had been blocked on antitrust grounds
• Samsung update bricks older phones
  • Affected phones are the Galaxy S10, Galaxy Note 10, Galaxy M51, and Galaxy A90
  • Update sends phones into a boot loop, rendering it impossible for users to power on their phones
  • It appears that the only way to recover the devices is to perform a data-erasing factory reset
  • Yet another reminder to check your backups
• Waymo announces a collaboration with Hyundai to use Ioniq 5 electric vehicles as robotaxis
  • Currently Waymo operates with Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and some Chrysler Pacifica minivans
  • The Ioniq 5 offers more passenger room than the Jaguars
  • Waymo had previously worked with the Chinese EV maker Zeekr
  • However impending tariffs on Chinese EVs as well as a ban on Chinese EVs with self-driving features made it impractical for Waymo to continue that collaboration
  • The Ioniq 5s used by Waymo will be manufactured at Hyundai's factory in Georgia
  • Will be converted into self-driving vehicles at Waymo's facility in Mesa, Arizona
• The Indian government will investigate whether offerings made at one of the most visited Hindu temples have been contaminated with beef fat
  • The Andhra Pradesh state government alleges that the laddu (sweet offering) at the Venkateswara temple in Tirupati has been contaminated with beef tallow
  • Laddu is made with ghee (clarified butter)
  • According to the government, lab reports indicate that the ghee used to make the laddu at the temple was contaminated with beef tallow, fish oil, and lard
  • The temple strongly denies the allegations
  • The previous chief minister, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, also denies the allegations
  • The Indian Supreme Court has created a team to investigate further

2024-10-03 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces still hold Cherkasskoe Porechnoe, depsite Russian attempts to drive them out
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance to Ostrivske, south of Kurakhivka
      • This is part of the Russian plan to advance on Kurakhove that Emil Kastehelmi wrote about in his analysis from September 2
    • A report from the front lines about the fall of Vuhledar
      • Report interviews a soldier from the 72nd Brigade, the unit responsible for holding Vuhledar
      • Unit had been deployed to Vuhledar since August 2022
      • New recruits were old (often 50+ years old) and poorly trained
      • Russia has reached drone parity with Ukraine and maintains artillery superiority
      • Big difference from 2023 where, at Vuhledar, Ukrainian forces had decisive advantages in both
      • The soldier says that Vuhledar could have been held if Ukraine had additional manpower and was able to rotate units
  • Trade and historical grievances threaten the Polish-Ukrainian relationship
    • Although Poland has been one of Ukraine's most steadfast supporters in the EU, there are underlying tensions between the two countries
    • In 2023, Poland banned Ukrainian grain exports because of farmers protesting that Ukrainian grain was collapsing commodity prices
    • Poland is now asking Ukraine to allow the exhumation of Polish victims of the 1943 Volyn Massacre, in which tens of thousands of Poles were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an insurgent force fighting both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
    • This has become a sticking point in Ukraine's EU accession negotiations
    • These tensions come amid declining public support for Ukraine in Poland
    • Polish citizens are increasingly resentful of Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainian exports to Poland
    • However, in the near term, this issue does not threaten Polish military aid to Ukraine
• US port workers agree to end strike
  • Port employers agreed to a 62% raise, up from their initial proposal of 50%
  • Agreement is tentative, and port workers will return to their jobs under an extension of the old contract while the final terms of the new contract are negotiated
  • Extension runs through January 15, 2025
  • Looks like there won't be much of a disruption after all; the contract extension will cover the holiday season
• Germany will vote against EU tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles
  • The EU commission states that a tariff is necessary to oppose low-cost financing and subsidies on land and raw materials provided by the Chinese government to its automakers
  • German automakers are more worried about retaliatory tariffs imposed by China than they are about Chinese competition
  • German manufacturers made approximately 1/3 of their sales in China
  • However, the measure is still likely to go through, as a qualified majority representing 65% of the EU's population is necessary to veto the tariffs
  • I think the German automakers are naive
  • Chinese trade policy, time and again, across a range of industries, from textiles to electronics, has been to trade with the West until Chinese manufacturers have absorbed enough knowledge to bootstrap local manufacturing
  • Then the Chinese impose tariffs and subsidize local production to drive foreign manufacturers from China and give Chinese manufacturers a boost in the global market
  • In game theory terms, the Chinese are consistent defectors
  • There's no sense in cooperating with them
  • This is exactly the sort of thing that the German Council of Foreign Relations was speaking out against in their assessment of Zeitenwende

2024-10-02 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • It looks like the Russians have captured Vuhledar
    • Russians have also advanced south of Tsukurnye
  • Luhansk region
    • Ukrainians fend off Russian attacks near Karmazynivka and Novovodyane
  • The Washington post has an article on the updated tactics that Russian forces have been using to gain territory
    • Russians advance in small groups, backed by vast amounts of artillery
    • Small groups take extremely heavy losses, but Russian commanders don't care; they know that eventually they'll find a weakness
    • Once Russian troops are in place, they call in artillery and drones, which force Ukrainian defenders to retreat
    • It looks like the Russians are increasingly using the German "stormtrooper" tactics from the end of World War 1
• The longshoremen's strike impacts supplies of frozen beef
  • Fast food chains had come to rely on cheaper meat from overseas after drought caused US-origin beef prices to spike
  • Importers had stockpiled some beef, but supplies will run out after about a week
  • Conversely, chicken suppliers face a glut, as their ability to export is cut by the same strike
  • Coffee supplies are also affected

2024-10-01 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces continue to advance into Vuhledar
    • Russian forces attack Selydove, taking vehicle losses
    • Hostre is shelled and attacked, but it doesn't appear as if Russian forces made much progress
      • I'm surprised that Ukrainian troops are still in Hostre, given that Ukrainsk, to the northwest, is under Russian control and Russian forces are attacking Hirnyk, which is practically behind them
  • The Kyiv Independent has published an article summarizing the situation at Vuhledar
    • Vuhledar was one of the bright spots in Ukrainian defenses in 2023, with Russians losing over 130 tanks and other armored vehicles , and an entire brigade of 5000 troops in an effort to capture the town in February and March of 2023
    • The loss of Vuhledar poses a threat to the southern flank of Pokrovsk
    • Vuhledar is under attack from two sides, as the Russians have captured Vodyane to the northeast (on September 10) and Prechystivka to the west (on September 4)
    • Not a whole lot that hasn't been covered here in various daily updates, but it does provide a useful summary and describes why Vuhledar is important
• China's housing glut collides with its shrinking population
  • A shrinking population means that, in many smaller cities excess housing may never be filled
  • Smaller cities by Chinese standards; these are still cities that have hundreds of thousands to millions of people
  • Many of these smaller cities encouraged home building even though they knew their populations were declining
  • As a result, many Chinese bought second or even third homes as investment properties, as construction was subsidized and prices were expected to keep going up
  • Now these homes sit empty
  • According to some estimates, China has as many as 90 million vacant housing units: assuming 3 residents per unit, that's enough housing for the entire population of Brazil
  • Assuming one resident per unit, that's enough for the entire population of Germany
  • Strict bankruptcy laws make it difficult for the owners of these houses and condos to walk away and let them be torn down
  • In Japan, which had a similar property boom right as its population peaked in the late '80s, the excess housing was never absorbed, and empty houses litter the landscape
  • The Chinese government has provided fiscal stimulus to further subsidize houses, but it's unclear whether that stimulus will ever get used in the absence of buyers
• Dockworkers launch strike at East Coast ports
  • Previous coverage from yesterday
  • Members of the International Longshoremen's Association walked off the job at ports from Maine to Texas
  • First strike across all east coast ports since 1977
  • Strike had been anticipated by importers who had moved up deliveries in advance
  • Supply chains should be able to weather a brief walkout, but will have trouble handling an extended shutdown, especially with the holiday season approaching
  • Retailers were able to use experience garnered during the supply chain disruptions during the COVID pandemic to plan for this shutdown
  • One commodity that will be especially affected by this strike is bananas
  • Most bananas come in through east coast ports
  • Bananas are a perishable, but relatively low-value good, so it doesn't make sense to use air freight to bring them in
• High vehicle prices and high interest rates crimp new car sales
  • Although auto prices have stopped rising, they still remain substantially higher than their pre-pandemic levels
  • Average prices of a new vehicle is now $44,467, up from $34,600 at the end of 2019
  • Consumers are gravitating towards smaller, more affordable cars as a result
  • More customers are choosing to lease, rather than buy
  • Although the Federal Reserve has recently cut interest rates, those cuts haven't yet translated into easier financing for car buyers
  • The brightest sector of the market is hybrids: sales of hybrids are growing faster than the auto market as a whole, indicating that hybrid vehicles are gaining market share over their internal combustion counterparts
  • Fully electric vehicle sales were up by 8% in the previous quarter
  • I wonder how much of the decline in growth rate of fully electric vehicles comes down to the fact that they're just expensive
  • Unfortunately the only short-term way to make EVs cheaper is to allow imports from China

2024-09-30 Monday

• I wrote an essay summarizing the German Council of Foreign Relations two year assessment of Zeitenwende
• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • No major territorial changes, however, Russian forces continue to attack near Selydove, Pokrovsk and Toretsk
    • Russian forces are also continuing to attack Vuhledar
  • Kharkiv region
    • In Vovchansk, Russian forces launched a major assault which was repelled with heavy casualties
  • Drone vs. drone combat in Ukraine as Russian unmanned ground vehicles are struck by Ukrainian FPV drones
  • After meeting with Zelensky, Biden does not grant permission for Ukraine to use American long-range weapons to strike Russia
    • American refusal to grant permission for Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory is beginning to garner frustration with other NATO allies as well
    • Notably, the president of Finland, the Lithuanian foreign minister and the Danish prime minister have urged the US to allow Ukraine unrestricted use of its weapons
• AI
  • Softbank will invest $500 million in OpenAI
    • Investment will be part of the previously announced $5 billion fundraising round that values OpenAI at $150 billion
    • Investment will be part of Vision Fund 2, largely made up of founder Masayoshi Son's personal wealth
    • After a period of retrenchment after the pandemic, Softbank has been moving aggressively into AI
  • Apple backs out of funding OpenAI
    • Reporting from August 29 indicated that Apple was considering joining OpenAI's latest funding round
    • However, it appears that Apple has dropped out of those talks
  • OpenAI charts a complex path towards becoming a for-profit entity
    • Previous coverage from last Wednesday
    • The fact that OpenAI is a for-profit owned by a non-profit makes reorganizing it into a pure for-profit entity difficult
    • Legally, nonprofits aren't allowed to give assets to for-profits
    • Therefore, the non-profit arm of OpenAI will have to be compensated for its ownership stake in the for-profit entity
    • One possible solution is for the nonprofit to continue operations as a charity, using its ownership stake in OpenAI as a source of income
  • Gavin Newsom, governor of California, vetoes an AI safety bill
    • SB-1047 was a bill that would have mandated that all owners large AI models (where "large" is defined as costing more than $100 million to train) to have testing procedures and response plans for safety incidents
    • Would also have required kill-switches for these large models
    • Newsom vetoed because he thought the bill was too broadly focused on large models
    • Wants legislation that is more targeted towards specific harms, rather than a blanket regulation covering all models above a certain size, regardless of their use
    • Argued that legislation didn't account for the context of particular AI deployments
    • Worried about a chilling effect, especially on "open-source" models which are released by companies for anyone to use
  • Google unveils AlphaChip, a reinforcement learning AI for chip design
    • Work builds upon a 2020 research paper outlining a reinforcement learning method for automatically placing chip components
    • AlphaChip is an implementation of that method
    • Google has used it internally to build the layouts for newer versions of its Tensor Processing Units
    • Google has open-sourced the model weights behind AlphaChip, enabling anyone to use it
    • Has reportedly been adopted by other chip design firms, such as MediaTek
• Strike at US east coast ports set to start on Tuesday
  • No negotiations are currently taking place and none are scheduled before the midnight strike deadline
  • Would be the first coast-wide walkout since 1977
  • President Joe Biden has indicated that he does not plan to intervene with the Taft-Hartley Act in order to force International Longshoremen's Association workers to return to work
  • Previous coverage from Wednesday
• DirecTV agrees to buy Dish Network's TV business for the nominal price of $1
  • DirecTV will be purchasing Dish Network's TV business from its current owner, EchoStar
  • DirecTV will take on $9.75 billion of Dish Network's debt
  • EchoStar will continue to own Dish Network's other business lines, such as its 5G cellular network
  • EchoStar was looking to get out of the TV business so that it could focus on the more lucrative cellular network portion of the business
  • Cellular network was boosted by a forced sale of some of T-Mobile's assets to Dish, as part of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger
  • Deal still needs regulatory approval
  • Is scheduled to close in Q4 of 2025
• The UK phases out its last coal fired power plant
  • Coal is being replaced by natural gas and renewables
  • Coal use has also been restricted by EU regulations aimed at controlling acid rain

2024-09-27 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces launched a major assault near Pishchane, which took heavy casualties and was repelled
  • New Ukrainian recruits often freeze in combat
    • Ukrainian commanders complain that new recruits often freeze or abandon their positions when they come under fire
    • Results in new recruits taking casualties at a much higher rate than veterans
    • Coordination between units remains a particular problem, with troop rotations proving to be a particular point of vulnerability that Russian forces have exploited repeatedly to advance
    • Field commanders note that Ukrainian trainers still have a Soviet-era mindset, and give passing grades to everyone regardless of their actual competence
    • Combat training is not realistic
    • This places more strain on veteran units leading to burnout there as well
    • Tatarigami wrote more about this on Monday
• The UK competition authority clears Amazon in an antitrust probe related to its investment in Anthropic
  • Amazon has invested $4 billion into Anthropic, and has taken a partial ownership position
  • This led the British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate whether this would hamper competition
  • British officials closed the case today after concluding that they lacked jurisdiction, as Anthropic's revenue in the UK didn't meet the minimum threshold of £70 million per year
  • Also stated that Amazon's investment in Anthropic was unlikely to result in a relevant merger scenario
• AIs can now reliably beat reCAPTCHA v2
  • Paper preprint
  • Researchers at ETH Zurich created a system that combined VPNs, human-like mouse movements and a finetuned version of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) vision model to defeat Google's reCAPTCHA v2
  • reCAPTCHA v2 is the CAPTCHA that asks users to identify images containing motorcycles, fire hydrants, bridges, etc.
  • The fine-tuned vision model could identify images correctly between 69% of the time (motorcycles) and 100% of the time (fire hydrants)
  • Although reCAPTCHA v2 is obsolete, having been phased out in favor of reCAPTCHA v3, it is still used as a fallback when v3 gives a low confidence score

2024-09-26 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have begun to move into Hirnyk
      • Sad but predictable: as I stated on Monday, Hirnyk and Vuhledar were the most vulnerable towns
      • Ever since Russian forces moved into Ukrainsk on September 17, Hirnyk has been at risk
    • It appears that Russian forces have advanced past Mykolaivka towards Myrnohrad
      • This implies that, in addition to Hirnyk, Selydove is at risk in the short term as well
    • Russian troops have also deployed thermite-drones near Vuhledar
• China's newest nuclear submarine sank next to the pier
  • Incident occurred in June or July
  • Was covered up by the Chinese government
  • The submarine that sank is reported as a Zhou-class
  • Was being built at Wuchang Shipyard, near Wuhan, on the Yangtze River
  • Most Chinese submarines have been built at Bohai Shipyards, in Huludao, however recently China has sought to diversify the shipyards that it uses to construct its submarines
  • Incident was reported by Thomas Shugart, an analyst working for the Center for New American Security who noticed the floating cranes working to raise the submarine in commercial satellite imagery
  • That's odd, because, as far as I know, there's no such thing as a Zhou-class
  • China's latest submarines are the Type 093B, also known as the Shang III class
  • China attempting to diversify submarine construction makes sense, because Bohai Shipyards have limited capacity and aren't capable of building very many submarines at a time
  • In the past, China has had to shut down construction of attack submarines to allow the shipyards to focus on building ballistic missile submarines
  • I've written more about the history of Chinese submarines
• Japan sends a ship through the Taiwan Strait for the first time
  • The United States and other nations routinely conduct freedom of navigation exercises by sending their ships through the Taiwan Strait separating Taiwan from mainland China
  • On September 25, the JS Sazanami, a Takanami-class destroyer, passed through the Taiwan Strait
  • Marks the first time since World War 2 that a Japanese military vessel has transited the Taiwan Strait
  • Ships from Australia and New Zealand ships also passed through the strait on the same day
  • This move comes in the aftermath of a Chinese aircraft carrier coming within 24 miles of the Japanese coastline and a Russian aircraft violating Japanese airspace

2024-09-25 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • No major territorial changes today
  • Reuters reports that the US will announce an $8 billion military aid package for Ukraine
    • Aid will come in two tranches
    • First tranche is $5.6 billion of the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which authorizes the President to send weapons to Ukraine from the US military's stocks
    • Second tranche is $2.4 billion under the Ukraine Security Assistance Program, which allows the administration to buy weapons from private companies on Ukraine's behalf
    • Ukraine will also receive Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs), a glide-bomb capable of striking targets from 130 km away
    • Will receive more ammunition for its artillery and HIMARS systems
  • Russia has reportedly established a secret drone factory in China
    • A subsidiary of the Russian arms company Almaz-Antey has established a factory in China to build a new long-range drone called the Garpiya-3 (G3)
    • The G3 can travel 2000 km with a 50 kg payload
    • Is an upgraded version of the Garpiya-A1
    • Two prototype models have reportedly already been delivered to the Russian Ministry of Defense for testing
    • There is reportedly a follow-up effort to make a drone comparable in capability to the US Reaper, with a payload of 400 kg
    • Delivery of the UAVs from China would represent a significant escalation
    • Would be the first time a whole weapons system was transferred from China to Russia
    • And yet we still hesitate to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons to strike into Russia
• OpenAI is reportedly working on a plan to reorganize into a for-profit entity
  • Previous coverage from September 14
  • Currently OpenAI is structured as profit-capped corporation owned by a nonprofit
  • Reorganization would remove the non-profit portion and reorganize the company into a public benefit corporation
  • Would also give Sam Altman equity
  • New organization would make OpenAI more closely resemble a "normal" startup
  • However, it raises questions as to whether OpenAI can hold itself accountable to develop a safe AI
  • Now we see the true purpose behind the boardroom drama from last year
• OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigns
  • During the boardroom coup, Murati was appointed interim CEO while Altman went into (temporary) exile
  • Since then, sources close to the company have stated that Murati was likely to leave
  • I guess Altman is cleaning house
• Google pays $2.7 billion to rehire Noam Shazeer
  • Noam Shazeer is one of the co-authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the seminal paper that introduced the Transformer architecture
  • After Google delayed releasing an LLM powered chatbot, Shazeer quit Google to found his own company, Character.AI
  • When Character.AI ran into financial trouble, Google paid $2.7 billion to rehire Shazeer and his co-founder Daniel De Freitas, and license Character.AI's technology
• Volkswagen isn't the only European carmaker in trouble
  • Volkswagen is not unique in having a high cost structure
  • Factory utilization rates for other European automakers, such as Stellantis and Renault, are similar to Volkswagen's
  • The difference for Volkswagen is that it committed to building electric vehicles at its highest cost plants, in Germany, putting it at a cost disadvantage to its competitors
  • Furthermore new car sales are down in Europe across the board
  • Union leaders are urging Volkswagen to commit to making affordable vehicles, even if that means they're internal combustion
  • Volkswagen management would like to close factories in Germany and move production to eastern Europe, but that will be difficult to do, as the union and the German state of Lower Saxony both hold seats on Volkswagen's board
  • Other automakers have shed jobs and closed factories, but Volkswagen's unique ownership structure makes it difficult for Volkswagen to do the same
• Shippers scramble as a strike at US east coast ports becomes more likely
  • Previous coverage from September 9
  • Shippers are bringing goods in early and making alternative arrangement to bring goods in via the West Coast or even via air freight
  • Scale of walkout, combined with the ongoing strike at Boeing, could affect US unemployment numbers
  • Would affect supply chains and would potentially stoke inflation
  • Might result in a shortage of bananas as East Coast ports handle the majority of US banana imports and it doesn't make sense to use air freight to ship bananas
• Google files antitrust complaint against Microsoft in Europe
  • Alleges that Microsoft is using Windows to lock customers into Azure
  • According to Google, Microsoft is allowing customers to set up Windows VMs on Azure for free, but is saying that if they wish to set up Windows VMs on competing cloud services, they'll have to purchase new Windows Server licenses

2024-09-24 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces have advanced near Veseloe
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have entered Vuhledar
    • This is significant, because this is the first time that Russian forces have actually managed to reach Vuhledar
    • In 2023, they assaulted Vuhledar, but the Ukrainians were able to fend them off in the fields outside the city
  • Kharkiv region
    • Ukrainian forces continue to advance in Vovchansk, and have retaken a major factory complex
  • Ukrainians are increasingly frustrated with the Biden administration's refusal to grant permission for Ukraine to conduct long-range strikes into Russia
    • One of the asks that Zelensky will make of Biden is to allow Ukraine to use ATACMS to strike into Russia
    • Ukrainian officials are frustrated, as they had expected this permission to have been granted months or even years ago
    • Ukrainians point out that the US has a pattern of insistent denial followed by acquiescence
      • HIMARS
      • Tanks
      • Fighter jets
    • Defense Department officials retort that they have yet to see a plan from the Ukrainians that shows how granting permission to strike inside Russia with ATACMS would help Ukraine on the battlefield
    • However, European officials disagree, and argue that giving weapons but restraining how they're used is incoherent policy
  • Russian defense spending will reach 6.2% of GDP next year
    • The Russian economy is adapting to elevated military spending
    • Over one third of the government's budget is now allocated to the military
    • Russia will get the money for this from hydrocarbon exports revenues and import duties
    • Will cut spending on social programs
    • The Russian government is prioritizing military strength over social stability: will deal with social and economic problems when they arrive
    • Sadly, 6.2% GDP on military spending is perfectly sustainable: the US was spending 6.5% of GDP on military spending during the Reagan administration
  • The Economist writes about the benefits that Iran, North Korea and China are receiving from the war in Ukraine
    • Iran gets feedback about how its drones (and soon, ballistic missiles) fare against Western countermeasures
    • North Korea gets feedback about its missiles as well
    • China gets information about Western weapons systems, many of which are also possessed by Taiwan
    • Russia is also giving technical expertise regarding missile defense, aircraft design and submarines to China in exchange for Chinese microelectronics, machine tools and heavy equipment
    • Iran, likewise is receiving Russian assistance on space technology, which is also applicable to ICBMs
    • However, the cooperation between Russia, Iran, China and North Korea comes with limits
    • No sign that Russia is sharing nuclear technology with its three partners
    • Russia has also declined to send missiles to the Houthis
    • China has not sent any weapons to Russia, despite having ample capacity to do so, because it risks secondary sanctions from the US
    • Sending weapons would also undermine the neutral mediator image that China is trying to portray for itself
    • Iran and China have a history of conflicts with the Soviet Union
    • Furthermore, China is concerned by Russia's increasing closeness with North Korea; gives North Korea a second patron and dilutes Chinese influence
• China raises its retirement age
  • Blue collar women: from 50 to 55
  • White collar women: from 55 to 58
  • For men: from 60 to 63
  • Like increases to retirement ages in other countries, this drew a public backlash
  • However, censors have quickly removed critical replies to the retirement age reform on social media
  • Pension reforms do not adjust hukou system, which gives people with a rural hukou a much smaller pension than people with an urban registration
  • Perhaps Xi Jinping thinks that the broader reforms to hukou proposed last month will fix that problem by allowing more people to gain urban hukou
• A Huawei laptop reveals China's progress towards technological self-sufficiency
  • In response to American export restrictions, China is mandating that local suppliers of electronics, cars, and other durable goods use made-in-China integrated circuits
  • The Huawei Qingyun L540 is an example of that localization
  • Uses a locally-designed HiSilicon CPU
  • Runs a locally designed variant of Linux, with locally built applications
  • However, there are still many components, such as memory, SSD storage and various controller chips that come either from the US or US allies, like South Korea
• Telegram turns over more data about users in response to police requests
  • Law enforcement officers had long complained that Telegram would ignore their requests for information about users engaging in illegal activity on the platform
  • Now, after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Telegram is doing more to comply with these requests
• AMD CEO Lisa Su expects that, in the future, AIs will be trained on custom chips rather than GPUs
  • Right now the pace of change in models ensures that GPUs are the most favored option
  • GPUs are quasi-generalist chips with "just enough" programmability to allow them to be used for different models
  • However, as the AI market matures and AI companies figure out what specific functions they need, the market will gravitate towards more specialized hardware
  • I think a useful analogy is with Bitcoin mining
  • When Bitcoin mining started out, GPUs were the favored tool
  • Now, however, all the major mining pools are using specialized application specific integrated circuits (ASICs)
  • Lisa Su is stating that AI hardware will undergo a similar evolution
  • To me, this is the greatest threat to nVidia: it's not that nVidia GPUs will suddenly stop being the best, it's that GPUs in general will become increasingly irrelevant to AI
• Booting Linux on the Intel 4004
  • Original blogpost with further project details
  • Video demonstration
  • The Intel 4004 is the world's first commercial microprocessor
  • 2,300 transistors running at 740 kHz
  • Dmitry Grinberg managed to boot Debian Linux on it by writing an emulator for a MIPS R3000
  • Boots Linux in 4.76 days
  • Notably the 4004 was designed for calculators, so it doesn't have any logical operators built in hardware
  • Logical operators must be implemented in software using arithmetic and shift operators
• Sandia National Labs performs an experiment that demonstrates that nuclear weapons can deflect asteroids as large as 4km across
  • Used the Z-machine to generate high-energy X-rays, which simulated the radiation of a nuclear explosion
  • X-rays were directed at rock samples similar in composition to asteroids
  • X-rays vaporized the surface of the rock sample and imparted significant momentum to the rock
  • By extrapolating from rock sample tests, Sandia researchers were able to determine that a nuclear weapon would be able to deflect an asteroid up to 4km across

2024-09-23 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donestsk region
    • Russian forces mounted a major attack near Pobjeda, which was repelled
    • Russian forces also attacked towards Tsukuryne
    • Russian forces advance on Mykolaivka
    • Emil Kastehelmi has another analysis thread, this time focusing on Vuhledar
    • Looking at the control map, it seems like the towns that are most in danger are Hirnyk and Vuhledar
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces expand southwards near Pischane
    • It's possible that they're trying to capture the bridge over the Oskil river at Kruhlyakivka
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues near Liubimovka
    • No further word of the Ukrainian attack near Veseloe
  • Financial Times report from Donetsk
    • Russian forces in the Pokrovsk area have a significant firepower and manpower advantage over the defenders
      • 10:1 advantage in shells fired
      • 8:1 advantage in troops
    • Russian forces have also learned lessons from Wagner, and have adopted the tactics that Wagner used in Bakhmut
    • The troops guarding Vuhledar are exhausted, and lack air defenses
  • To counter Ukrainian "interceptor" UAVs, Russian forces have started equipping their reconnaissance UAVs with built in jamming systems that turn on when they detect the radio frequencies used to control interceptors
  • Tatarigami writes about the systemic leadership problems in the Ukrainian military that are hampering its ability to defend against the Russian onslaught
    • While enlisted men and junior officers are performing well at the tactical level, they're being let down by their senior leadership
    • Inexperienced units are being assigned to guard high-risk areas of the battlefield
    • Brigades are having to develop their own internal training programs because new recruits are not being sufficiently prepared for combat by training centers
    • The Ukrainian military still does not have a formal after-action-review process to identify and disseminate lessons learned in combat
• Russia suffered a major failure in testing its newest nuclear missile
  • Test was of the RS-28 Sarmat
  • Appears that missile either exploded in or very close to the silo
  • At one point Russian officials had stated that the RS-28 would be ready by 2018
  • However the missile has been repeatedly delayed since then, and this test failure is likely to result in further delays
  • This is the fourth failed test of the RS-28, and raises doubts about the viability of the missile
• The Biden administration proposes banning Chinese vehicles with self-driving features
  • The administration is concerned that self-driving features which report back to China could be a privacy threat
  • Vehicles might be shut down or caused to crash in the event of a conflict with China in order to cause chaos on American roads
  • The ban is a proactive step that seeks to prevent internet-connected Chinese vehicles and components from entering US supply chains
  • This would functionally be a total ban on Chinese electric vehicles, since all of them come with some kind of driver assistance
• Boeing returns to the bargaining table with the International Association of Machinists in hopes of ending the strike
  • Offers a 30% pay increase instead of the previous 25% increase offered
  • Restores annual bonuses
  • Increases company contributions to 401(k) plans

2024-09-22 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance further into Toretsk
    • Russian forces have captured Nevske
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces are attacking Liubimovka
    • It doesn't seem like the Ukrainian flanking offensive near Veseloe has had much of an effect thus far
  • A dispatch from Snake Island
    • The Wall Street Journal spoke with members of the Timur Unit, an elite unit that's part of Ukraine's intelligence agency, about the recapture of Snake Island
    • Recapturing Snake Island was both a practical and symbolic victory
    • Symbolic, because, on the first day of the war, the Ukrainian outpost on Snake Island told the cruiser Moskva, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself" when asked to surrender
    • Practical, because taking Snake Island opened up a sea route out of Odesa for grain ships
    • Russia is still striking the island with missiles, even though they have not made an effort to recapture it
    • Ukraine used innovative tactics, including firing howitzers and MLRS from barges at the island in order to pummel the Russian garrison there
    • The initial mission to reestablish Ukrainian control over Snake Island after Russian forces evacuated it almost foundered as bad weather forced them to abandon their initial speedboat and use an inflatable with no motor
    • After demining the island, Ukraine has established a small garrison on Snake Island and uses Snake Island as a base from which to launch raids on Russian-held oil platforms in the Black Sea
• The EU's defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, advocates for the EU to mandate that member states must stockpile ammunition
  • Would function similarly to the EU's current natural gas stockpile, where countries maintain reserves and share with neighbors as necessary
  • The stockpile would create a stable long-term demand signal for production, a key factor in convincing defense manufacturers to invest in additional capacity
  • In March, the EU allocated €500 million under the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) act to boost EU-wide 155mm shell production to 2 million per year
  • Kubilius wants a debt-funded EU-wide fund in order to bolster the EU's defenses
  • However member states, notably Germany and the Netherlands, oppose EU-wide bonds for defense spending
• TSMC and Samsung discuss building chip fabs in the Middle East
  • Discussions are still in the early phases and may not result in any actual investment
  • Fabs would be funded by Mubadala, the UAE's sovereign wealth fund
  • Efforts are a result of the growing AI boom and a desire to diversify chip production away from Taiwan
  • Sure, let's move chip fabs out of missile range of China and into missile range of Iran​/the Houthis, I'm sure that'll go well
  • Chip-making requires large amounts of ultra-pure water, which would be problematic for the UAE to supply
  • The Biden administration is concerned that factories in the Middle East could be a source for chips to China, a country with which the UAE has extensive trade relations
  • Mubadala has experience investing in chip manufacturing, as it was the owner of AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries before taking it public in 2021
• Twitter has hired lawyers to represent it in Brazil, a first step towards complying with the Brazilian government's demands
  • Brazil had banned Twitter on September 2, after Twitter refused to ban accounts that had been accused of spreading misinformation
  • Brazil's Supreme Court has stipulated that Twitter must do three things before it overturns the ban
    1. Appoint a legal representative in the country
    2. Block accounts found to be spreading misinformation
    3. Pay a fine
  • Twitter's hiring of a law firm in Brazil represents the first of those steps
• Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, is in talks with advertisers as it seeks to challenge Google
  • Perplexity is reportedly in talks with major advertisers, such as Nike and Mariott, to allow them to place sponsored follow-up questions after Perplexity's AI search engine provides an answer to a user's query
  • Perplexity currently makes money via a subscription model, like all the other AIs
  • The timing of this is interesting, because it comes right as Google's deep integration between ads and search is coming under anti-trust scrutiny
  • That will likely prevent Google from acting as ruthlessly as it otherwise would have to undercut Perplexity's experiment
• Linux kernel 6.12 brings some interesting new features
  • Finally enables the realtime preemption modifications, completing a 20-year long process to allow Linux to be used for "realtime" applications like industrial control machinery, which require deterministic response times
    • Background article from 2009 explaining why realtime preemption is important
  • Replaces the current scheduler with the new EEVDF scheduler which will help more latency sensitive programs
  • Also adds a way for users to implement custom schedulers using eBPF

2024-09-21 Saturday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced to Leonidivka, potentially opening a flank on Niu York
    • Russian forces have advanced past Chervonopopivka to Nevske
    • Russian forces attack towards Novoukrainka, in an effort to cut Vuhledar off from the west
      • I think this is pretty serious: Vuhledar is another notable strong point in Ukrainian defenses, which had defeated significant Russian attacks in the past, notably at the beginning of 2023, when Bakhmut was also under attack
  • Ukrainian long range drones hit two Russian ammunition depots
    • First depot to be hit is near Tikhoretsk, in Krasnodar Krai, on the other side of the Sea of Azov from Crimea
    • Second depot is in Oktyabrskii, south of Toropets, where a depot had been hit previously
  • According to US officials, Iran has not sent launchers for the ballistic missiles that it shipped to Russia
    • Previous reporting
    • One possibility is that Russia might be planning to build its own launchers, as Iranian launchers might not be suitable for the cold winters and rough terrain of Ukraine
    • Another possibility is that Iran is holding back launchers as a bargaining chip in arms control talks with the West
• The chief of Boeing's defense and space unit is leaving the company
  • Ted Colbert had only taken over the division in March, under previous CEO Dave Calhoun
  • Had reorganized defense division into four large groups, down from eight
  • Defense unit was responsible for the troubled Starliner program
  • In addition to Starliner, it had taken write-downs on contracts to create a successor to the VC-25s that are often used as Air Force One
  • Was also affected by a fatal Osprey crash off the coast of Japan, which led to a temporary grounding of the entire Osprey fleet
• Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a method to break down polyethylene and polypropylene plastic into propylene and isobutylene
  • Polyethylene and polypropylene are extremely commonly used plastics
  • Used for bags and food packaging
  • Researchers used a catalyst to break down mixed polyethylene and polypropylene stocks into a mixture propylene and isobutylene gas
  • Both propylene and isobutylene can be used as feedstock for plastics and other chemicals
  • Approach still needs to demonstrate that it can be scaled up

2024-09-20 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces renew their attacks near Veseloe
    • This seems like another effort to hit the flanks of the Russian counterattacks near Nikolaevo-Darino
    • Looking back, it seems like the report from August 19 which stated that Ukraine had captured Tolpino and Kolychevka was probably misleading
    • I don't think the Ukrainians ever got past Korenevo with enough forces to hold territory
    • Ukrainian troops might have advanced to Tolpino, but it doesn't seem like they were able to capture the town
  • Kherson region
    • Russian forces are increasingly targeting random civilians with drone attacks near Antonivka
  • The Wall Street Journal reports that Russia may be preparing for another round of mobilization
    • Although Russia has had success near Pokrovsk, it has come at a heavy price
    • The UK Defense Minister, John Healey, estimated that Russia was losing 1,100 soldiers per day
    • The Russian government has stepped up recruitment, increasing the signing bonus that it gives to new volunteers, but that hasn't been enough to make up for the losses
    • The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has forced Russia to pull troops from sectors of Ukraine, such as Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, where fighting has been less intense
    • As a result, officials are reportedly pressuring Putin to conduct another round of mobilization
    • However, a further round of mobilization would be politically more difficult to conduct
    • My prediction is that mobilization won't happen until something goes catastrophically wrong for Russia
    • Putin's entire approach to managing the war has been procrastination
    • The first round of mobilization was a reaction to Ukraine's recapturing territory in Kharkiv Oblast in the autumn of 2022
    • As long as Russian forces are creeping forward around Pokrovsk, as long as the Ukrainians are contained in Kursk, as long as Putin can keep claiming wins today, he'll put off further conscription until tomorrow
    • The thing that's saving the Russians right now is that the Ukrainians are also starved of troops, as they wait for new recruits to be trained after their own second round of mobilization
    • See also this article from yesterday, where Ukrainian commanders lament not having enough troops to exploit Russian weaknesses
    • I would also caution about reading too much into the fact that Ukraine has a smaller overall population than Russia; both Russia and Ukraine have enough men to continue this war for a very long time
    • Countries with smaller populations win against countries with larger populations all the time: after all, the US lost the Vietnam War
  • Russia is struggling to build trade links for commodities other than oil
    • The US imposed new rules that prohibit foreign banks from dealing with Russia
    • These secondary sanctions appear to have been effective in reducing trade between Russia and countries like Turkey and China
      • Sanctions aren't very effective at stopping a country from doing things, but they are effective at slowing things down and making them more complicated
      • The theory behind sanctions is that this drag, over time, will be persuasive
      • However, in practice, countries such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. always seem to prioritize their geopolitical objectives over having access to global markets
    • Russia was immediately successful in rerouting oil supplies to India and China because oil can be transported in tankers
    • However, it has not been as successful in rerouting natural gas supplies, as natural gas is much more efficiently transported via pipeline
    • Russian ability to liquefy natural gas for tanker transport is limited
    • Notably Xi Jinping has refused to authorize a new gas pipeline between Russia and China
      • Xi Jinping understands that Russia is more desperate to export gas than China is to import gas
      • Therefore he's holding out for price guarantees that will ensure that China will receive the gas at a favorable rate
    • Russia's underdeveloped rail infrastructure in Siberia has hurt its ability to export to Central Asia
    • Furthermore, those rail links are now overstretched in bringing imports from China
    • Russia is attempting to implement a trade route to India through Azerbaijan and Iran via the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, but that effort is hampered by lack of funding and poor Iranian infrastructure
  • Ursula von der Leyen announces a new €35 billion loan to Ukraine
    • Loan will be collateralized by interest on frozen Russian assets in Western banks
    • The amount of the loan is a compromise
    • The original amount was to be greater, and the US was meant to participate
    • However, the US conditioned its participation on the EU agreeing to indefinitely freeze Russian assets in order to ensure that the loan would pose little risk to lenders
    • The EU was unable to provide this assurance, because of Hungarian insistence that freezes on Russian assets be time-limited
    • Therefore the EU proceeded on its own with a smaller loan
  • Ramzan Kadyrov accuses Elon Musk of remotely disabling his Cybertruck
    • For context, on August 19, Kadyrov posted a video of himself driving a Cybertruck with a machine gun mounted to the bed
    • Kadyrov alleges that he received the Cybertruck as a gift from Elon himself
    • Claims that the vehicle was sent to Ukraine where it "performed admirably"
    • If by "performed admirably" he means "got a lot of views on TikTok or Telegram", I believe him
  • Ukraine bans Telegram from state-owned devices
    • Ban comes after Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian intelligence, submitted evidence of Russia's ability to spy on Telegram users
    • Ban only applies to official devices, not personal ones
• China sentences a Taiwanese person for the first time on charges of separatism
  • Yang Chih-yuan was a Taiwanese living in China
  • Was arrested in 2022, in Wenzhou province
  • Had previously founded a minor political party in Taiwan
  • His sentencing prompted the Taiwanese government to issue an advisory telling citizens traveling to China to take caution
  • Separatism charges, in the past, have been directed more at Uighur activists than Taiwanese
  • Officials from the Communist Party have stated that the sentence is intended to intimidate the people of Taiwan
  • More self-defeating actions from the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to Taiwan
  • I don't see how indicating that Taiwanese people will risk jail by traveling to the mainland will make the Taiwanese people more sympathetic to unification with China
• Microsoft reaches a deal with Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant
  • Unit that would restart is Unit 1, which is adjacent to the reactor that suffered the infamous meltdown in 1979
  • Unit 1 had been retired in 2019 because it was no longer economically viable to operate
  • Three Mile Island plant will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center
  • Will generate 835 MW for Microsoft's data centers
  • Driven by increasing power demands for AI applications
  • Restart will be challenging but Microsoft and Constellation are betting that there will be enough sustained demand from data centers to make Unit 1 economically sustainable once again
• Intel places its foundries under a wholly-owned subsidiary
  • Intel had already started reporting its foundry division's financial results separately, in an effort to increase the separation between the design side and the manufacturing side of the company
  • This restructuring allows the foundry division to seek outside financing independently of the parent organization
  • Intel has also reached an agreement with Amazon to manufacture custom chips for AWS
  • Won a $3 billion Department of Defense contract to build semiconductor manufacturing capacity for national security applications
  • It also makes the foundry division easier to spin off, should Intel want to do what AMD did in 2009 when it spun off GlobalFoundries
• Semiconductor process node names do not reflect transistor sizes
  • Semiconductor process node names ("22 nm", "14 nm", etc.) at one point reflected the "gate-pitch" or the distance between two gates on a single transistor
  • However, these names diverged from that statistic in the '90s
  • At this point, semiconductor manufacturers assign node names somewhat arbitrarily
  • This is all well known to people within the industry, but it bears repeating

2024-09-19 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Supposedly Ukrainian forces are on the offensive once again near Glushkovo, but there are few confirmed details from the area
  • Donetsk region
    • In the north of Donetsk, Russian forces advance west of Chervonopopivka
    • Around Pokrovsk it doesn't seem like much has changed over the past day
  • US officials note that Ukraine has been able to rapidly train maintenance crews for F-16s
    • US officials have been impressed at how quickly Ukrainian forces have learned training material for the F-16
    • One consistent theme in this war is that the US has underestimated Ukraine's ability to provide logistics for the Western weapons that have been given
    • In many ways, the Ukrainian military is less bureaucratic than our own
      • Much younger military: bureaucracy hasn't had a chance to set in
      • Fighting a war: great incentive to avoid unnecessary bureaucracy
  • A dispatch from a drone unit on the front lines
    • Drones drop anti-tank mines and small "mini-bombs" on individual soldiers
    • Jamming is pervasive and "friendly" jamming is often as much of a problem as enemy EW
    • It seems like there's a disconnect between Ukrainian drone units and Ukrainian infantry units
    • There's a need for "limited" jammers that can discriminate between the frequencies used by enemy drones and those used by friendly drones
  • Ukrainska Pravda has a long article discussing the issues that led to the retreat towards Pokrovsk
    • New soldiers are less well-trained than the experienced veterans they've replaced
    • Artillery ammunition shortages continue to be a problem
    • There is a disconnect between Ukrainian front-line units and Ukrainian logistics units which dig trenches: often the pre-prepared trenches are dug in totally unsuitable locations, which forces retreating Ukrainian front-line units to re-dig new fortifications
    • Example: Pre-dug trenches are dug in open fields that are easily targeted by artillery or drones
    • Once the Russians started advancing past Avdiivka, not enough was done to spoil their paths of advance
    • Minefields that had supposedly been laid proved to be nonexistent
    • The Ukrainian military is drawing a distinction between offensive and defensive units; the units that were deployed to Kursk were primarily offensive units, which might have been wasted committed to a fight that they didn't train for near Pokrovsk
    • However opening the Kursk front has not led to a meaningful decrease in pressure on Pokrovsk; Russian attacks in Pokrovsk have actually intensified since Ukraine invaded Kursk
    • The main problem appears to be personnel: Ukrainian commanders stated that there are known weaknesses in the Russian flanks, but they don't have the personnel to assault them
• How a continuing resolution could hurt the Air Force in 2025
  • Delays in modernizing space launch and testing equipment
  • Would prevent the Air Force from buying the amount of long-range missiles that it needs
  • Delays the production of new jet trainers
  • Delays procurement of new F-35s
  • Delays procurement of advanced Collaborative Combat Aircraft UAVs
  • I genuinely think that the Congressional budgeting process, which results in these continuing resolutions, is a greater threat to national security than China
  • When people ask, "Why are defense programs so expensive?" one of the factors they often overlook is the huge risk premiums that defense contractors have to charge in order to guard against contingencies like these
  • Low missile inventories are a well known problem, but without stable funding, no contractor is going to be willing to invest in new plant, equipment and personnel to improve production rates
• Three Wasp-class amphibious landing ships have had mechanical problems in the last few months
  • The USS Iwo Jima suffered a mechanical problem on September 5 while conducting exercises off the coast of Virginia
  • Earlier this year the USS Wasp and USS Boxer suffered mechanical issues causing them to return to port
  • The maintenance issues reflect the increased strain caused by the loss of the USS Bonhomme Richard , which was declared a total loss after it suffered a fire while down for maintenance
  • Wasp-class amphibious assault ships are deploying undermanned by 20%, which makes it difficult for ships to complete routine maintenance while at sea, further increasing the likelihood of mechanical breakdown
  • These mechanical problems hinder training and could potentially impact the ability of the US Navy and the US Marine Corps to respond to unexpected crises

2024-09-18 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • No major changes to the front-lines today
  • A Ukrainian drone attack causes a large explosion at an ammunition depot in Tver
    • Explosion occurred at an arsenal near Toropets
    • Heat from fire and explosions was intense enough to be picked up by NASA fire monitoring satellites
    • Force from explosions was powerful enough to register as a small earthquake
    • Toropets is approximately 300 miles from the Ukrainian border
    • Shows that Ukrainian drones can launch strikes deep into Russia itself
• Walkie-talkies explode across Lebanon, in an apparent continuation of the pager attack from yesterday
  • Walkie-talkies all had new batteries
  • Increasingly indicative of supply-chain compromises
  • This attack was narrower, because the new batteries had been distributed to fewer people
  • These attacks are significant not for their physical impact, but for their psychological impact
  • Hezbollah will now have to spend a lot of time working out how these devices were compromised, and will be forced to revert to e.g. paper messages sent by courier
  • During this time, decision-making will be slowed and coordinated actions will be more difficult to carry out
• The EU's €1.49 billion fine on Google for antitrust violations has been overturned
  • Fine had been imposed in 2019 as a penalty for Google limiting how websites could display ads sold by rivals
  • Google had ended the practice in 2016, so no changes in Google's business practices were sought
  • The General Court of the EU upheld most of the regulators' findings, but overturned the fine after stating that the European Commission's assessments of the duration of contract provisions were incorrect
  • The European Commission can still appeal this decision further to the European Court of Justice
  • This ruling comes a week after the ECJ upheld
• Meta is being investigated by the EU for anticompetitive business practices relating to Facebook Marketplace
  • Meta is accused of unfairly favoring Facebook Marketplace links in Facebook
  • This follows up on preliminary findings issued by the EC in December 2022 which stated that by making Facebook Marketplace the default option for classifieds on Facebook, Meta had given Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage
  • Furthermore, Meta is accused of imposing restrictions on competing classified ad services which seek to advertise on Facebook or Instagram
  • Normally I get a bit annoyed by EU antitrust actions, but this one makes sense
  • The Facebook​/Facebook Marketplace scenario is analogous to Windows​/Internet Explorer
  • It makes sense that Meta shouldn't be able to use its dominant position in one market (social networking) to unfairly privilege its business in another (online classifieds)
• Boeing furloughs thousands of employees in order to save cash during the machinists' strike
  • Boeing machinists voted to go on strike on Friday
  • The strike halted production of the 737 Max, 777, and 767
  • This has led to cash-flow issues for Boeing, which is why it's having to furlough workers
• The SEC is preparing rules to allow stocks to be priced in increments of $0.005
  • Is an effort to reduce bid-ask spreads
  • Will apply to heavily traded stocks whose bid-ask spread frequently hits the current minimum of $0.01 (i.e. stocks with a lot of trading volume)
  • Approximately 1700 securities are expected to qualify for the half-cent increments
• 23-and-me board resigns amid cash-flow problems for the DNA testing company
  • 23-and-me had, at one point, a $6 billion valuation
  • That valuation has collapsed by over 99.9% to $169 million
  • Has never turned a profit
  • No recurring revenue: people only need to take a DNA test once
  • The effort to use 23-and-me's DNA database as a tool for drug development hasn't worked out
  • CEO Anne Wojcicki announced a plan to take the company private, which prompted the board resignation
  • Wojcicki controls 49% of the company, which prevents the board from entertaining other competing offers
  • The directors who resigned said that Wojcicki's offer lacked committed financing and was not priced at a premium above the existing share price

2024-09-17 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance into the center of Ukrainsk
    • Russian forces make advances in Hrodivka, taking control of almost the entire town
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces advance on Borki
    • Russian forces spotted west of Nikolaevo-Darino
    • This seems to indicate that Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Gordeevka area, where fighting was taking place yesterday
• Nine killed and thousands injured as pagers explode across Lebanon
  • Pagers belong to Hezbollah
  • Israeli sabotage suspected
  • Israeli government hasn't commented
  • Explosions followed what Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, reported as a foiled assassination attempt on an Israeli official
  • According to the New York Times , the pagers had been sabotaged by inserting small amounts of the explosive PETN into their batteries
  • Hezbollah had reverted to using pagers as a way of thwarting Israeli monitoring of more modern means of communication
• Instagram is using AI to detect whether users are underage and is proactively restricting accounts
  • Teen accounts will be restricted by default from the kinds of content they're able to access
  • Will display notifications to close the app after an hour
  • Notifications will be muted overnight by default
  • Removing the restrictions will be an opt-in process for parents, who will have to use a parental supervision tool to lift the content restrictions
  • If underage users attempt to create unrestricted accounts by lying about their age, they will be prompted to send proof of age, such as a photo ID
  • Can also send a photo of their face, which will be checked by an AI to determine if they look old enough
  • Meta will also roll out an AI model which will police existing accounts to determine if they likely belong to teenagers
  • This all sounds like an incredible dystopia
  • The war on general purpose computing continues
  • I look forward to seeing the creative workarounds that teens will come up with to try to get past these restrictions
• Brazil seizes cash from Starlink and Twitter to cover fines imposed on Twitter
  • Banks carried out orders to transfer fines from Starlink and Twitter's accounts to the government
  • Bank accounts were unfrozen afterwards
  • Brazil's Supreme Court found that Starlink and Twitter were part of the same de facto economic group, so therefore it was justified to take money from Starlink to pay off fines owed by Twitter
• Google announces a privately-funded nonprofit project to create a constellation of fire-monitoring satellites
  • FireSat will be a constellation of 50 small satellites in low-earth orbit
  • Managed by the Earth Fire Alliance (EFA) nonprofit
  • Will use multispectral infrared to image the earth from orbit, looking for hotspots indicative of wildfires
  • Infrared imagery will feed into a Google AI system that will determine if a particular hotspot is likely to be a wildfire
  • AI system was trained with satellite data from controlled burns
  • At full capability, the constellation will be able to report new wildfires in as little as 20 minutes
  • Satellites will be built by Muon Space and will likely be launched by SpaceX
  • While NASA and Planet labs also have fire-detection capabilities, they don't have the resolution or refresh rate envisioned by FireSat
• Apple stops the rollout of iPadOS 18 after some users report that their devices had been bricked by the update
  • Apple is offering hardware replacements to users whose devices are affected
  • Affected devices appear to be the new M4 iPad Pros
  • Uncharacteristic for Apple to botch an upgrade like this

2024-09-16 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance near Stupochky
      • This is a significant advance across the canal that separates Chasiv Yar from Bakhmut
      • Opens up a new flank against Chasiv Yar
      • Puts Kostyantynivka under greater pressure
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces attack Gordeevka, Vnezapnoe and Byakhovo
    • Does this mean that Ukrainian forces have been pushed out of Sadovoye Tovarishchestvo Glushkovo?
  • Kharkiv region
    • Ukrainian forces advance in Vovchansk, pushing Russians out of the city center
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces advance near Kolisnykivka, and are within 4 km of the Oskil River
  • According to Anthony Blinken, Russia has agreed to share nuclear technology with Iran
    • /It would make sense as a quid-pro-quo for the short-range ballistic missiles that Iran is reportedly supplying to Russia /
    • Raises questions about Israel's reluctance to aid Ukraine: Iran getting a nuclear weapon is considered a red line for Israel, and here Russia is, helping Iran towards, if not over, that line
  • General Syrsky announces an overhaul of basic training for Ukrainian soldiers
    • I think this is underrated
    • One of the problems that Ukraine has faced this year is that after two years of war, the quality of the Ukrainian military has also become very uneven
    • A key factor in the success of Russian forces after the fall of Avdiivka has been the fact that a Ukrainian unit broke at Ocheretyne
    • Improving the quality of basic training is key to allowing Ukraine to get some relief for its most competent and experienced units
    • It should have been done sooner, but that could be said of so many things in this war
• Thierry Breton has resigned his post and pulled his candidacy for the European Commission
  • Breton was EU commissioner for the internal market
  • Notable for being the EU's chief enforcer of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA)
  • Was also the EU's coordinator for increasing ammunition production to aid Ukraine
  • Resigned after posting an acrimonious note on social media pointed at EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen
  • Accused President Leyen of promising France more influence on the EU Commission if someone other than Breton were nominated to be the French representative
  • I bet Musk is very happy about this: he and Breton butted head several times over Twitter's policies for handling disinformation
• Boeing takes immediate action to cut costs and preserve cash during the machinists' strike
  • Hiring freeze
  • Parts orders for the 737, 767 and 777 programs canceled
  • Temporary furloughs are under discussion
  • The immediate priority for Boeing CFO Brian West is to hoard cash and preserve Boeing's credit rating
• Amazon tells its employees to return to the office five days a week
  • Official Amazon announcement
  • In addition to returning to the office five days a week, Amazon will be reducing the ratio of managers to individual contributors
  • This is more evidence that the pandemic was just a blip

2024-09-15 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have made many small advances, but no new towns have come under threat
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces are fighting west of Sadovoye Tovarishchestvo Glushkovo
  • Russian state-owned banks open branches in occupied Ukraine
    • Banks such as Sbersbank and VTB are already subject to stringent Western sanctions, so there is little additional pressure that can be brought to bear to prevent them from aiding the Russian government's occupation
    • However, privately owned Russian businesses are still wary of operating in the occupied regions
    • Residents of the occupied regions rely on an informal courier service, ordering items to addresses in Southern Russia, which are then couriered into the occupied territory
    • These courier services operate informally via Telegram groups
  • Ukrainian Defense Intelligence chief Kyrilo Budanov says that Russia has increased its production of ballistic missiles and glide bombs
• The Philippines has withdrawn its coast guard ship in a stand-off over a disputed reef
  • Stand-off was over Sabina Shoal
  • Sabina Shoal is near Second Thomas Shoal, the scene of other confrontations between Chinese and Philippine forces
  • Philippine ship was forced to withdraw after being blocked and rammed by a Chinese coast guard vessel
  • The Philippine government has said that another ship will be dispatched to the area
  • China claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, which includes many small islands and reefs that are within the exclusive economic zone of other countries
  • These claims have no basis in international maritime law, according to the Permanent Court of Arbitration which judged competing claims from China and the Philippines under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)

2024-09-14 Saturday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces continue to press forward around Ukrainsk
    • Russians have also made marginal gains around Hryhorivka, near Chasiv Yar
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces have reached Obukhovka, on the outskirts of Veseloe
    • Fighting continues around Korenevo, and is especially heavy near Liubimovka
    • Although this attack was repelled, it was dangerous that the Russians managed to get so close to the Sudzha-Korenevo road
    • A report from soldiers who fought in Kursk
      • Kursk was by no means an easy operation
      • Involved casualty rates comparable with other areas of the frontline
      • Ukrainian forces have found Wagner flags and insignia: Russia is deploying Wagner fighters to counter the Ukrainian incursion
      • Ukrainian troops say that Wagner forces are distinguished by their greater discipline and better equipment
      • Praise Russian fortifications: combine different types of defensive measures, such as dragons teeth and anti-tank mines
      • Describe challenges with navigating unfamiliar territory
      • Different from other parts of the front line which have been defended for months, if not years, and Ukrainian forces know intimately
      • Russian electronic warfare has been effective
        • No GPS
        • Radios jammed
        • No Starlink
      • This is one thing that concerns me about the US military: are we training to operate in a GPS-denied environment?
      • For the past 30+ years, the US military has had unrestricted access to GPS in its combat theaters
      • However, Russia and China have developed increasingly sophisticated GPS jamming and spoofing capability
      • Ukrainian forces are now assuming a defensive posture to ready themselves for further Russian counterattacks
• OpenAI's $150 billion valuation depends on it removing its profit cap
  • OpenAI's latest $150 billion funding round will reportedly come in the form of convertible debt
  • $150 billion valuation will be contingent on the startup removing the profit cap for investors
  • If the board does not approve removing the profit cap, then the funding round will have to be renegotiated, likely at a lower valuation
  • When OpenAI was founded, it was originally a nonprofit
  • Started a for-profit subsidiary to commercialize AI to generate funding for the large amounts of computing capacity needed to train new AIs
  • This for-profit subsidiary is what most people know of as OpenAI: it's the entity behind commercializing ChatGPT
  • Returns to the first investors in OpenAI are capped at 100x their original investment
  • It's this cap which is supposedly at the heart of OpenAI's latest funding negotiations
  • Is this the real reason why Sam Altman undertook the boardroom coup last year?
• Boeing faces losing its investment grade debt rating as the machinists' strike impacts 737 Max production
  • The machinists' strike could seriously impact Boeing's ability to deliver planes to customers
  • This could have significant deleterious impact on free cash flow
  • Ratings agencies had been counting on Boeing to raise 737 Max production to 38 planes per month, the limit set by the FAA, by the end of the year
  • The strike puts that goal in jeopardy
  • It just keeps getting worse and worse for Boeing
• United plans to roll out free Starlink-based wifi across all its planes
  • Rollout won't start until 2025
  • Will take several years before equipment is installed across the entire fleet

2024-09-13 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Ukrainsk is under attack by Russian troops, indicating a further advance towards Selydove
    • Russian forces are attempting to advance out of Vodyane, attacking a coal mine that sits in between Vodyane and Vuhledar
    • Russian forces are also attacking Dibrova, north of Siversk
      • Siversk has been one of the post-Bakhmut success stories, holding off multiple waves of Russian attacks
      • However, that area has been quiet more recently, as both sides have focused on the fighting near Pokrovsk
    • Russian forces are attempting to advance through Bilohorivka
      • Like Siversk, Bilohorivka had also been a post-Bakhmut success
    • In general, it seems like Russia is piling on the pressure across Donetsk
    • Maybe they're hoping to reveal another exploitable weakness, like the one they found around Ocheretyne in April
    • In some good news for Ukraine, it doesn't appear that Russia has made many further advances into Niu York or Toretsk
  • Kursk region
    • Situation is still unclear
    • It doesn't appear that the Russians have advanced beyond Snagost
    • However, it also doesn't appear that the Ukrainian counter-counteroffensive at Veseloe has been all that successful either
  • Russia is producing UAVs with Chinese engines
    • Russia can use Iranian drones, North Korean ballistic missiles, and weapons with Chinese components to strike into Ukraine
    • But somehow it'll be escalatory if we allow Ukraine the same freedom to strike into Russia with Western weapons
    • The US reaction to this is toothless: yet more sanctions that Chinese companies can work around via shell companies or third parties in places like Kazakhstan
  • Ukraine is experimenting with rocket launcher drones
• Boeing's US factory workers go on strike, halting 737 Max production
  • 94.6% of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers voted to reject the new contract
  • Workers demanded a 40% pay increase
  • Boeing was only offering a 25% raise
  • The last strike, in 2008, closed Boeing factories for 52 days
• 7-and-i, owner of 7-11 is classified as "core" to Japanese national security
  • On August 27, the owners of 7-11, 7-and-i, sought to have the chain of convenience stores classified as a "core" company on national security grounds
  • This claim has been granted by the Japanese government
  • This means that any acquisition of more than 1% must pass a review by the national government
  • Doesn't affect the initial takeover bid from Alimentation Couche-Tard, because that was for the entire company, a process that automatically triggers a national security review, regardless of the company's classification
  • However, according to the previous FT article, that review would only have been triggered after a deal had been agreed to
  • Being classified as a "core" business enables the government to investigate proactively
  • 7-and-i claims that its reclassification does not have anything to do with the takeover offer from Alimentation Couche-Tard, and is due to a routine annual Ministry of Finance reclassification based on survey data
  • The reclassification is not based on 7-and-i's convenience store holdings, rather, it is based on its provision of financial services and security services for commercial facilities
  • Between this and the FTC's notification that it will investigate any deal between 7-and-i and Alimentation Couche-Tard, I wonder if Alimentation Couche-Tard will bother with an updated offer
• Uber and Waymo partner to expand self-driving taxis to Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia
  • Uber had previously partnered with Waymo to expand Waymo to Phoenix
  • Uber also has a collaboration with Cruise
• The Biden administration targets Shein and Temu with revisions to the "de minimis" exemption
  • The de minimis exemption allowed shipments valued at less than $800 to come into the US largely tariff and paperwork free
  • This exemption is heavily used by Shein and Temu to ship directly from Chinese factories to US customers
  • The exemption was intended to allow US residents to receive small parcels from abroad or bring back souvenirs
  • The Biden administration is revising the exemption to make it so that parcels containing merchandise subject to tariffs under other sections of trade law will be ineligible for the de minimis exemption
  • Critics say that the heavy use of the de minimis exemption makes it difficult for regulators to block shipments based on consumer safety problems or use of forced labor
  • Lawmakers in both parties have written to the Biden administration expressing concerns about the de minimis exemption

2024-09-12 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • A Russian airstrike destroyed a bridge on the freeway connecting Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad
    • A water treatment station has been hit near Pokrovsk, severing the water supply to the city
    • Russian forces launch a major assault on Hostre, but are repelled
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces appear to have recaptured Krasnooktyabrskoe, southwest of Korenevo
    • Ukrainian forces are attacking near Veseloe
  • Ukrainian forces struck a Russian ammunition dump outside of Mariupol
  • Ukrainian special forces managed to shoot down a Su-30SM fighter while raiding a Black Sea oil platform
• OpenAI launches new "o1" model
  • FT coverage
  • Comes in two variants, o1 Mini and o1 Preview
  • Specialized for reasoning and logic tasks
  • Designed to help with science, math and programming
  • Uses chain of thought prompting to elicit more advanced capabilities from the baseline model
  • OpenAI notes that o1 is complementary to, not a substitute for ChatGPT-4o
  • 4o still has more advanced multimodal capabilities, and is able to access outside resources
  • This is why o1 didn't seem all that impressive in my early tests, I think, because I was already informally doing chain-of-thought prompting by telling e.g. GPT-4o to break down a problem into steps and then solve each step individually
  • This is convenient, but I don't think it represents "true" reasoning capabilities like OpenAI claims it does
  • Still, UI and UX matter!
• OpenAI's latest funding round is now valuing the company at $150 billion
  • Previous reporting
  • OpenAI is seeking to raise at least $5 billion
  • Funding round could exceed $6.5 billion depending on investor demand
  • Funding round will value the company at $150 billion
  • Comes in the wake of former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raising $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation
  • The $150 billion valuation would put OpenAI's valuation close to that of SpaceX, whose latest tender offer valued the company at roughly $210 billion
• Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis conduct the first commercial spacewalk
  • Spacewalk took place as part of the Polaris Dawn private spaceflight mission
  • Entire capsule was depressurized
  • Isaacman and Gillis ventured out of the capsule in turn
  • Conducted suit mobility tests for SpaceX
• The Federal Trade Commission tells 7-and-i and Alimentation Couche-Tard to preserve documents related to the proposed merger between them
  • Although 7-and-i rejected Alimentation Couche-Tard's bid on September 6, Alimentation Couche-Tard has said that it remains focused on the potential merger
  • The FTC has proactively approached both companies with anti-trust concerns and instructed them to preserve documents, as there has been an increasing number of cases where companies have destroyed documents to avoid scrutiny during a potential anti-trust trial
  • Underscores that any merger would face scrutiny in the US, where both own large numbers of convenience stores across multiple brands
• Australia will strip service medals from soldiers accused of participating in war crimes
  • These are service medals, which are essentially participation trophies that show that a particular soldier served in a particular conflict

2024-09-11 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Russian forces are also experimenting with incendiary drones
  • It doesn't seem like there have been too many territorial changes between yesterday and today
  • The situation on the eastern flank of Ukraine's incursion into Kursk remains confused, and so I'm waiting for more geolocated events before posting more on it
  • There are rumors about the US relaxing restrictions on Ukraine's ability to strike into Russia with American-made weapons, but similarly, without a public statement or evidence of Ukraine striking Russia with ATACMS or Storm Shadow, it's impossible to say what the current status of those restrictions is
  • Similarly, there have also been rumors about Russia receiving and preparing to actually use Iranian ballistic missiles, but until there is evidence of those missiles in Ukraine (as there is of North Korean missiles) it's useless to speculate about their, use, impact or effectiveness
• New genetic data from Easter Island casts doubt on the Easter Island ecological collapse hypothesis
  • Original paper (open access)
  • A popular theory about the lack of trees on Easter Island is that they were chopped down by the natives
  • This then led to ecological collapse and a severe decline in population
  • However, a historical analysis of genome data from Easter Island doesn't show any sign of a population bottleneck
  • Instead, a comparison between older Easter Island genomes and those of the present population indicates that the only bottleneck was caused by the initial arrival of humans on Easter Island
  • The genetic data indicates that Easter Island's pre-European population fluctuated between 1,000 and 3,000 individuals, far below the 15,000 that was thought to be the cause of overexploitation and population collapse
  • The major population collapse in Easter Island's history occurred after contact with Europeans, where a combination of slave raids and disease reduced the population to hundreds

2024-09-10 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has captured Vodyane
    • Russian forces have been spotted west of Marynivka, indicating that it has been captured as well
    • The Economist has a good overview of the current situation in Donetsk
      • Ukrainian forces are getting pushed back slowly
      • Trading territory for opportunities to inflict casualties on Russian forces
      • Russia has paused pushing westwards towards Pokrovsk directly and is instead attacking northwards and southwards in an effort to create new avenues for attack
      • Ukrainian forces are having local successes in pushing back Russian forces, for example, around Selydove, but overall the Russians have the advantage
      • Russian advantages in drones and electronic warfare continue to make it difficult for Ukrainian armored vehicles and logistics
      • The article points out the danger of encirclement, but I think that's overblown
      • One general characteristic of this war is that, just as in World War 1, neither side has been able to get a breakthrough
      • Ukrainian and Russian armies bend, but they don't break, and any local weakness cannot be exploited quickly enough to force more than small retreat
      • The only large-scale encirclement in this war was Mariupol, and that was because it's right next to the Russian border, and on the east side of the Crimean peninsula, which meant that Russian forces could rapidly cut off supply lines to the city
      • But other than that, I'm not sure there have been any World War 2-style "cauldrons"
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces have reportedly counterattacked near Korenevo and have reached Snagost
    • Video of a Ukrainian HIMARS strike on a Russian pontoon bridge
  • Ukraine launches 144 drones at Russia, with some targeting Moscow
    • Some drones hit apartment buildings in Moscow, causing civilian deaths
    • 50 flights had to be diverted from Moscow airports
    • Russia denies that there has been any impact to its energy infrastructure or oil refineries
  • Tatarigami has a good analysis of the current limitations of Ukraine's military
    • New weapons, such as ATACMS and F-16s are useful, but "boring" things such as more IFVs and artillery systems are arguably more important
    • This has been a war of quantity over quality, and nothing we've seen thus far has done much to change that assessment
    • Ukraine's domestic production of military equipment, especially long-range drones, has improved dramatically over the course of the war
    • The most cost-effective way for Western allies to aid Ukraine might be to set up joint ventures with Ukrainian defense companies to further increase Ukrainian domestic production
    • Unfortunately, France and Germany see the Ukraine war as a way to bolster their domestic arms industries and increase the number of manufacturing jobs; enabling Ukraine to produce its own weapons would be counterproductive to that goal
    • However, problems remain, especially with leadership: Ukraine's military leadership has made a number of questionable decisions, especially in their defense of Donetsk
• SpaceX launches the Polaris Dawn private spaceflight mission
  • Led by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and pilot
  • Will attempt the first private spacewalk, using new suits developed by SpaceX
  • Will also study radiation levels and test the use of Starlink in space
• Roblox announces a generative AI tool that can create 3D landscapes from a text description
  • The tool has not been released to the public yet
  • Is a LLM, only instead of predicting text-token output, Roblox's model tokenizes a library of 3D building blocks
  • Outputs those blocks as a completed 3D environment
  • The likely limitation to this approach would be a lack of 3D training data, which could lead the model to produce glitchy output
  • I think this can be fixed with an adversarial model that can be trained to look for glitchy models
  • Roblox plans to open-source the model
  • Previously Roblox debuted a tool that would create Lua functions from text descriptions for its scripting engine
  • This is a great example of commoditizing your complement
  • Roblox's revenue source is player engagement, which results in on-platform transactions
  • In order to maximize engagement, Roblox needs to make it very easy for people to add new minigames and activities to its platform
• UPS acquires a pair of healthcare logistics firms based in Germany
  • UPS will acquire Frigo-Trans and BPL, for terms that haven't been disclosed
  • UPS has been intensively pushing into the healthcare logistics space since the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a need for dedicated logistics for transporting medical supplies such as drugs and vaccines
  • To address this need, UPS created a dedicated division, UPS Healthcare, to build out a network of specialized warehouses and transportation for medical supplies
• Germany imposes border controls on all its land borders
  • Germany has imposed temporary controls on all its land borders for six months, in an effort to control what it describes as uncontrolled immigration
  • The controls come after a series of deadly knife attacks carried out by Islamic State-aligned immigrants
  • The German backlash against immigration gained momentum after it took in over a million people fleeing Syria and other war-torn regions of the Middle East
  • Reached a tipping point after asylum was extended to Ukrainian refugees
  • The imposition of border controls tests the unity of European countries in the Schengen visa-free zone

2024-09-09 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Niu York remains contested
    • Russians advance near Hrodivka
    • Russians continue to make small advances in Toretsk, and around Selydove
    • Russians make advances near Vuhledar
  • Kursk region
    • Overall, it seems like the front line has stabilized in this sector
    • Ukrainian forces have captured Sudzha, are near Korenevo to the northwest, and are around Spalnoe to the southeast
    • Ukrainian forces have reached Pogrebki
    • Ukrainian forces destroy another pontoon bridge, near Zvannoe
    • Ukrainian forces destroyed a pontoon bridge in this area a week ago, however, this is (or rather, was) a new bridge
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces keep advancing near Pishchane, now within 5km of the river
  • The Ukrainian military destroys an ammunition depot in Soldatskoe, inside Russia
  • The Ukrainian military has developed fixed-wing "interceptor" UAVs that can target Russian reconnaissance UAVs
  • Incendiary UAVs
    • Footage of the aftermath of an incendiary UAV attack
    • Russian soldiers post on Telegram about their efforts to defend themselves from drone-dropped thermite
      • Dig deeper
      • Cover trenches with sand
      • Think the ideal solution would be to use concrete
      • However, digging shelters and lining them with concrete is time-consuming and isn't something that is practical for front-line trenches
  • CIA Director Bill Burns says that China has not shipped weapons to Russia but has shipped lots of items that are just short of weapons which is allowing Russia to maintain and build up its defense-industrial base
  • Insurance brokers push insurers to resume coverage in Ukraine
    • Aon and Marsh McLellan, two of the largest insurance brokers in the world, are saying that insurers must drop "arbitrary" exclusions that disallow policies from covering Ukraine
    • Lack of insurance is impeding Ukraine's economic recovery
    • While the exclusions may have made sense during the early part of the war, in 2022, today they fail to recognize that there is a broad diversity of risk in the country
  • Data on signing-bonuses indicates that Russia recruited 166,000 new soldiers in the first half of 2024
• Apple launches the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 16 Pro
  • Both launch with Apple's new A18 chip
  • Improved efficiency along with a larger battery should result in increased battery life
  • Phones are designed around a suite of generative AI features called Apple Intelligence, which is currently in beta
  • Vertically aligned camera lenses
  • Includes a dedicated button to launch the camera and take a picture
  • Once the generative AI features launch, holding the button will take a picture and ask the AI to give information about the picture
  • The Pro model now supports taking video at 4k resolution at 120 frames per second, thanks to new video encoding hardware
• Google's second anti-trust case begins
  • This antitrust case is about Google's dominance of ad-sales
  • The government alleges that Google used unlawful tactics to keep advertisers using its marketplace exclusively
  • The proposed remedy is for Google to divest itself of its Ad Manager product
  • A win by the government could have a massive effect on Google, as advertising integration is deeply woven into so many of Google's business processes
  • Google has been criticized by the judge for deleting e-mails, chat logs and other data that might have had a bearing on the case
  • The previous anti-trust case, which Google lost on August 5, was about Google paying third parties, notably Apple to be the default search engine on their devices
  • Although Google has lost that case, no sentence has yet been given, nor have any appeals been filed
  • This case has a far larger potential impact on Google than the previous one, as it would potentially require Google to divest itself of one of its core products
• Brazilians protest the Twitter ban
  • Street protests in Sao Paulo on Brazil's independence day
  • Protesters want the order banning Twitter to be lifted
  • Accuse the government of banning right-wing political speech
  • Want the judge who imposed the ban to be impeached
• Platinum producers see their fortunes improve as EV sales fall short of expectations
  • The primary use of platinum is in catalytic converters which clean car exhausts
  • Platinum producers had been preparing for a steep dropoff in demand, as EVs don't have exhausts
  • However, the recent slowdown in sales of EVs has increased the demand forecast for platinum
• A strike at American ports becomes more likely by the day
  • The International Longshoremen's Association, a union of dockworkers, is requesting a 77% pay increase
  • Argues that this is fair, because ocean carriers are significantly more profitable today than they were before the pandemic
  • The ILA's leader, Harold Daggett, has been threatening a strike since 2023
  • A strike would lead to significant impacts at US ports, and would affect supply chains worldwide
  • The US government can invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to force dockworkers back to work
• James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader, has passed away

2024-09-06 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance north of Krasnohorivka
    • This means that Ukrainian troops have likely withdrawn from Nevelske, a position that had held since 2022
    • Russian forces advance on Klishchiivka
    • Niu York and Toretsk remain contested
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces continue to advance towards the Oskil River near Pishchane
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues in Korenevo
  • Kherson region
    • Russian forces raid across the Dnipro river near Yantarne
  • Photos of Vovchansk, a city near the Russian border that has been the scene of heavy fighting
  • President Zelensky urges allies to increase the rate at which they send air-defense equipment to Ukraine
    • Zelensky is attending a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Rammstein Air Base in Germany
    • Urged allies to send more air defense weapons so that the Ukrainian military can defend more cities
    • Discussed a "victory plan" with US security officials
    • The Biden administration would prefer that Ukraine work to increase production of its own homegrown weapons systems, including long range drones, to attack Russian air bases and economic targets
    • Points out that the majority of planes launching glide bombs do so from air bases beyond the range of ATACMS
      • Only because the US has given Russia so much warning, Russia has had time to move the planes back
      • If the US had given Ukraine ATACMS at the same time as it gave Ukraine HIMARS, Ukraine could have inflicted significantly greater damage on the Russian air force by striking its aircraft while they were operating from air bases near Kursk and in Belarus
    • Zelensky also briefed American officials about the Kursk offensive
  • Iran has reportedly sent short range ballistic missiles to Russia
    • So if Russia uses Iranian ballistic missiles to strike Ukraine, that's fine, but if Ukraine uses American cruise missiles to strike Russia, that's escalation?
    • The US government's policy of banning Ukraine from using weapons with American components against Russian territory looks ever less justifiable, by the day
    • Russia has already been using large numbers of Iranian drones to attack targets deep inside Ukraine
    • The short-range ballistic missiles can be reliably targeted by Patriot air defense batteries, but Ukraine has too few of these to protect all major cities
    • While the EU will likely ban Iran Air from flying to European airports as a result of this transfer, few additional sanctions are expected
    • At what point does the EU realize that Iran does not care about "targeted" sanctions
    • The only sanctions that have a chance of stopping the Iranian government are broad-based economy-wide sanctions
    • The Iranians continue to arm the Houthis, and arming Russia is a logical next step for them
  • Emil Kastehelmi has an analysis of Ukrainian incendiary drones
    • Incendiary drones aren't a replacement for FPV or bomber drones
    • Are a useful addition for special circumstances, such as entrenched infantry formations
    • Will likely have a large psychological effect on enemy infantry
    • Too early to tell how effective they are
    • If they are effective, it won't be long until we see the Russians making their own incendiary drones
  • Russian ultranationalists remain the largest open challenge to Putin's government
    • Criticism from right-wing ultranationalists against Putin has increased in the wake of Ukraine's incursion into Russia
    • "Z-bloggers" on Telegram have openly contradicted the government's claims that Ukrainian incursion is under control
    • These social media influencers strongly believe in the righteousness of Russia's war against Ukraine and wants the Russian military to succeed
    • Call out corruption and military blunders when they occur, in order to make the military more effective
    • However, there is a thin line between critiques of the military and criticism of the government as a whole
    • Z-bloggers who cross that line, such as Igor Girkin, were arrested for going beyond critiquing specific military failures and criticizing Putin himself
    • After Girkin's arrest and sentencing to four years in prison, many of these bloggers quietened down
    • However, after Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, many of these bloggers resumed their harsh critiques of the Russian military and security agencies
    • Called out the lack of fortifications on the border
    • Called out desertion by Chechen Akhmat Brigade fighters, leading to increased ethnic tensions between Akhmat Brigade fighters and regular Russian army soldiers
    • Z-bloggers remain an exception to the majority of Russian society, because they are engaged and informed rather than apathetic
    • This makes them a potential nucleus of opposition to Putin, and currently, the most organized challengers to the government
    • The Z-bloggers are a perfect illustration of the dictum that "The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less."
    • As bad as Putin is, having any of these people in charge would be worse
• Volkswagen is attempting to close factories in order to cut costs
  • Volkswagen is facing dwindling sales and a high cost structure
  • Is looking at closing factories in Germany in order to reduce costs
  • This plan faces stiff resistance from unions and the German state of Lower Saxony, both of whom have seats on Volkswagen's board
  • However reducing capacity and cutting costs won't necessarily help sales
  • Volkswagen has arguably invested too much, too soon in electrification
  • Its ID-series of electric vehicles are not selling well
  • Another problem has been software: Volkswagen's attempt to create an in-house software division, Cariad, has been a disaster
  • As a result, Volkswagen is moving away from in-house software and is licensing software from Rivian, an American electric automaker and XPeng, a Chinese electric automaker
  • The story is trying to make this about electrification, but it seems to me that the real problem is that Volkswagen couldn't do software right
  • Cariad lost over $2 billion in 2022 alone
  • That loss led to Volkswagen's $5 billion investment in Rivian
  • Cariad has 6000 employees and is tasked with creating a unified software platform for all of Volkswagen's sub-brands
  • This is way too much, way too soon; Volkswagen's brands traverse every market segment, from Skoda to Bugatti
  • Any attempt at creating a single software platform that can handle such a wide range of vehicles and customer expectations, right from the get-go is doomed to failure, as Volkswagen is currently finding out
  • Instead of 6000 employees attempting to create some kind of unifying monolith that will handle the software needs of the entire Volkswagen group, they should have started with like 60 employees and a single task: make software for the ID3 and ID4
• Intel's 18 Angstrom manufacturing process fails quality control checks
  • Manufacturing contract was with Broadcom
  • Initial batch of chips failed quality control
  • This is a further setback for Intel Foundry Services, which is already facing scrutiny for the amount of money it is spending to set up new foundries
  • Intel still aims to have volume production of 18 Angstrom chips in 2025
• Qualcomm is reportedly an interested customer for some of Intel's chip design groups
  • See previous coverage
  • Qualcomm is reportedly interested in Intel's PC design business
  • I'm guessing this means the NUC business, but I thought Intel had already sold off that line to ASUS
  • Intel's board will meet next week to consider Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's plan to trim Intel's lines of business in order to reduce costs
• 7-11 owners 7-and-i reject Alimentation Couche-Tard's takeover offer
  • See previous coverage from Tuesday 8/27 and Tuesday 8/20
  • 7-and-i rejected the offer from Circle-K owners Alimentation Couche-Tard as being too low
  • Also highlighted antitrust concerns
  • One of the really good things about the increased anti-trust enforcement lately is that companies are abandoning merger plans on their own, without the government having to get involved, because they can see that the market concentration of the combined firm will lead to anti-trust concerns

2024-09-05 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia fails to make any notable advances for two days in a row near Selydove and Pokrovsk
    • Russian forces appear to have been pushed back slightly near Mykhailivka
    • Russian forces continue to mount attacks in the fields east of Vodyane
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces make slight advances near Pishchane
  • Vladimir Putin reiterates his peace proposal
    • Talks are based off a Russian proposal from 2022
    • Would allow Ukraine to join the EU
    • Would prohibit Ukraine from joining NATO
    • Would significantly pare down the Ukrainian military
    • Would prevent Ukraine from having any "foreign" weapons
    • Says that territorial negotiations will start from existing lines of control
    • I don't see why this deal is any more acceptable to Ukraine today than it would have been in 2022
    • Why should Ukraine trust Putin enough to disarm?
    • Especially given that this phase of the war started when Putin left the Minsk II negotiations and launched a full scale invasion to take by force what it was taking too long for him to gain with negotiations
    • The provisions having to do with cutting down the Ukrainian military are telling: in Putin's eyes, the real Ukrainian crime is having the gall to fight back when Russia invaded
    • Putin could probably end the war today, if he allowed Ukraine to retain its expanded military and join NATO, in exchange for territorial concessions
    • But he won't because he doesn't just want Donetsk and Luhansk, he wants all of Ukraine to be a Russian vassal-state
  • More footage of Ukrainian incendiary drones
    • The first one seems to be operating at a much higher altitude than the the one from Wednesday
    • As a result, it doesn't seem to be as effective: the burning thermite is being scattered over a much wider area
    • The second one is at a much lower altitude and more focused; is clearly leaving behind a burning trail of forest
    • I still wonder about how effective they are against vehicles, but I increasingly think that they're effective against trenches: at the very least this is the sort of thing that would get troops to leave trenches
    • Of course, it's an attack that can only work once: once that section of the woods is burnt, you can't easily burn it again
• Microwaves don't self-disinfect
  • Researchers took swabs from 30 microwaves and cultured the results
  • Found numerous disease-causing bacteria (such as staphylococcus) in swabs from household microwaves
  • Microwaves aren't usually on for long enough to kill disease-causing bacteria
  • Microwaves should be cleaned as often as other surfaces in a kitchen, like tables or countertops
  • The real lesson here is that office microwaves are gross
• nVidia invests in Japanese AI startup Sakana AI
  • $100 million funding round is in collaboration with other investors
  • Sakana was founded by former Google engineers
  • Is focused on developing new foundation models
  • I'm skeptical
  • Unless they really have an edge, they're going to be building the same thing as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, etc, just with a two or three year delay
  • We're seeing, for example, Amazon abandoning its own models in favor of Claude for its Alexa service
  • This is because the vast amount of training and computational resources required to build a new state-of-the-art foundation model means that by the time a startup creates a ChatGPT-3 equivalent model, cutting edge companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will have released new, even more capable versions of ChatGPT and Claude
  • Furthermore, we have Meta releasing Llama model weights for free, so there's no profit in selling lower capability models: why would anyone pay to use Sakana AI when they can get Llama for free?
  • So unless they have some kind of shortcut that enables them to build a higher capability model either faster or cheaper they'll never catch up
• Billy McFarland is planning a second Fyre Festival
  • The original Fyre Festival was notorious for being a disaster
  • Led to Billy McFarland being convicted for fraud and sent to jail
  • Also led to the best documentary on Netflix
  • Now McFarland is back and has scheduled a second Fyre Festival
  • Is working with an anonymous production company that a 51% share of the defunct Fyre Media, the festival's parent company
  • Venue and performers haven't yet been named
  • McFarland acknowledges that people have their doubts, given his history, but says that the doubters give him additional motivation to pull off a successful festival this time
  • If anything, it'll be even more difficult for him to pull off a successful festival this time around
  • 2019 was something of a peak for festivals and outdoor events
  • These days, even major festivals such as Coachella and Burning Man are not selling 100% of their tickets
  • Artists are canceling concert tours because of sluggish ticket sales
  • Maybe his notoriety will drive some interest, but it's just as likely to drive people away
• North Korean spies are seeking IT remote work in the United States
  • North Korean spies are using false identities to apply for remote IT jobs
  • Recruit accomplices in the US to provide valid addresses and host "laptop farms" which allows the Korean engineers to access laptops remotely
  • Spies sometimes actually did work for companies
  • In addition to claiming paychecks legitimately the North Korean remote workers sought to plant malware on corporate networks
• Verizon strikes a $9.6 billion deal to buy Frontier Communications
  • Verizon is facing increasing competition from AT&T and T-Mobile
  • Customers who get wired Internet and cell service together from Verizon are less likely to switch away
  • Frontier had bought a large chunk of legacy landline infrastructure from Verizon in 2016 for $10.5 billion
  • The debt from this deal led Frontier to go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2020
  • Frontier emerged from Chapter 11 with a reduced debt load and a focus on building out fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure
  • And now Verizon gets to buy back the assets it sold for $10.5 billion for $9.6 billion
  • I wonder if this deal will survive antitrust scrutiny
  • Verizon is already the largest cell-phone provider in the US and one of the largest landline broadband providers: any deal that allows it to achieve more lock-in is the sort of thing that regulators would be looking at
• Brazilians have mixed opinions over the Twitter ban
  • A plurality think that Twitter is in the wrong by failing to ban accounts accused of spreading misinformation
  • However, a majority also think that banning Twitter entirely for this is unjustified
  • A large majority oppose the financial penalties that users face for using VPNs to work around the ban
  • A majority also opposes the decision to link Starlink and Twitter, saying that imposing penalties on Starlink for Twitter's actions just because they're both owned by Elon Musk is unjustified

2024-09-04 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has captured Prechystivka
      • This goes back to what Emil Kastehelmi was saying on Monday
      • Russians are capturing towns faster now than at any point since the opening few weeks of the war
      • The Ukrainian defense in southern Donetsk, especially, looks to be crumbling
  • Ukraine has developed a drone with an incendiary attack
    • Video of the UAV from a Russian soldier's perspective
    • It looks impressive, but it's unclear how effective this would be
    • It doesn't seem like it'd be very effective against vehicles
  • President Zelensky reshuffles his cabinet
    • Coverage from the Wall Street Journal
    • A total of six ministers have submitted their resignation, including Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister
    • Zelensky says the government needs "new energy"
    • Some of the outgoing ministers might be reappointed to new roles
    • Zelensky claims this was a planned reshuffle, in order to bring in new voices and new ideas
  • How do long-range strikes fit into Ukraine's theory of victory?
    • If long-range strikes are authorized, they will not immediately win the war
    • However, they will allow Ukraine to put more pressure on the Russian economy
    • No single thing is decisive in war
    • Victory in war is due to cumulative effects
    • Scaling small tactical successes can result in strategic impact over time
• Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc raises $1 billion
  • Deal values the company at $5 billion
  • Ilya is a co-founder of OpenAI who left after a boardroom dispute with Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
  • Safe Superintelligence Inc does not have a product; instead it's a "skunk works" effort aimed at building a safe general artificial intelligence
  • I wish SSI the best, but I don't see how they can build a product without customer feedback
  • As Steve Jobs put it: "Real artists ship"
• The Dutch data protection authority issues a $33 million fine against ClearView AI
  • ClearView maintains a facial recognition database
  • Markets it to US law enforcement as a means of tracking suspects and missing persons
  • Scrapes images from social media and other online sources
  • The Dutch data protection authority asserts jurisdiction because it claims that data about citizens of The Netherlands is in ClearView's database
  • However ClearView asserts that because it does not do business in the EU and does not maintain any commercial presence in the EU, it is not subject to the EU's jurisdiction
• nVidia suffers a record drop as investors become more skeptical about AI spending
  • nVidia shares suffer the largest ever single-day decline for an American company
  • Decline comes in the wake of nVidia's quarterly earnings, which were good, but below expectations
  • However nVidia is still up by 118% for the year to date
  • nVidia has delayed shipping its new "Blackwell" chips until Q4
• Intel is discussing plans to cut lines of business in an effort to trim costs and focus investment on CPUs
  • Might include plans to delay or halt entirely Intel's $32 billion factory in Germany
  • Might also include plans to spin out Altera, a manufacturer of FPGAs, which Intel had acquired for $16.7 bn in 2015
  • A potential buyer for Altera is Marvell, a manufacturer of chips for embedded devices
• What's going on at Relativity Space?
  • Relativity Space is a space startup working on 3D printed rocket engines
  • Launched the Terran 1 rocket, with a payload capacity of 1,250 kg to low-earth orbit
  • Terran 1 launch had a successful first stage burn, but a malfunction on the second stage caused loss of mission
  • After the Terran 1 launch failure, Relativity pivoted to working on the much bigger Terran R, a rocket with a 33,500 kg payload capacity
  • Claimed that the market for larger rockets was much larger
  • However, according to this article, Relativity Space is having trouble with the manufacturing of the Terran R
  • Has been forced to rely on outside suppliers for components that were planned to be manufactured internally using 3D printing
  • Further increasing costs is the size of the Terran R
    • Too large to be transported by highway or rail
    • Needs to be shipped by barge through the Panama Canal, which adds time and cost
  • Relativity appears to be making a large and risky bet that it will be able to figure out reusability quickly, as that is the only way it can amortize the development costs of the Terran R
  • However, reuse is much more difficult than it looks: took SpaceX seven years to make its systems reliable enough to land and reuse rockets consistently
  • There is real demand for more heavy-lift launch capacity, particularly as Amazon looks to build out Project Kuiper, but it will be a hard road for Relativity Space, given that their supposed 3D printing advantage has turned out to be illusory
• SpaceX advises its employees not to travel to Brazil as it becomes embroiled in the government's dispute with Twitter
  • SpaceX has had its accounts in Brazil frozen, as Brazil determines whether SpaceX can be held liable for Twitter's noncompliance with Brazilian court orders to suspend accounts deemed to be spreading misinformation
  • Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, has advised employees to not travel to Brazil
  • Starlink has become relatively important as an internet provider to rural Brazilians since it entered the country several years ago
• US Steel warns of plant closings if it is not allowed to complete its merger with Nippon Steel
  • Would also likely move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh
  • Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump are all on record opposing the merger
  • Deal is also opposed by the United Steelworkers union
  • Since 2020, US Steel has idled portions of its mills near Detroit and St. Louis, because of low steel prices
  • The CEO of US Steel, David Burritt, says that the merger is necessary for US Steel to secure additional investment to improve efficiency at older mills
  • Nippon Steel executives say that the deal with US Steel is necessary to allow Nippon Steel to expand into the US
  • Nippon Steel outbid an American company, Cleveland Cliffs for US Steel

2024-09-03 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia continues its attacks on Vuhledar
      • Fighting has reportedly reached Prechystivka
      • Russians are attacking from both flanks
    • Another report from Pokrovsk
      • A Ukrainian commander notes that Russian EW is so thick that the Ukrainians have to fly 10-15 drone missions, in some cases, to achieve one kill
        • More proof that drones aren't unstoppable wonder weapons that will revolutionize warfare
        • Also emphasizes that, while social media feeds are full of drones killing tanks, that represents a vanishingly small proportion of all drone missions
        • The real battlefield utility of drones is in providing reconnaissance and surveillance, which doesn't get published to Telegram or Twitter
      • If Pokrovsk falls, it will complicate the supply lines for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the two remaining major cities in Donetsk that are still under Ukrainian control
      • According to the report, fighting has reached Krasnyi Yar
      • The threat to Pokrovsk has been amplified by the decision to send troops into Kursk, which depleted reserves that might have been used to contain and slow down Russian advances in this sector
      • The Russians are still suffering extremely high casualty rates, however, as they advance
  • The head of Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytski, has been fired
    • Ukrenergo is the Ukrainian state-owned electricity grid operator
    • Foreign directors on the board describe the firing as "politically motivated"
    • Analysts have interpreted the firing of Kudrytski as a further centralization of power in the Presidency
    • This is worrying because Kudrytski was widely regarded as an honest operator who worked hard to ensure the resilience of Ukraine's electricity grid in the face of constant Russian attacks
  • A Russian ballistic missile strike on Poltava kills at least 50 and wounds 271
    • One of the deadliest missile attacks in recent months
    • Ukraine has insufficient air defense to protect all of its cities
    • Patriot batteries are concentrated around major cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv, leaving smaller cities like Poltava exposed
• Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will roll out to the launch pad on Monday
  • New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket, with capability similar to Falcon Heavy
  • New Glenn will launch two small spacecraft on a trajectory to Mars
  • The launch window to Mars is narrow and opens in six weeks, giving Blue Origin a tight timeline to conduct final tests and integrate the payload
  • New Glenn will attempt a landing on a drone ship, but success isn't likely, given that it took SpaceX 23 attempts before it had a successful landing
  • New Glenn is an important next step for Blue Origin, as it is the company's first rocket capable of reaching orbit
  • Their current rocket, New Shepard, is only capable of suborbital flights, limiting its utility to space tourism and training missions
• Brazilians flock to BlueSky after Twitter ban
  • BlueSky reported almost 2 million new registrations in four days
  • Became the most download app on both iOS and Android app stores
• The European Court of Justice limits the EU Competition Authority's merger overview procedures
  • Merger was between two genetic testing companies, Illumina and Grail
  • The EU's scrutiny of the merger was contentious because one of the companies, Grail, had no revenue in the EU
• The EU's proposed tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles could have unintended consequences on EU automakers
  • Focuses on Volkswagen's CUPRA brand
  • CUPRA had designed the Tavascan, an all electric SUV to be built in China
  • Because this vehicle is built in China, it would be hit with an import tariff of 21.3%
  • Raising the price of the vehicle isn't an option, given current levels of demand for electric vehicles
  • However, without Tavascan sales, CUPRA would miss its emissions reduction targets, triggering heavy fines that would threaten the continued existence of the brand and its operations in Spain
  • The 21.3% tariff is lower than the general 48% tariff on Chinese built vehicles from Chinese companies
  • However it is much higher than the 9% tariff that Tesla negotiated on imported vehicles from its Shanghai gigafactory
    • How did Tesla manage that?
  • This story highlights the ongoing tension between reducing emissions and decoupling from China
  • While many politicians, especially on the left, insist that there is no tension, that "both" can be done at the same time, in practice China's dominance of the lithium ion​/lithium ferrophosphate battery supply chain means that decoupling will result price increases
  • Combined with the fact that electric vehicles have saturated the early adopter market, but have yet to find substantial demand among mainstream consumers, this means that EU automakers are caught between a rock and a hard place
  • On the one hand, they need to sell more electric vehicles in order to meet the EU's climate change targets
  • On the other hand, in order to actually sell those vehicles, they need to be cheap, and in order to be cheap, they need to be built in China
  • The usual EU method for squaring circles like these is government subsidies; I wonder why they're not being considered here
• The White House directs federal agencies to improve BGP security
  • White House press release
  • The White House has directed to deploy improved security around BGP routing messages
  • Published roadmap directs government agencies to Resource Public Key Infrastructure to ensure proper authentication and authorization of BGP update messages
  • This is a good proactive step
  • BGP is an important, but often overlooked part of internet infrastructure
  • Unverified BGP update messages have long been recognized as a vulnerability in Internet routing infrastructure
  • This hopefully addresses a vulnerability before it results in a major outage or hack
• Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn appears in court over charges related to "dieselgate"
  • Winterkorn is accused of fraud in directing Volkswagen engineers to make engine software that would run the engine at a lower power setting when it detected that it was being subject to an emissions test
• Sony shuts down Concord and issues refunds after just two weeks
  • Concord was a new multiplayer shooter, like Overwatch, or Valorant
  • Debuted to an extremely underwhelming reception
  • Had only 25,000 sales after two weeks
  • Fewer than 1,000 concurrent players on Steam
  • Market for new shooters is saturated, and Concord didn't really distinguish itself

2024-09-02 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukraine destroys another Russian pontoon bridge near Zvannoe
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced to Selydove and Ukrainsk
    • Russian forces captured Halytsynivka
    • Russian forces have advanced to the mine complex just northeast of Vuhledar
    • The Wall Street Journal has an article on the evacuation from Pokrovsk
    • Emil Kastehelmi has a good update on the current overall situation in Donetsk
      • Russia is pushing in two directions in Donetsk
        • Pokrovsk
        • Toretsk
      • The two towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are a significant logistical hub and had over 100,000 pre-war residents
      • Russian forces are less than 10km away from Pokrovsk
      • More concerning is the rate of Russian advances
      • Towns such as Novohrodivka (pre-war population: 14,000) are falling in less than a week
      • Previously it would have taken Russian months, or even the better part of a year to conquer such a town
      • Ukrainian defenses appear to be uncoordinated, with persistent manpower and ammunition shortages
      • The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk did not cause Russia to overreact and draw troops away from Donetsk
      • Instead, it appears that the Russians have reinforced their Donetsk offensive and have done the minimum necessary to contain Ukrainian advances into Kursk, knowing that the Ukrainian incursion is limited by the Ukrainian's own logistics
      • Ukrainian forces are digging new fortifications around Pokrovsk, but the fortifications need adequate manpower to hold against Russian assaults
      • South of Donetsk, Russian forces are advancing towards Kurakhove
      • This, combined with Russian advances near Karlivka, have left Ukrainian forces west of Krasnohorivka in an exposed position
  • A Ukrainian drone hits a refinery near Moscow
  • American officials state that the crash of the Ukrainian F-16 was probably not caused by friendly fire
• Brazil's Supreme Court upholds the country's ban on Twitter
  • Twitter ban includes an $8000 fine for people who use VPNs to bypass the block

2024-08-30 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Gen. Syrski says that Ukrainian forces have advanced up to 2km in Kursk
    • Ukrainian forces continue their attacks on Kremyanoe, east of Korenevo
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have entered Hrodivka
    • Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from the Karlovske Reservoir near Karlivka
      • This makes sense, given the Russian advance into Memryk reported on Wednesday
      • The tweet also reports that Ukrainian forces have also withdrawn from their defensive positions near Pervomaiske and Nevelske, but doesn't offer any photo or video evidence backing that up
      • Still, it's likely, given the advances of Russian forces in that area would have left Pervomaiske and Nevelske in a very exposed position
      • I guess this also means that Ukrainian forces have pulled back from Krasnohorivka
    • The Financial Times reports on the increasingly dire situation near Pokrovsk
      • Critics say that the attack on Kursk has fatally weakened the defenses around Pokrovsk
      • Ukrainian analysts suggest that Pokrovsk will fall much faster than Bakhmut
      • Withdrawals of Ukrainian troops from areas like Novohrodivka and Niu York indicate a shortage of manpower and ammunition
      • If Pokrovsk falls, then it exposes Dnipro, Ukraine's fourth largest city to Russian attack
      • Overall, I think the point I made on August 15, that trading Pokrovsk for some random villages in Kursk is a bad trade, still holds
      • If the strategic goal of the Kursk incursion was to force Russia to withdraw forces from Donetsk to reinforce Kursk, it seems like the Kursk incursion has been a failure
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian troops advance to Pishchane
  • President Zelensky has dismissed the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force
    • Dismissal comes in the wake of the loss of one of Ukraine's F-16s
    • No specific reason was given, but the statement issued by the President's office says that all personnel must be protected
• More details on the arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram
  • Charges are based on a novel legal theory that holds the CEO of a corporation as an accomplice if the corporation does not comply sufficiently with law enforcement requests to take down illegal content
  • French prosecutors are also reportedly investigating Discord
  • This legal theory has implications for other encrypted messaging applications, most notably Signal
• AnandTech shuts down
  • This is really sad news for me
  • AnandTech was a great source for reviews, not just of CPUs and GPUs, but for more mundane computer hardware, like heatsinks and fans
• Boeing will attempt an unmanned return of Starliner next week
  • Starliner will depart the station on September 6
  • Is scheduled to make touchdown the next day, on September 7
  • Flight controllers successfully performed a software update to allow the capsule to perform an autonomous reentry

2024-08-29 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces are building fortifications near Dolgii
      • That's one thing the Russians have always been good at during this war: digging
  • Russian forces advance into Synkivka, near Kupyansk
    • This is significant because it's well away from the main Russian advance, in Donetsk
    • Erases some of the gains that Ukraine made in autumn of 2022
  • A Ukrainian F-16 was lost in a crash while helping to repel Russia's barrage of missiles and drones
    • The circumstances of the crash are unclear
    • However Ukrainians say the jet was not shot down by enemy fire
    • Also deny that pilot error was the cause
    • Loss might have been due to fratricide by a Patriot missile battery
    • Ukraine doesn't have many F-16s or pilots trained to fly them, so the loss of any at this early stage, hurts disproportionately
  • Russia places former deputy defense minister Pavel Popov under arrest
    • Fraud charges are linked to the construction of a military theme park
    • The Russian government alleges that Popov diverted construction materials for the park to his own country house
    • Comes as part of a broader crackdown against corruption undertaken by the new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov
    • Two other senior defense officials, Major General Vladimir Shesterov and the director of the park, Col. Vyacheslav Akhmedov had already been arrested in connection with this investigation
    • These officials had been accused of embezzling 40 million rubles ($470,000) from funding for the park
• SpaceX misses a booster landing for the first time in three years
  • Booster successfully landed on the drone ship, but then tipped over
  • Possible engine burn timing issue
  • The booster in question had launched 23 times, making it the most reused booster in SpaceX's fleet
  • Although successful booster recovery is a secondary objective on every mission, and failing to recover the booster doesn't indicate that the mission failed, SpaceX is reliant on reliable booster recovery in order to sustain its aggressive launch schedule
• Tesla has developed a low-latency network protocol for its datacenters to help with machine learning
  • Instead of using a proprietary datacenter networking solution like Infiniband, Tesla has chosen to use Ethernet, with a custom transport protocol, TTP (Tesla Transport Protocol)
  • TTP can be viewed as a highly simplified TCP, designed to operate over low-latency, high-reliability links
  • Replaces TCP's three-way handshakes for opening and closing connections for simpler two-way handshakes
  • Removes wait-states; assumes that over low latency datacenter links there won't be any out-of-order packets still propagating when a connection close signal is sent
  • Congestion control is implemented by defining a fixed number of packets that are allowed to be in flight, unlike TCP's congestion control mechanism which scales up and down depending on the bandwidth and reliability of the underlying link
  • TCP needs to use this mechanism because it's going to be running on a wide variety of links, from high-speed fiber-optic Ethernet to noisy Wi-Fi
  • Tesla doesn't have this problem so they can predefine their congestion control parameters
  • Defining a fixed width congestion control window allows TTP to be more easily implemented in hardware; can use a fixed size SRAM buffer to store packets
  • The fact that TTP is a custom protocol running at the transport layer allows Tesla to use commodity Ethernet switches, unlike Infiniband, which requires proprietary networking gear
• Apple is in talks to participate in OpenAI's latest funding round
  • Comes on the heels of reports from yesterday that OpenAI is raising a new round of funding at a $100 bn valuation
  • Investing in OpenAI could complicate Apple's ability to partner with other AI model developers, such as Google, in the future
• nVidia reports strong quarterly earnings, but highlights ongoing challenges with its new chips
  • Sales and profit have more than doubled compared with a year ago
  • However, production issues with "interposer" that ties together the various components of nVidia's new chip have caused manufacturing delays
  • nVidia faces scrutiny from antitrust regulators, and restrictions on selling to China
  • nVidia's growth rate has slowed, however, as the AI market becomes increasingly saturated
  • The WSJ article also mentions potential competition from AMD, but I think that competition from large cloud vendors making custom AI chips is a bigger threat to nVidia

2024-08-28 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance into Memryk
    • Russian forces have also been geolocated north of Novohrodivka
    • Russian forces make gains near Toretsk
    • Overall, Russian forces are roughly 8km from Pokrovsk
    • A visualization of Russian gains in Pokrovsk
    • The steady Russian advance to Pokrovsk continues
  • Kursk region
    • Russian POWs report that they were abandoned by their superior officers when the Ukrainian attack started
    • Traffic cameras are still operating in Kursk, and residents are complaining about receiving speeding tickets while fleeing from Ukrainian forces
    • Thread detailing how Ukrainians were able to surprise and overwhelm Russians during the opening stages of the Kursk offensive
      • Ukraine used its own reconnaissance drones to map Russian fortifications
      • Used this data to predetermine artillery and drone strikes
  • Russian soldiers take cover after detecting drones nearby with a handheld spectrum analyzer
    • This is an interesting video because it shows what it's like to be on the other side of all those drone videos
    • The soldiers detect drones nearby and drop into a trench, and shelter there until the drone threat is gone
    • The most distinctive thing is the sound; drones have a very distinct noise
  • An attack by Ukrainian drones has caused a major fire at an oil depot in Rostov-on-Don
    • Russia has claimed to have defeated several other Ukrainian drone attacks
  • Ukraine secures a debt relief deal worth $11 bn
    • Reduces the economic value of the affected debt by 60%
    • Bondholders will directly write off 37% of their claims
    • Debt relief program was organized by the IMF
    • Ukraine still needs to restructure payments on "GDP Warrants" that it had issued in 2015
    • This is important for Ukraine, as it enables the government to continue to seek international financing to run its operations, which would have been difficult if it had gone into default
• French prosecutors bring formal charges against Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram
  • Durov is accused of being complicit in distributing child pornography, illegal drugs and hacking software
  • Durov is alleged to have refused to cooperate with investigations into illegal activity on the app
  • As a result, prosecutors claim that Durov is in violation of laws that require app developers to cooperate with authorities to limit harmful content
  • Wow they hit him with three of the four horsemen
• The EU investigates Telegram over misreporting user numbers
  • The EU is investigating whether Telegram deliberately understated its user numbers
  • Online platforms with more than 45 million EU users are subject to additional rules under the Digital Services Act
  • The EU's Joint Research Center is conducting an investigation to determine how many EU users are using Telegram
  • Investigation comes in the wake of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's arrest
• OpenAI is in talks to raise funding at a greater than $100 bn valuation
  • Was previously valued at between $86 bn and $90 bn in a share sale that allowed employees to cash out their stock grants
  • Funding round will be led by Thrive Capital
  • Microsoft is also expected to increase its investment
• The AI boom has sparked a literal land-rush as speculators seek to buy up land and prepare it for datacenter expansions
  • Currently the major datacenter markets are Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Phoenix and Silicon Valley
  • As those markets become saturated, developers are expanding to locations like Indiana, Idaho and Kansas
  • One major constraint on datacenter growth is power availability, especially power from renewable sources
• India is in talks with Russia to fully indigenize production of the Su-30
  • The Su-30 is a derivation of the Su-27, with some backported features from a canceled follow-up to the Su-27, such as the Su-27M and Su-37
    • Thrust-vectoring nozzles
    • Forward canards for increased maneuverability
    • Improved radar
    • The article claims that the Su-30 was the first operational fighter with thrust-vectoring nozzles, a claim I found surprising, but it turns out that the Su-30 was declared operational in 2002, while the F-22 didn't reach initial operational capability until 2005
  • India has over 260 Su-30 fighters
  • However, unlike China, which has fully indigenized production of its Su-27 variants such as the J-11, India's contribution to the Su-30 is less than 50%
  • Full indigenous production of the Su-30 by India would potentially allow India to re-export the Su-30 to other states which have significant pre-existing stocks of Soviet aircraft
  • Potential customers include Egypt and Malaysia, both of whom were pressured by the US to cancel orders for Su-35s from Russia
  • This arrangement would be similar to the BrahMos partnership which isn't subject to US sanctions either
  • India will have to improve the Su-30, however, if it is to be competitive on the export market
    • Indian-made Su-30s cost roughly twice as much to build as their Russian counterparts
    • The Su-30s radar, while considered state of the art in 2002, is widely considered to be obsolete today
    • Engines also need improving for improved performance and reductions in maintenance requirements
  • With the war in Ukraine turning Russia into a pariah, India is finding itself in a profitable position as a reseller of Russian commodities and technology to countries who suddenly find themselves unable to work with Russia directly

2024-08-27 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops continue to advance near Vodyane
    • Russian troops advance into Kalynove
    • Russian forces have captured Kostyantynivka
    • That's bad news for the Ukrainian position in Vuhledar: unlike last year, where the Russians made a frontal assault from the south, through Pavlivka, this time, they can attack from two directions
    • See previous coverage for why Vuhledar is important
  • Kursk region
    • The Russian military has built a fourth pontoon bridge across the Seym River near Zvnannoe
    • Probably just another target for HIMARS, just like the last three
  • Article on why Pokrovsk is so important
    • Until the start of this year, Avdiivka was an important stronghold for Ukrainian forces in Donetsk
      • Put Russian logistics under threat
      • Provided a Ukrainian foothold for potential counterattacks against Russian forces
    • Pokrovsk is just west of Avdiivka and holds a key railroad junction
    • Supplies come into Pokrovsk for distribution to Ukrainian forces along a broad front, from Vuhledar into north Donetsk
    • Pokrovsk also holds a number of significant highway junctions as well
    • Capturing Pokrovsk also gives Russian troops a clear march to the border of Donetsk Oblast and Dnipro Oblast
    • The pace of Russian advances in this sector has quickened since about July
    • The problem for Ukraine appears to be insufficient manpower rather than insufficient weaponry
    • Ukraine's redeployment of its reserves to Kharkiv has reduced the number of troops available to be rotated into trouble spots to stabilize the Pokrovsk front
  • Belarus conducts military exercises on Ukraine's border
    • The exercises are probably not a prelude to invasion
    • However their location, Gomel, was one of the staging areas for Russia's initial thrust towards Kyiv
    • As a result, the possibility of invasion, although unlikely, cannot be discounted
• GM delays building a battery factory in Indiana
  • Factory is a collaboration between GM and Samsung
  • Plant's opening will be delayed to 2027
  • A separate plant, built in collaboration with LG Chemical will open later this year
  • Comes in the wake of GM delaying new electric models and Ford taking a $1.9 billion write-down on EVs
  • Volkswagen is also cutting back on its electrification plans
• Chinese automaker XPeng unveils an affordable EV with self-driving features
  • Called the Mona M03
  • Based on a design purchased from the ride-hailing company Didi
  • Starting price of RMB 119,800 ($16,800), but adding self-driving features raises the price to approximately $22,000
  • XPeng is partially backed by Volkswagen
  • The price point of the car raises questions about its profitability
  • No word on range (which probably means that the range is bad, which is fine for China but less for foreign markets)
  • The other reason to question the range is the price point: $16,800 means there just isn't a lot of room in the budget to have a big battery, even assuming that XPeng is taking zero to negative profit on every car
  • In Q2 2024 XPeng delivered 30,200 cars, compared with 982,700 (wow) for its mass market rival, BYD
  • It's a good looking car, at least
• 7-11 explores seeking protected status as it tries to defend itself from a takeover offer from Circle-K owners Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • Seeks to have the company categorized as a "core" company under Japan's Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act (FEFTA), which would require the Japanese government to vet any acquisition on national security grounds
  • Would put 7-11 in the same category as companies in the nuclear power, defense, and semiconductor industries
  • 7-11's argument is that its convenience stores form a critical part in providing food and supplies during natural disasters
  • Although Alimentation Couche-Tard's takeover offer is friendly and 7-11's board has set up a committee to consider the offer, the fact that they're also investigating changing the company's designation under FEFTA means that there is at least a faction within the company that is strongly opposed to the merger
  • An application for core status would not be straightforward and would have no guarantee of success
  • Personally, I think this is dumb
  • The straightforward way to block a takeover of 7-11 by Alimentation Couche-Tard is during the review of the merger agreement by anti-trust authorities
  • Trying to block it on national security grounds stretches the definition of national security to the breaking point
  • If 7-11 convenience stores are a national security asset, what isn't?
• The NFL allows team owners to sell a portion of their teams to private equity consortia
  • The NFL was one of the last few leagues that banned private equity ownership
  • New agreement allows team owners to sell up to 10% of their firms to one of a list of preapproved private equity groups
  • Each private equity group can own stakes in at most six different teams
  • Does not allow investments by sovereign wealth funds
  • Is likely to further increase the franchise values of NFL teams
• What we learned about Boeing's culture from the investigation into the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout
• The FreeBSD foundation announces that the German Sovereign Tech Fund has issued a grant for €686,400 for infrastructure modernization
  • Money is for addressing technical debt and improving build infrastructure
  • Work will continue through 2024 and into 2025
  • Nice to see money going towards non-Linux Unixes for a change

2024-08-26 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting is ongoing in Toretsk, as Russian forces attack the town from two directions
    • Russian troops have reportedly entered Novohrodivka
    • This is after they took Orlivka on August 23
    • Ukrainian forces counterattack and capture Russian prisoners in Niu York
  • Russia launches a large salvo of drones and missiles against Ukrainian power infrastructure
    • A detailed breakdown of the missiles launched
    • Over 200 missiles and drones
    • Energy infrastructure struck
    • This seems to be the standard Russian pattern as Ukraine has built up its air defenses; keep things relatively quiet for weeks or months, build up an inventory and then launch a big attack that can saturate defenses
    • I worry for Ukraine this winter; Russia has been much more systematic about targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure this year than it had been last year
    • One thing that's remarkable is how dependent Russia has become on Iranian Shahed drones for these sorts of attacks: 46% of the systems used in this attack were Shaheds
    • The implication is that Ukraine would benefit significantly from more "low-end" anti-aircraft systems to knock down the Shaheds and free up sophisticated systems to engage Kh-101s and Kalibrs
    • Also, Russia appears to be using its Su-57s in a more active role: they've been launching missiles into Ukraine on more than one occasion this year
  • Ukraine has implemented a new mobilization program drafting roughly 30,000 soldiers a month, according to US officials
  • The Russians have reinvented flak towers to give their short-range air-defenses a better chance of shooting down incoming drones
    • Ukraine is reinventing door gunners and Russia is reinventing flak towers; everything old is new again

2024-08-25 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Analysis of the logistical challenges that Ukraine faces in Kursk
      • Like Russia, Ukraine is largely rail-dependent for its logistics
      • However, in Kursk, Ukraine has not secured any rail infrastructure
      • Reliant on trucks to move supplies
      • One of the reasons the front lines have stabilized over the last day or so is that it's likely that Ukrainian forces have reached the end of their logistical rope
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops make advances near Vodyane
      • This is important because Vodyane is just northeast of Vuhledar
      • Vuhledar was the scene of heavy fighting in early 2023, as Ukrainian forces there held off a significant armored assault
      • Vuhledar holds a key piece of terrain that enables Ukraine to threaten a potential rail link between Russia and occupied southern Ukraine that bypasses the Kerch Strait
    • Russian forces also make small advances in Kostyantynivka
  • Narendra Modi urges peace talks between Ukraine and Russia
    • Modi is visiting Kyiv
    • Suggests that India is prepared to play an active role as a host of peace talks
    • Zelensky says he's open to that suggestion
    • However he says that talks to end the war need to take place on Ukraine's terms not just Russia's
  • The Economist has coverage from Pokrovsk
    • Pokrovsk is emptying out as civilians evacuate
    • Suggests that the reason for continued Ukrainian retreats in the area is because of a lack of manpower, not necessarily a lack of ammunition
    • Says that a flawed troop rotation in Ocheretyne gave Russian forces the vulnerability they needed to make advances
    • Not a whole lot here that's new, but is a good summary of the overall story around Avdiivka this year
  • The US unveils new economic sanctions against Russian entities
    • Tightens export controls on goods produced by US-based companies that are manufactured outside the US
    • Targets overseas proxies that Russian companies have set up to try to bypass sanctions
    • Aimed at blocking Russian access to microelectronics
    • Maybe this will work, but I'm not confident
    • Russian entities have proved adept at evading Western sanctions in the past
    • Ultimately there will always be people in India, China, Turkey, Thailand, etc, who are willing to do business with Russia
    • The real way to hurt the Russian economy is for Europe to wean itself completely off Russian gas, but that's not going to happen any time soon
  • Ukraine uses helicopters with door gunners to down Shahed drones
• Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is arrested in France
  • Arrest was supposedly due to Telegram lacking moderation, which enabled criminal activity on the platform
  • According to Durov, Telegram is a "neutral platform" that doesn't participate in geopolitics
  • Telegram has been a platform heavily used by both Russian and Ukrainian sources to disseminate information and propaganda about the war
  • If Telegram gets shut down, a major source of information about the war goes dark
  • A lot of the videos on especially Twitter about the war come directly from Telegram
  • Without Telegram, battlefield geolocations go dark, and that makes it much more difficult to assess various parties' claims about their positions
• ISS Astronauts will be returning on SpaceX's Crew Dragon instead of Starliner
  • NASA is not confident that helium leaks in the spacecraft wouldn't endanger the ability of the crew to return
  • Instead of returning on Starliner, they will return on the next Crew Dragon flight next year
  • This failure raises questions about the financial viability of Starliner for Boeing
  • Reinforces SpaceX's dominant position
  • This is huge embarrassment for Boeing
• YCombinator backs its first weapons startup
  • Startup is called "Ares Industries"
  • Aims to build low-cost cruise missiles
  • Goal is to increase US magazine depths for a potential US-China conflict scenario
  • Advertises a plan to build a cruise missile for $300,000
  • "10x cheaper and 10x smaller" than existing missiles
  • 10x cheaper makes sense
  • LRASM costs approximately $3 million per missile, and that's widely seen as being too expensive
  • 10x cheaper than that is $300,000, which is what Ares Industries is targeting
  • However, I hope they're being hyperbolic with the 10x smaller claim
  • A cruise missile is already pretty much as small as it can be
  • The majority of the space and weight on a cruise missile isn't the control electronics, but rather the engine, fuel tank and warhead
  • Making a missile that's 10x smaller than existing cruise missiles would mean either reducing the range considerably, or making the warhead ineffectual against ships
  • That missile is still going to have to fly out to a place, find a ship (hopefully an enemy ship), dodge the ship's countermeasures, and hit the ship with enough of a bang to do meaningful damage; how do you accomplish with 10x less space​/weight
  • Ammunition supplies are a real problem for a US-China conflict, and I hope that this startup helps solve them, but their initial public statements make them seem like yet another group of Silicon Valley software types who are dangerously out of their depth when it comes to building physical hardware

2024-08-23 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian troops have reached Krasnooktyabr'skoe
    • This further tightens their encirclement of Korenevo
    • Krasnooktyabr'skoe is important because it enables Ukrainian troops to establish positions on the Seym River, an important natural boundary
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Ptyche
    • Russian troops have advanced beyond Orlivka
    • According to UA Control Map, the town to the north of Orlivka, Zhuravka, has fallen as well, but I'm still waiting for more confirmation on that
  • Ukraine strikes and sinks a ferry carrying fuel tanker railcars in Chushka, on the Kerch Strait
  • This is significant, because this ferry is only one of two capable of carrying railcars
  • Mourners gather to celebrate Yevgeny Prigozhin, on the one-year anniversary of his death
• CN Rail workers to strike on Monday
  • Comes in the wake of the Trudeau government asking its labor relations board to impose a back to work order and force the Teamsters and the companies into binding arbitration
  • Teamsters are saying that they're prepared to defy the back-to-work order
• Chinese entities are using AWS and other cloud services to gain access to high-end nVidia chips for training AI
  • The efforts by Chinese entities to gain access to AWS were revealed by a survey of tender documents for government contracts
  • Providing Chinese entities access to high-end nVidia chips in the US doesn't technically violate sanctions
  • Sanctions only govern the export of property (either physical or intellectual), and in this case, technically no US property has been transferred to China
  • The US House of Representatives is working to close this loophole
  • In addition to hardware, AWS and other cloud services offer Chinese entities access to the latest "foundation models", such as Claude and ChatGPT
  • The condition of this access is that while China-based entities may not access these foundation models directly, they are allowed to access them through overseas-based subsidiaries
  • This highlights the continuing difficulty in trying to make economic sanctions work between two highly integrated economies in a globalized economic system
  • There are a lot of ways to bypass sanctions that prohibit the transfer of hardware
• Volkswagen board member in charge of technology, Thomas Schmall, lays out the evolution of VW's electrification strategy
  • Defends Volkswagen's hybrid strategy of building its own battery factories while continuing to purchase batteries from third party suppliers
  • Says that build-out plans for battery factories have been designed with built-in flexibility to allow VW to build more or less capacity to meet fluctuating market demands
  • Volkswagen has not overcommitted to EVs: it still remains a leading manufacturer of conventional and hybrid vehicles
  • However, unlike the CEO of BMW, Schmall still believes that in the long term, EVs represent the only viable future for mass-manufactured consumer vehicles
  • Will be building capacity to manufacture lithium ferrophosphate (LFP) batteries, a cheaper variant of lithium-ion batteries that Tesla and Chinese manufacturers have been using for some time
  • Still plans on building a solid-state battery by the end of this decade
  • Volkswagen is trying to downplay it, but this represents a reduction in investment in EVs
  • They've cut back the number of battery factories they're building from six to three
  • It turns out that European consumers aren't significantly more accepting of EVs than American consumers are
  • Volkswagen wants the EU to stick to its EV mandates because it has invested significantly more in electrification than its peers in Europe, due to the fallout from the "Dieselgate" scandal, and it needs market demand to catch up to that investment
  • Comes on the heels of Ford taking a significant writedown on its EV plans
  • GM has delayed new EV models as well

2024-08-22 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces have advanced to Komarovka in the west
    • Ukrainian forces have advanced to Olgovka in the north
    • The status of Korenevo is unclear, but it looks increasingly surrounded by Ukrainian forces
    • Near Sudzha, Ukrainians have advanced to Martynovka and Russkaya Konopelka
    • However, the Ukrainians seem to be taking more losses in the process, as Russian resistance intensifies
    • More footage of the Ukrainian strikes against Russian pontoon bridges near Glushkovo
  • Donetsk
    • Fighting continues on the outskirts of Kostyantynivka
    • According to the latest map updates, Kostyantynivka is still under Ukrainian control, however the Russians have advanced to the outskirts of the town after capturing Novomykhailivka
  • Zaporizhzhia
    • Russian forces have advanced to Luhivske, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast
      • This is notable because, until now, the Zaporizhzhia front has been relatively quiet, compared to Donetsk
  • Ukrainian drones strike a Russian airbase in Volgograd
    • The Ukrainian drone campaign has been effective by forcing Russia to stage its glide bombs farther away from the front, forcing its aircraft to fly longer before dropping their bombs
  • A summary report on the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk
    • Ukraine is seeking to broaden its incursion rather than deepen it
    • This is smart because it means that Ukrainian forces aren't going to advance beyond their supply lines
    • Russia is putting up stiffer resistance
      • More counterattacks by Russian soldiers
      • More experienced Russian soldiers
      • Greater artillery and glide-bomb support
      • However, it still seems like the Russian response is fairly disorganized and uncoordinated
  • More video of Russian turtle tanks
    • They built an entire house on top of that tank, it looks like
    • Like other examples, this has zero visibility off to the sides; but apparently that's not as much of a hindrance I thought it would be
• Mike Lynch confirmed dead
  • Sad but expected
• Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City lock out workers as negotiations with the Teamsters break down
  • More coverage from the Financial Times
  • Canadian railroad disputes comes on top work stoppages in Indian ports
  • Ongoing disruption to Red Sea traffic because of the Houthi threat
  • Potential industrial action at US ports by the International Longshoremen's Association
  • Although this work stoppage is limited to Canada, it will likely have effects in the United States, given the volume of cross-border trade handled by these railroads
  • Will impact grain prices, as Canada is heavily rail dependent to ship grain to ports

2024-08-21 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Ukraine launches a massive drone attack on Russia
    • Air raid sirens have sounded in Moscow, Rostov on Don, Bryansk, and Belgorod
  • How A General's Blunder Left Russia's Border Vulnerable
    • Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin disbanded a council focused on border security
    • Said that the responsibility for border security should rest with the military
    • The disbanding of the interagency council has hampered coordination between the military, the interior ministry and the Federal Security Service
    • The initial response to the incursion was reminiscent of the response to Prigozhin's rebellion
    • Although Lapin had sent warnings to Moscow that Ukraine was massing troops on the border, it was dismissed as a Ukrainian bluff
    • Furthermore, Lapin's troops failed to build defensive fortifications like trenches and minefields
    • Ukrainian electronic warfare disabled Russian communications, leaving troops unable to mount a coordinated resistance
    • While some soldiers did form localized pockets of resistance, the majority, often conscripts serving their mandatory military service, just surrendered
    • Conscript units were often lacking armored vehicles: a motor rifle regiment had just a few dozen armored vehicles instead of the hundreds that it's supposed to
    • Prior to this Lapin had been in charge of Russian forces in Kharkiv, prior to Ukraine's successful counteroffensive there in the autumn of 2022
    • To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, once maybe regarded as misfortune, twice looks like carelessness
  • Franz Stefan-Gady has a good analysis of the Kursk offensive and the overall situation in Ukraine
    • A large scale Russian counterattack against the incursion into Kursk in inevitable
    • It is not clear that the benefits of carving out a buffer zone in Kursk are worth the costs in terms of manpower and materiel
    • However, with this operation, Ukraine has shown that it can still carry out combined-arms maneuvers and achieve operational surprise, something that would be beyond the capability of many European armed forces
    • There are ongoing concerns about Ukraine's ability to hold Donetsk Oblast; has Ukraine committed its strategic reserve?
    • The ability of Ukrainian forces to hold territory inside Russia is strongly dependent on how well they can protect their logistics from Russian artillery, UAVs and glide bombs
    • We need to evaluate this offensive not just today, but weeks or months from now
    • No matter what happens from here on out, Ukraine has increased the perimeter of the territory that it must defend
    • While this offensive goes on, we must remember that Ukraine still has not stabilized the front in the Donbas region
    • We haven't actually seen the true Russian response yet, as Russia is still organizing larger units for a potential counterattack
  • General Syrski delivered a report to the Ukrainian legislature re: missile and drone interception rates (translation)
    • Russian missiles and drones have hit 11,879 targets in Ukraine
      • 6,203 civilian targets
      • 5,676 military targets
    • To hit these targets, the Russians used 9,590 missiles and 13,997 drones
      • 2,429 missiles intercepted
      • 5,972 drones intercepted
    • Large cruise missiles, such as the Kalibr, Kh-555/101, and R-500 were intercepted with 67% success
    • However smaller cruise missiles, such as the Kh-59, Kh-35, and Kh-31 were only intercepted 22% of the time
    • The difference is due to the fact that the smaller cruise missiles are used against frontline or border targets, which have less air defense protection
    • Ballistic missiles are very difficult to shoot down
      • The Iskander OTRK, Tochka-U and the North Korean KN-23 were used 1,388 times in total
      • Of these, only 4.5% were intercepted
    • However the most difficult missiles to intercept were the high-speed air-launched anti-ship missiles such as the Kh-22 and Kh-32: out of 362 launched, only 2 were intercepted, a hit rate of 0.55%
    • Drones, such as Lancets and Shaheds were intercepted 63% of the time
  • President Zelensky says that Ukraine has used US-made weapons to destroy Russian pontoon bridges in Kursk
    • These strikes disrupt Russian logistics and help Ukraine hold a defensive line along the Seym River
    • Strikes were conducted with HIMARS
• A federal court vacates the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements
  • Sad, but predictable
  • The legal basis for the FTC's regulation here was always shaky
  • And especially since Loper Bright the Supreme Court has made it clear that agencies are supposed to stick to their statutory limits
• Ford takes a $1.9 bn writedown on canceling a three-row electric SUV
  • WSJ's coverage
  • Cancellation was due to uncertainty that the SUV would be profitable within one year of launch
  • Will be manufactured as a hybrid instead of all-electric
  • Ford's electric vehicle division lost $5 bn last year, so the company is cutting models in an effort to improve profitability
  • Will still launch an electric commercial van and midsized electric pickup in the coming years
  • This comes in the wake of GM delaying new EV models

2024-08-20 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk offensive
    • Ukraine has captured Snagost, and Ukrainian troops are fighting for Korenevo
    • There are reports of Ukrainian troops in Vishnevka, directly west of Snagost as well
    • Ukraine has also captured Cherkasskoe Porechnoe and Martynovka
  • Donetsk
    • A visualization of the movement of the front line in Donetsk over the previous month
      • As expected, it's not good
      • Seems like the Russian advance has intensified in that area
    • According to UA Control Map's interactive map, Russian forces are less than 20km from Pokrovsk
  • Analysis of the political aspects of the Kursk incursion
    • The Ukrainians have succeeded in shutting up many Western commentators who advocated for freezing the war along current lines
    • Has completely discredited Russia's red lines
      • According to Russian doctrine and Putin's statements, the response to an incursion onto Russian territory by a foreign power would have been a nuclear strike
      • The fact that Ukraine has taken roughly 300km² of Russian territory shows that threats of nuclear escalation aren't credible
    • Shows that large scale operations are still possible
    • When Ukraine captures towns, it does so with minimal destruction; when Russia captures towns, it flattens them
    • The incursion into Russia by Ukraine is another nail in the coffin of CSTO
  • Further analysis of the Ukrainian offensive into Kursk
    • This is a high-risk/high-reward strategy
    • Ukraine has depleted the reserves that it was building up for a 2025 offensive
    • Whether this incursion is successful is less dependent on how much territory Ukraine captures and more on how many losses they're able to inflict on the Russians on the way out
    • Ukraine appears to be preparing for a potential Trump victory by ensuring that it has territory that Russia wants, as a bargaining chip
• Rocket Factory Augsburg loses a first stage during a hot-fire test
  • Failure occurred during the first test of the full complement of 9 engines
  • RFA was taking a higher-risk approach with an emphasis on real testing in lieu of simulations
  • Prior to this failure, the German startup had been planning to launch its first orbital rocket later this year
  • RFA's "Helix-One" rocket resembles a small Falcon 9, with 9 first stage engine and a single second stage engine
  • Designed to deliver 1.3 metric tons to low earth orbit
• Elon's takeover of Twitter has been the worst underwriting deal for major investment banks since the financial crisis
  • Twitter's weak financial performance has made it difficult for banks to resell the loans the made to underwrite Elon's buyout of Twitter
  • Banks got taken in by financing the world's richest person
  • They could be made whole by keeping the loan on their books until it matures
  • However this is reliant on Twitter actually repaying those loans
  • The inability to sell the loans has reduced compensation for senior bankers at banks like Barclay's and BNP Paribas
  • Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group has assigned the Twitter loan to its special situations and workouts group, which normally handles distressed debts and bankruptcies
• 7-11 shares close lower because of antitrust concerns with the Circle-K merger
  • 7-and-i Incorporated, owner of 7-11 has been approached with a merger offer from Alimentation Couche-Tard, owner of Circle-K
  • FTC and Japan's competition authority are expected to have major questions about this merger, if it's agreed to
  • Food and fuel are both sensitive concerns for anti-trust authorities
  • This will raise even more concerns than the proposed Kroger-Albertson's merger, which was halted due to anti-trust concerns

2024-08-19 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia captures Zalizne
    • Capture probably occurred around August 5, but is only being confirmed today
    • Russian forces have entered Toretsk and made progress in Niu York
    • Russian forces have also entered Zavitne
      • This follows up from the capture of Zelhanne on August 15
  • Kursk region
    • Ukraine destroys a third bridge over the Seym River
      • The destruction of the three bridges turns the Seym river into a natural barrier that the Russians will have to cross in order to retake the area of Kursk that Ukraine has captured
      • At least one of the bridges was destroyed with a HIMARS strike, according to Russian officials
    • The Russians have reportedly replaced one of the destroyed permanent bridges with a pontoon bridge
      • However pontoon bridges are even easier to destroy than concrete bridges
    • Ukraine has reportedly captured the towns of Tolpino and Kolychevka, cutting off a Russian garrison in Korenevo
    • Aleksandrovka has reportedly been captured as well
  • Russia has started flying drones with hard-wired fiber optic connections
    • This is likely to insulate them from electronic warfare
  • Ramzan Kadyrov posts a video of himself on a Cybertruck equipped with a machine gun
    • It's completely useless on the battlefield
    • But it'll go viral on social media
    • So of course it's the Chechens who come up with it
  • The German finance ministry is reportedly hesitating on approvals for more aid to Ukraine
    • The government's draft 2025 spending plans halved aid to Ukraine , from €8 bn to €4 bn
    • Now, Christian Lindner, the finance minister, is arguing that aid to Ukraine should be cut entirely, unless alternative funding mechanisms can be found
    • One possible funding mechanism he suggested was frozen Russian assets in Europe
    • But aren't those assets already being used as collateral for the €50 bn loan for Ukraine organized by the G7?
  • According to President Zelensky, the goal of the incursion into Kursk is to create a buffer zone that would prevent Russian attacks towards Sumy
    • Other goals include destroying as much Russian offensive potential as possible
• Mike Lynch among the missing in a yacht sinking off the coast of Sicily
  • Mike Lynch was the CEO of Autonomy, a company acquired by HP in a major transaction
  • After the acquisition went bad, HP brought fraud charges against Mike Lynch
  • However, Mike Lynch was found not guilty on all counts , and retained the fortune he made by selling the company
  • Yacht was named the Bayesian and was reportedly owned by Lynch's family
  • Previous coverage of the trial on June 7, 2024
• The owner of 7-11 convenience stores has been approached with a merger offer from the owner of Circle-K, Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • 7-11 has just completed its acquisition of the Speedway chain of gas stations and convenience stores
  • Offer is friendly and nonbinding
  • I think this deal will face significant anti-trust scrutiny

2024-08-16 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Ukraine orders an evacuation of Pokrovsk
    • More bad news out of the east
• Epic Games and Spotify take advantage of looser iOS App Store regulations imposed by the EU
  • This is the first practical effect of the EU ruling that Apple was violating the DMA by restricting apps exclusively to its own app store
• The US Navy is beginning to deploy the AIM-174B to the Pacific
  • The AIM-174B is an air-launched version of the Standard Missile 6 (SM-6)
  • Much longer range than AIM-120 AMRAAM
  • Up to 400 km range as compared with the AMRAAM's 150 km
  • Is a counter to China's PL-15 missile which is thought to have a range of approximately 250 km
  • Because the AIM-174B is a variant of an existing missile, it can be manufactured rapidly from existing production lines
  • Is compatible with Australian aircraft

2024-08-15 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia captures Zelhanne, near Pokrovsk
      • The news coverage is all on Ukraine's incursion into Russia, but, at the same time, Russia is continuing to advance in Donetsk
    • WSJ coverage of the Pokrovsk offensive
      • Despite the military aid package, Ukrainian forces in this region are still fighting at a disadvantage in terms of artillery
      • Russia is increasingly able to neutralize Ukrainian drones with electronic warfare
      • The critical problem for Ukraine in this area is a lack of manpower
      • Russia has a manpower advantage of roughly 5:1 in the region
      • Soldiers are spending hundreds of days in front-line trenches, as there are not enough troops available to rotate them out
      • Russia is attacking with motorcycles; these attacks are expensive, often taking 60-80% casualties, but enough soldiers get through to push the Ukrainians back bit by bit
      • Russia pushes widely separated soldiers forward on motorcycles, maybe 4 out of 5 are killed by Ukrainian forces, but last one hunkers down and serves as an artillery spotter
      • Then Russian forces use their artillery advantage to hammer the Ukrainians and force them back
      • Ukraine took heavy casualties during last summer's offensive, and, as a result, the Ukrainian army has manpower shortages
        • If that's true, then last year's offensive was a truly terrible idea
      • The real problem here is lack of artillery: if the Ukrainians had enough artillery, they'd be able to kill the remaining Russian soldiers that escaped direct fire with an artillery barrage
      • But they don't have enough shells at the frontline to conduct artillery barrages
  • Kursk offensive
    • Ukraine captures over 100 prisoners of war after capturing a large bunker in Sverdlikovo
      • I guess Ukraine is going to be exchanging a lot of its own POWs
    • Ukraine strikes the railway station in Lgov
    • This was probably a drone or MLRS strike, as Lgov is fairly distant even from the maximum extent of the Ukrainian advance
    • Emil Kastehelmi has an update on the overall status of the Kursk offensive
      • Sudzha is under Ukrainian control
      • Ukraine is pushing towards Belitsa
      • A large amount of fighting is taking place between Sudzha and Koronevo
  • While Russia is pulling troops from Ukraine in order to reinforce Kursk, it does not appear to be withdrawing troops from the Donetsk offensive
    • This highlights the problem I've had all along with the Ukrainian offensive, which is that it's not actually preventing Russia from achieving strategic objectives
    • Exchanging Pokrovsk for some random dirt across the border in Kursk is not a good trade!
  • I think one of the main questions of military strategy today is, how does one achieve operational surprise in a battlefield where surveillance is ubiquitous
    • The main impact of drones, per interviews with Ukrainian officers, has been less about kinetic impact (i.e. directly striking enemy troops and vehicles) and more about surveillance and reconnaissance
    • The true advantage of Russian drones over Ukrainian drones isn't that Russia has more FPV drones, it's that they have many more medium-altitude surveillance drones, like their Zala and Orlan UAVs
    • This surveillance advantage allows Russian commanders to react to Ukrainian troop movements
    • However, as Ukraine demonstrated in its incursion into Kursk, surprise is still possible
    • It is still possible to find enemy weakpoints, mass troops and engage in maneuver warfare
    • The question is: how does one do this reliably?
  • The Wall Street Journal has a feature article on the Nord Stream pipeline attack
    • Previous coverage in the WSJ
    • Sourced from interviews with four unnamed Ukrainian officials who had personal involvement with the plot
    • Was a largely private effort, financed by Ukrainian businessmen and carried out by military officers
    • Initial President Zelensky approved of the attack, but, he rescinded his approval after the CIA warned him against carrying out the attack
    • Effort was personally supervised by Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who, at the time, was the head of the Ukrainian military
    • Attack was conducted by a small team of 6
    • Was a mix of active-duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise
    • Included a woman to add credence to their cover story that they were friends on holiday
    • Zelensky tried to get Zaluzhniy to call off the attack, but Zaluzhniy claimed that the team had already been dispatched and were running incommunicado
    • In their rush to leave Germany following the attack the sabotage team failed to hose down the ship they'd rented, the Andromeda allowing German investigators to retrieve evidence, including explosive residue
    • German investigators struggled to secure cooperation from Polish authorities, despite having evidence that Polish front-companies linked to Ukrainian intelligence helped organize the travel arrangements for the attack
• Toyota plans to convert all of its models to hybrid-only
  • This will give Toyota more time to develop electric vehicles while still complying with ever more stringent emissions regulations
  • Is looking like a sound choice as demand growth for purely electric vehicles slows
  • Toyota already has a dominant position in the market for hybrid vehicles with the Prius, the hybrid RAV-4, the hybrid Camry and other models
  • Toyota chairman Akido Toyoda says that the global share of electric vehicles will top out at around 30%, with the remainder being hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, sustainable fuels and other technologies yet to emerge
  • I think that's pure cope
  • The EU is banning all new sales of internal combustion powered vehicles in 2035
  • Toyota is way behind on EV development, and rather than rushing to catch up, like Honda is with its GM partnership, they're burying their heads in the sand and pretending that EVs aren't the future
  • What's especially worrying is that Akio Toyoda keeps repeating the claim that hydrogen is going to be part of the future, when, in reality, hydrogen has repeatedly failed to gain market traction despite massive investments from Toyota
  • There's no evidence that "green fuels" will ever be a mass-market solution
  • It seems like sustainable fuels will be a way to keep vintage sports cars running, and they might have some application in motor racing (which is why e.g. Porsche is looking into them)
• Softbank shifts to TSMC as its manufacturer of AI chips
  • Further coverage from the Financial Times
  • Under Project Izanagi, Softbank seeks to develop AI processors to rival nVidia
  • Softbank was investigating using Intel Foundry Services to manufacture these processors
  • However, after Intel couldn't meet Softbank's "volume and speed" requirements, Softbank chose TSMC to manufacture the chips
  • Softbank has not ruled out working with Intel in the future
  • This is another setback for Intel
• The US amends ITAR to ease transfers of nuclear technology to Australia
  • Enables Australia to buy military equipment from the US without requiring an export permit
  • Enables Australian companies to collaborate with US and British companies on new weapons and technologies
  • For the technologies that still require an export license, the US will implement an expedited licensing process
  • However these changes still don't impact data that has been classified at the "NoForn", which prevents dissemination outside the US
  • ITAR changes came after the UK and Australia made changes to their own export licensing rules to assure the US that any shared technology would not be reshared outside AUKUS
  • This is a big deal; ITAR rules can be pretty onerous

2024-08-13 Tuesday

• Russia reportedly withdraws some troops from Ukraine to counterattack against the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk oblast
  • Unclear how many troops have been shifted
  • Ukrainian troops are facing greater resistance as they seek to expand their foothold
  • The ultimate goal of the Kursk incursion is still unclear
• Data from NASA's InSight lander on Mars indicates the existence of large amounts of subsurface water
  • The analysis is based on recorded seismic activity
  • Water would be located anywhere between 11.5km and 20km beneath the surface
• The TikTok law and the foreign influence boogeyman
  • The primary justification for the law forcing TikTok to divest itself from its Chinese owner is to ensure that China can't use TikTok as a mechanism to push its propaganda onto American users
  • This article does not dispute that China uses TikTok as a mechanism to push propaganda
  • The Chinese government appears to operate on an "injection" model, where mere exposure to information can trick users into beliefs that don't conform with their pre-existing worldview
  • However, evidence from American social media firms shows that this isn't the case
  • Attempts to make more than marginal changes to beliefs just cause users to leave
  • Facebook's "poke to vote" effort to drive increased voter turnout only raised voter turnout by 0.4%
  • The filter bubble effect is not due to social media algorithms, it is due to people self-selecting into groups whose ideologies conform to their pre-existing beliefs
  • We blame algorithms for causing social media harm, but the harm caused by social media algorithms is due to those algorithms showing us more and more extreme versions of things we already want to see
  • This effect will not go away if TikTok becomes American owned, and in fact, it might become worse, as American ownership would be more attuned to American cultural norms
  • To the extent that motivated reasoning, attachment to beliefs and interest in only viewing cherry-picked information is a problem, it is a problem that is much more likely to be exploited by domestic political parties than foreign actors
  • Information is not a weapons system!
  • Factors that could change this assessment
    • Just-in-time manipulation
      • A well-timed misinformation push at a critical moment could swing a campaign
      • However, this push would have to be massive and easily detected in order to be effective
      • Would only work once: after that point trust in the social network would be destroyed
    • AI-customized manipulation
      • In theory it could be possible to use AI to create hyper-customized messages designed to say the right words to each and every person viewing in order to have the greatest persuasive impact
      • However, there is little to no evidence for any such hyper-customization in use today
  • Congress has no business in "protecting" Americans from speech they choose to engage with voluntarily
  • There is no evidence that TikTok has caused any shifts in political belief
  • Bills like the TikTok ban do more to help Chinese interests by diminishing trust in the impartiality of American political institutions than TikTok itself
  • In other words, banning TikTok makes it easier to make the case that Moldbug makes, which is that the US is just as totalitarian as China, but in service of different masters

2024-08-12 Monday

• Ukrainian forces have advanced to near Cherkasskoe Porechnoe, in their Kursk offensive
• The greatest extent of Ukrainian incursion thus far appears to be near Semenovka, approximately 25 miles inside the Russian border
• Russian forces out of Donetsk are attacking Mykolaivka, near Donetsk
• Note that Novozhelhanne and Komyshivka are still in Ukrainian hands, so this might be an attempt to create an encirclement in that area
• The Economist has a summary of the Kursk offensive
• Emil Kastehelmi has a good analysis thread as well
  • After six days, the Ukrainian offensive is slowing down in the face of increasing Russian reinforcements arriving in the area
  • Still not clear what the objective is
  • Ukraine likely cannot commit many more soldiers to this offensive than it already has
  • There is a possibility that Putin allows Ukraine to take and hold this territory, under the expectation that it will be returned to Russia when the war ends, either in a trade for some Ukrainian territory or as part of surrender negotiations
• The Wall Street Journal has a summary and analysis of the Ukrainian offensive thus far
  • The strategic logic of this attack is questionable
  • However, the attack may have the political goal of showing the US and other Western backers that Ukraine is able to counterattack effectively and take the fight to Russia
  • US was not informed about the attack before it began
  • There are concerns that Putin might order retaliatory missile strikes on Ukrainian cities as a result
  • I don't think that's any more of a concern than it was prior to this incursion, because I don't think Russia has enough missiles and drones to launch after expending significant numbers of them in its previous efforts to target Ukrainian energy infrastructure
  • The pattern of Russian attacks has been to launch waves of drones and missiles when the Russian military has built up enough of an inventory to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses
  • The main concern is whether this is drawing more Ukrainian manpower away from Donetsk than it is drawing Russian manpower

2024-08-09 Friday

• Ukrainian drones hit a military airfield in Lipetsk
  • Reportedly blew up a large amount of ammunition
  • Unclear whether any aircraft were destroyed
• Ukraine's offensive into Kursk Oblast continues
  • Over 300 km² of Russian territory occupied so far
  • The town of Sudzha has been captured
  • One possible aim of this incursion is to ensure that, if Putin wants to declare a ceasefire "along existing lines", that "existing lines" will include Ukrainian control of Russian territory, increasing Ukraine's bargaining power
• Japan's earthquake early warning system warns of a possible "megaquake" in the Nankai Trough
  • Warning comes in the aftermath of a magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck Kyushu
  • No damage reported as a result of that, however, the Japan Meteorological Agency warned that it might be a harbinger of an even more powerful quake in the same region
  • Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida canceled a trip to Central Asia as a precautionary measure
  • The early warning doesn't mean a quake is guaranteed to occur, rather it means that conditions are unstable and a strong earthquake is possible
• A better explanation for the early rush of holiday shipping
  • This is a follow-up to the article about increased early holiday orders from Wednesday
  • Retailers are concerned about a possible strike in October by the longshoremen's union
  • A work stoppage would affect imports on both coasts
  • Even a one-week shutdown could take 4-6 weeks to recover from
  • Another factor is new tariffs imposed by the Biden administration, which will take effect later this year
    • New tariffs have been imposed on a wide range of products
    • Notably, electric vehicle tariffs are increasing to 100% (mostly a preventive measure, as there aren't a huge number of Chinese EVs coming in)
    • Another notable tariff is tariffs on imports of critical minerals used to manufacture solar panels
    • Notable because it conflicts with Democratic goals of speeding the energy transition: the government wants to build solar panels, but not with a supply chain that's entirely dependent on China)
    • Tariffs will be imposed for the first time on PPE imported from China

2024-08-08 Thursday

• DeepMind unveils a robotic ping-pong player capable of playing at a human level
  • Has a 100% win rate against beginner opponents
  • 55% win rate against intermediate opponents
  • Still loses to advanced players
  • Uses a system-of-systems approach
    • Low-level "skills"
      • Forehands
      • Backhands
      • Serve returns
    • High-level decision-maker chooses which skill to use for a particular return
  • Was trained using a hybrid of simulated and real-world environments
    • Real world table-tennis data was used to set up a simulated environment
    • Robot was trained in the simulated environment
    • Then, after each round of training, the robot played against a human opponent, and the results of those plays informed the creation of the next iteration of the simulated environment
  • Humans enjoyed playing against the robot
  • Weaknesses of the current system
    • High-spin shots
    • Backhand shots
    • Extremely fast shots
• System76, a manufacturer of Linux workstations, unveils a new desktop environment: Cosmic
  • Official announcement
  • Code is still in alpha
  • Will be built into System76's custom Linux distribution, Pop!_OS
  • Built in Rust
  • Aimed primarily as a replacement for GNOME
  • It's nice to see someone taking on the GNOME/KDE duopoly in Linux desktop environments
• More analysis of Ukraine's offensive into Russia
  • Ukrainian objective appears to be to create a buffer zone inside Russia, much like how Russia has created a buffer zone inside Ukraine near Kharkiv
  • Open question as to whether the US will allow its weapons to be used to reinforce this buffer zone
  • This is a risky operation, as Russia has sufficient reserves to reinforce and counterattack this buffer
  • A notable success thus far has been the capture of numerous Russian POWs which can be exchanged for captured Ukrainians
  • It seems like this offensive has had more success than I gave it credit for yesterday
  • However I still think it's a bad idea that Ukraine is committing reserve forces to capturing territory that it has neither the intention nor capacity to hold in the long-term

2024-08-07 Wednesday

• Ukrainian forces have launched a major raid into the Kursk region of Russia
  • This appears to be a reply to Russia's incursion into the Kharkiv region
  • Same justification: force Russia to redeploy troops to defend against Ukrainian raids, blunting its ongoing offensive in the Avdiivka-Pokrovsk region
  • However, at the same time, Russian forces have advanced in Niu York
  • Rob Lee assesses that this cross-border incursion will not have the intended impact, as Russia has substantially reinforced its reserve units with conscript soldiers
  • The analysis I'm seeing is that this seems like desperation: Ukraine is getting slowly but steadily pushed back near Pokrovsk, so it needs something to change, and quickly
  • This operation will also likely harden Russian attitudes towards the war; Ukraine has brought the war to Russia, which will allow Putin to ask more of his citizens
  • It's an open question whether the troops that Ukraine is using for this incursion would have been better used reinforcing Toretsk or Niu York
  • The other open question is just how much of a price Russia is paying for this advance: as per the analysis I linked on July 23, Russia is chewing through its stock of artillery at a ferocious rate
• Maersk has stated that companies are bringing forward orders from China in anticipation of increased tariffs under a possible Trump administration
  • Says that some companies are bringing forward their Christmas orders
  • This doesn't make any sense because regardless of the outcome of the election, the new administration won't take office until January
  • Christmas orders are safe, no matter what happens in November
• What we've learned about Boeing from the probe into the Alaska Airlines door panel blowout
  • Boeing factories were marked by a "push, push, push" attitude towards increasing production
  • A cycle of layoffs at the beginning of the pandemic followed by hiring as orders for aircraft rebounded left Boeing with a relatively inexperienced workforce
  • Boeing had been warned by the FAA about employees removing parts from airplanes for modification or rework without following appropriate procedures
  • The investigation into the door panel blowout revealed that defective adhesive had caused the oxygen canisters to shift, potentially preventing oxygen masks from receiving oxygen in case of emergency
  • The reason no one was seated next to the door plug is because the passengers that were scheduled to be in those seats arrived late and were rebooked on a different flight
  • Boeing is working to redesign its door plug with sensors, similar to those on actual emergency doors, that will alert the crew if the plug hasn't been seated correctly
• WarnerBros Discovery has written down the value of its traditional cable television channels by $9 billion
  • Reflects the rise of streaming
  • WarnerBros Discovery anticipated a recovery in traditional TV advertising spending that never materialized

2024-08-06 Tuesday

• OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves for Anthropic
  • Leaving to pursue alignment research at Anthropic
  • Greg Brockman will be taking a year-long sabbatical as well
• Armenia withdraws from Russia-led CSTO
  • Useful backgrounder on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
  • Comes in the wake of two successive offensives by Azerbaijian to capture the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in 2020 and 2022
  • In neither instance did Russia, the principal military power in the CSTO intervene on behalf of Armenia
• One thing unites America: Hating Google
  • But we all hate Google for different reasons
• Twitter sues advertisers, alleging antitrust violations with regards to an alleged boycott against Twitter
  • Not sure Musk has much of a case here
  • Also, suing your customers is never a good look
  • I think this is Elon just being bipolar again
  • We'll probably never hear about this lawsuit again: either it'll be settled quietly or Elon will drop it

2024-08-05 Monday

• Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina has reportedly resigned and left the country
  • Comes in the aftermath of renewed protests against her rule
  • Protests began a month ago as students protested a quota system that reserved 30% of jobs for the families of army veterans that had fought for Bangladeshi independence
  • Government was hoping that a Supreme Court decision significantly revising the quota system would quell the protests
    • Reduced veterans' quota to 5%
    • Allocated another 2% to ethnic minorities and disabled people
    • Remaining 93% allocated on merit
  • However, by that point, the objective of the protests had widened to demanding the resignation of Sheikh Hasina herself
• Myanmar's military junta says that communications have been lost with several senior officers as rebels overrun a major base
  • Military base was in Lashio, in Shan province
  • Was the headquarters of the Burmese military's Northeastern Command
  • One of 14 major regional commands
  • Lashio is by far the largest city the coalition of rebel groups, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), has conquered so far
  • Governing the city will be a test to determine whether the MNDAA can successfully govern the entire nation
• Japanese stocks are down by over 12% as the Japanese stock market suffers its worst single-day loss since 1987
  • Selling was severe enough to trigger automatic circuit breakers
  • Korean stocks also hit similar circuit breakers as the Korean market fell as well
  • Sell-off was largely driven by large declines in manufacturers of chip-making equipment
    • TSMC down by almost 10%
    • Samsung and SK Hynix down by about 10% as well
    • Renesas and Tokyo Electron down by 15% and 18% respectively
  • Seems like investors are pulling back from all AI-related stocks
• China unveils 5-year plan to dismantle its hukou system
  • Further coverage from the South China Morning Post
  • The Chinese hukou is a registration system that ties people to the province of their birth
  • People can only access government benefits in the province that they were born in
  • This means that Chinese migrants to cities are often in the same situation as illegal immigrants in the US: no way to access government benefits where they live
  • Although migrants can theoretically change their hukou, cities often impose stringent quotas on the number of reregistrations in a given year
  • Goal is to achieve 70% formal urbanization
  • Currently 66% of Chinese residents are estimated to live in urban areas, but only 48% have an urban hukou
  • Migrants who wish to re-register their residency in cities whose population is less than 3 million will face zero restrictions
  • Cities with populations of 3 million to 5 million will have their quotas "comprehensively relaxed"
  • Cities larger than 5 million will be allowed to keep a grading system to select who is allowed to reregister as a resident, but will be encouraged to abolish formal upper limits on immigration
  • Plan is primarily aimed at revitalizing the Chinese property market by allowing people with rural hukous to buy property in urban areas, especially second and third-tier cities
  • There will likely be significant local opposition to this plan from existing residents of cities who don't wish to see property prices increase
  • Might also be resistance from rural hukou holders, who wish to hold onto the land rights associated with their rural hukou as a form of insurance
• Google loses antitrust case over search dominance
  • A US federal court rules that Google abused its dominance in online search by paying web browser developers and phone manufacturers to keep Google as the default search engine
  • Google was criticized for auto-deleting chat messages, however the judge did not impose any specific penalty on Google for doing so, arguing that doing so wouldn't "move the needle" on the court's assessment of Google's liability
  • Possible remedies include caps on how much Google can pay to be the default or a search-engine selection screen
• Russian troops have pushed into Toretsk
  • I think this is a consequence of the Russian push into Vesele last week
  • The Russian advances near Vesele and Chasiv Yar have put Toretsk and Niu York into an exposed position
  • So now the Ukrainians are having to pull back from these positions
  • The real root cause of this is the fall of Avdiivka; Ukraine hasn't been really able to stabilize that area since the fall of Avdiivka
• At least one Su-34 was destroyed by the ammunition explosion in Morozovsk last week
• An interesting comparison between the Summer 2023 Ukrainian offensive and the 2024 Russian offensive
  • The Ukrainian offensive captured a lot of territory early on but petered out quickly
  • Russia has been much more steady in its gains
  • At this point, Russia has captured more territory than Ukraine was able to liberate in the summer of 2023
  • Most of these gains have occurred around Ocheretyne and around Toretsk/Niu York

2024-08-02 Friday

• AP Moeller-Maersk lifts profit guidance
  • Lift is because of continuing disruptions in Red Sea shipping
  • Longer trips caused by ships having to route around the Cape of Good Hope have soaked up oversupply

2024-08-01 Thursday

• Russian forces have advanced to Vesele on the way to Pokrovsk
  • Lost Prohres, Vovche and Novoselivka Persha
  • This isn't good for Ukraine
  • Ukraine has not been able to close the door that opened at Avdiivka
• Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and US businessman Paul Whelan have been freed by Russia as part of the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War
  • In exchange, Russia gets a number of hackers and Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who murdered a Chechen dissident in Berlin
• Intel suspends its dividend and cuts 15% of its workforce as it seeks to focus on its turnaround
  • Intel's stock is down by over 40% for the year and fell a further 20% in after-hours trading
  • Intel has struggled against AMD in the market for CPUs and against nVidia in the market for GPUs
  • Qualcomm has emerged as a new challenger with its new ARM chips for desktop PCs

2024-07-28 Sunday

• French railroads are back to being fully operational
  • Railroads will run 80% of their normal schedule on Sunday and will be back to 100% by Monday
  • French investigators are saying they have a good idea as to who perpetrated the attacks

2024-07-27 Saturday

• The Ohio Supreme Court rules that consumer can't sue if they choke on a bone in their "boneless" wings
  • Berkheimer vs. REKM LLC
  • Majority opinion
    • Chickens have bones, so therefore a bone is "natural" to chicken
    • Therefore, a consumer has a reasonable expectation that there might be a bone in the chicken, even if the chicken is advertised as "boneless"
    • "Boneless wings" merely describes a cooking style; it is not a guarantee of bonelessness
  • Dissent
    • The plaintiff should have received a jury trial
    • "Boneless" means "boneless": it is a claim made by the restaurant about the condition of its wings
  • I'm with the dissent on this one
  • According to the majority opinion, a restaurant may serve regular wings as boneless wings: if anyone complains, they can say, "Because bones are natural to chickens, you had a reasonable expectation that your boneless wings may contain bones"

2024-07-26 Friday

• French railroads hit by coordinated sabotage attack on the day of the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics
  • 3 fires were set at critical railway junctions in Croisilles, Pagny-sur-Moselle, and Courtalain
  • Another attempted attack at Vergigny was stopped when rail workers encountered the saboteurs and chased them away
  • Saboteurs cut and burned signaling cables, requiring repairs which will take days
  • 250,000 travelers affected, with predictions suggesting that 800,000 travelers will be affected before the rail lines are operational again
  • This attack is a counterpoint to "Terrorism Is Not Effective"
  • These terrorists managed to shut down large portions of France's high-speed rail system by attacking weak points away from Paris that were poorly guarded and seem to have gotten away scot-free
  • Furthermore, it is impossible to completely stop this kind of attack: what is France going to do? Deploy police officers to guard every single one of the thousands of signaling nodes that line its TGV lines?
• Large tech corporations are down after investors express increasing concerns about the scale of AI investments
  • nVidia and Tesla are down by approximately 17% over the past week
  • Alphabet is down by 14%
  • Microsoft and Amazon are down by 9%
  • Apple is down by "only" 7%
  • Sell-off was sparked by Alphabet warning about greater investments in AI hurting its profit forecast
  • It's important to note that I think there's still a bull case for nVidia
  • As tech companies increasingly invest in AI, there will be an increased demand for nVidia's chips
  • The distinction between nVidia and the rest is that nVidia is "selling shovels"
  • nVidia will next announce earnings on August 21
• Myanmar is facing an energy shortage as its primary gas field becomes depleted
  • The primary source of natural gas for Myanmar, the Yadana gas field, is nearing depletion
    • Reduced exports to Thailand by 47%
    • Reduced electricity generation by 35%
  • Energy crisis is the direct result of the country's civil war
  • International sanctions and economic damage from war spending have left the government unable to finance additional investments in gas production
  • The Burmese military is awful at any kind of economic development: repeats the same mistakes over and over again
  • Better at announcing new projects than implementing them
  • The loss of gas production will result in power cuts to Yangon and reduced industrial activity, as a result
  • Could also mean greater vulnerability to the rebels: the other major source of electricity for Myanmar is hydropower, and most of the hydropower dams are located in the upland, rebel-controlled areas

2024-07-25 Thursday

• Students at elite Chinese universities express disillusionment about their prospects
  • Project 985 universities are elite universities designated by the government of China
  • Not quite at the same level as the truly elite universities, like Peking or Tsinghua, but close
  • Students say that they don't feel like the hard work they put in to get into a Project 985 school was worth it, given that "salaries are low and house prices are high"
  • Reinforces that China faces many of the same challenges that the US does
• Samsung unveils 60TB SSD
  • Joins Solidigm in offering a drive of this size class
  • Western Digital is expected to announce a 60TB drive later this year
  • Costs $6905
  • Intended for use in data centers as fast storage for AI
• Graphcore has been acquired by Softbank
  • AI accelerator manufacturer was having trouble competing with nVidia
  • Purchase price was between $400 million and $500 million
  • Comes in the wake of significant layoffs at the firm
  • Might result in a possible tie-in with ARM
  • Softbank money will keep them alive for a while, but the structural problem with their business remains, which is that nVidia's software is the de facto standard for AI
  • It's unclear what advantage any integration with ARM will bring
• Southwest Airlines is introducing assigned seating and extended legroom options
  • Comes in response to declining margins and pressure from activist investors
  • Southwest had been one of the only airlines to use open seating, where fliers could choose any open seat, instead of having pre-assigned seats
  • However, this meant that Southwest didn't have the ability to upsell fliers by charging more for more favorable seating
  • Also meant that Southwest planes had to be essentially single-class economy, when competitors were getting greater margins by splitting their cabins into multiple classes
• Russia is battling runaway inflation
  • Russian interest rates at 9%, but it's still not enough to stop inflation
  • Government is printing a huge amount of currency to pay for war production and soldier salaries
  • Labor pool has massively shrunk as people of prime working age have been drafted or sought higher paying jobs in the military-industrial complex
  • The appointment of Belousov as defense minister in a transfer from the finance ministry is an acknowledgment that Russia is on a full war economy, and that having the best possible economic management is key to winning the war
  • However, the economic hardships have not resulted in civil unrest or any significant destabilization of Putin's government
  • As a Russian I know put it, never ever bet against the Russian people's ability to withstand great economic hardship in the service of their rulers' idiocy
• Russian training is formally incorporating clay pigeon shooting practice in order to train soldiers on how to shoot down FPV drones
  • However, to paraphrase Bruce Lee, "Skeet don't shoot back"
• OpenAI tests search tool
  • Dubbed "SearchGPT"
  • Will use ChatGPT to conduct web searches to supplement answers with references and more up-to-date information
  • Could be a direct threat to Google, if it works
  • However, existing AI-enhanced search engines, such as Perplexity, have not been as transformative as hoped, because of confabulation
  • OpenAI has struck deals with publishers, such as the Wall St. Journal, the Financial Times, and People Magazine to use their content legally, which they say will reduce the chances of confabulation

2024-07-24 Wednesday

• One preprocessor line in the Linux kernel expands to over 47 megabytes of output
  • Recursive preprocessor directives expand each argument 8000 times
  • Results in a large constant expression
• Alphabet posts higher revenue, indicates that search business has not been affected by AI
  • 14% increase in revenue in Q2
  • Indicates that AI tools have not meaningfully affected search traffic
  • This fits with my usage of AI: AI is fine as a general introduction to a topic, but I still end up using Google to drill down into details
  • It might be that AI tools are complementary to Google Search as they solve the "what words do I search for" problem
• A Ukrainian crew aboard a container ship engages and destroys a Houthi drone boat with small arms fire
  • This reinforces a point that many advocates of drone swarms miss, which is that drones are not immune to physics
  • A drone that is cheap to make and easy to deploy will necessarily be limited in some way, be it range, maneuverability or armor
  • These limitations are vulnerabilities which can be exploited
  • Making the drone less vulnerable makes it more expensive, reducing the cost advantage that makes drone swarms advantageous in the first place

2024-07-23 Tuesday

• An analysis of Russian artillery stocks (Translation)
  • OSINT analysts examined satellite photos of Russian storage depots to estimate stocks of Russian artillery systems
  • Although the numbers of self-propelled artillery units in Russian depots increased from estimates carried out in 2023, this is due to two factors
    • The first reason is that study used a more conservative count than the previous one: counted units with missing barrels as salvageable
    • This was done to ensure that any possible error would result in an overestimate of Russian capability rather than underestimate
    • The second reason is that Russia has been taking severely damaged units off the battlefield and shipping them back to storage depots so that they can be cannibalized for parts
    • Small and medium storage depots are actually depleted, and all suitable equipment has been moved to larger depots for restoration and repair
    • The intermingling of battlefield salvage with pre-existing stocks will make future estimates of Russian reserves more difficult
    • The highest rates of depletion/cannibalization appear to be for 2S7 "Pion" heavy howitzers
    • This makes sense, because the 2S7 is the largest and most powerful howitzer in the world, offering a level of firepower that cannot be substituted for by other systems
    • However, although the quality of restored systems is declining, Russia has enough stocks to last for another 1.5 to 2 years
  • Russian towed artillery quantity is better than self-propelled artillery, but quality is worse
    • Russian towed artillery stocks are down to 36-38% of pre-war levels
    • However, given the vast amounts of towed artillery the Russian military had saved up from the Soviet era, this still represents an ample supply for the foreseeable future
    • A bigger issue is the fact that increasingly, these towed artillery systems are dating from the World War 2 era (late 1930s to 1950s)
    • In addition, Russia can source towed artillery parts from Iran and North Korea, further bolstering its supplies
    • It is unlikely that Iran and North Korea will transfer their most modern systems to Russia, so any transfers will be more of these older World War 2-era cannon
    • As self-propelled artillery stocks become increasingly depleted, we should expect to see the replacement of self-propelled artillery with towed artillery in front-line units
  • Russian stocks of multiple-launch rocket artillery systems (MLRS) have almost totally been depleted from open fields
    • However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the Russian military will run out of MLRS any time soon
    • MLRS tend to have longer range than gun-based artillery, making them more difficult to kill, giving them a longer expected lifespan on the battlefield
    • Russian maintenance depots likely preemptively disassembled stored MLRS systems, removing the actual launcher portion from the chassis
    • These launcher components were likely moved indoors, while the stripped chassis were left outside
  • How much can Russia produce "from scratch"
    • This is difficult to ascertain, because often media reports confuse restoration of stored Soviet-era systems with from-scratch production
    • Expansion of self-propelled artillery production is limited by the fact that Russia's self-propelled artillery systems use non-interchangeable gun barrels
    • Expansion of MLRS systems are limited by the fact that many of these systems are mounted on T-72 and T-90 tank chassis, so production of MLRS has to compete with tank production for the same components
    • Artillery barrel production is limited, according to some sources, to 50-80 barrels per year
    • Other sources report production figures as high as 200 barrels per year
    • However, even the high end estimate is still a small fraction of the barrels that are lost to enemy attack or simple wear and tear in combat
    • The bottleneck for Russian artillery barrel production is the sorry state of Russian metallurgy
      • Artillery barrels require special high-strength alloys
      • Russia has largely lost the ability to produce these alloys
    • One possibility this report does not consider is China stepping in to help Russia with barrel production
    • Chinese metallurgy, while not the absolute best in the world, is still reasonably high quality and capable of high volume
    • Furthermore, sending specialized metal alloys and machine tooling to Russia would not violate the Chinese policy of not providing lethal aid
    • The Chinese government draws a distinction between sending raw material and fabrication equipment and sending finished weapons
  • Can Russia source artillery from its allies, Iran and North Korea
    • North Korea
      • Much of North Korea's artillery is outdated, even compared to depleted Russian stocks
      • North Korea is unlikely to supply its most modern equipment, because it has too few examples, and Kim Jong-un would not want to deplete his own military's readiness
      • North Korea's systems have also diverged from Russia
        • Many North Korean guns use 130mm shells, a caliber that Russia doesn't generally use
        • North Korean MLRS are also incompatible with Russian systems for the most part
      • Therefore, North Korea is likely to continue to supply ammunition for Russian forces
      • However, there have been complaints that this ammunition is of poor quality, with North Korean shells reported as having lower accuracy than Russia-produced shells
    • Iran
      • Iran has many fewer Soviet-era systems than North Korea
      • In addition, Iran is involved in many more conflicts than North Korea is: Russia is merely one customer among many for Iran
      • The most likely system that Russia will turn to Iran for spare parts for is the D-30 towed howitzer
  • While Iran and North Korea can supply ammunition, it's unlikely that they will be able to provide enough artillery guns to compensate for battlefield wear and destruction
• Are Macs vulnerable to CrowdStrike-type errors
  • CrowdStrike Falcon Protect does not use a kernel module on modern Apple Silicon Macs, as it does on Intel Macs and Windows machines
  • Instead it uses an Endpoint Security System Extension
  • Endpoint Security System Extensions run with normal user privileges, so if they crash, they won't bring down the entire machine
  • CrowdStrike actually supported this change, stating, "reducing the need for privileged access is always a more secure approach and we are proud to embrace this new architecture."
  • However, although Macs are safe from kernel issues caused by third-party updates, first-party updates from Apple remain a point of vulnerability
  • In 2016, Apple pushed an update that accidentally added one of its own kernel extensions to the list of incompatible kernel extensions, resulting in the loss of wired Ethernet connectivity on all Macs that downloaded the update
  • Although this didn't cause systems to crash, it resulted in the loss of connectivity for any machine not connected to wifi, and also broke software that validated Ethernet MAC addresses for licensing
  • However, Apple's processes have improved since then, and these process improvements, combined with greater vertical integration, in the form of Apple Silicon, has reduced the probability of such an error occurring again
  • If Windows is to have the same resiliency as MacOS in this regard, it too needs to remove drivers from its kernel
  • To its credit, Windows has removed drivers from its kernel, to a large extent
  • Notably GPU drivers; now when a GPU driver crashes, Windows' screen goes blank for a moment as the driver restarts, instead of showing a blue-screen
• Hamas and Fatah agree to form a unity government
  • Negotiations between Hamas and Fatah were brokered by China
  • Declaration has not been approved by the US, Israel or Britain
  • Demonstrates China's growing influence in the Middle East
  • It also increases the pressure on Israel to negotiate with Hamas regarding a political settlement for the Gaza Strip that leaves Hamas in charge there
• GM puts self-driving vehicle plans on hold
  • GM has shelved development work on its futuristic "Origin" self-driving taxi concept
  • Origin was intended to be a driverless taxi designed from the ground up for autonomous operations
  • Lacked a steering wheel and had bench seating and subway-style doors
  • Instead GM will refocus on developing a new version of its inexpensive Bolt EV
  • This is smart, given the fallout from the Cruise accident from October 3, 2023 , where a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian who had already been struck by another driver running a red light
  • Cruise had faced increasing regulatory scrutiny and had to scale back operations drastically, so it's probably not worthwhile to continue efforts to design a vehicle that won't have any applications beyond Cruise
  • Plus, I'm not really sure why GM canceled the Bolt in the first place: it was their most popular and profitable EV

2024-07-22 Monday

• Chrome abandons plan to deprecate third-party cookies
  • Reverses a 2020 pledge to end the usage of third-party cookies within two years
  • Plans were abandoned in response to feedback from advertisers and regulators
  • UK regulators opened an investigation into whether Google's replacement for third party cookies, Privacy Sandbox (earlier known as Federated Learning of Cohorts), was anti-competitive
  • Although UK regulators were eventually mollified, continued pushback from advertisers, led Google to abandon its plan to deprecate third-party cookies entirely
  • Instead, Google will display a prompt that will allow users to enable or disable third-party cookies at any time
  • It really is remarkable how scared big tech companies are of any kind of anti-trust
• Korean ISP KT is accused of planting malware on its customers' machines in order to disrupt file-sharing
  • In Korea, ISP peering is billed on a "sender-pays" model, where ISPs pay each other for outgoing traffic
  • This is contrast to the rest of the world, where ISPs largely do not bill one another for cross ISP-traffic ("settlement-free peering")
  • KT, as the largest ISP in Korea, faced the largest bills for outgoing traffic
  • In an effort to reduce outgoing traffic, KT allegedly funded a unit to develop malware that would spread through peer-to-peer file-sharing software and disable it
  • In certain cases, this led to files disappearing and computers crashing
  • KT claims the group was a small group of hackers operating independently

2024-07-21 Sunday

• Ogilvy launches service to help brands deal with rogue influencers
  • Ogilvy is an advertising agency
  • Advertising is increasingly reliant on personal endorsements by influencers
  • However, these influencers can make controversial statements
  • InfluenceShield is a product that tracks influencer controversies and allows brands to distance themselves from influencers who have found themselves in a backlash
  • Program involves 24-hour monitoring of social media, and a crisis response team
  • Also includes vetting of influencers: service will scan social media history of influencers in order to discover any potentially problematic statements made in the past
  • Reflects the increasing importance of influencers as a marketing channel for major brands
• The Indian military had to mobilize to provide air-traffic control services for the Ambani wedding
  • Indian Air Force provided air traffic controllers and support staff so that Jamnagar Airport wouldn't be overwhelmed by the number of private jets coming in
  • Over 600 takeoffs and landings were handled
  • Had to establish special coordination with Mumbai airport to allow planes to fly to Mumbai after dropping off guests
• Investing In Rust
  • Brookings policy paper advocating for greater adoption of Rust
  • Argues that greater investment in memory-safe programming languages will reduce maintenance costs and reduce security vulnerabilities
  • The content of this paper is less interesting than the fact that it exists: "policy" people are starting to examine the choice of programming language as a component of cybersecurity
• Defining the 5th Generation fighter jet
  • Attempt by an Air Force pilot whose career has spanned multiple generations of aircraft to define what a "5th Gen" fighter jet is
  • First gen
    • Exploited technologies first developed during World War 2, such as jet engines and swept wings
    • Not supersonic
    • Armed with guns
    • Examples: MiG-15, F-86
  • Second gen
    • More powerful afterburning jet engines
    • Able to achieve supersonic speeds in level flight
    • First fighters to be armed with air-to-air guided missiles
    • Examples: F-104, MiG-21
  • Third gen
    • More advanced radar capable of providing tracking data for homing missiles
    • Radar warning receivers
    • Chaff and flares to defeat enemy missiles
    • Examples: F-4, MiG-23
  • Fourth gen
    • Form the bulk of most air forces
    • Can perform maneuvers resulting in high G-forces
    • Digital datalinks allow them to share information with one another
    • Most are designed as multi-role, capable of engaging air targets and ground targets in the same mission
    • Examples: F-15, F-18, MiG-29, JAS 39
  • Fifth gen
    • Stealth: incorporate low-observability features that had been previously only present on specialized platforms (like the F-117)
    • Electronic self-protection: are capable of providing their own jamming and electronic countermeasures without relying on specialized electronic warfare aircraft
    • Sensor-fusion: avionics can integrate data from multiple sensors (radar, infrared, etc) and present a unified "picture" to the pilot
    • Advanced handling characteristics in excess of 4th gen fighters
  • These definitions are pretty close to the ones on my wiki

2024-07-19 Friday

• US intelligence agencies warn that Russia may arm the Houthis with anti-ship missiles in retaliation for the US allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia with Western weaponry
  • Russian anti-ship missiles would represent a qualitative upgrade for the Houthis' capabilities
  • Putin had reportedly moved to arm the Houthis in the past but had been talked out of doing so by Mohammed bin Salman
• Crowdstrike outage brings many IT systems to a halt worldwide
  • Affected systems include many airlines, including American and Delta
  • NHS affected
  • Sky News, a UK television channel, went off-air
  • Outage reportedly caused by a faulty Crowdstrike update, which pushed a misformatted driver file, rendering Windows machines unable to boot
  • I want to see the postmortem on this one
• Reporters' misunderstanding of guns continues to frustrate me
  • That is not an AR-15 pattern rifle
  • That is an AK pattern rifle
  • The AK is not just iconic in the US, it is iconic worldwide
• Corporations turn to smaller language models
  • Smaller models trained on company specific data often perform as well as fine-tuned large language models
  • Corporations are willing to give up generality because these language models have many fewer parameters, which makes them cheaper to train and operate
  • Smaller models also run faster, providing a more responsive user experience
  • Can be hosted on a company's own infrastructure, lessening reliance on third party providers like OpenAI or Anthropic
  • Many AI companies are moving to provide a greater variety of smaller models that can be customized by customers on their own datasets
    • Microsoft - Phi
    • Google - Gemini Flash
    • Cohere - Command R
    • Mistral - Mistral Small
    • Anthropic - Claude Haiku

2024-07-18 Thursday

• Ukrainian companies race to create drones capable of autonomous targeting
  • Swarmer Technology is working to create software that will allow a single operator to control groups of drones
  • Drones will identify targets automatically, and strikes only need to be approved by a human
  • Allows limited numbers of operators to scale to control ever larger numbers of drones
  • Swarm technology is already being reportedly used in Ukrainian long-range drone strikes targeting Russian oil infrastructure
    • Core drones with payloads to strike targets
    • Escort drones to distract and engage air defenses
  • Autonomy and swarming are seen as key countermeasures to regain the advantage as ever advancing electronic warfare systems make it more difficult for traditional FPV drones to find their targets
    • Experienced FPV operators see hit rates between 30% and 50%
    • New FPV operators have hit rates that are as low as 10%
  • Computer vision systems running on Raspberry Pis allow drones to continue the attack once "locked on", even if the signal to the human operator is cut
  • Of course, that also means that once the drone is locked on it's impossible to cancel the attack
  • Like I said on June 21: it's easy to say in peacetime that fully automated killbots are bad, but it's quite another thing to tell people not to build fully automated killbots when fully automated killbots are the primary line of defense stopping a hostile nation from conquering more territory
• Frontier Airlines initiates a ground stop due to issues with Azure cloud services
  • Ground stop was temporary and has already been lifted
  • Caused by Azure issues the Central US region
• The EU's production capacity of shells is short of expectations
  • The EU has only sent half as many shells as it has promised to Ukraine, with a significant delay
  • Thierry Breton has stated that the EU's production capacity of 155mm artillery shells is around 1 million shells per year as of January
  • However, according to the Estonian defense ministry, production capacity is only around 600,000 shells per year
  • A Rheinmetall estimate from January put European production capacity at around 550,000 shells per year
  • Ukraine's need, ideally, is approximately 200,000 shells per month, far beyond the production capacity of the US and EU combined
  • Although Rheinmetall has received some long-term contracts to fund capacity expansions, other European ammunition producers, such as Nammo, have not
  • While some components of artillery shells have successfully ramped up production, component delays and materials shortages ensure bottlenecks remain
  • While the Czech Republic has promised 800,000 shells to Ukraine, fewer than 50,000 have been delivered thus far
  • The EU continues to overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to military aid to Ukraine
• Google Docs is officially gaining Markdown import/export support
  • I'm not a fan of Markdown, but it does make things easier when porting from org-mode to Google Docs
  • Previously, I'd have had to export to HTML, open the HTML document in a separate tab, and then copy-paste into Google Docs
  • Now I can export to Markdown, and copy-paste directly from Emacs
  • Markdown export means I can copy-paste into Emacs, edit, and re-import into Google Docs

2024-07-17 Wednesday

• Ukrainian forces withdraw from Krynky on the "left-bank" of the Dnipro river
  • Actual withdrawal reportedly happened weeks ago: only being reported today
  • Ukrainian forces gained a foothold in Krynky in October 2023
  • It's surprising that it took them this long to withdraw
  • That beachhead was hard to supply and difficult to expand from
• Michael Kofman summarizes findings after a recent field study in Ukraine
  • Situation has stabilized after Russian offensive in Kharkiv
  • Ukraine is slowly rectifying its manpower deficit compared to Russia
  • Ukraine is basically out of ammunition for Soviet-era artillery and air-defense systems
  • This has allowed Russian long-range reconnaissance UAVs to be used across the front, which further suppresses Ukrainian artillery
  • Ukrainian air defense shortages have also allowed Russia to use glide bombs more frequently, which are psychologically worse than artillery; artillery might take hours or days to destroy a building; a glide bomb destroys a building in seconds
  • After Ukraine passed its latest mobilization law, the number of people volunteering for service has also increased
  • We focus on F-16s, but Ukraine needs more "basic" weapons, like M-113s and Bradley AFVs
  • What's saving Ukraine right now is the fact that Russian troops struggle to perform operations at scale
  • The main challenge for Ukraine is dealing with Russian missiles targeting its energy infrastructure
  • F-16s can help with this by intercepting Russian cruise missiles, allowing Ukrainian Patriot and NASAMs systems to focus on ballistic missiles

2024-07-16 Tuesday

• "Strava jockeys" get paid to run for others in order to secure achievements on Strava
  • I don't get the point; won't the people hiring these guys get found out when they have to defend their record?
• "Emacs bankruptcy" is inevitable
  • Emacs is not immune to bitcreep
  • Over time the supported set of Emacs packages will change and one's Emacs config will become obsolete
  • This cannot be solved by forcing oneself to stick to the modules that come built-in with Emacs
  • I'm not sure I agree
  • My Emacs config has been pretty stable over time
  • Even if Emacs isn't entirely immune to bitcreep, Emacs' bitcreep is far slower than those of other ecosystems
  • Furthermore, Emacs' approach to backwards compatibility means that packages remain usable long after they've become "obsolete"

2024-07-15 Monday

• Chinese firms develop AI tutors to help students pass the civil service exams
  • Helps students choose which civil service roles to apply for
  • Crafts study plans
  • Explains answers to exam questions
  • Cheaper than hiring a human tutor
  • This is the latest iteration of Chinese "edtech" firms
  • Let's see how long they last before Xi Jinping cracks down on them too
• A profile of the Chinese woman who was killed while defending a Japanese student and his mother from a stabbing attack
  • What this story says is less interesting than the fact that it exists in the first place
  • The existence of this story tells us that the Chinese government is trying to tamp down online nationalism
  • Notably, the woman was a migrant, which makes the existence of this story doubly surprising: Chinese state news doesn't usually highlight actions taken by migrant workers, especially when they're defending Japanese

2024-07-12 Friday

• Redbox files for Chapter 7 liquidation
  • Verge feature story explaining RedBox's demise
  • Employees' health insurance contributions and 401(k) deductions reportedly misplaced
  • I had no idea Redbox was in so much trouble
  • I thought they'd found a relatively stable niche as the replacement for Blockbuster and Netflix's DVD rental business for people who still wanted to watch movies on DVD or Blu Ray
• The EU alleges that Twitter's paid verification system violates the Digital Services Act
  • Argues that the paid verification is a violation of the EU's regulations on dark patterns
  • Also alleges that Twitter fails to comply with advertising transparency requirements, by failing to maintain a public database of ads
  • EU regulations state that researchers should be allowed to scrape data from Twitter, which Twitter currently prohibits
  • I will never call it X
• SpaceX suffers its first malfunction since 2016
  • First stage booster performed nominally
  • Upper-stage engine failure as it was deploying Starlink satellites
  • Will require a mishap investigation from the FAA
  • Places doubts on the scheduling of Polaris Dawn and the next crew transfer to the ISS

2024-07-10 Wednesday

• AMD buys Silo AI, in an effort to compete with nVidia
  • Silo AI is a Finnish startup that's one of the largest AI model builders in Europe-
  • Makes the "Poro" family open-source models (rather like Mistral, I guess?)
  • All-cash 665 million dollar deal
  • Will be interesting to see if this draws anti-trust attention: EU regulators have not been favorable towards EU tech companies getting bought out by American firms lately
  • I'm skeptical of this deal; "Poro" is not a well-known model
  • I don't see how acquiring a model builder helps AMD's Triton compete with nVidia's CUDA
  • Maybe the strategy is to acquire Silo AI, port its models to Triton and release them as a way to drive further usage of Triton?
• The Mirage, the first Las Vegas resort hotel, is closing
  • Built in 1989, by Steve Wynn, one of the first outside financiers to enter the Las Vegas market
  • Focused on being a destination: pioneered the themed hotel with an indoor volcano that erupted nightly and a 20,000 gallon fish tank
  • The success of The Mirage paved the way for Ceasar's Palace, Bellagio, Excalibur, Luxor and Treasure Island
  • However, The Mirage has failed to keep up with its more modern rivals, and was sold to Hard Rock International in 2022
  • Hard Rock will be shutting down the hotel, extensively renovating it, and will re-open it in 2027

2024-07-09 Tuesday

• The Ukrainian power grid is already under severe strain
  • Widespread electricity cuts
  • Some areas reporting outages of over 12 hours per day
  • And it's not even winter yet
  • The consequences of the lack of air-defense ammunition for Ukraine are beginning to be felt

2024-07-08 Monday

• Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges
  • This was due to prosecutors bringing charges that had been deferred in 2021 over the crashes of the 737 Max in Ethiopia and Indonesia
  • Boeing will pay a fine of $243.6 million
  • Will spend an additional $455 million on increased safety training and compliance programs
  • The court will appoint an independent monitor, who will file annual public progress reports for three years to judge Boeing's compliance
  • Guilty plea will make it more difficult for Boeing to secure government contracts: will have to seek exemption from Department of Defense before it is allowed to bid on contracts
  • Full plea agreement will be filed by July 19
• Iran expands missile production facilities
  • Facilities being expanded are the Modarres military base and the Khojir production facility
  • Numerous new buildings, surrounded by earthen berms for explosion containment
  • Missile production likely expanding to meet increased Russian demands for the war in Ukraine

2024-07-05 Friday

• A deep dive into the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's GPU
  • Appears to be a scaled up version of the Adreno 730 that comes with the Snapdragon 8 series phone chip
  • Competent GPU design, but is slow, even compared to Intel and AMD integrated GPUs
  • DRAM bandwidth is better than comparable integrated GPU designs from Intel and AMD
  • Low cache bandwidth
  • Insufficient register file capacity
  • Much worse at compute workloads than at graphics workloads
  • AMD's integrated GPUs, as usual, are the best of the lot
  • Snapdragon X Elite doesn't lose any performance on battery power (arguably because it doesn't have that much performance to begin with)
  • Older DirectX 11 games have rendering artifacts, possibly due to driver issues
  • Manual driver update process requires extracting and manually installing .cab files, and different platforms have different drivers
  • It seems like Qualcomm carried over their driver process from their phone hardware
• Micro-mechanical resonators as a replacement for quartz crystals
  • Historically, the clock signals for chips have been provided by piezoelectric quartz
  • SiTime claims that MEMS resonators are
    • Cheaper to manufacture (as they can be made using repurposed lithography equipment for computer chips)
    • More accurate than quartz crystals
    • Less susceptible to variability due to thermal or electrical changes in the environment, which is especially important for embedded or wearable devices
    • Much higher MTBF
  • MEMS resonators are not new technology: first models were made in 1968, by IBM
  • However quartz was cheaper, at the time, and easier to scale
  • The biggest obstacle to wider adoption of MEMS oscillators is that quartz is well understood and thoroughly integrated into chip design workflows
• Russia has debuted UAVs that are specialized for air-to-air UAV combat
  • UAVs continue to mirror the evolution of manned aircraft
• The Ukrainian utility DTEK has reported that 90% of its generation capacity has been damaged or destroyed by Russian strikes
  • Russia has successfully attacked Ukraine's power infrastructure all throughout 2024
  • Ukraine doesn't have enough air-defense infrastructure (and, for a while was running out of ammunition for its existing launchers)
  • This bodes ill for the coming winter for Ukraine
• Video of a Russian tank withstanding multiple FPV drone hits
  • Drones are not a replacement for artillery and ATGMs, they are a complement

2024-07-04 Thursday

• ROSTEC announces that it will be localizing production of ammunition in India
  • The ammunition in question will be the BM42 "Mango" projectile
  • In addition, Rostec has announced that propellant production will be localized
  • This allows India to become more self-sufficient in sustaining its T-72 and T-90 tanks
  • The interesting question is whether Russia will re-import these projectiles from India
• Canada enacts a digital services tax, risking US retaliation
  • Canada implemented a 3% levy on revenue collected in Canada by foreign technology companies
  • The tax has been opposed by the Biden administration which alleges that it violates Canada's obligations under the USMCA trade agreement
  • Canada is also considering a tax on foreign streaming services, such as Netflix, Hulu, and Disney Plus to subsidize the production of Canadian film, television and music

2024-07-03 Wednesday

• Houthis adopt USVs in order to strike ships in the Red Sea
  • Using swarming tactics
  • Possibly inspired by Ukrainian tactics in the Black Sea
  • USV strikes contributed to the sinking of the MV Tutor, a Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier
• Chinese local governments allowed to buy Teslas as official vehicles
  • Tesla and Volvo are the only foreign brands allowed for local governments to buy
  • The restrictions on Teslas entering government and military facilities have been lifted
  • Volvo almost doesn't count because it's owned by a Chinese brand, Geely
  • This is especially interesting because previously, the Chinese government was restricting Tesla, because they were worried about data collection

2024-07-02 Tuesday

• The underground network ferrying nVidia chips to China
  • US export restrictions prohibit nVidia from selling its most advanced chips in China
  • However small quantities of these chips are being smuggled in by informal buyers and couriers who buy the chips in the US or Singapore
  • These buyers take advantage of a loophole wherein re-export of nVidia chips from countries like Singapore isn't illegal
  • The scale of smuggling, however, is tiny in comparison to the overall demand for nVidia's chips; 12,500 chips are known to be smuggled, as compared with 2.6 million sold legitimately
  • This means that 0.4% of nVidia's top end chips go to China
  • I'm not concerned about this; nVidia's chips are important, but having a few thousand won't meaningfully help China catch up to the US in AI
• China is expanding its influence in Central Asia, at Russia's expense
  • China is investing significantly in Central Asia to give it a land route to Europe that bypasses Russia
  • Central Asian countries are becoming more economically integrated with China, with trade tripling to $98 billion dollars per year
  • China is providing green energy infrastructure (solar panels, wind turbines) at discounted rates to Central Asian governments to allow them to wean themselves off Russian natural gas, which they fear might be used as a source of leverage against them
• United Airlines uses AI to help craft messages informing why their flight is delayed
  • Previously, the airline was using a team of human "storytellers" to take in messages from the operations center, collate information, remove industry jargon and craft customized text messages explaining delays
  • In order to expand the number of flights that are eligible for these customized messages, United is turning to AI to do the job of the human storytellers
  • This is the sort of thing that I'd expect AI to do well: take a bunch of reports, and come up with a coherent sounding summary rephrased to avoid jargon

2024-07-01 Monday

• New Delhi Airport's Terminal 1 likely to be closed for weeks
  • Outdoor canopy collapsed under heavy rain on Friday
  • 1 person was killed in the collapse
  • A full inspection of the wreckage will have to be carried out before debris can be cleared
• EU alleges "Pay or OK" violates the DMA
  • In response to the EU Digital Markets Act, Meta created a system where users of Facebook could pay to opt out from tracking and advertising
  • Today, the European Commission found that "pay or OK" still violates the DMA
  • The EU wants Meta to offer a service that allows users to opt out of personal tracking, but is otherwise equivalent to the "personalized ads" based experience
  • Okay, but if you don't allow Facebook to charge for subscriptions, and you don't allow Facebook to offer advertising, then how exactly is Facebook supposed to make money?
  • At what point does Meta decide that the EU is too much trouble and that Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer going to be available in the EU?

2024-06-30 Sunday

• The US Justice Department will file criminal charges against Boeing over 737 Max crashes
  • US Justice Department had reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing in 2021 where the prosecution over the 737 Max crashes would be dropped if Boeing had no further safety violations for three years
  • The Alaska Airlines door panel blowout occurred just before the three year period was up
  • Therefore, prosecutors are alleging that Boeing has failed to live up to the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement, and therefore needs to be subject to a criminal trial for negligence leading to the fatal crashes of the 737 Max
• Spirit Aerosystems to be split between Boeing and Airbus
  • Boeing will be acquiring the majority of Spirit Aerosystems for $4.7 billion in stock
  • Airbus will acquire the company's European operations, which had been making parts for it, in exchange for 559 million dollars in compensation
  • Spirit had been originally spun out of Boeing in 2005

2024-06-28 Friday

• The Supreme Court overturns Chevron v. NRDC
  • Chevron v. NRDC was a 1984 precedent that held that courts should defer to Executive Branch agencies in interpreting administrative law
  • The precedent had already been weakened by the "major questions doctrine" introduced in West Virginia v. EPA, which stated that questions of "economic or political significance" must be decided by Congress

2024-06-27 Thursday

• Amazon is about to launch a new discount service to compete with Shein and Temu
  • Ship products directly from China to consumers in 9 to 11 days
  • Products will be part of a new channel on Amazon.com
• Amazon is using generative AI in its financial division
  • Some areas of generative AI use
    • Fraud detection
    • Contract review
      • Looks at reference data, company policies, and previous contract history
      • Recommends changes to company policies needed to accommodate contract terms
    • Financial forecasting
      • Generative AI can help create queries to more efficiently gather certain financial data to generate forecasts
    • Interpretation of regulations
    • Tax-related work
      • Validate inbound invoices for VAT compliance
  • Amazon employees use an in-house AI builder based on AWS Bedrock to create their internal tools
  • Most of these AI uses are pretty predictable
  • I was initially surprised to see AI involved in financial forecasting, but it makes sense when you realize that the AI isn't actually doing the forecasting, it's writing the PowerBI (or whatever equivalent system Amazon uses internally) queries that gather the data that go into the forecasts
  • Instead of creating a centralized tool, Amazon has created an internal build-your-own AI system that allows employees to automate whatever parts of their job they feel would be best handed off to an AI
• Companies are having issues with generative AI tools
  • AI tools often give answers based on the wrong data (e.g. using last year's data instead of current numbers)
  • Often the databases going into the AI are incorrect or outdated: enterprises have poor internal documentation, which leads to incorrect answers from the AI
  • In order to help enterprises manage how their AIs generate answers, Microsoft has introduced additional tooling which will help enterprises direct their AIs to retrieve information from authoritative systems of record rather than random e-mails
  • Some see AI as beneficial in this sense, because it's forcing enterprises to properly organize their internal documentation, a task that they might have been sluggish about in the past
  • If AI forces companies to get their SharePoint houses in order, it will have been worth it even if it does nothing else
• The Financial Accounting Standards Board approves new regulations which will force publicly traded companies to break out the cost of employee compensation
  • Each expense line item on the income statement will have to be broken down
  • Companies will have to disclose how much of their cost-of-goods-sold goes to employee compensation
  • Will be required for 2027 annual reports
  • Companies will have to carry out additional work to gather the data needed for these disclosures
• Trucking company US Logistics Solutions shuts down
  • One of the largest trucking bankruptcies since the collapse of Yellow
  • US Logistics Solutions was a specialist in shipping apparel to stores
  • Trucking sector is struggling amid a post-pandemic slump in demand
  • When there is a shortage of truckers, it's front-page news
  • When there is a surplus of truckers, it's buried in a specialty section of the Wall Street Journal
  • This is why people believe there's always a shortage of truckers
• The US, Israel and Ukraine are in talks to send up to 8 additional Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine
  • Israel is replacing the Patriots with more advanced systems
  • Would represent a change in Israeli policy, which has been somewhat conciliatory towards Russia
  • Possibly caused by Israeli concerns about increasing cooperation between Russia and Iran
  • In addition to the launchers, Israel will reportedly send a large batch of missiles

2024-06-26 Wednesday

• Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been elected as the next NATO Secretary-General
  • Replaces Jens Stoltenberg
  • Advocates a policy of continuity re: Ukraine
  • Is stepping down from the Dutch Prime Ministership after the right-wing party of Geert Wilders gained ground in the Dutch parliamentary elections
• EU imposes further sanctions on Russian natural gas
  • Bans re-export of Russian natural gas to third countries through EU ports
  • Restricts EU nations from providing natural gas processing equipment to Russia
  • However, EU nations are still allowed to buy Russian natural gas for themselves

2024-06-25 Tuesday

• Denmark to charge farmers €100 per cow per year to address climate change
  • Tax will be introduced in 2030
  • Charges €16 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted: works out to €96.50 per cow per year on average
  • It's important to note that the farmers haven't agreed to this; the Danish farmer's association has already come out against the deal
  • I'm predicting that this tax will be delayed or repealed after protests
• Autonomous target identification in Ukraine
  • A drone identifies potential ground targets using AI image recognition
  • This is an example of the autonomous targeting capabilities referred to in The Economist article from 2024-06-21, about the use of AI in warfare
• The Biden Administration is considering allowing US contractors to go into Ukraine
  • Right now, Ukrainians are entirely responsible for in-country repairs, aided by video chat from US bases
  • Equipment that is too severely damaged to be repaired by the Ukrainians must be sent to a NATO country (Poland, Slovakia)
  • This would allow US contractors to go into Ukraine to conduct more extensive repairs and maintenance without having to send the equipment out of the country
  • Especially needed as Ukraine gets F-16s, which have more complex maintenance and repair needs
  • Ukraine will not have the same level of contractor presence that Iraq and Afghanistan did; a few hundred at most compared to the thousands of contractors that were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • This makes sense, but despite what the Biden administration says, this is somewhat escalatory
  • Regardless of how many contractors there are, they will be a target for Russian attacks
• Trump advisers propose peace plan for Ukraine
  • Position paper proposed by the America First Policy Institute
  • Ukraine and Russia will be told to negotiate an end to hostilities
  • Negotiations will be based on current battlefield front-lines
  • If Ukraine doesn't agree to negotiate, aid will be cut off
  • If Russia doesn't agree to negotiate, aid to Ukraine will be increased
  • The problem is that this gives Russia most of what it wants: Ukrainian territory
  • Of course Putin will state that he is open to negotiation. Why wouldn't he, when his troops control approximately 20% of Ukraine, and the initial basis for negotiations will be him keeping that 20%
  • The actual policy paper website is very strange: spends more space criticizing Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan and having a "weak" China policy than it does actually laying out its proposal on Ukraine
  • Says that Trump's strong foreign policy deterred Russia, but that Biden's hostility to Russia provoked the war
  • Gives credit to Trump for "unblocking" deliveries of Javelin missiles to Ukraine… without mentioning that he was the one who blocked them in the first place
  • Blames the Biden administration for "provoking" Russia by giving Ukraine implicit security guarantees, but also blames the Biden administration for giving Ukraine insufficient support: they say that the Biden administration's lukewarm support for Ukraine's eventual NATO membership provoked Russia, but also that the Biden administration is to blame for not immediately giving Ukraine tanks and fighter jets at the outset of hostilities
• Waymo opens its service to everyone in San Francisco
  • This is the second market that Waymo has opened itself to, after Phoenix, AZ

2024-06-24 Monday

• New supplies of Western ammunition are finally making it to the Ukrainian front-line
  • The proof will be in the pudding; will Russian advances near Novooleksandrivka, Chasiv Yar, and Robotyne be stopped?
• How Ukrainian naval drones turned the tide of battle in the Black Sea
  • Ukraine has sunk or damaged 24 Russian ships using naval drones
  • Has caused Russia to disperse its fleet from Sevastopol
  • Allows Ukraine to resume exports from Odessa
  • Recently Ukraine has experimented with mounting MLRS on naval drones and using them to attack targets on land
  • Ukraine has also used naval drones to attack the Kerch Strait bridge, causing more damage than the truck bomb attack and preventing Russia from sending heavy equipment over the bridge

2024-06-23 Sunday

• Thales readies a radio-frequency directed energy anti-drone weapon for Ukraine
  • Goal is to provide a more cost-effective anti-drone solution
  • Estimated to be ready by the end of the year
  • This will put further pressure on Russia to build full autonomy into its drones
• Not all wars end with negotiations
  • The Falklands War is an example of war where all the conditions were in place for a negotiated settlement
    • The British task force would take weeks to arrive at the Falklands, so there was time for negotiations before fighting started
    • Conflict would be necessarily limited by logistical concerns
    • The Falklands weren't of vital strategic interest to either the British or the Argentinians: war was likened to "two bald men arguing over a comb"
    • The US invested significant effort into communicating with both sides: had good relations with both the UK government and the Argentine military junta, and had no desire to see a war take place in its hemisphere
  • Yet despite these "optimal" conditions, negotiations still failed to prevent armed conflict
  • The problem is that once the Argentinians initiated the conflict by invading the Falklands, the space for negotiations for both governments narrowed significantly
    • The Argentine military junta found that invading the Falklands was by far the most popular thing they'd done, so couldn't be seen to be backing down in the face of a potential UK military response
    • Margaret Thatcher's reputation as a hard-liner on foreign policy would have been fatally undermined by acquiescing to the forced loss of sovereign territory by a military dictatorship
  • Wars may start for "transactional" reasons, but once the war has started and lives have been lost, the positions of both sides tend to ossify, and even though more-or-less temporary cease-fires may be negotiated, a permanent settlement to the conflict often comes years or decades later, if it comes at all
  • The Korean War, for example, still has not come to a formal end, despite having started in 1950
  • I would disagree, however, with the piece's core assertion that wars "usually" don't end with negotiated solutions
  • Freedman and I disagree over what it means for a war to "end"
  • I see the "temporary" armistice that ended hostilities on the Korean peninsula as an "end" to the war
  • However, Freedman disagrees, because the armistice was not a permanent settlement, and technically either side could resume fighting at a moment's notice
  • Similarly, do I expect Ukraine and Russia to come to an agreement over the final settlement of Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, etc? No. Do I expect the fighting to eventually stop with a "temporary" cease-fire that could last decades, if not forever? Yes.
• An analysis of Putin's new deputy defense ministerial appointments
  • The appointment of both Leonid Gornin and Anna Tsivileva is an effort to balance competing priorities
  • Guarantee the status of his family while also ensuring that competent people are in charge of the war effort
  • Others who gained promotions
    • Dmitry Patrushev, son of Nikolai Patrushev, the (former) head of the Russian Security Council
    • Boris Kovalchuk, son of Yuri Kovalchuk, a banking and media billionaire who is one of Putin's closest allies
  • Elevating these sons is a means of ensuring the continued status of Putin's allies
  • However, these promotions could prove destabilizing in the long run, as people from different families with competing interests race to secure their positions for a post-Putin future
  • Another motivation for promoting Anna Tsivileva into the Defense Ministry could be to give Putin a direct line into the lower levels of the ministry, enabling him to bypass Belousov if needed

2024-06-21 Friday

• Amazon reportedly preparing paid, premium version of Alexa
  • Alexa has never been profitable for the company
  • Has reportedly failed at its primary purpose of driving additional sales
  • Is reportedly an effort by Amazon to keep up with the offerings from generative AI companies
  • No tie-in with Prime membership
  • That's a huge mistake, IMO
• FDA authorizes a flavored vape product from Altria
  • Flavor is just menthol, an existing cigarette flavor
  • FDA requires vape manufacturers to show that they are primarily a stop-smoking tool and will not cater to new users
  • Even though the approved flavor is just menthol, I'm still surprised that they did this, given how anti-vaping they've been lately
• Russia is expropriating property in Mariupol
  • Property owners have to be present, with Russian documentation, in order for their property to be marked as occupied
  • Unoccupied property will be marked for demolition or sale
  • Russian real estate agents are showing off apartments in which the previous owners' belongings are clearly visible
• What went wrong for Huy Fong sriracha
  • Huy Fong Foods' sriracha sauce has long been the most popular and recognizable sriracha brand
  • Had financial disagreements with its supplier of vine-reddened jalapeno peppers, Underwood Ranches
  • Switched to alternative growers, whose product was not as consistent
  • This has opened the market for alternative srirachas, such as one from McIlhenny, manufacturer of Tabasco Sauce
  • Underwood Ranches has also launched its own sriracha brand
  • I was wondering why new Huy Fong sriracha was less spicy than the old version
  • Perhaps it's worth giving some other brands a try, like the one from Trader Joe's
• US pauses deliveries of Patriot interceptor missiles to other nations in order to prioritize air defenses for Ukraine
  • US has also reportedly secured commitments from other countries to supply more air defense systems to Ukraine
  • Italy has agreed to send a SAMP/T air defense system
  • Air defense exports to Taiwan are not expected to be affected by this reprioritization
• The enforcement of sanctions against Russian businessmen involved in the war effort could be improved
  • Russian UAV manufacturer Albatros and its chief designer, Aleksei Florov are under US sanctions for their involvement in creating drones for Russia's war in Ukraine, most notably in their efforts to build local production of Iranian Shahed drones
  • However, they are still able to trade with companies in US-allied nations
  • While many of these transactions go through intermediaries, often located in China, there are still a few direct transactions, which should be totally disallowed by the US sanctions regime
  • This highlights the limitations of economic sanctions in limiting Russian companies' access to the tools and supplies they need to build weapons
• South Korea is reportedly reconsidering its decision against supplying weapons to Ukraine
  • South Korea has a policy against supplying weapons to countries involved in active hostilities, which has prevented it from supplying weapons to Ukraine
  • However, an exception to that policy is being considered in light of the recent mutual defense pact between North Korea and Russia
• Airbus and Boeing near deal to carve up Spirit AeroSystems
  • Airbus is reportedly planning on buying up the facilities that Spirit was using to build parts for it
  • This would allow Boeing to buy up the majority of Spirit and reintegrate it into the company
• NASA delays return of Starliner from June 26 to an indefinite date in July
  • Original date was set prior to a review meeting discussing helium leaks and reaction-control system thruster failures
  • NASA is likely not comfortable with the planning for contingencies during the return from the ISS
  • This Starliner is only rated for 45 days in space, starting on June 6
  • Has to return before July 21
• India's state television broadcaster, Doordashan, has introduced a pair of AI news anchors
  • Will host shows on Kishan, a channel aimed at providing news to farmers
  • Designed to provide information on commodity prices, farming trends, and updates on agricultural research
  • Only the anchors are synthetic, the news copy is still written by humans
• Detailed article on how AI is changing warfare
  • Describes "StormCloud", a British experiment in using AI-enhanced command-and-control software, along with mesh networks, to enable troops to coordinate among themselves and designate targets for strikes without involving higher command
  • AI is already being used to determine which parts should be kept in inventory
  • However, the AI model did worse at maintaining inventory of parts that rarely failed
  • As the Naval Logistics In Contested Environments report points out, this is a significant vulnerability
  • Parts that rarely fail in peacetime will often fail at much higher rates during wartime conditions
  • An AI or statistical maintenance model trained on peacetime or low-intensity data may not maintain correct inventories of munitions and spares for wartime, leading to shortages
  • In Ukraine, both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are equipping drones with image recognition systems to allow them to autonomously identify targets
  • It's easy to say during peacetime that fully automated killbots are bad, but when fully automated killbots are the only thing preventing a hostile adversary from capturing more of their nation's territory, people will make the killbots
  • AI has arguably more potential augmenting intelligence gathering, reconnaissance and data processing than it does in augmenting actual weapons
    • Processing satellite imagery to automatically detect and categorize troop movements and weapons deployments
    • Analyzing sonar data from USVs and UUVs to detect underwater mines
    • Using speech-to-text to automatically transcribe intercepted communications so that they can be searched
  • Advanced AI systems blur the line between C2 (command and control) and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance)
  • Skeptics argue that AI systems are too easily fooled and result in too many false positives
  • However, proponents of AI argue that, in the stress of combat, humans make mistakes too, and unlike a human, an AI won't be swayed by stress or hatred
  • Furthermore, the high-intensity war situations that many AI systems are being designed for aren't situations where civilians are likely to be present
  • I'm not sure about that: the war in Ukraine was high intensity in its opening phases, and those opening phases took place in areas around Kyiv and Kharkiv where there was a large civilian presence
  • It's not necessarily realistic to suggest that civilians will be able to evacuate or hunker down in advance of a high intensity conflict
  • Another possible drawback of AI is humans becoming too dependent on AI
  • During the current Gaza war, Israel used a tool called Project Lavender, which was designed to identify potential terrorist targets
  • Reportedly, Israeli troops rubber-stamped the target lists generated by Lavender, without subjecting them to any additional scrutiny
  • Although there are efforts to regulate autonomous weapons via international law, even defining what constitutes an autonomous weapon is tricky
    • UN defines autonomous weapons as anything capable of targeting based on a general profile
    • Proposes regulating autonomous weapons that are capable of targeting individual people
    • However the US and UK define autonomous weapons as anything capable of identifying, selecting, and attacking targets without context-appropriate human intervention, a much more stringent standard
    • I think the US​/UK definition makes a lot more sense: under the UN definition, missile defense systems are "autonomous weapons"
    • I also disagree with the UN's targeting criteria distinction: what is the difference between an autonomous drone that targets a 6-man infantry squad patrolling on foot and an autonomous weapon targeting a vehicle with a 6-man infantry squad riding inside?
    • Military vehicles can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish from civilian vehicles, and, as we've seen in Ukraine, military units will often press civilian vehicles into service as ad hoc transports
    • The laws of war are structured around what you do, not who you are, and we shouldn't change that
  • A fraught topic is using AI to make decisions in a nuclear context
  • Russia reportedly has integrated AI into its "dead hand" system designed to automatically order a retaliatory strike against an adversary that has successfully incapacitated the Russian leadership
  • The good news about AI is that it doesn't seem like China has much of a lead any more
  • The Chinese military-industrial complex is also bureaucratic and sclerotic, and that, combined with the effect of chip export bans has prevented China from sprinting ahead on military AI
  • One thing that the article doesn't adequately address is the "valley of death" separating one-off R&D science projects from widely deployed systems in the military
  • Many of the projects and initiatives listed are funded by grants from DARPA or various other research organizations
  • Even if these projects demonstrate great success, there's no guarantee that they'll receive funding in a timely manner to become products that the average soldier has access to

2024-06-19 Wednesday

• Boeing's Starliner delays its return once again
  • Original return date was June 14
  • Return delayed until June 26
  • NASA is leaving Starliner attached to the ISS longer than anticipated while it studies the effect of helium leaks
  • Five helium leaks on board
  • Spacecraft has 70 hours of helium remaining, and requires 7 hours of helium to complete a safe return
  • Had five temporary thruster failures as the vehicle docked with the ISS
  • Starliner continues to be a fiasco
• Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un sign a mutual defense agreement
  • Apparently, Russia is shipping oil to North Korea as well, in violation of UN sanctions that Russia had agreed to in the past
  • So that's what Kim Jong-Un is getting in exchange for all the artillery shells and missiles he sent to Russia

2024-06-18 Tuesday

• Apple's next generation CarPlay
  • Apple's next generation CarPlay is going to be a UI for the entire car
  • Not just a pass through of your phone's UI
  • Will involve two-way data transfer between the phone and the head unit
  • Will handle "core" dashboard functionality like showing speedometer, HVAC controls, etc.
  • Wireless only
  • I'm not sure I like this
  • Do I really want a smartphone interface for HVAC controls? No! I want physical buttons for HVAC controls
• Technology woes continue to erode new vehicle dependability
  • Historically there has been a high correlation between initial quality reports and the vehicle dependency survey, which polls automobile owners who've had their car for three years
  • However, lately, that relationship has begun to break down
  • The chief culprit is technology
    • Android Auto and Apple CarPlay issues are most prevalent
    • Another widely reported source of issues is with built-in voice recognition systems
    • Owners also report dissatisfaction with automated driver assistance systems (ADAS) alerts
      • Do not get used to overactive ADAS
      • ADAS false alarms might actually get more irritating over time
  • EV owners experience more issues
    • Battery EV owners report having to replace their tires at nearly twice the rate of gas powered vehicles; likely due to BEVs being heavier than their gas or hybrid counterparts
  • Overall, it seems like cars have been wholly captured by the third-user effect
  • Car manufacturers are great at catering to car buyers, but horrible at catering to car owners
  • Furthermore, car buyers seriously overestimate the reliability of the whiz-bang assistance features they're buying, and seriously underestimate how annoyed they'll be when those features start throwing false alarms
  • It's easy to be impressed by a demo that shows a forward collision alarm automatically braking and preventing you from running into an inflatable pole, but difficult to understand just how annoying that same system will be when it goes off every time the car in front of you slows fractionally
• Proton switching to a nonprofit foundation ownership model
  "We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”)," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. "Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core."
  • Foundation incorporated in Switzerland
  • Swiss foundations do not have shareholders: are obligated to act in accordance with their charter
  • Proton's charter obligates it to respect privacy to the greatest extent possible under Swiss law
• A report from the Kharkiv front, from near Vovchansk
  • Lots of UMPK glide bombs being used by the VKS
  • Not many armored vehicles, leading to lots of Russian infantry casualties
  • The armored vehicles that are in evidence appear to be operated by relatively inexperienced crew, relative to those fighting around Bakhmut/Donetsk
  • Reinforces earlier assessments that the Kharkiv offensive is meant more to draw Ukrainian forces away from other, higher priority areas, than it is to actually pose a threat to Kharkiv
  • Russian leadership understands that the Ukrainian military cannot simply retreat to Kharkiv city itself: defending the city from artillery barrages is an important political priority, so the Ukrainian military has to push back against Russian attacks in order to prevent Russian artillery systems and MLRS from targeting Kharkiv
  • Shows the casual disregard that Russian leadership has towards their troops' lives: the Russian soldiers around Kharkiv are being sacrificed like pawns in order to enable the Russian military to have the opportunity to advance near Donetsk
• A captured T-62 turtle tank
  • A video showing what's underneath the superstructure
  • One interesting thing about the latter video is the prominent red "1941"
  • Shows just how obsessed Russians are with World War 2: ordinary soldiers are decorating their tanks as if they're T-34s marching to Berlin
• Putin fires four deputy defense ministers
  • Likely a continuation of the purge that saw Minister of Defense Shoigu replaced with Andrey Belousov
  • Fired deputy ministers are
    • Nikolai Pankov
    • Ruslan Tsalikov
    • Tatiana Shevtsova
    • Pavel Popov
  • Replacements are
    • Oleg Savelyev
    • Pavel Fradkov
    • Leonid Gornin
    • Anna Tsivileva
  • Anna Tsivileva is a daughter of one of Putin's cousins
  • Leonid Gornin is the former first deputy finance minister
  • The article focuses on the fact Tsivileva being related to Putin, but I think the bigger factor is that Leonid Gornin, who is being appointed as the first deputy, is from the Ministry of Finance
  • One of the recurring themes of the war has been the relative overperformance of Russia's economic elites and the relative underperformance of its military elites
  • The Russian military has floundered in Ukraine, but the Russian economy has weathered unprecedented sanctions relatively well
  • I think what we're seeing now is Putin recognizing that and putting the competent people more directly in charge of ensuring that the Russian defense industrial complex can sustain a long war
• Russia is scouring China for used CNC machine tools
  • Russian subsidiaries and distributors are buying secondhand Western machine tools in China, and then re-importing them into Russia, skirting sanctions
  • As pointed out in the Rhodus Intelligence Report, "How Does Russia Make Missiles", the key bottleneck for Russian missiles isn't semiconductors, it's precision metal forming and cutting equipment: namely CNC machine tools
  • Russia produces virtually none of its own machine tools
  • As a result, Russian manufacturers are doing whatever they can to smuggle machine tools in from the West and from China
  • The CNC machines they're importing are decades old, in some cases, but decades old American or Japanese CNC tools are still far beyond what Russia can make natively

2024-06-17 Monday

• Russia is using fast attack craft to counter Ukrainian naval drones
  • High-speed boats armed with lots of machine guns and thermal sights
• More drone vs. drone combat from Ukraine
  • Ukraine is using FPV drones to counter Russian unmanned ground vehicles
• Verstka article on the treatment of people who are deserting or refusing to serve in the Russian army (GPT translation)
  • Soldiers who are suspected of deserting are being sent back to the front at gunpoint
  • Medical exceptions are not being honored by the Russian military: soldiers requesting exemptions due medical conditions, many of which have been acquired during the war, are being rounded up and sent to the front
  • Relatives don't know where their loved ones are being sent
  • Used in support units in order to free up experienced soldiers for front-line duty
  • Some are also being sent to combat units to be used as shock troops
• RFERL article on voluntary enlistment in the Russian military
  • The military and weapons manufacturers pay wages that are well above average
  • These wages, plus death benefits for widows and parents, are leading to genuine economic improvements in Russia's underdeveloped eastern regions
  • The war has offered many poor people in these regions a level of upward social and economic mobility that they wouldn't otherwise have
  • States that the death toll from the war has been estimated by the US at 315,000
  • The signing bonus alone for the Russian military is higher than the average annual salary
  • Salaries in the defense industry have likewise increased by 20-60%
  • These high salaries and benefits are contributing to high inflation
  • Also create a post-war problem: soldiers will come home being accustomed to high salaries
• Apple is shutting down its buy-now-pay-later service
  • Instead of offering its own service, Apple will be partnering with Affirm to offer buy-now-pay-later loans
  • BNPL never really made sense as an in-house offering, IMO
  • I think the writing was on the wall for this service when Goldman Sachs ended its partnership with Apple and backed out of consumer finance more generally
• This aged like milk
  • We're no closer to direct conflict with Russia today than we were before we sent tanks

2024-06-14 Friday

• EU prevents Meta from rolling out AI features based on user data
  • Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta's direct regulator in the EU walks back prior approval for these features after the European Center for Digital Rights filed a complaint
  • Complaint argued that opt-out was insufficient, given Meta's propensity to use dark patterns to make it difficult for users to opt out
  • Meta's "legitimate interests" do not cover using user-provided content to train AI
• Putin sets out ceasefire conditions
  • Ukraine must cede Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
  • Must never join NATO
  • Must pursue "demilitarization" and "denazification" (whatever that means)
  • Must forego nuclear weapons
  • In other words, "give me everything I want, and then I will go away"
• FAA investigating questionable titanium in Boeing and Airbus planes
  • Titanium came from a Turkish supplier who originally sourced it from China
  • Was sold to Spirit Aerosystems, which incorporated it into parts for both Boeing and Airbus
  • Although the documentation stated that the titanium came from Baoji Titanium, a reputable supplier, Baoji Titanium later said that it did not supply the titanium and had no business relationship with the reseller
  • Spirit is working to re-test the titanium and ensure that it does meet quality standards
• The EU has invested €70 million into developing an indigenous RISC-V CPU
  • Website of the European Processor Initiative
  • RISC-V will be used for the "accelerator processor" component of the EPI
  • An accelerator consists of a general purpose 64-bit RISC-V core coupled to 4 "vector tiles"
  • The test chip only contains 4 vector tiles, however the architecture is scalable and up to 512 vector tiles can be connected to a single CPU
  • Processor will be optimized to accelerate Iterative Stencil Loops
  • The architecture is very much like nVidia's all-in-one accelerator chip, with many vector processing units connected to a single CPU
  • However instead of the CPU being ARM, as in nVidia's case, it's RISC-V
  • €70 million is not very much at all to be spending on an initiative this ambitious, if the goal is to make a commercially viable chip
    • The RISC-V software ecosystem is far less mature than the software ecosystems for x86 or ARM, so quite a lot of investment will have to be made into getting competitive software
    • Without competitive software, it doesn't matter how good your hardware is: just look at AMD's attempts to compete with nVidia for machine learning accelerators
  • On the other hand, if the goal is to just make a proof of concept, it might be enough to make a demo system and get some research papers done
• Improving control-flow integrity on RISC-V
  • Contains an interesting discussion of how control-flow integrity mechanisms work in general
  • It's interesting (and somewhat depressing) to realize that the only reason we need CFI is because of the limitations of C

2024-06-13 Thursday

• How the far-right movement gained traction with European youth
  • Far-right is the new counterculture
  • The simple message on immigration resonates
  • Most youth still back leftist parties: growth among the far-right is a matter of degree rather than a total political reorientation
  • Right-wing parties seem to reach youth primarily through TikTok
  • This is different from the US, where TikTok is very much a bastion of left-wing politics
• Amazon announces plans to launch satellite internet in South America, competing with Starlink
  • Partnership with Vrio Corp, a US-based firm that resells DirecTV in South America
  • Will use Project Kuiper
  • Scheduled to come online by mid-2025
  • This is interesting, because it gives us a timeline for Project Kuiper launches
  • As far as I know, as of today, Amazon has no functioning Kuiper satellites in orbit, after it deorbited the prototype satellites
  • So this means that Amazon has roughly a year to launch a substantial number of satellites
• SES and Inmarsat get permits to deliver satellite internet to India , in partnership with the Reliance Jio cell network
  • Both Starlink and Project Kuiper have applied for permits to deliver satellite internet in India as well, but those permits have not been granted
• G7 negotiators reach provisional deal on $50bn loan to Ukraine
  • Loan will be financed by interest on Russia securities that were seized in 2022
  • Not sure what this means: "'It's done. At the sherpa level, it is agreed and I do not expect any leaders… to block it', said one of the officials who declined to be named.
  • What's the "sherpa level"
• Japanese researchers explore the use of free-electron lasers as high-intensity EUV light sources
  • Seems like this is still very far from production-ready
  • Wavelength measured in microns, rather than nanometers
  • Requires a huge particle accelerator
  • No mirrors or photoresists capable of handling light this intense
• The German Sailor Moon opening is a banger
• The US and Ukraine sign a bilateral security arrangement
  • Text of arrangement
  • Reuters coverage
  • Signed at the G-7 summit in Italy
  • 10-year agreement
  • Annual conference between US and Ukrainian defense officials
  • Civilian nuclear technology sharing
  • US pledges direct aid to Ukraine as well as support for Ukraine's defense-industrial base
  • Ukraine commits to further anti-corruption measures and to further modernization of its defense procurement procedures
  • Not sure what this means in the short-run, since right now Ukraine's defense procurement process is to take whatever equipment NATO countries can donate at short notice and try to cobble together seventeen different systems into a single coherent fighting force
  • Will require further support from Congress (which will entirely be dependent on election results)
  • Goal is to develop Ukraine's forces and build towards eventual NATO membership for Ukraine
  • Agreement will not necessarily be obsoleted by Ukrainian entry into NATO; agreement only states that the parties will "confer" on the future status of the arrangement if Ukraine joins NATO
  • This is probably intended to mean that if Ukraine enters NATO, there will be a conference at which point the US and Ukraine dissolve this agreement by mutual consent
  • However, there is nothing forcing this: technically, Ukraine might end up with a stronger security guarantee than NATO countries, insofar as it might have both a bilateral agreement with the United States and a multilateral security guarantee through NATO

2024-06-12 Wednesday

• The EU will impose 48% tariffs on Chinese electric cars
  • This is still well short of the 100% tariffs being imposed by the US
  • Some sources report this as a 38% tariff: that is because this is a 38% additional tariff on top of a 10% pre-existing tariff, so 48% total
• Four teachers from US college stabbed in China
• Elon drops lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman
  • Lawsuit never had much legal or evidentiary force behind it
• An update on Chinese fighter jets
  • Just as the US is working on the NGAD as a successor to the F-22, China is working on the J-XD as a successor to the J-20
  • The J-20A variant, which would be equipped with China's state-of-the-art homegrown WS-15 engines, does not seem to have reached mass production
  • It seems that Chinese production of the J-20 has reached 100 airframes per year
  • But they're all equipped with either WS-10 or Al-31 engines, which means that they don't have supercruise
  • The J-20A may represent a significant overhaul, comparable to the Block 4 upgrade for the F-35
  • The FC-31/J-35 carrier-based fighter has begun trials, on both the ski-jump equipped Liaoning and the catapult equipped Fujian
  • The status of the H-20 stealth bomber project is unclear: may have been shelved or deprioritized
  • Work on Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) is proceeding, but what shape those will take is unclear
• A technical that isn't a Toyota Hilux
  • Ukraine has built technicals out of Ford F-150s
  • Is this even allowed? Technicals are always Hiluxes! That's the rule!
• Ukraine is using US equipment in ways that it wasn't intended
  • Bradleys were supposed to be support vehicles
  • Ukraine is using them on their own in small groups
  • Soldiers praise the Bradley's ability to take punishment and protect its crew
  • Also still worry about ammunition shortages
• GM approves stock buyback because of improving EV profitability
  • The narrative of late is that EV sales, and their corresponding revenue has been below expectations
  • Manufacturers, especially American manufacturers, seem to be focusing more on (plug-in) hybrids over pure EVs
  • This could be the early signs of that narrative turning around, as EVs slowly gain popularity with more mainstream car buyers after quickly saturating the early adopters
  • Also might suggest that Tesla isn't necessarily reflective of the overall EV market: declines in Tesla sales might be the result of consumers souring on Tesla in particular rather than EVs in general

2024-06-11 Tuesday

• The economics department of the University of Genoa has a diesel-electric submarine
  • Does this mean that MIT is entitled to a Los Angeles-class?
• Chinese students use AI to defeat AI
  • Chinese universities often use AI detection tools on submitted papers
  • These tools often falsely flag human-written text as AI-generated
  • Ironically, as a result, some students are forced to use AI to rewrite their papers… to make them seem less AI-written
• Worker productivity is down due to an influx of new inexperienced workers
  • Lots of people switched jobs during the pandemic
  • Lots of people retired and left the labor force
  • This was encouraged by companies
  • Now companies are finding out that inexperienced workers aren't as productive as experienced workers, and that this is cutting into the cost savings of having inexperienced workers
  • This is an especially significant factor in fast-food and fast-casual restaurants
  • Boeing is also struggling with this , making it more difficult to turn around quality problems
  • In manufacturing, the problem is that the manufacturing sector in general has declined, so more workers are coming in with zero manufacturing experience
• The port of Baltimore has fully reopened
  • Faster than I expected
• A deep dive into the architecture of China's Longsoon processors
• The first joint venture between Rheinmetall and Ukroboronprom has started operating

2024-06-10 Monday

• Ukraine's 3rd assault brigade recruitment station at a comic and anime convention
  • Ukraine is about to deploy its most powerful weapon yet: Hatsune Miku
• A very detailed analysis of PMC Wagner's involvement in the battle for Bakhmut
  • Prigozhin's claim that Wagner suffered 20,000 KIA is likely very close to accurate
  • Of the prisoners recruited, one in three died
  • The KIA rate among prisoners was significantly higher than those among "free" mercenaries
  • Relatives of KIA prisoners were paid 5 million rubles or approximately 55,000 dollars

2024-06-09 Sunday

• Ukraine damages a Su-57 on the ground at Akhtubinsk with a drone strike
• France will be transferring Mirage-2000s to Ukraine
  • Cue the dead-eyed Ukrainian maintenance technician meme
• A thread on Shoigu's medals
  • Shoigu never served in the military
  • Wears a uniform anyway
  • Medals are all basically participation trophies
• While the situation is still challenging for Ukraine, it's becoming clear that the Russian offensive has not made any immediate breakthroughs

2024-06-07 Friday

• No one wants a new car any more
  • V8 engines
  • CD players
  • Stop-start engines
  • Lack of touch-screens
• Trump has a significant base of support in Silicon Valley
  • His most prominent supporter is David Sacks (lol)
  • Cryptocurrency venture capitalists who dislike the Biden Administration's hostility to crypto
• Mike Lynch is found not guilty on all counts
  • Rare case of a defendant helping their case by testifying on the stand
• Giorgia Meloni sparks controversy by issuing a stamp depicting Italo Foschi, founder of AS Roma and prominent supporter of Benito Mussolini
• The person who inspired the woman in "Baby Reindeer" is suing Netflix for defamation
• The "turtle tank" at home
  • On the one hand, what the heck, Russia?
  • On the other hand, what the heck, Ukraine, why are you wasting a FPV drone on this?
• Recruitment poster for the 3rd Assault Brigade, spotted in Kyiv
• Putin makes a good point
  • Most wars do end with negotiations, rather than unconditional surrender
  • World War 2 is not a typical war
  • However the bargaining position that each party has in negotiations is dependent on their battlefield positions when negotiations begin
• Russia is gearing up for another push in Ukraine

2024-06-02 Sunday

• Shein prepares for a London IPO
  • Seems like they're only listing in London because they couldn't list in the US
• Apparently Ahmedinejad has fallen out with the Iranian Revolutionary Council
  • Advocated for election reforms and limits on the power of Supreme Leader Khamenei

2024-05-31 Friday

• Russia is better at purchasing ammunition on the international market than the West is
  • The interesting thing is the implication that the Czech ammunition sourcing effort is for Soviet-spec 152 mm shells
  • Else why would Russia be competing with the Czech effort?
• A plausible explanation for why Cthulhu always seems to be swimming "left"
  • Constitutional originalism is the "second best" legal framework for all conservative factions
  • Gives conservatives the "house advantage" at the Supreme Court; they might not win all the time, but the odds are in their favor
  • Ironically wins as a matter of legal realism
  • Allows conservatives to claim that they are not winning at the Supreme Court, because any given faction of conservatives can look at Supreme Court decisions and see that a majority of them are either for liberals or for one of the other conservative factions

2024-05-30 Thursday

• American Airlines' bet on secular shifts in business travel changes did not pay off
  • American Airlines bet that business travel would be permanently reduced, and that it wouldn't need to offer incentives to travel agencies as a result
  • However, business travel has strongly rebounded, and American's business strategy has seen much of that benefit go to its rivals, like Delta or United
  • Another piece of evidence for the pandemic being just a blip
• The Biden administration has quietly relaxed its restrictions on Ukraine using American weapons to target Russian troops amassing near Kharkiv
• Wagner commanders: Where Are They Now?
  • Most of them have fanned out to various Ministry of Defense or Ministry of Interior units
  • One, controversially, has gone to Ramzan Kadyrov's Akhmat PMC
• Trump guilty of all counts in hush money trial
• The stereotypical hold music is known as "Opus Number One"
• China launches a rocket immediately offshore a major metropolis
  • Range safety is western decadence
  • This is a different rocket from the OrienSpace Gravity 1
  • However, the launcher appears to be either the same, or the same type of ship

2024-05-29 Wednesday

• A report from the front in Ukraine
  • Not that much new here
  • Kind of overemphasizes the role of FPV drones (as a lot of reports have done)
  • Still, it's a useful (if grim) picture of what life on and near the front line is like
• Blinken claims that US weapons deliveries have helped Ukraine stabilize the front line
• It's possible that Ukraine has made advances near Krasnohorivka
• A Russian FPV drone strikes a Ukrainian naval drone
  • This is the latest evolution of drone vs. drone combat
• A close-up of a Russian turtle tank
  • Reinforces the idea that there have been very few tank vs. tank battles in this war
  • Also that Russian tanks are willing to give up a significant amount of maneuverability in order to have protection against FPV drones
• According to this analysis, Starlink is profitable
• An instance of MySQL having better data consistency practices than Postgres

2024-05-28 Tuesday

• Common Soviet air defense systems and their corresponding NATO reporting names
• France allows Ukraine to strike inside Russia with its missiles
  • Unfortunately the permission is limited to only striking facilities and units that conduct strikes inside Ukraine directly: missile launchers, airbases, etc
  • Even with this permission, Ukraine could not have used French missiles to preemptively attack the Russian build-up prior to its second Kharkiv offensive, for example
• The Musk vs. Twitter of trucking company mergers

2024-05-27 Monday

• The case for a US Cyber Force
  • Arguably, though, this is a case for moving cyber operations out of the military altogether
  • In a sense, we already have a "cyber force", it's called the NSA
  • If we want a cyber-force more aligned with the military, why not have the DIA handle it?
• Vector databases and Retrieval Augmented Generation
• DeepL announces a 300 million dollar investment round at a 2 billion dollar valuation
  • The question I have is whether the valuation is justified, given that pretty much all generalist AI models have DeepL-level translation ability for the most common languages
  • It used to be that DeepL's differentiator was that it was far better at translation than Google Translate, but when ChatGPT can translate as well, or better than DeepL and do a bunch of other stuff besides, why would anyone pay for DeepL?
• Researchers have discovered an open-source Chinese data set consisting entirely of oblique and satellite images of Arleigh-Burke class destroyers
  • Just totally normal AI training data, right?
• Russia is still able to import European machinery to manufacture weapons
  • Yet more evidence that sanctions aren't effective as a means of crippling a war economy
• An analysis of the front-line hot-spots in the Ukraine war
  • Although Russia has increased the pressure significantly they have not yet achieved a significant breakthrough beyond the limited gains around Ocheretyne
  • However, Russia still has substantial reserves that they're likely holding back to exploit any cracks that may develop in Ukrainian defenses

2024-05-26 Sunday

• Trump booed and heckled at Libertarian convention
  • But why was Trump invited to the convention in the first place?
• Another instance of turbulence causing injuries
  • Thankfully the injuries were much less severe this time
  • Of course the plane is a Boeing: it wouldn't be a headline if it were an Airbus
• Republican areas have experienced higher inflation than Democratic areas
  • Combination of secular factors and higher inflation expectations
  • Gasoline is a larger component of Republican voters' spending baskets, so the jump in gasoline prices caused by the Ukraine war affected them more
  • Inflation expectations are converging, but it's a slow process
• Meet the startups seeking to dethrone nVidia
  • Cerebras, Groq, MatX
  • This is why I'm invested in Micron as well as nVidia: even if nVidia goes down, all of these other LLM replacements will require memory
  • It's increasingly apparent to me that the real hardware bottleneck is going to be supplies of HBM memory
• Airfish seeks to commercialize ekranoplans
• It takes many more drone hits than artillery hits to destroy a tank
  • 7 drone hits
  • That tank would have been gone after a single direct hit from a 155mm artillery shell
• Ukraine has apparently received air-launched GBU-39s in addition to the GLSDB

2024-03-28 Sunday

• Home Depot strikes a deal to acquire SRS Distribution for $18.25 billion
  • Home Depot struck a megadeal to acquire roofing supplies distributor SRS Distribution
  • Deal includes Home Depot assuming responsibility for SRS's $5.8 billion in debt
  • Home Depot has been working to increase its ability to serve professional customers, as well as do-it-yourselfers
  • Is anticipating that it can grow SRS's sales by improving its e-commerce system
  • Last year, Home Depot purchased Construction Resources, a commercial distributor of stone and porcelain tiles

2024-03-04 Monday

• Apple hit with $2 billion EU antitrust fine in Spotify case
  • The European Commission penalized Apple for preventing Spotify from notifying its users about alternative payment options outside of the App Store
  • Penalty is €1.84 billion
  • Ruling came after Spotify filed a complaint in 2019
  • Apple plans to appeal the ruling

2023-12-18 Monday

• Nippon Steel announces that it is acquiring US Steel for $14.1 billion
  • Nippon Steel is already one of the world's largest steel producers
  • Takeover of US Steel would make it a key supplier to the US auto industry
  • States that US Steel would retain an independent identity and its Pittsburgh headquarters as a fully-owned subsidiary of Nippon Steel
  • Nippon Steel would also honor existing labor contracts
  • Deal comes in the wake of US Steel rejecting an unsolicited takeover offer from Cleveland Cliffs, a rival US steel producer