The fastest mobile speeds you can get in London tend to be down in the Underground. CC-licensed photo by Mike Knell on Flickr.
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There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 10 links for you. Jammed? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Trump’s win is neither an oil gusher nor a green crusher • Bloomberg
Liam Denning:
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as much as Trump calls the energy transition a scam, he entered office in 2017 amid sustained declines in the price of clean technologies. Developers’ decisions are certainly influenced by policy but few can resist the siren call of lower costs. For example: More US wind-power capacity was installed under the former president who speculates that the sound of spinning turbines can cause cancer than under Biden (Biden still wins big on solar and batteries).
Similarly, anyone expecting another round of energy dominance to spark a big jump in US oil and gas output should remember that the industry has in recent years grown rather fond of profitability. The same day Americans went to the polls, shale darling Diamondback Energy Inc. hosted an earnings call luxuriating in the company’s efficiency gains but warning against using that extra firepower to boost production: “I think that spreadsheet math is what’s gotten this industry in trouble in the past” — see: the Obama oil boom — as Chief Financial Officer Matthew Kaes Van’t Hof put it.
Trump will certainly reduce hurdles for producers; expect lower royalties and easier environmental rules on federal lands as well as more lease auctions. But federal lands account for a minority of oil and gas production and there are far bigger forces shaping the outlook for prices — and, therefore, the path of domestic production.
Chinese oil imports have slowed, exacerbating an excess of supply that has forced OPEC+ to delay bringing back production. If the group decides to pull the trigger in the first quarter — seasonally weak for oil demand — Trump’s inauguration could coincide with a slump in prices. That’s before we get to the negative impacts on oil and gas prices from a potential easing of sanctions on Russia or the chilling effect on global trade, and the opposite effect on US inflation, of his promised sweeping tariffs.
Similarly, Biden’s signature green policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, isn’t necessarily dead come January. The vast majority of announced cleantech manufacturing investment and associated jobs, underpinned by IRA subsidies, are in red [Republican] House districts.
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This is an important point: Trump can’t buck the market, and the price of renewables is cratering. In 2016 he was full of talk about coal: its use plummeted. The fact that the Inflation Reduction Act is making so much impact in Republican areas makes it much, much harder to kill.
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How the Trump whale correctly called the election • WSJ
Alexander Osipovich:
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The mystery trader known as the “Trump whale” is set to reap almost $50 million in profit after running the table on a series of bold bets tied to the presidential election.
Not only did he see Donald Trump winning the presidency, he wagered that Trump would win the popular vote—an outcome that many political observers saw as unlikely. “Théo,” as the trader called himself, also bet that Trump would win the “blue wall” swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Now, Théo is set for a huge payday. He made his wagers on Polymarket, a crypto-based betting platform, using four anonymous accounts. Although he has declined to share his identity, he has been communicating with a Wall Street Journal reporter since an article on Oct. 18 drew attention to his bets.
In dozens of emails, Théo said his wager was essentially a bet against the accuracy of polling data. Describing himself as a wealthy Frenchman who had previously worked as a trader for several banks, he told the Journal that he began applying his mathematical know-how to analyze US polls over the summer.
…Polls failed to account for the “shy Trump voter effect,” Théo said. Either Trump backers were reluctant to tell pollsters that they supported the former president, or they didn’t want to participate in polls, Théo wrote.
To solve this problem, Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as “neighbour polls” that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbours to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbours plan to vote for.
Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbour method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbours would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported.
To Théo, this was evidence that pollsters were—once again—underestimating Trump’s support. The data helped convince him to put on his long-shot bet that Trump would win the popular vote. At the time that Théo made those wagers, bettors on Polymarket were assessing the chances of a Trump popular-vote victory at less than 40%.
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People who saw the size of the bets thought the “Whale” must be some sort of foreign influence operation. Half-right, at least. (How did they think a big bet would influence millions of voters?) I hadn’t heard of neighbour polls, but it seems like a clever method to discover revealed preference.
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Walking Phoenix • Chris Arnade Walks the World
Chris Arnade has been walking around all sorts of countries, seeing them from the ground, for years. In March this year he was in Phoenix, Arizona, seeing the American dream at ground zero:
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The second morning began at the same McDonald’s, with the now familiar woman yelling at Susan — my own little Groundhog Day-like riff (“Okay, campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties”) which I chuckled at.
By noon I wasn’t chuckling anymore. The walk, although in a different direction, was just as depressing. Long empty stretches on mile-long blocks, with just me and the distraught. It became another day-long lesson in the zoology of American dysfunction — the homeless addict, the mentally-ill homeless addict, the bored and aimless teens, the elderly with no family, the physically handicapped, the obese, the obese physically handicapped, the perc 30 addict, the angry mentally ill, and so on and so on.
After a lunch my body had no interest in, I realized I was in over my head, and needed to get out of the sun, needed water, so I called it quits, and found a bus route to get the six miles back to my motel. The first bus was running forty-five minutes late, and the stop had no shade, so instead of waiting, I walked to the second, which was an hour and fifteen late. I also walked that last bit.
When I finally got to my room, I realized I’d made a massive mistake2. I had zero appetite, despite having eaten little all day, and I badly needed hydration, so I went to the corner 24 7 Convenience Store to stock up on Gatorade, where all my cards were declined, then locked. I’ve used these cards in Senegal, Mongolia, and Ecuador without triggering so much as a security text, but the corner of 27th and Indian School Rd was too much for the algorithm. Given who was around me and the amount of plexiglass between me and the clerk, it was probably justified.
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Do you want the remain candidate? Or the change candidate?
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The old man lost his horse • Flavia Ouyang
Flavia Ouyang:
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There is a well-known parable in the book Master of Huainan that encapsulates Daoist’s idea of the relativity of luck in life. It’s known as “The old man lost his horse, how could he know if this is not fortuitous” (Original: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福).
Here’s the story:
Once Upon a time, a skilled equestrian lived near the border. For no reason, his horse ran off into the barbarian kingdoms. Everyone felt bad for him. But his father said, “Don’t be glum. Who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the better?”
Months passed. His horse came back with a herd of well-bred barbarian horses. People congratulated him. His father said, “Don’t be overjoyed. Who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the worse?”
Now with an abundance of horses, the son indulged in riding. One day, he fell and broke his leg. Again, people sympathized with him. Yet his father said, “My son, who’s to say this won’t take a turn for the better?”
A year later, the barbarian breached through the border. All able-bodied men were conscripted to fight. Nine out of ten were killed. Due to his injury, the father and son were spared.
Thus, misfortune can bring fortune, and fortune can lead to misfortune. This happens time and time again. The evolution of fortune is endless and unfathomable.
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Ouyang’s comment: “Here’s to the horse we [in the US] lost last night.”
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Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears • The Guardian
Miranda Bryant:
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Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks.
The country’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast.
The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato’s newest member.
“The government believes that it would lead to unacceptable consequences for Sweden’s defence to build the current projects in the Baltic Sea area,” Jonson said at a press conference.
The proposed windfarms would have been located between Åland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm.
Wind power could affect Sweden’s defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said.
The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden’s west coast.
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Quite a thing when you have to bear in mind that your renewable energy strategy might interfere with your defence strategy.
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Why is London’s phone signal so bad? • London Centric
Jim Waterson:
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Astonishingly, tests carried out by London Centric found that in several high-profile areas of the capital the best place to find a fast 5G mobile data connection is now hundreds of feet under the capital in deep tube tunnels. This is thanks to new equipment – known as “leaky feeders” – installed in recent years under a contract with Transport for London.
In a damning indictment of the capital’s outdoor mobile infrastructure, if you want to tether your laptop to your phone and work remotely you might be better off tapping into the tube network and doing your work while riding around at 40km/hr underneath London. (Much of this article was written on the tube in this manner.)
On a packed rush hour Jubilee line train to Canary Wharf on Thursday morning it was possible to download data over EE’s network at 217mbps (megabits per second), as fast as many home broadband connections. But the moment you go above ground and are surrounded by the financial district’s skyscrapers the data download speed falls by more than three quarters to 49mbps.
Get back on the Jubilee line heading east from Canary Wharf and, thanks to the train emptying out, it was possible to hit a super-fast 371mbps on 5G in a tunnel deep under the Thames, enough to download an entire film in little over a minute. But on arrival at Stratford station there was no data connection on many platforms.
Jump on the Elizabeth Line to central London and the in-tunnel data speed returns to 203mbps – but outside Tottenham Court Road station, where you might be trying to meet a friend, it immediately falls to a barely-usable 2mbps. Even wandering around the corner to the middle of an empty Soho Square, free from obstructions, did little to improve download speeds.
The solution to all of this is to install more masts with greater capacity. Gareth Elliott works for lobby group Mobile UK, which represents the interests of mobile phone network providers. He said the biggest issue the operators face in London is the planning system, with local councillors across the capital politically incentivised to object to new masts at all costs – either on aesthetic grounds, or over dubiously-sourced fears about the supposed health impacts.
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Planning regulations really are a blight.
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Just have AI build an app for that • David Gomes
David Gomes:
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I sometimes need to search for a website that will “convert a PNG to SVG”, or “remove page from PDF” or “resize svg”. And these apps are… okay. I don’t really trust most of them with my data, and also a lot of times they just don’t work or have too many ads.
So, I’ve been noticing a trend of people just using AI agents to create full blown apps for these simple use cases.I decided to try it myself for a “resize SVG” app since I recently had to go through a bunch of websites to do this. So, I pulled up Replit Agent and even though I’ve used it before, it doesn’t cease to amaze me just how insanely good it is. The level of polish on this product is unlike any other AI agent out there right now.
It starts off by drawing up a plan and asking you for feedback on that plan. Then, it’ll just go to town and try to build the app. But what’s super clever about it is that the agent asks you for feedback along the way. Effectively, the Replit Agent guides you, not the other way around (as one might have expected).
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This is going to be the next generation of apps. Total junk, but single-use.
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Fate of Google’s search empire could rest in Trump’s hands • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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A few weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that a breakup of Google’s search business may not be an appropriate remedy to destroy the tech giant’s search monopoly.
“Right now, China is afraid of Google,” Trump said at a Chicago event. If that threat were dismantled, Trump suggested, China could become a greater threat to the US, because the US needs to have “great companies” to compete.
Trump’s comments came about a week after the US Department of Justice proposed remedies in the Google monopoly trial, including mulling a breakup.
“I’m not a fan of Google,” Trump insisted. “They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do, without breaking it up, is make sure it’s more fair.”
Now that Trump is presumed to soon be taking office before the remedies phase of the DOJ’s litigation ends next year, it seems possible that Trump may sway the DOJ away from breaking up Google.
Experts told Reuters that a final ruling isn’t expected until August, giving Trump plenty of time to possibly influence the DOJ’s case. But Trump’s stance on Google has seemed to shift throughout his campaign, so there’s no predicting his position once he takes power.
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Creates the perfect conditions to force Sundar Pichai to come and pay fealty in the hope of getting amelioration.
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Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division • TechCrunch
Zack Whittaker:
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The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Firefox browser maker Mozilla, has laid off 30% of its employees as the organization says it faces a “relentless onslaught of change.”
When reached by TechCrunch, Mozilla Foundation’s communications chief Brandon Borrman confirmed the layoffs in an email.
“The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” read the statement shared with TechCrunch.
According to its annual tax filings, the Mozilla Foundation reported having 60 employees during the 2022 tax year. The number of employees at the time of the layoffs was closer to 120 people, according to a person with knowledge. When asked by TechCrunch, Mozilla’s spokesperson did not dispute the figure.
This is the second layoff at Mozilla this year, the first affecting dozens of employees who work on the side of the organization that builds the popular Firefox browser.
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I think the “onslaught of change” is actually an absence of money. Mozilla is getting walloped by the drying up of Google’s funding.
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What are you Haydn? The hoaxers who fooled the classical music world • The Guardian
Phil Hebblethwaite:
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In 1993, completely out of the blue, the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda was sent a photocopy of a manuscript purporting to be six lost Haydn keyboard sonatas. It came with a letter from a little-known flautist from Münster, Germany called Winfried Michel, who told Badura-Skoda that he’d been given it by an elderly lady whose identity he could not reveal.
Badura-Skoda was suspicious, but once he played the music, he became sure that the works were real. He asked his wife Eva, a musicologist, to examine the manuscript. Although the music wasn’t in Haydn’s hand, she believed it to be an authentic copyist’s score dating from around 1805 and originating in Italy. They checked with the Haydn scholar, HC Robbins Landon, and he too was convinced. He penned an article for BBC Music Magazine, headlined Haydn Scoop of the Century, tipped off the Times, and called a press conference for 14 December 1993.
Within hours, the Joseph Haydn Institute in Cologne declared the manuscript to be a fake. An expert from Sotheby’s in London agreed. The Badura-Skodas had been hoaxed, or so it seemed. The following February, Eva gave a talk in California titled: The Haydn Sonatas: A Clever Forgery. Paul played a selection of the works – in a confused state of mind. Eva told the music scholar Michael Beckerman, reporting for the New York Times, “My husband still thinks they’re genuine,” raising difficult questions about truth and art. What did Paul believe he was playing? What was the audience hearing? And did it matter?
In his article, Beckerman wrote: “Knowing that a work is by Haydn or Mozart allows us to see ‘inevitable’ connections. Take away the certainty of authorship, and it’s devilishly difficult to read the musical images within.” He noted, too, that it was the inauthenticity of the manuscript that had exposed Michel and not the fidelity of the music. And so, Beckerman dared to ask: “If someone can write pieces that can be mistaken for Haydn, what is so special about Haydn?”
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That is the question, isn’t it? I’m surprised, in passing, that AI music generators haven’t yet given us Beethoven’s Tenth, or Schubert’s Finished Symphony.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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