Episódios

  • AI CapEx

    AI CapEx
    Aug 12 2025
    This week we talk about tech bubbles, building moats, and infrastructure investment.We also discuss capital expenditure, data centers, and employee compensation.Recommended Book: The Art of Gathering by Priya ParkerTranscriptMany technology booms have early periods in which innovators have a first-mover advantage, and a lot of what happens in their industry is informed by the decisions those innovators make.After that—depending on the technology, but this is common enough to be considered a trend—after that there tends to be a period of build-out and consolidation amongst the people and business entities that survived that initial, innovation-focused throw-down.In the context of personal computers, this moment saw computer-makers like Microsoft and Apple scramble to pivot from figuring out what an operating system should look like and whether or not to use mice to navigate user interfaces, to a period in which they were rushing to scale-up the manufacture of now-essential, but previously comparably rare components: suitable screens for their monitors, chips that could power their increasingly graphical machines, and the magnetic materials necessary to produce floppy disks and spindle-based hard drives.There’s an initial period in which new ideas and approaches provide these entities with a moat that protects them against competition, in other words, but then the game they’re playing changes, the rules are more fully understood and to some degree locked into place and agreed upon, and instead of competing for the biggest, most brazen new ideas, they lock onto one set of ideas that seemed to be the best of what’s available at that moment and build on those, iterating them at a regular cadence, but focusing especially on scaling them.So at this second stage, they’re investing in the ability to out-produce their competition in some way, so they can eventually bypass that competition and (they hope) safely increase their prices and make a profit, as opposed to just larger and larger revenues with equal or greater expenses, continuing to be reliant on investor injections of capital, rather than generating their own surplus returns.By many analysts’ and insiders’ estimates, we’ve just entered that second stage in the generative AI industry. That’s the sort of AI that generates text and images and code and such, and it’s increasingly becoming a sort of commodity, rather than a new, hot things that few companies can offer the market.What I’d like to talk about today are the increasingly massive financial figures associated with this industry’s shift to that second stage of development, and why some of those insiders and analysts are voicing fresh concerns that this could all lead to a bubble, and possibly an historically large one.—There are many ways we could measure the growth of the AI industry over the years.The US market size, for instance, which is a measure of the value of AI-oriented companies based on how much shares of their company cost or would cost on the open market, has ballooned from just over $100 billion in 2022 to an estimated $174 billion in 2025. That figure is expected to grow at a not quite 20% compound annual growth rate through 2034, which, if accurate, would put this market, in the US alone, at more than $850 billion.Another metric we might use is that of capital expenditure, or capex, in this corner of the tech industry, which refers to the amount of money AI companies are using to buy, upgrade, or maintain their long-term assets, like new computer chips or the data centers they fill with those chips.The seven most valuable US tech companies—Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, NVIDIA, and Broadcom (that last spot formerly held by Tesla, which was dropped from this designation in late-2024)—just those seven companies have spent $102.5 billion on capex this last financial quarter (and most of that was from just four of them, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, the remainder only spending something like $6.7 billion).That’s a staggering amount of money, and due to a recent drop in consumer demand—the money individual US citizens spend on things like food and clothes and smartphones and cars and all the other things people buy—AI-related capex, spending by these massive US tech companies, has added more to GDP growth than consumer spending for the past two quarters.All the things all the people in the US bought over the past two quarters did not cost as much, in aggregate, as what these companies spent during the same period, on new and existing assets. That’s pretty wild.And it’s the consequence, partly, of the shift in these companies’ focus from providing goods and services that relied heavily on people—salary and stock compensation, basically, which is not a capex expense, because its spent on employees, not stuff—to spending heavily on all that infrastructure that they believe will be required to help them compete with those ...
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    18 minutos
  • Dynamic Pricing

    Dynamic Pricing
    Aug 5 2025
    This week we talk about surge pricing, Walmart, and the Robinson-Patman Act.We also discuss personal data, AC settings, and Delta’s earnings call.Recommended Book: How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared RubinTranscriptThe US Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 is also called the Anti-Price Discrimination Act, and it was passed to make it illegal for a product supplier to charge different prices to different customers.So a company that makes candy bars wouldn’t be allowed to charge one price to most of their customers, all the smaller and mid-sized convenience stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores, for instance, and then a lower price to the big stores, the Walmarts and Amazons of the world.The concern was that these larger players, which at the time this law was passed were burgeoning grocery stores like A&P, would be able to achieve a monopolistic position in the market for these goods, these slightly lower prices giving them one more advantage over their smaller competitors.During the four decades or so of this Act’s enforcement, small grocery stores has prices that were, on average, about 1% higher than those offered by their large competitors, and the eight largest grocery store chains only captured about 25% of all grocery sales in the US—essentially every city and town of any size had at least one small grocery store, and most had several of them, during this period. It was a very competitive market.During the Reagan administration in the 80s, though, enforcement was abandoned, as the folks in charge of that enforcement were convinced this Act was holding back growth; they saw it as a handout to small businesses at the expense of big business, so while it technically remained on the books, they just stopped enforcing it, and the big businesses in these spaces got the message pretty quickly.Walmart was the first big business to really lean into the new powers afforded them by this fresh governmental stance, and that led to it becoming the country’s largest grocery store chain by 2001, and other big grocery brands, like Kroger and Safeway, began to do the same, consolidating all their buying so they could put in huge orders like Walmart was able to put in, and that allowed them to demand lower prices, which in turn allowed them to dramatically increase profits and gobble up their smaller competition.All of which led to the emergence of food deserts across the country, a term that was coined in 1995 to refer to areas where there are simply no grocery stores within a reasonable distance of relatively large populations of people, because smaller grocery stores can no longer compete, even when they’re the only player in town; folks have to travel to the larger chain stores, and have no real options closer to home, which can result in food precariousness, and situations in which the only nearby food options are unhealthy ones—the snacks at gas stations, for instance.This same general pattern played out across all retail spaces, including pharmacies and bookstores and athletic supply stores, and between 1982 and 2017, the total market share of independent retailers in the US dropped from 53% to 22%.Which in some ways is great at the federal level, as—and this is what the Reagan administration seemed to want, back in the 80s—big businesses can grow a lot faster and bigger than small businesses, and that can lead to outsized GDP numbers, and other such macro-scale figures.Unfortunately, while independent retailers tend to keep nearly half of the revenue they pull in within their local community, major chains only keep something like 14% in the local community—so the shift from independent to chain retailers has had a deleterious impact on communities across the US, in the sense of having less competition, having food and other sorts of product deserts, and in terms of tax revenues and overall economic wealth being sapped from these areas and moved to other places, creating some relatively few winners and a whole lot of losers, in the process.What I’d like to talk about today is another type of variable pricing, this one more directly aimed at consumers, and enabled, at least in its modern incarnation, by big data and the devices we use every day.—Dynamic pricing refers to changing the price of goods or services based on all sorts of variables.Demand or surge pricing, for instance, might see the price of a bus ticket or rideshare ride with Uber cost more during rush-hour, the idea being that there are only so many bus seats and only so many available rideshare rides to go around, and when everyone’s either trying to get to work or get home from work, there will be a lot more people wanting these finite number of seats and rides than there are seats and rides available.Upping the prices, then, is a means of determining who wants these things the most, because they’re willing to pay at times massively inflated prices for something that would cost far less in an hour or two, ...
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    17 minutos
  • Age-Gating

    Age-Gating
    Jul 29 2025
    This week we talk about lobbying, Steam, and adult-themed games.We also discuss cultural influence, extreme ideologies, and itch.io.Recommended Book: Limitarianism by Ingrid RobeynsTranscriptIn mid-July of 2025, Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that it was tightening its adult-only content guidelines, its not-safe-for-work content, basically, following pressure by the payment processing companies it works with.Its new policy even says that “content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers” is not allowed on Steam’s network, which in practice means these games will be more difficult to find and purchase, because of Steam’s prominence in the non-console gaming space.About a week later, the founder of Itch.io, another gaming marketplace that’s similar in some ways to Steam, as it allows creators to sell their games to folks who use the platform, but which is a bit smaller and more focused on indie games, said that itch.io would likewise be removing NSFW, adult-themed games from its catalog, due to concerns that the payment processors they work with have communicated to their company.In no uncertain terms, he said itch.io wouldn’t be able to operate without these payment processors, so they had to “prioritize our relationships with our payment partners and take immediate steps toward compliance.”The folks whose games were removed from itch.io as part of this purge were given no warning, and many critics of the decision have pointed to similarities between this gaming-world censorship, as they see it at least, and what happened back in 2018, when social platform Tumblr banned pornographic content, the company’s owner citing pressure from credit card companies as the rationale for that decision—a decision that led to a huge exodus of users from the platform and a whole lot of criticism from creators, users, and folks who keep tabs on censorship-related issues.There’s been a lot of the same in response to these moves by itch.io, Steam, and similar platforms which have recently decoupled themselves from certain types of adult content, and statements from these companies seems to be illustrative of what’s happening here: they’re completely reliant on these payment processing companies to exist, because without them they can’t easily accept money for what they’re selling. Thus, they’d better comply with what these companies tell them to do, or else.There have been claims from some folks who have watched this sort of purge occur in other corners of the web over the years that credit card companies are anti-porn and anti-anything-NSFW because the chargeback rate is huge in these spaces—something like 10-times the number of chargebacks, which is what happens when customers say they didn’t buy something, and in some cases then get their money back, after the fact, compared to the next-highest facet of the payment processing industry. And that’s both a pain and potentially expensive.Others have pointed out that these sorts of purges tend to be political in nature: the groups that push payment processors to adopt these stances are typically vehemently anti-porn, either ultra-conservative or radical-feminist in nature—two ideologies that are oppositional in many ways, but they loop back around when it comes to some topics and have similar, burn it all down ideas about adult content; we don’t approve, so let’s get rid of all this stuff that we don’t approve of by whatever means necessary.In most cases this means lobbying to get influence in various political spheres, including with politicians who control various governments’ relationships with these payment processors. If they can get the ear of those who make the rules to which these payment processors must adhere, they can then threaten the payment processors—who in many countries, though especially the United States, have pretty sweet deals that allow them to more or less collect a tax on every payment made for everything across every sector—saying, well, we can push our friends in the government to take those sweetheart deals away. So unless you want to suffer that consequence, push these customers of yours to take down this stuff we don’t like.What I’d like to talk about today are some similar and overlapping movements that are beginning to see censorship-related success across these and other aspects of the web, and the seeming purpose behind these pushes to censor and purge and create the apparatuses by which censorship and purges can be more thoroughly performed.—One of the big concerns about banning certain types of games is that games are just content, and if you’re able to find a reliable means of banning one type of content, you can then, in theory at least, using that same lever to ban other types of content, like books, articles, films, and so on. Some of the ...
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    16 minutos
  • Kurdistan Workers' Party

    Kurdistan Workers' Party
    Jul 22 2025
    This week we talk about the PKK, Turkey, and the DEM Party.We also discuss terrorism, discrimination, and stateless nations.Recommended Book: A Century of Tomorrows by Glenn AdamsonTranscriptKurdistan is a cultural region, not a country, but part of multiple countries, in the Middle East, spanning roughly the southeastern portion of Turkey, northern Iraq, the northwestern portion of Iran, and northern Syrian. Some definitions also include part of the Southern Caucasus mountains, which contains chunks of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.So this is a sprawling region that straddles multiple nations, and it’s defined by the presence of the Kurdish people, the Kurds, who live all over the world, but whose culture is concentrated in this area, where it originally developed, and where, over the generations, there have periodically been very short-lived Kurdish nations of various shapes, sizes, and compositions.The original dynasties from which the Kurds claim their origin were Egyptian, and they governed parts of northeastern African and what is today Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. That was back in the 8th to 12th century, during which Saladin, who was the sultan of both Egypt and Syria, played a major historical role leading Muslim military forces against the Christian Crusader states during the Third Crusade, and leading those forces to victory in 1187, which resulted in Muslim ownership of the Levant, even though the Crusaders continued to technically hold the Kingdom of Jerusalem for another hundred years or so, until 1291.Saladin was Kurdish and kicked off a sultanate that lasted until the mid-13th century, when a diverse group of former slave-soldiers called the mamluks overthrew Saladin’s family’s Ayyubid sultanate and replaced it with their own.So Kurdish is a language spoken in that Kurdistan region, and the Kurds are considered to be an Iranian ethnic group, because Kurdish is part of a larger collection of languages and ethnicities, though many Kurds consider themselves to be members of a stateless nation, similar in some ways to pre-Israel Jewish people, Tibetan people under China’s rule, or the Yoruba people, who primarily live in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, but who were previously oriented around a powerful city-state in that region, which served as the central loci of the Ife Empire, before the Europeans showed up and decided to forcibly move people around and draw new borders across the African continent.The Kurds are likewise often politically and culturally powerful, and that’s led to a lot of pushback from leaders in the nations where they live and at times operate as cultural blocs, and it’s led to some very short-lived Kurdish nations these people have managed to establish in the 20th century, including the Kingdom of Kurdistan from 1921-1924, the Republic of Ararat from 1927-1930, and the Republic of Mahabad, which was formed as a puppet state of the Soviet Union in 1946 in northwestern Iran, following a Soviet push for Kurdish nationalism in the region, which was meant to prevent the Allies from controlling the region following WWII, but which then dissolved just a few months after its official formation due to waning support from the Kurdish tribes that initially helped make it a reality.What I’d like to talk about today is the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, and why their recently declared ceasefire with Turkey is being seen as a pretty big deal.—The Kurdistan Worker’s Party, depending on who you ask, is a political organization or a terrorist organization. It was formed in Turkey in late-1978, and its original, founding goal was to create an independent Kurdish state, a modern Kurdistan, in what is today a small part of Turkey, but in the 1990s it shifted its stated goals to instead just get more rights for Kurds living in Turkey, including more autonomy but also just equal rights, as Kurdish people in many nations, including Turkey, have a long history of being discriminated against, in part because of their cultural distinctiveness, including their language, manner of dress, and cultural practices, and in part because, like many tight-knit ethnic groups, they often operate as a bloc, which in the age of democracy also means they often vote as a bloc, which can feel like a threat to other folks in areas with large Kurdish populations.When I say Kurdish people in Turkey have long been discriminated against, that includes things like telling them they can no longer speak Kurdish and denying that their ethnic group exists, but it also includes massacres conducted by the government against Kurdish people; at times tens of thousands of Kurds were slaughtered by the Turkish army. There was also an official ban on the words Kurds, Kurdistan, and Kurdish by the Turkish government in the 1980s, and Kurdish villages were destroyed, food headed to these villages was embargoed, and there was a long-time ban on the use of the Kurdish language in public life...
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    15 minutos
  • AI-Associated Delusions

    AI-Associated Delusions
    Jul 15 2025
    This week we talk about AI therapy chatbots, delusions of grandeur, and sycophancy.We also discuss tech-triggered psychosis, AI partners, and confident nonsense.Recommended Book: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin SloanTranscriptIn the context of artificial intelligence systems, a hallucination or delusion, sometimes more brusquely referred to as AI BS, is an output usually from an AI chatbot, but it can also be from another type of AI system, that’s basically just made up.Sometimes this kind of output is just garbled nonsense, as the AI systems, those based on large language models, anyway, are essentially just predicting what words will come next in the sentences they’re writing based on statistical patterns. That means they can string words together, and then sentences together, and then paragraphs together in what seems like a logical and reasonable way, and in some cases can even cobble together convincing stories or code or whatever else, because systems with enough raw materials to work from have a good sense of what tends to go where, and thus what’s good grammar and what’s not, what code will work and what code will break your website, and so on.In other cases, though, AI systems will seem to just make stuff up, but make it up convincingly enough that it can be tricky to detect the made up component of its answers.Some writers have reported asking AI to provide feedback on their stories, for instance, only to later discover that the AI didn’t have access to the stories, and they were providing feedback based on the title, or based on the writer’s prompt—the text the writer used to ask the AI for feedback. And their answers were perhaps initially convincing enough that the writer didn’t realize the AI hadn’t read the pieces they asked them to criticize, and the AI systems, because most of them are biased to sycophancy, toward brown-nosing the user and not saying anything that might upset them, or saying what it believes they want to hear, they’ll provide general critique that sounds good, that lines up with what their systems tell them should be said in such contexts, but which is completely disconnected from those writings, and thus, not useful to the writer as a critique.That combination of confabulation and sycophancy can be brutal, especially as these AI systems become more powerful and more convincing. They seldom make the basic grammatical and reality-based errors they made even a few years ago, and thus it’s easy to believe you’re speaking to something that’s thinking or at the bare-minimum, that understands what you’re trying to get it to help you with, or what you’re talking about. It’s easy to forget when interacting with such systems that you’re engaged not with another human or thinking entity, but with software that mimics the output of such an entity, but which doesn’t experience the same cognition experienced by the real-deal thinking creatures it’s attempting to emulate.What I’d like to talk about today is another sort of AI-related delusion—one experienced by humans interacting with such systems, not the other way around—and the seeming, and theoretical, pros and cons of these sorts of delusional responses.—Research that’s looked into the effects of psychotherapy, including specific approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy and group therapy, show that such treatments are almost aways positive, with rare exceptions, grant benefits that tend to last well past the therapy itself—so people who go to therapy tend to benefit from it even after the session, and even after they stop going to therapy, if they eventually stop going for whatever reason, and that the success rate, the variability of positive impacts, vary based on the clinical location, the therapist, and so on, but only by about 5% or less for each of those variables; so even a not perfectly aligned therapist or a less than ideal therapy location will, on average, benefit the patient.That general positive impact is part of the theory underpinning the use of AI systems for therapy purposes.Instead of going into a therapist’s office and speaking with a human being for an hour or so at a time, the patient instead speaks or types to an AI chatbot that’s been optimized for this purpose. So it’s been primed to speak like a therapist, to have a bunch of therapy-related resources in its training data, and to provide therapy-related resources to the patient with whom it engages.There are a lot of downsides to this approach, including the fact that AI bots are flawed in so many ways, are not actual humans, and thus can’t really connect with patients the way a human therapist might be able to connect with them, they have difficulty shifting from a trained script, as again, these systems are pulling from a corpus of training data and additional documents to which they have access, and that means they’ll tend to handle common issues and patient types pretty well, ...
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    18 minutos
  • Pay Per Crawl

    Pay Per Crawl
    Jul 8 2025
    This week we talk about crawling, scraping, and DDoS attacks.We also discuss Cloudflare, the AI gold rush, and automated robots.Recommended Book: Annie Bot by Sierra GreerTranscriptAlongside the many, and at times quite significant political happenings, the many, and at times quite significant military conflicts, and the many, at times quite significant technological breakthroughs—medical and otherwise—flooding the news these days, there’s also a whole lot happening in the world of AI, in part because this facet of the tech sector is booming, and in part because while still unproven in many spaces, and still outright flubbing in others, this category of technology is already having a massive impact on pretty much everything, in some cases for the better, in some for the worse, and in some for better and worse, depending on your perspective.Dis- and misinformation, for instance, is a bajillion times easier to create, distribute, and amplify, and the fake images and videos and audio being shared, alongside all the text that seems to be from legit people, but which may in fact be the product of AI run by malicious actors somewhere, is increasingly convincing and difficult to distinguish from real-deal versions of the same.There’s also a lot more of it, and the ability to very rapidly create pretty convincing stuff, and to very rapidly flood all available communication channels with that stuff, is fundamental to AI’s impact in many spaces, not just the world of propaganda and misinformation. At times quantity has a quality all of its own, and that very much seems to be the case for AI-generated content as a whole.Other AI- and AI-adjacent tools are being used by corporations to improve efficiency, in some cases helping automated systems like warehouse robots assist humans in sorting and packaging and otherwise getting stuff ready to be shipped, as is the case with Amazon, which is almost to the point that they’ll have more robots in their various facilities than human beings. Amazon robots are currently assisting with about 75% of all the company’s global deliveries, and a lot of the menial, repetitive tasks human workers would have previously done are now being accomplished by robotics systems they’ve introduced to their shipping chain.Of course, not everyone is thrilled about this turn of events: while it’s arguably wonderful that robots are being subbed-in for human workers who would previously have had to engage in the sorts of repetitive, physical tasks that can lead to chronic physical issues, in many cases this seems to be a positive side-benefit of a larger effort to phase-out workers whenever possible, saving the company money over time by employing fewer people.If you can employ 100 people using robots instead of 1000 people sans-robots, depending on the cost of operation for those robots, that might save you money because each person, augmented by the efforts of the robots, will be able to do a lot more work and thus provide more value for the company. Sometimes this means those remaining employees will be paid more, because they’ll be doing more highly skilled labor, working with those bots, but not always.This is a component of this shift that for a long while CEOs were dancing around, not wanting to spook their existing workforce or lose their employees before their new robot foundation was in place, but it’s increasingly something they’re saying out loud, on investor calls and in the press, because making these sorts of moves are considered to be good for a company’s outlook: they’re being brave and looking toward a future where fewer human employees will be necessary, which implies their stock might be currently undervalued, because the potential savings are substantial, at least in theory.And it is a lot of theory at this point: there’s good reason to believe that theory is true, at least to some degree, but we’re at the very beginning phases of this seeming transition, and many companies that jumped too quickly and fired too many people found themselves having to hire them back, in some cases at great expense, because their production faltered under the weight of inferior automated, often AI-driven alternatives.Many of these tools simply aren’t as reliable as human employees yet. And while they will almost certainly continue to become more powerful and capable—a recent estimate suggested that the current wave of large-language-model-based AI systems, for instance, are doubling in power every 7 months or so, which is wild—speculations about what that will mean, and whether that trend can continue, vary substantially, depending on who you talk to.Something we can say with relative certainty right now, though, is that most of these models, the LLM ones, at least, not the robot-driving ones, were built using content that was gathered and used in a manner that currently exists in a legal gray area: it was scraped and amalgamated by these systems so that ...
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    18 minutos
  • Hurricane Tracking

    Hurricane Tracking
    Jul 1 2025
    This week we talk about the NOAA, FEMA, and the SSMIS.We also discuss Arctic ice, satellite resolution, and automated weather observation stations.Recommended Book: Superbloom by Nicholas CarrTranscriptThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is a US scientific and regulatory agency that tackles an array of environmental, climatic, and weather-related issues, alongside its responsibilities managing oceanic ecosystems.So it’s in charge of managing fishing protections and making sure endangered species within US waters are taken care of, but it also does scientific exploration—mapping the ocean, for instance—it monitors atmospheric conditions and keeps tabs on the various cycles that influence global and US water, air, and temperature happenings, and it tracks macro- and micro-scale weather events.That latter responsibility means NOAA (which is the modern iteration of several other agencies, including the US Environmental Science Services Administration and the US Weather Bureau) also manages the US National Weather Service, which is the sub-agency that sends out hazardous weather statements when there are severe storms or tornadoes or other weather-related events of note in a given area, and which also provides weather forecast information that local experts on the ground use to make their own predictions.Most of what the National Weather Service puts out is in the public domain, which means anyone can access and use it, free of charge. That’s a pretty big deal, because the data they collect and informational products they distribute, including all those hazardous weather statements, are at times life and death, but they’re also a big part of what makes standard local weather services possible in the US—they help the FAA and other agencies do their jobs, and they help everyday people understand how hot or cold it’s going to be, whether to pack and umbrella for the day, and so on.To accomplish all this, the NOAA and its sub-agencies make use of a bunch of facilities and other tracking resources to collect, aggregate, and interpret all those data points, crunching them and spitting them back out as something intelligible and useful to their many end-users.They’ve got weather observation stations across the US, many of them automated surface observing stations, which are exactly what they sound like: automated stations that collect data about sky conditions, wind direction and speed, visibility, present weather conditions, temperature, dew point, and so on—most of these are close to airports, as this information is also vital for figuring out if it’s safe to fly, and if so, what accommodations pilots should be making for the weather and visibility and such—but they also collect data from smaller weather stations scattered across the country, around 11,000 of them, many operated by volunteers under the auspices of an effort called the Cooperative Observer Program that was established in 1890, and that’s paired with another volunteer data-collection effort called the Citizen Weather Observer Program.There are also weather buoys and weather ships lingering across the surface of the ocean and other bodies of water, tracking additional data like sea surface temperature and wave height at various points. And there are weather balloons which collect additional information about happenings further up in the atmosphere, alongside the many satellites in orbit that capture various sorts of data and beam that data down to those who can make use of it.Again, all of this data is collected and crunched and then turned into intelligible outputs for your local weather forecasters, but also the people who run airlines and fly planes, the folks out on boats and ships, people who are managing government agencies, scientists who are doing long-term research on all sorts of things, and everyday people who just want to know if it’ll be sunny, how hot it will be, and so on.There’s one more major client of the NOAA that’s worth noting here, too: the Department of Defense. And that relationship is a big part of what I want to talk about today, because it seems to be at the root of a major curtailing of weather-related data-sharing that was recently announced by the US government, much to the chagrin of the scientific community.—US President Trump has long voiced his skepticism about the NOAA.There have been claims that this disdain is the result of the agency having called him out on some bald-faced lies he told about hurricane projections during his first administration, when he reportedly altered an NOAA hurricane impact projection map with a Sharpie to support a misstatement he had previously made about a hurricane impacting Alabama; the hurricane in question was not anticipated to hit Alabama, Trump said it would, and he later altered a map in order to make it look like he was right, when all the data, and all the experts, say otherwise.Whether that’s true or not, the NOAA ...
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    16 minutos
  • The Strait of Hormuz

    The Strait of Hormuz
    Jun 24 2025
    This week we talk about OPEC, the Seven Sisters, and the price of oil.We also discuss fracking, Israel and Iran’s ongoing conflict, and energy exports.Recommended Book: Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock by Maud WoolfTranscriptThe global oil market changed substantially in the early 2000s as a pair of innovations—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—helped the plateauing US oil and gas market boom, unlocking a bunch of shale oil and gas deposits that were previously either entirely un-utilizable, or too expensive to exploit.This same revolution changed markets elsewhere, too, including places like Western Canada, which also has large shale oil and gas deposits, but the US, and especially the southern US, and even more especially the Permian Basin in Texas, has seen simply staggering boosts to output since those twin-innovations were initially deployed on scale.This has changed all sorts of dynamics, both locally, where these technologies and approaches have been used to tap ever-more fossil fuel sources, and globally, as previous power dynamics related to such resources have been rewired.Case in point, in the second half of the 20th century, OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is a predominantly Middle Eastern oil cartel that was founded by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela in 1960, was a dominant force in geopolitics, as they collaboratively set global oil prices, and thus, were able to pull the strings connected to elections, war, and economic outcomes in nations around the world.If oil prices suddenly spiked, that could cause an incumbent leader in a country a hemisphere away to lose their next election, and if anyone threatened one of their number, they could conceivably hold back resources from that country until they cooled down.Before OPEC formed and established their position of primacy in global energy exports, the so-called Seven Sisters corporations, which consisted of a bunch of US and European companies that had basically stepped in and took control of global oil rights in the early 20th century, including oil rights across the Middle East, were the loci of power in this space, controlling about 85% of the world’s petroleum reserves as of the early 1970s.That same decade, though, a slew of governments that hosted Seven Sisters facilities and reserves nationalized these assets, which in practice made all these reserves and the means of exploiting them the government’s property, and in most cases they were then reestablished under new, government-controlled companies, like Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia and the National Iranian Oil Company in Iran.In 1973 and 1979, two events in the Middle East—the Yom Kippur War, during which pretty much all of Israel’s neighbors launched a surprise attack against Israel, and the Iranian Revolution, when the then-leader of Iran, the Shah, who was liberalizing the country while also being incredibly corrupt, was overthrown by the current government, the militantly Islamist Islamic Republic of Iran—those two events led to significant oil export interruptions that triggered oil shortages globally, because of how dominant this cartel had become.This shortage triggered untold havoc in many nations, especially those that were growing rapidly in the post-WWII, mid-Cold War world, because growth typically requires a whole lot of energy for all the manufacturing, building, traveling around, and for basic, business and individual consumption: keeping the lights on, cooking, and so on.This led to a period of stagflation, and in fact the coining of the term, stagflation, but it also led to a period of heightened efficiency, because nations had to learn how to achieve growth and stability without using so much energy, and it led to a period of all these coming-out-of-stagflation and economic depression nations trying to figure out how to avoid having this happen again.So while OPEC and other oil-rich nations were enjoying a period of relative prosperity, due in part to those elevated energy prices—after the initial downsides of those conflicts and revolutions had calmed, anyway—other parts of the world were making new and more diversified deals, and were looking in their own backyards to try to find more reliable suppliers of energy products.Parts of the US were already major oil producers, if not at the same scale as these Middle Eastern giants in the latter portion of the 20th century, and many non-OPEC producers in the US, alongside those in Norway and Mexico, enjoyed a brief influx of revenue because of those higher oil prices, but they, like those OPEC nations, suffered a downswing when prices stabilized; and during that price collapse, OPEC’s influence waned.So in the 1980s, onward, the previous paradigm of higher oil prices led to a surge in production globally, everyone trying to take advantage of those high prices to invest in more development and production assets, and that led to a ...
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    19 minutos