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  • The Strait of Hormuz

    The Strait of Hormuz
    2025/06/24
    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 分
  • Operation Rising Lion

    Operation Rising Lion
    2025/06/17
    This week we talk about tit-for-tat warfare, conflict off-ramps, and Israel’s renewed attacks on Iran’s nuclear program.We also discuss the Iron Dome, the Iran-Iraq War, and regime change.Recommended Book: How Much is Enough? by Robert and Edward SkidelskyTranscriptIn late-October of 2024, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against targets in Iran and Syria. These strikes were code-named Operation Days of Repentance, and it marked the largest such attack on Iran by Israel since the 1980s, during the height of the Iran-Iraq War.Operation Days of Repentance was ostensibly a response to Iran’s attack on Israel earlier than same month, that attack code-named Operation True Promise II, which involved the launch of around 200 ballistic missiles against Israeli targets. Operation True Promise II was itself a response to Israel’s assassination of the leader of Hamas, the leader of Hezbollah, and the Deputy of Operations for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.If you feel like there might be a tit-for-tat pattern here, you’re right. Iran and Israel have been at each other’s throats since 1979, following the Islamic Revolution when Iran cut off all diplomatic relations with Israel; some backchannel relations continued between the two countries, even through part of the Iran-Iraq War, when Israel often supported Iran in that conflict, but things got tense in the early 1980s when Iran, partnering with the Syrian government, started backing Hezbollah and their effort to boot Israel out of Southern Lebanon, while also partnering with Islamist militants in Iraq and Yemen, including the Houthis, and at times Hamas in Gaza, as well.Most of these attacks have, until recently, been fairly restrained, all things considered. There’s long been bravado by politicians on both sides of the mostly cold war-ish conflict, but they’ve generally told the other side what they would be hitting, and signaled just how far they would be going, telling them the extent of the damage they would cause, and why, which provides the other side ample opportunity to step off the escalatory ladder; everyone has the chance to posture for their constituents and then step back, finding an off-ramp and claiming victory in that specific scuffle.That back-and-forth in late-2024 largely stuck to that larger pattern, and both sides stuck with what typically works for them, in terms of doing damage: Israel flew more than 100 aircraft to just beyond or just inside Iran’s borders and struck a bunch of military targets, like air defense batteries and missile production facilities, while Iran launched a few hundred far less-accurate missiles at broad portions of Israel—a type of attack that could conceivably result in a lot of civilian casualties, not just damage to military targets, which would typically be a no-no if you’re trying to keep the tit-for-tat strikes regulated and avoid escalation, but because Israel has a fairly effective anti-missile system called the Iron Dome, Iran could be fairly confident that just hurling a large number of missiles in their general direction would be okay, as most of those missiles would be shot down by the Iron Dome, the rest by Israel’s allies in the region, and the few that made it through or struck unoccupied land in the general vicinity would make their point.While this conflict has been fairly stable for decades, though, the tenor and tone seems to have changed substantially in 2025, and a recent wave of attacks by Israel is generally being seen as the culmination of several other efforts, and possibly an attempt by the Israeli government to change the nature of this conflict, perhaps permanently.And that’s what I’d like to talk about today; Operation Rising Lion, and the implications of Israel’s seeming expansion and evolution of their approach to dealing with Iran.—In mid-June of 2025, Israel’s military launched early morning strikes against more than a dozen targets across Iran, most of the targets either fundamental to Iran’s nuclear program or its military.The strikes were very targeted, and some were assassinations of top Iranian military leaders and nuclear scientists, like the Commander of the Revolutionary Guard, along with their families, including twenty children, who were presumably collateral damage. Some came from beyond Iran’s borders, some were conducted by assets smuggled into Iran earlier: car bombs and drones, things like that.More attacks followed that initial wave, which resulted in the collapse of nuclear sites and airport structures, along with several residential buildings in the country’s capitol, Tehran.This attack was ostensibly meant to hobble Iran’s nuclear program, which the Iranian government has long claimed is for purely peaceful, energy-generation purposes, but which independent watchdog organizations, and pretty much every other non-Iranian-allied government says is probably dual-purpose, allowing Iran to produce nuclear energy, but also nuclear...
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    20 分
  • Operation Spider's Web

    Operation Spider's Web
    2025/06/10
    This week we talk about drone warfare, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and total war.We also discuss casualty numbers, population superiority, and lingering munitions.Recommended Book: The Burning Earth by Sunil AmrithTranscriptEight years after Russia launched a halfheartedly concealed invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, under the guise of helping supposedly oppressed Russian-speakers and Russia loyalists in the area, in February of 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.This invasion followed months of military buildup along the two countries’ shared borders, and was called a special military operation by Russian President Putin. It was later reported that this was intended to be a quick, one or a few day decapitation attack against Ukraine, Russia’s forces rapidly closing the distance between the border and Ukraine’s capitol, Kyiv, killing or imprisoning all the country’s leadership, replacing it with a puppet government loyal to Putin, and that would be that.Ukraine had been reorienting toward the European Union and away from Russia’s sphere of influence, and Russia wanted to put a stop to that realignment and bring the country fully back under its control, as was the case before 2014, when a series of protests turned into an uprising that caused their then-leader, a puppet of Russia, to flee the country; he, of course, fled to Russia.On paper, Ukraine was at a massive disadvantage in this renewed conflict, as Russia is a global-scale player, while Ukraine is relatively small, and back in 2014 had one of its major ports and a huge chunk of its territory stolen by Russia.Russia also has nukes, has a massive conventional military, and has a far larger economy and population. Analysts near-universally assumed Ukraine would collapse under the weight of Russia’s military, perhaps holding out for weeks or months if they were really skillful and lucky, but probably days.That didn’t end up being the case. Despite Russia’s substantial and multifarious advantages, Ukraine managed to hold out against the initial invasion, against subsequent pushes, and then managed to launch its own counterattacks. For more than three years, it has held its ground against Russia’s onslaught, against continuous land incursions, and against seemingly endless aerial attacks by jets, by bombers, and by all sorts of rockets, missiles, and drones.It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine actual casualty and fatality numbers in this conflict, as both sides are incentivized to adjust these figures, either to show how horrible the other side is, or to make it seem like they’re suffering less than they are for moral purposes.But it’s expected that Russia will hit a milestone of one million casualties sometime in the summer of 2025, if it hasn’t actually hit that number already, and it’s estimated that as many as 250,000 Russian soldiers have already been killed in Ukraine.For context, that’s about five-times as many deaths as Russia suffered in all the wars it fought, post-WWII (as both the Soviet Union and Russia), combined. That’s also fifteen-times as many fatalities as they suffered in their ten-year-long war in Afghanistan, and ten-times as many deaths as in their 13-year-long war in Chechnya.It’s also estimated that Russia has lost something like 3,000-4,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and more than 400 air defense systems in the past year, alone; those numbers vary a bit depending on who you listen to, but those are likely the proper order of magnitude.The country is rapidly shifting to a full-scale war footing, originally having intended to make do with a few modern systems and a whole lot of antique, Soviet military hardware they had in storage to conduct this blitzkrieg attack on Ukraine, but now they’re having to reorient basically every facet of society and their economy toward this conflict, turning a huge chunk of their total manufacturing base toward producing ammunition, tanks, missiles, and so on.Which, to be clear, is something they’re capable of doing. Russia is currently on pace to replace this hardware, and then some, which is part of why other European governments are increasing their own military spending right now: the idea being that once Russia has finished their reorientation toward the production of modern military hardware, they’ll eventually find themselves with more tanks, missiles, and drones than they can use in Ukraine, and they’ll need to aim them somewhere, or else will find themselves have to pay upkeep on all this stuff as it gathers dust and slowly becomes unusable.The theory, then, is that they’ll have to open up another conflict just to avoid being bogged down in too much surplus weaponry; so maybe they’ll try their luck in the Baltics, or perhaps start shipping more hardware to fellow travelers, terrorists and separatists, in places like Moldova.In the meantime, though, Russian forces are ...
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    22 分
  • Personalized CRISPR

    Personalized CRISPR
    2025/06/03
    This week we talk about gene-editing, CRISPR/Cas9, and ammonia.We also discuss the germ line, mad scientists, and science research funding.Recommended Book: The Siren’s Call by Chris HayesTranscriptBack in November of 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui achieved global notoriety by announcing that he had used a relatively new gene-editing technique on human embryos, which led to the birth of the world’s first gene-edited babies.His ambition was to help people with HIV-related fertility problems, one of which is that if a parent is HIV positive, there’s a chance they could transmit HIV to their child.This genetic modification was meant to confer immunity to HIV to the children so that wouldn’t be an issue. And in order to accomplish that immunity, He used a technology called CRISPR/Cas9 to modify the embryos’ DNA to remove their CCR5 gene, which is related to immune system function, but relevant to this undertaking, also serves as a common pathway for the HIV-1 virus, allowing it to infect a new host.CRISPR is an acronym that stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, and that refers to a type of DNA sequence found in all sorts of genomes, including about half of all sequenced bacterial genomes and just shy of 90% of all sequenced archaea genomes.Cas9 stands for CRISPR-associated protein 9, which is an enzyme that uses CRISPR sequences, those repeating, common sequences in DNA strands, to open up targeted DNA strands—and when paired with specific CRISPR sequences, this duo can search for selected patterns in DNA and then edit those patterns.This tool, then, allows researchers who know the DNA pattern representing a particular genetic trait—a trait that moderates an immune system protein that also happens to serve as a convenient pathway for HIV, for instance—to alter or eliminate that trait. A shorthand and incomplete way of thinking about this tool is as a sort of find and replace tool like you have in a text document on your computer, and in this instance, the gene sequence being replaced is a DNA strand that causes a trait that in turn leads to HIV susceptibility.So that’s what He targeted in those embryos, and the children those embryos eventually became, who are usually referred to as Lulu and Nana, which are pseudonyms, for their privacy, they were the first gene-edited babies; though because of the gene-editing state of the art at the time, while He intended to render these babies’ CCR5 gene entirely nonfunctional, which would replicate a natural mutation that’s been noted in some non-gene-edited people, including the so-called Berlin Patient, who was a patient in Germany in the late-90s who was functionally cured of HIV—the first known person to be thus cured—while that’s what He intended to do, instead these two babies actually carry both a functional and a mutant copy of CCR5, not just the mutant one, which in theory means they’re not immune to HIV, as intended.Regardless of that outcome, which may be less impactful than He and other proponents of this technology may have hoped, He achieved superstardom, briefly, even being named one of the most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2019. But he was also crushed by controversy, stripped of his license to conduct medical research by the Chinese government, sent to prison for three years and fined 3 million yuan, which is more than $400,000, and generally outcast from the global scientific community for ethical violations, mostly because the type of gene-editing he did wasn’t a one-off sort of thing, it was what’s called germ-line editing, which means those changes won’t just impact Lulu and Nana, they’ll be passed on to their children, as well, and their children’s children, and so on.And the ethical implications of germ-line editing are so much more substantial because while a one-off error would be devastating to the person who suffers it, such an error that is passed on to potentially endless future generations could, conceivably, end humanity.The error doesn’t even have to be a botched job, it could be an edit that makes the edited child taller or more intelligent by some measure, or more resistant to a disease, like HIV—but because this is fringy science and we don’t fully understand how changing one thing might change other things, the implications for such edits are massive.Giving someone an immunity to HIV would theoretically be a good thing, then, but if that edit then went on the market and became common, we might see a generation of humans that are immune to HIV, but potentially more susceptible to something else, or maybe who live shorter lives, or maybe who create a subsequent generation who themselves are prone to all sorts of issues we couldn’t possibly have foreseen, because we made these edits without first mapping all possible implications of making that genetic tweak, and we did so in such a way that those edits would persist ...
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    16 分
  • Chinese Emissions

    Chinese Emissions
    2025/05/27
    This week we talk about greenhouse gases, renewable energy capacity, and China’s economy.We also discuss coal power plants, natural gas, and gigatons.Recommended Book: What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonTranscriptIn 2024, global CO2 emissions hit a new all-time high of 37.8 gigatons, that figure including emissions from industrial processes, oil well flaring, and the combustion of fuel, like petroleum in a vehicle.And for context, a gigaton is one billion metric tons, which is about 2.2 trillion pounds. A single gigaton is about the weight of 10,000 fully equipped aircraft carriers, it’s about twice the mass of all human beings on the planet, and it’s approximately the same mass of all non-human land-mammals on earth.That’s one gigaton, and global CO2 emissions last year hit 37.8 gigatons; so quite a lot of carbon dioxide headed into the atmosphere, every year, these days.That’s up about .8% from 2023 levels, and it resulted in an atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 422.5 parts per million, which is around 3 ppm higher than 2023, and 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. And again, for context, if we don’t want to experience global average temperature increases, more extreme weather, and disrupted water cycles, the general consensus is that we want to keep atmospheric CO2 levels at or below 350 ppm, and we’re currently at 422.5 ppm.That said, while emissions grew last year, mostly because fuel combustion increased by around 1%, which overshadowed the decrease in industrial process emissions, which was down 2.3% for the year, emissions growth in 2024 was less than GDP growth; and that’s important because for a long time it was assumed that in order to grow global wealth, according to that metric for wealth, at least, more fossil fuels would need to be burned, because that was the pattern for a long time, industrial revolution, onward.Beginning in the early 2000s, though, GDP growth and emissions growth diverged, and that decoupling has become more prominent as many wealthy nations, including the US, have upped the efficiency of many previously energy-hogging aspects of their economies—things like appliances and the aforementioned industrial processes—while also shifting a lot of energy generation away from massively polluting fuels like coal and oil, over to less-polluting fuels like gas, and non-polluting sources like solar and wind, and in some cases nuclear, as well.This relationship varies significantly from country to country, and the benefits are mostly being seen in so-called advanced economies right now, as many poorer nations are still seeing increased emissions from more polluting power sources, generating electricity, and the growth in wealth leading to more people buying cars and scooters, many of which run on dirty fuels.In the US, though, GDP has doubled since 1990, but CO2 emissions have dropped back down to around 1990 levels.Which to be clear is still a whole lot, as Americans consume a lot of stuff and use a lot of energy, and there are a lot of people living in the US using all that energy and buying all that stuff. But it serves as a good example of this divergence, which we’re also seeing across the EU, where European economies, on average, are 66% larger than in 1990, and CO2 emissions are about a third lower than levels from that same year.What I’d like to talk about today, though, is how this dynamic is playing out in China, a place with a staggeringly high population, a rapidly enlarging middle class, and a whole lot of energy needs.—China is a renewable energy powerhouse.It’s an energy of all kinds powerhouse, truthfully, but its development of renewable energy technologies, and its deployment of those technologies, has been truly remarkable, especially over the past decade or so.China has more renewable energy capacity—mostly solar and wind—than the next 13 countries combined. The US comes in second place, but China has four-times as much renewable energy capacity than the US.Despite that, though, because of China’s huge population and its remarkable wealth-spreading success story, having brought something like 800 million people out of poverty over the past 40 years, a lot of people in the country need a lot more energy, every year. Because as people make more money, they tend to use more electricity and heat, and they tend to buy more things, need bigger homes, and so on. All of which requires more energy.So even though they’ve been building solar panels and wind turbines at a blistering rate, spreading these things all over the place, massively increasing their capacity for clean electricity, they’ve also been building more fossil fuel-burning power plants, especially coal power plants, and that’s made it the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases; a little less than half of the country’s total installed generation capacity burns fossil fuels, which is a huge drop from even a handful of years ago, but ...
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    12 分
  • Coinbase Hack

    Coinbase Hack
    2025/05/20
    This week we talk about kidnappings, ransoms, and bitcoin.We also discuss crypto wealth, robberies, and memecoins.Recommended Book: The Status Game by Will StorrTranscriptIn 2008, a white paper published by someone writing under the pen name Satoshi Nakamoto proposed a method for making a decentralized asset class called a cryptocurrency that led to the creation of bitcoin, which was implemented and began trading in 2009.While there were other variations on this theme, and attempts to create something like a cryptocurrency previously, bitcoin is generally considered to be the first modern incarnation of this asset class, and its approach—using a peer-to-peer network to keep track of who owns what tokens on a publicly distributed ledger called a blockchain—led to the development of many copycats, and many next-generation cryptoassets based on similar principles, or principles that have been iterated in all sorts of directions, based on the preferences and beliefs of those assets’ founders.In its early days, bitcoin didn’t make much of a splash and was considered to be kind of an anomaly, mostly interesting to a very small number of people who speculated about alternative currencies and how they might be developed and implemented in the real world, but as of mid-May 2025, the global market cap for all cryptocurrencies is $3.39 trillion, bitcoin accounting for more than $2 trillion of that total.That said, there are tens of thousands of cryptocurrencies available, these days, though the majority of them have been formally discontinued or simply allowed to go fallow, becoming functionally inactive.That’s partly the consequence of a surge in interest during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the price of bitcoin popping from just over $5,000 at the start of the pandemic to around $68,000 in late-2021.Bitcoin and most of the other crypto-assets that sprung up during that tumultuous period then collapsed when the US Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, intending to temper inflation, which had the knock-on effect of reining in risky bets on things like seed-level startups and alternative assets classes, like crypto—bitcoin dropped to less than $17,000 in 2023, partly as a result of that move—but as inflation levels cooled and investors started to look for assets that might pay out big time again, there was another wave of crypto-asset launches, especially of the ‘meme coin’ variety, which basically means a crypto token that’s launched either as a joke, or to try to make some money off something that’s trending—the most famous meme coin is probably Dogecoin, which was originally released in 2013 as a joke, but then boomed in popularity and price during the pandemic.Through it all, and well before most people knew what bitcoin or cryptocurrencies were, Coinbase has served as a central pillar of the crypto-asset ecosystem.The company was founded in 2012 by a former Airbnb engineer as a crypto exchange: a place where you can swap crypto assets for other crypto assets, but importantly, where you can also sell those assets for real world money, or buy them for real world money.And that’s what I want to talk about today, and more specifically a recent hack of Coinbase, and the potential implications of that hack.—In mid-May of 2025, Coinbase reported, in a legally required Securities and Exchange Commission filing, that their company was hacked, and that the hack may end up costing Coinbase between $180 and $400 million, all told.According to that filing, Coinbase received an email from the hacker on May 11, saying that they’d obtained a bunch of information about Coinbase customers and their accounts, alongside other Coinbase documentation related to their account management systems and customer service practices. The hacker demanded $20 million from the company, which the company refused to pay.Coinbase officials have been keen to note that passwords and private keys were not compromised in the hack, so the hackers couldn’t just log into someone’s account and empty their crypto wallets or the real-deal money they might be keeping there, but they did access names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, alongside the last four digits of some users’ social security numbers, their government ID images, like drivers licenses and passports, and their account balances.All of which isn’t as bad as passwords and private keys being stolen, but it’s not good, either. The hackers, or people working with them, have reportedly been launching phishing attacks against some of the higher net-worth individuals whose information was stolen, those attacks—which usually involve tricking victims into divulging other information, like passwords—made a million times easier because the folks doing the attacks had that stolen information.What’s more, and this isn’t necessarily obvious from reading the pieces published about this hack, but it’s important context surrounding all of ...
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    12 分
  • Energy Star

    Energy Star
    2025/05/13
    This week we talk about the NHTSA, CAFE standards, and energy efficiency.We also discuss incentive programs, waste heat, and the EPA.Recommended Book: Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo FaloyinTranscriptIn the United States, fuel-efficiency laws for vehicles sold on the US market are set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA. They set the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE standards by which vehicle-makers have to abide, and that, in turn, establishes the minimum standards for companies like Ford or Toyota making vehicles for this market.That CAFE standard is paired with another guideline set by the Environmental Protection Agency that sets standards related to tailpipe emissions. The former says how many miles a vehicle should be able to travel on a gallon of fuel, while the latter says how much CO2, methane, and other pollutants can be legally emitted as that fuel is burnt and those miles are traversed.These two standards address different angles of this issue, but work together to, over time, reduce the amount of fuel consumed to do the same work, and pollution created as that work is accomplished; as a result, if you’re traveling 50 miles today and driving a modern car in the US, you’ll consume a lot less fuel than you would have traveling the same distance in a period-appropriate car twenty years ago.Back in the final year of the Biden administration, the president was criticized for not pushing for more stringent fuel-efficiency standards for US-sold and driven vehicles. The fuel economy requirements were increased by 2% per year for model years 2027 to 2031 for passenger cars, and the same 2% per year requirement will be applied to SUVs and other light trucks for model years 2029 to 2031.This is significantly lower than a previously proposed efficiency requirement, which would have seen new vehicles averaging about 43.5 mpg by model year 2032—an efficiency gain of 18%. And the explanation at the time was that Biden really wanted to incentivize carmakers to shift to EVs, and if they weren’t spending their time and resources on fuel-efficiency tech deployment for their gas-guzzlers, which Biden hoped to start phasing out, they could spend more on refining their EV offerings, which were already falling far behind China’s EV models.Biden wanted half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030 to be electric, so the theory was that fuel-efficiency standards were the previous war, and he wanted to fight the next one.Even those watered-down standards were estimated to keep almost 70 billion gallons of gasoline from being consumed through the year 2050, which in turn would reduce US driver emissions by more than 710 million metric tons of CO2 by that same year. They were also expected to save US drivers something like $600 in gas costs over the lifetime of each vehicle they own.Since current president Trump returned to office, however, all of these rules and standards have come into question. Just as when he was president the first time around, rolling back a bunch of Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards—which if implemented as planned would have ensured US-sold vehicles averaged 46.7 mpg by 2026, so better than we were expected to get by 2032 under Biden’s revised minimum—just as he did back then, Trump is targeting these new, Biden standards, while also doing away with a lot of the incentives introduced by the Biden administration meant to make EVs cheaper and more appealing to consumers, and easier to make and sell for car companies.What I’d like to talk about today is another standard, this one far less politicized and widely popular within the US and beyond, that is also being targeted by the second Trump administration, and what might happen if it goes away.—In 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency, under the endorsement of then-president George HW Bush, launched the Energy Star program: a voluntary labeling program that allowed manufacturers of various types of products to affix a little blue label that says Energy Star on their product, boxes, and/or advertising if their product met the efficiency standards set by this program.So it’s a bit like if those aforementioned fuel-efficiency standards set for vehicles weren’t required, and instead, if your car met the minimum standards, you could slap a little sticker on the car that said it was more energy efficient than cars without said sticker.A low bar to leap, and one that wasn’t considered to be that big a deal, either in terms of being cumbersome for product-makers, or in terms of accomplishing much of anything.Energy Star standards were initially developed for the then-burgeoning field of personal computers and accessories, but in 1995 things really took off, when the program was expanded to include heating and cooling infrastructure, alongside other components for housing and other buildings.From there, new product categories were added on a semi-regular basis, and the government ...
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    17 分
  • Model Context Protocol

    Model Context Protocol
    2025/05/06
    This week we talk about the Marshall Plan, standardization, and USB.We also discuss artificial intelligence, Anthropic, and protocols.Recommended Book: Fuzz by Mary RoachTranscriptIn the wake of WWII, the US government implemented the European Recovery Program, more commonly known as the Marshall Plan, to help Western Europe recover from a conflict that had devastated the afflicted countries’ populations, infrastructure, and economies.It kicked off in April of 1948, and though it was replaced by a successor program, the Mutual Security Act, just three years later in 1951—which was similar to the Marshall Plan, but which had a more militant, anti-communism bent, the idea being to keep the Soviets from expanding their influence across the continent and around the world—the general goal of both programs was similar: the US was in pretty good shape, post-war, and in fact by waiting to enter as long as it did, and by becoming the arsenal of the Allied side in the conflict, its economy was flourishing, its manufacturing base was all revved up and needed something to do with all the extra output capacity it had available, all the resources committed to producing hardware and food and so on, so by sharing these resources with allies, by basically just giving a bunch of money and assets and infrastructural necessities to these European governments, the US could get everybody on side, bulwarked against the Soviet Union’s counterinfluence, at a moment in which these governments were otherwise prone to that influence; because they were suffering and weaker than usual, and thus, if the Soviets came in with the right offer, or with enough guns, they could conceivably grab a lot of support and even territory. So it was considered to be in everyone’s best interest, those who wanted to keep the Soviet Union from expanding, at least, to get Europe back on its feet, posthaste.So this program, and its successor program, were highly influential during this period, and it’s generally considered to be one of the better things the US government has done for the world, as while there were clear anti-Soviet incentives at play, it was also a relatively hands-off, large-scale give-away that favorably compared with the Soviets’ more demanding and less generous version of the same.One interesting side effect of the Marshall Plan is that because US manufacturers were sending so much stuff to these foreign ports, their machines and screws and lumber used to rebuild entire cities across Europe, the types of machines and screws and lumber, which were the standard models of each in the US, but many of which were foreign to Europe at the time, became the de facto standard in some of these European cities, as well.Such standards aren’t always the best of all possible options, sometimes they stick around long past their period of ideal utility, and they don’t always stick, but the standards and protocols within an industry or technology do tend to shape that industry or technology’s trajectory for decades into the future, as has been the case with many Marshall Plan-era US standards that rapidly spread around the world as a result of these giveaways.And standards and protocols are what I’d like to talk about today. In particular a new protocol that seems primed to shape the path today’s AI tools are taking.—Today’s artificial intelligence, or AI, which is an ill-defined type of software that generally refers to applications capable of doing vaguely human-like things, like producing text and images, but also somewhat superhuman things, like working with large data-sets and bringing meaning to them, are developing rapidly, becoming more potent and capable seemingly every day.This period of AI development has been in the works for decades, and the technologies required to make the current batch of generative AI tools—the type that makes stuff based on libraries of training data, deriving patterns from that data and then coming up with new stuff based on the prompting of human users—were originally developed in the 1970s, but the transformer, which was a fresh approach to what’s called deep learning architectures, was first proposed in 2017 by a researcher at Google, and that led to the development of the generative pre-trained transformer, or GPT, in 2018.The average non-tech-world person probably started to hear about this generation of AI tools a few years later, maybe when the first transformer-based voice and image tools started popping up around the internet, mostly as novelties, or even more likely in late-2022 when OpenAI released the first version of ChatGPT, a generative AI system attached to a chatbot interface, which made these sorts of tools more accessible to the average person.Since then, there’s been a wave of investment and interest in AI tools, and we’ve reached a point where the seemingly obvious next-step is removing humans from the loop in more AI-related processes.What that means in ...
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