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The story of my life in China is here.
Transportation consultant Huber Horan wrote my favorite article about Uber:
An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply much higher than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate. Uber not only lacks powerful competitive advantages, but it is actually less efficient than the competitors it has been driving out of business.
Horan then compares Uber’s business model to that of the taxi industry and concludes that “Uber has not increased taxi productivity or solved long-standing industry problems” but instead subsidizes fares so that it can offer prices consumers are willing to pay.
Go read the whole article. It’s fascinating.
Horan has a PDF version (and more articles about Uber) on his website.
In the next fifty years Miami Beach is going to disappear in the ocean. Sarah Miller tried to buy property:
I did not ask if Mother Nature would respect the zoning requirements, but I did say it was amazing to me that such a famous architect was taking the time to build in a city so threatened by climate change. (I do not think that, by the way. I think he is getting paid a lot and he will get to see what he created and in a world where people tell you with a straight face that no, this city will be wiped off the map in fifty years, not thirty, and you’re supposed to be like “Oh, I feel so much better now,” I am not at all surprised by an architect building an enormous luxury apartment building here.)
On his great 3-2-1 newsletter James Clear quotes architect Christopher Alexander (A Pattern Language) about designing a room people love:
Light on two sides of every room. When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.
This pattern, perhaps more than any other single pattern, determines the success or failure of a room. The arrangement of daylight in a room, and the presence of windows on two sides, is fundamental. If you build a room with light on one side only, you can be almost certain that you are wasting your money. People will stay out of that room if they can possibly avoid it…
The importance of this pattern lies partly in the social atmosphere it creates in the room. Rooms lit on two sides, with natural light, create less glare around people and objects; this lets us see things more intricately; and most important, it allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people’s faces, the motion of their hands … and thereby understand, more clearly, the meaning they are after. The light on two sides allows people to understand each other.
Jack Forster analyzes the Apple Watch Solar Face for Hodinkee and starts talking about twilight:
Twilight, as it turns out, is further divided into three phases: Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight, and Astronomical Twilight, and it is the phases of twilight, plus sunset, which are indicated by the four dots clustered at sundown.
He continues describing every form of twilight and why it is important to be defined. One example:
Civil Twilight is not only an astronomical event – it is also important in fields as diverse as aviation and law. Here in the United States, the FAA defines night, and the additional regulations pertaining to nighttime aircraft operations, as the period between the end of Civil Twilight and the beginning of morning Civil Twilight.
CJ Hauser in The Guardian:
But once I gave up on the banterers, my Tinder chats became uniform. The conversations read like a liturgy: where are you from, how do you like our weather, how old is your dog, what are your hobbies, what is your job, oh no an English teacher better watch my grammar winkyfacetongueoutfacenerdyglassesface. The conversations all seemed the same to me: pro forma, predictable, even robotic.
That’s when I realised that what I was doing amounted to a kind of Turing test.
Also check out the behind the scenes video:
In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made an ingenious argument that we might be living in a computer simulation created by a more advanced civilization. He argued that if you believe that our civilization will one day run many sophisticated simulations concerning its ancestors, then you should believe that we’re probably in an ancestor simulation right now. His reasoning? If people eventually develop simulation technology — no matter how long that takes — and if they’re interested in creating simulations of their ancestors, then simulated people with experiences just like ours will vastly outnumber unsimulated people.
Nick Bostrom is the author of Superintelligence. (Check out Tim Urban’s take on it for Wait but Why.)
He makes a compelling argument with, again, grave consequences.
How a simple rice cooker uses the physical properties of water and magnets to cook perfect rice.
My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their head. All my life, I could hear my voice in my head and speak in full sentences as if I was talking out loud. I thought everyone experienced this, so I did not believe that it could be true at that time.
When World War 2 started, the Civil War felt as far away to Americans as WW2 feels to us now.
Also, remember when Jurassic Park, The Lion King, and Forrest Gump came out in theaters? Closer to the moon landing than today.
Many incredibly fascinating facts.
Andy Grove passed away the same day that Apple announced the iPhone SE. One of Grove’s best decisions reminds me of this launch.
Apple’s Phil Schiller explains how Apple has perfected its attention to detail over time, and how it manifests in products like the new MacBook.