Travel tips, coal, AGI, airships, the Roman Empire, Elon Musk, and more. Enjoy!
People travel to retreat (vacation) or to engage (experience and education). This is advice for the latter kind of traveler: “(1) organize travel around passions instead of destinations; (2) crash a wedding (you will be obliged to dance); (3) when visiting a [new] city, get a street food walking tour; (4) go to a cemetery […] and see how it's different and the same all at once; (5) enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage; (6) minimize the amount of time spent in transit […] it’s far better to spend more time in a few places than a little time in lots of places; (7) for a memorable trip, go without reservations; (8) visit the [local] McDonald’s;” and more! For related tips, check out Rediscovering Travel.
Some original research on the takeoff of coal for home heating at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The prevailing theory is that coal first gained popularity as a replacement for wood in London in the late 1500s because deforestation increased the price of wood. But this doesn’t mesh with the fact that coal was cheaper than wood for most of this period. This article argues that coal took off due to a “wood-saving furnace” developed in Germany for beer-makers, which had intended to reduce wood consumption by having a more efficient flue for heat re-circulation. This flue came with the beneficial effect of reducing noxious gas penetration into the beers, and this made cheap coal useful for brewing. Plus, details on the development of chimneys.
(3) Deep Research and Knowledge Value
OpenAI’s Deep Research feature in ChatGPT has been, for many, the moment “when they felt the AGI.” Because Deep Research seems to get bogged down by SEO slop on the internet (at least for now), it paradoxically produces the best results for the most obscure info. If AI yields the best results for obscure information, then finding obscure public info is no longer an edge: “[Deep Research makes clear] how much future economic value is wrapped up in information not being public.” In part, it’s an argument for the decline of fundamental research for public market investors: “it's going to be more difficult to harvest alpha by reading endless financial filings when an AI can do that research in a fraction of the time.” It’s also an argument for the value of prediction markets as a financial counterweight to incentivize exposing information to the public, at least through the price mechanism: “AI's capability of knowing everything that is public is going to increase the incentive to keep things secret; prediction markets in everything will provide a profit incentive for knowledge to be disseminated, by price if nothing else.”
(4) Interview with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman About Models, Margins, and Moats
Startups often make a Faustian bargain with publicity. The media attention feels nice—it builds momentum with investors, hires, and team morale—but comes with the side effect of attracting competition. AI companies are learning this the hard way: “There are theories of how you create moats for yourself and generate margins and seven powers and network effects [and] cornered resources. But [almost] anything can be competed away[.] What matters is how much attention your industry gets—if you're just on the front page of every news publication every single day [… especially] in software [where the barriers to entry are] just devilishly low to the point where a random company in China is just able to go for gold […] your margin will just erode over time.” Growth alone doesn’t create shareholder value. More examples: Engines That Move Markets.
(5) Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World?
The Herculaneum papyri is a collection of thousands of 2,000-year-old scrolls buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The collection contains thousands of likely lost documents, but the charring from Vesuvius made the scrolls unreadable and stuck together in a “charred log” form… until now. How does it work? The burnt scrolls are scanned in a particle accelerator, then “unrolled” by simulating how the pages would have originally looked: “[their software can] detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it […]. As they build more training data from each scroll, “unrolling” gets easier. AI can do more than automate B2B SaaS!
(6) Airships May Finally Prove Useful For Transporting Cargo
Cargo airships (think: Zeppelins) fell out of favor in the 1930s due to catastrophic accidents (infamously, the Hindenburg) and other transportation improving its cost efficiency. Airships’ inefficiency stems from variable buoyancy—it is hard to managing changing weights when loads are picked up and dropped off. But some recent innovations show promise: (1) water ballast; (2) helium compression; (3) airframe designs that improve lift using pressure differentials (similar to airplane wings); and (4) replacing expensive helium with cheap hydrogen in fireproof dirigibles. FAA notwithstanding, airships could become the biggest transport revolution since jet airliners.
(7) The Afterlife of the Roman Republic
“The way to understand the fundamental change in the structure of Roman government [during the principate] is that the [former] Roman Republic [was] not a democracy, but fundamentally a partnership of the Roman Senate (representing the aristocracy) and the People. Indeed, that is what the appellation SPQR—senatus populusque Romanus (“the Roman Senate and People”)—implies: the state [was] composed of two roughly equal entities, the People and the Senate. In contrast, [the principate] is best understood as a partnership between the Roman aristocracy, still represented by the Senate [and] emperor, with the People excluded. The Senate [is kept around as a] junior partner [since] the emperor needs the Senate in order to run the empire.”
(8) U Thant Island: The Quirky Story of NYC’s Smallest Island
“Situated halfway between the United Nations complex and Long Island City is a tiny, 1/2 acre island that appeared in the East River in the 1890s. U Thant Island, as it is known, is nicknamed after a former United Nations Secretary General from Burma. […] The island was created from the materials excavated by piano manufacturer William Steinway during an attempt to build underwater trolley tunnels in the East River from Manhattan to his company town in Astoria.” Officially, U Thant Island is a bird sanctuary and off-limits for visitors. Unofficially… kayaks.
(9) How Many New Yorkers are Secretly Subsidized By Their Parents?
Years ago, I had to move out of my apartment when the rents went up >100% on lease renewal. While it was annoying to be on the receiving end of gentrification, I was also curious about the apparently unemployed 22 years olds replacing long-time tenants. Dynastic wealth was suspected. Suspicions have been confirmed: “Someone who isn’t generationally wealthy probably cannot buy a property in New York City. In seven years of working in the industry, [he] has yet to see a first-time homebuyer who can close on a property without parents’ help […] Only about one in three adults under age 43 manage to support themselves [in NYC] without any financial help from their parents.” Here’s Part II.
(10) Only Fools Think Elon is Incompetent
“As an industrialist, Elon is unmatched by any American in the country’s history […] any of us could spend a lifetime and a burn trillion dollars and end up with [nothing] resembling Musk’s high-tech industrial behemoths. Even with zero institutional constraints in our way, we would fail to identify the best managers and engineers, [we’d] often fail to convince them to come work for us, [and] we might not be able to inspire them to work incredibly hard […] We’d also fail to elevate and promote the best workers and give them more authority and responsibilities. We’d fail to raise tens of billions of dollars at favorable rates to fund our companies [and] we’d fail to negotiate government contracts and create buzz for consumer products. […] Maybe saying that Elon has a 110 IQ makes you feel like you beat him in your online fantasy world, but out there in the actual world, he is ripping up national institutions at breakneck speed. […] Elon Musk is [the] single most capable man in America, and we deny that fact at our peril.”
(0) Miscellaneous
The quiet acquisition of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Background on secretive Miami Stock Exchange. Distribution of federal government employees. Soon lab-grown diamond rings will soon be $10-15 per carat. Online scams are a $500 billion industry. Trump’s plan to Make Gaza Great Again. Investing in Guyana’s Rupununi Ranch. 22 hour trading day is coming to NYSE. Only 5% of Americans use AI. Conclusion of the Minnesota Timberwolves ownership dispute. Experience is incompressible. Insanity of the health insurance appeals process. Valentine’s Day flowers are mostly imported via Miami Airport. Startup founders and business intuition. Zombie unicorns. A niche clearinghouse for eggs. Paradoxes and God. The Berkshire Hathaway 2024 annual report. Palace intrigue in Uzbekistan. The reclusive Italian billionaire Andrea Pignataro. Axiomatic analysis of the papal conclave.