Thursday Thoughts, March 18, 2021

Another week with so much going on. Cool things are happening right now (SXSW, Barkley Marathons), interesting things happened (job titles, data security breaches), and much more is in store (regulation, plans for climate change, reimagination of wearables). And lots of insights from great thinkers covering it all. One wonderful thing that I'm noticing more and more is the impending sense of optimism about the state of the world as we move towards exiting the pandemic; it's overdue and great to see light at the end of the tunnel.

That all said, this week was hard for many people in the U.S. and around the world. The evil of racism expresses itself in many ways and recently it has manifested in violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It's detestable, it's deplorable, and it needs to stop. For those of us who aren't a part of the AAPI community, as we work to end racism and the violence associated with it, we can take steps to support the AAPI community. One real way to start is by simply being caring friends and allies, and treating others with empathy, kindness, and grace. Here's more about how to support the AAPI community right now.

Tech:

• Happening now: SXSW is live (but online).
• Tim O'Reilly is suggesting the current (2000s-2020s) version of Silicon Valley is coming to an end as a result of four trends:  (1) Consumer internet entrepreneurs lack many of the skills needed for the life sciences revolution. (2) Internet regulation is upon us. (3) Climate response is capital intensive, and inherently local. (4) The end of the betting economy. And maybe that's not a bad thing -- new, bigger, and more important tasks are ahead of us.
• Wikipedia is free. Wikipedia also costs tens of millions of dollars per year to run. So Wikimedia Foundation is asking large tech companies for financial help (which makes sense, since Wikipedia and other Wikimedia tools are highly useful in, say, search for Google).
• Facebook is announcing a new commitment to human rights. Worth watching to see if it translates into meaningful action.
• More Facebook news: the company will no longer recommend political groups to users. Good move.
• A Facebook update: here's a deeper dive into the Facebook smartwatch plan. It's bold thinking; the execution (and building trust to go to market) will be tough.
• Netflix is launching a test crackdown on shared passwords. They didn't care so much before but, with the streaming wars heating up, it makes sense.
• Stripe is now the highest valued U.S. private 'unicorn' ever, with a valuation hitting $95 billion.
• Facebook is using it's addictive algorithms to push for vaccination (it used to be the case that anti-vax takes were 'sticky' on the platform but no longer?).
• Facebook is also reportedly piloting a plan to pay content creators to write things on its platform.
• I'm not a huge fan of Elon Musk's but his recent job title change (and that of Tesla's CFO) is pretty funny.
• Online transactions in China are going to be subject to more rules in the future.
• Just because it's crypto doesn't mean the rules go out the window: the CFTC is reportedly investigating Binance (the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange) over concerns that it allowed Americans to place wagers that violated U.S. rules.
• Repeat warning: robots are likely to take over some office jobs but they won't be 'robots' per se.
• A new space race is heating up, with China aiming to dominate satellite internet using a strategy similar to that employed by Huawei in the 5G context. Meanwhile, China is developing ties with Russia for a moon research base as U.S./Russian space ties fray (SpaceX is cutting into the U.S. dependency on Russia to reach the International Space Station).
• Eye-opening, at least for me. Bloomberg does a deep-dive into a topic I'd read only a little about previously: how the caste system in India plays out in Silicon Valley (the article looks at it through the prism of IIT).
• It's not really the case that there's a mass exodus from Silicon Valley to other locations like Texas or Florida. But for the folks thinking of heading to Austin or Miami, it might be worth considering whether or not those states' labor laws are as protective as California's.
• Tech is finally dealing--if only in fits and spurts--with labor organization and the questions/challenges that come with it. The gig worker fights with delivery companies and the battle at Amazon in Alabama are just the start. But the real interesting question is how the companies will handle divides between the white collar and blue collar workers at the same companies (e.g., Amazon).
• The EU is finding that it's tough to bring a competition law case against Amazon when it struggles to understand how the company works.
• Pretty wild: Tencent operates much like a conglomerate with investments in lots of publicly traded companies and those investments alone made Tencent $120 billion last year.
• Following Apple's move, Google is slashing app store fees in half.
• The NYT puts forward an argument that Google and Facebook's ads model (and hegemony) have led to the resurgence of subscription-only models on the internet.
• Tesla says one thing to consumers, another to regulators regarding self-driving. Will it catch up with the company?
• No-code/Low-code services are continuing to grow.
• A rejection letter generator is making the rounds.
• Benedict Evans makes a good case that Amazon's ads bring in more revenue than AWS.
• Vice and Buzzfeed may go public via SPACs, but it'll come at decreased valuations.
• There's a new 'get out of Zoom calls' tool that will introduce echoes, choppiness, etc. into your calls.

Privacy:

• When dealing with non-EU entities, how far does the GDPR's long arm extend? Well, as far as the UK is concerned--keep in mind that the UK is not part of the EU at this point--the GDPR doesn't extend as far as some data subjects would wish.
• With the news that SMS can be rerouted, it's probably worth re-reading how to do 2FA appropriately.
• Facebook's Oversight Board may ask the company for its algorithms. They'll likely get it, so what happens next is anyone's guess.
• I have advocated this for years - if you don't like tracking, give the trackers junk data.
• 150,000 security cameras' worth of data, collected by start-up Verkada, was breached, including Tesla camera data and hospital and police department cameras.
• The highest administrative court in France ruled that it is permissible for businesses to host sensitive personal data on AWS because sufficient legal/technical safeguards were in place to protect the data from U.S. government access requests.
• The Texas AG, along with the AGs from 14 other states, is accusing Google of anticompetitive behavior by implementing cookie changes that harm third party advertisers (but leave Google in a stronger position). Interestingly, Politico is reporting that the FTC balked at a chance to go after Google for antitrust violations a decade ago. More interestingly, the French competition authority has not found the Texan argument, as applied against Apple, to be compelling.
• A $5 billion suit against Google over incognito mode tracking is able to go forward.

Sports:

• LeBron James is now going to be a part owner of the Boston Red Sox. Huge for LeBron, but even bigger for the Red Sox who, as many know, have had some struggles with race in the past: LBJ and his business partner Maverick Carter will become the ownership company's first Black partners.
• The 2021 NCAA indoor track and cross-country championships happened. Lots of good racing (most of which can be found on YouTube).
• Mario Fraioli (of the Morning Shakeout) has a great write-up on his thinking re: super-shoes, race times, and the spirit of competition.
• Luke Wicker, a great Bay Area runner, is headed back to the UK. But before he left, he created a 104K 'round' of SF that tags all 76 accessible peaks within the City, and FKTed it on his way out. Absolute legend.
• Only 15 people have finished the Barkley Marathons (the event is live now). There is now a book about them.
• Nepal implemented some new rules for climbing Everest. Some in the climbing community are skeptical that they'll accomplish the goal of reducing crowding and danger on the peak.
• It may be a long time before gyms get back to normal. Many have closed permanently; others are struggling once open to attract customers.
• Your periodic reminder that VO2Max is just one of many factors for endurance performance.
• More details on the Protecting America's Wilderness and Public Lands Act and how it will help trail runners, particularly in the Western U.S.
• Backcountry skiing is fun and also more dangerous. The SF Chronicle dives into how the Tahoe region is dealing with the growth of backcountry skiing in the covid era.
• The North Face is ubiquitous. High Snobiety digs into how TNF, like Nike, pairs cutting edge technology with mass consumption.
• Alabama was the only state to bar yoga from schools, but that just changed.
• Maybe it's old news to many but it was new to me this week: coffee consumption is actually associated with increased bone density. Great news for me!

Covid:

• A great proposal: public holidays to give folks time to get vaccinated.
• The EU's vaccine rollout has been suboptimal, to say the least (others have said it's the bloc's worst policy failure, aside from austerity). It's amazing to think of negotiating to get a dollar off per shot while agreeing to step further back in line for supplies, since the impact of that delay in shots will have much more significant economic effects.
• An unlikely covid vaccine success story: West Virginia.
• More than a dozen countries have suspended administration of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine; the evidence for continuing the suspension isn't really clear.
• The covid triple-whammy (healthcare for the sick, economic disruption, and vaccine costs) is hitting poorer countries hard.
• The Economist weighs in on the idea of vaccine passports and their likely impact on international travel.
• A panel of UCSF physicians recently weighed in on the next phases of the pandemic.
• Republicans are the segment of the U.S. population most likely to hold back efforts to develop herd immunity (if they're 30+% of the population and 30-40% of them opt-out, that's a lot of people!). The former guy advocating for the vaccine could help shift that.
• The NYT has a great visual showing how air flow (and opening windows) will be a key part of reopening schools (and probably offices, too).
• Where you live may impact your health in more ways than you think: the political party of governors has associations with covid morbidity.
• Have Neanderthal DNA? Depending on what genes you have, you could be at an advantage or disadvantage in terms of your response to covid infection.

Climate Change:

• If you want to understand how something may happen in the future, you need good models. Scientists are now attempting to build a 'digital twin' of the Earth to help understand how climate change will affect us in the future.
• The world needs rubber. Unfortunately, climate change is posing an existential threat to the rubber trees' ecosystem.
• The SEC will likely be looking at companies' climate-related disclosures in their public filings. This is likely good news for transparency advocates.
• India may go carbon net-zero by 2050, a decade before China. Given India's reliance on coal and other extractive industries, this would be a big shift.
• When dreams for renewables clash with humanitarian crises: plans for more renewable solar energy are running into conflict with concerns over China's treatment of the Uighur people.
• Who should pay to save a town? Towns in North Carolina's Outer Banks are grappling with the costs of climate change. They aren't the first to have to figure out how to allocate climate change costs (West Coast towns have been in this battle for a while too), and certainly won't be the last.
• Science confirms what many of us already knew/believed: wildfire smoke is worse for you than car-related pollution.
• Also in the Department of Unsurprising News: Indigenous people are often the most effective at environmental stewardship and should be listened to, rather than disregarded, by climate scientists.
• Unbelievable: somehow, in 2021, Kern County, California is still approving 40,500 new oil/natural gas wells.
• When Russia engages in (or secretly promotes) climate change denialism, keep in mind that Russia views global warming as a tremendous opportunity to unlock value for agriculture, extractive industries, trade, and more.
• There are many glimmers of good news re: the environment if you know where to look.
• The U.S. may start rewarding regenerative farming, but there are skeptics wondering if it's just a Big Ag giveaway.

California:

• It's a California trifecta: housing, wildfire, environmentalism. The SF Chronicle has a deep dive into the proposal to develop Guenoc Valley in Lake County.
• We're entering into serious drought territory (again). Not good. More here on reservoir levels.
• There are groves of trees dying, and it's not the Sudden Oak Death disease. Rather, it's a set of native pathogens that are killing climate-stressed trees.
• Good news, SF: the parklets might become permanent.
• End of an era: Mills College in Oakland may be folding as a degree-granting institution.
• Living in California might lead to living longer: California ranks second to Hawaii in terms of life expectancy in the U.S.

Etc.

• Optimism is 'in' this year. In the U.S., the number of people expressing optimism about the state of affairs has reached a 16 month high, and the NYT is explaining 17 reasons why we should be optimistic about the near term economic future.
• In 1851, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior said "the only alternatives left are to civilize or exterminate" Native Americans. 170 years later, we now have our first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland. Progress takes time but, as MLK Jr. said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
• United States but not united in media consumption/trust (or reality): there's a 63% divide between Republicans and Democrats on trusting the news. A deeper dive here.
• New women employees often earn less than men. The likely reason? Perceived confidence. But the issue might be that men are overconfident (and thus overpaid) and companies aren't doing enough to correct for overconfidence in hiring and compensation decisions.
• Remote work is great, but could be a negative for office culture (and people seeking promotions) post-covid.
• What do the Grammys, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, and the SuperBowl have in common? Very few people are watching them.
• A very good essay in the Atlantic on the inequities of elite private schools in modern U.S. society. Somewhat relatedly, the admissions battles for elite schools are becoming even more heated with applications up and SATs/ACTs out.
• Taylor Swift is helping seed the notions of ecology and the outdoors in her listeners. Meanwhile, streaming and musical ubiquity are killing off music genres.
• Interesting read in Bloomberg about how Canada's economy is a bit too heavily influenced by real estate.
• Azeem Azhar has some of the best information around and periodically puts together charts to help encapsulate some of the most compelling trends. Check out his latest set of charts here.
• Why do hummingbirds hum? Scientists have apparently solved the mystery: it's in the aerodynamic forces creating pressure changes as the wings move.