The removal of fluoridation from water in the US could cost millions of teeth and billions in dentistry. (One job AI can’t do..) CC-licensed photo by Electric Teeth on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Brush it off. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
What if Google just broke itself up? A tech insider makes the case • The New York Times
David Streitfeld on the suggestion of Google breaking itself up (as was floated last week by an analyst):
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Adam Kovacevich, the chief executive of Chamber of Progress, a trade group funded by Google and other tech companies, said Google needed to be big and think big.
“It’s a company the size of a cruise ship,” he said. “Could it split itself into four yacht-sized companies? Sure. But what would be gained? Google is locked in an intense competition against the other cruise ships — Apple, Meta, Amazon. And there are some opportunities only a cruise-ship-sized company can tackle, like A.I.”
If a split encourages competition, proponents argue, that will benefit Google’s ad customers, who will see lower prices. Employees might be more challenged working for a smaller company, where it is easier to move higher.
“The breakup of Google would only hurt people who would otherwise benefit from unlawful market power,” said Barry Barnett, an antitrust lawyer at Susman Godfrey. “These might include Google executives, whose compensation could fall; start-ups, which could get lower buyout offers from Google or none at all; and rivals like Apple, which could see chances to share revenue vanish.” Google currently pays Apple $20bn annually to be the default search engine on the Safari browser.
Looming over any discussion of a voluntary breakup is the weight of history. Beyond AT&T, there are few examples of a successful company willing to pull itself apart. Companies that are in permanent slumps have regularly done it, however.
General Electric, whose roots go back to Thomas Edison in 1892 and was once as iconic as Google, split itself into three companies last year after skittering close to death. Hewlett-Packard, another iconic company suffering a long-term decline, broke itself in two in 2015.
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The question is, are all the bits necessary for Google to compete in that way? Microsoft doesn’t have an adtech side and does fine; Google does have a gigantic video site which it would never want to sell. If you were trying to assemble (via acquisition) what you absolutely needed to make “NuGoogle” today, which bits would you really want to buy, and which leave behind? Kovacevich is defending the status quo for no reason other than that it’s the status quo.
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How electric scooters are driving China’s salt battery push • BBC Future
Xiaoying You:
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Dozens of glitzy electric mopeds are lined up outside a shopping mall in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China, drawing passersby to test them.
But these Vespa-like scooters, which sell for between £300 and £500 ($400 and $660), are not powered by the mainstream lead-acid or lithium-ion cells, commonly used in electric two-wheelers. Instead, their batteries are made from sodium, an abundant element that can be extracted from sea salt.
Next to the scooters stand a few fast-charging pillars, which can replenish the vehicles’ power level from 0% to 80% in 15 minutes, according to Yadea, the major Chinese two-wheeler manufacturer holding this promotional event in January 2025 for its newly launched mopeds and charging system. There is also a battery-swapping station, which enables commuters to drop in their spent cells in exchange for fresh ones with a scan of a QR code. (Read more about China’s battery swap stations for electric vehicles here.)
Yadea is one of many companies in China trying to build a competitive edge in alternative battery technologies, a trend that shows just how fast the country’s clean-technology industry is developing.
Even as the rest of the world tries to close its gap with China in the race to make cheap, safe and efficient lithium-ion batteries, Chinese companies have already taken a head-start towards mass producing sodium-ion batteries, an alternative that could help the industry reduce its dependence on key raw minerals.
Chinese carmakers were the first in the world to launch sodium-powered cars. But the impact of these models – all of them tiny with short ranges – has been low so far.
In April 2025, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, China’s CATL, announced its plan to mass-produce sodium-ion batteries for heavy-duty trucks and cars this year under a new brand Naxtra.
… 2021 proved to be a turning point for sodium-ion batteries. The global prices for battery-grade lithium skyrocketed, multiplying over fourfold in a year due to strong demand for electric vehicles (EV) and the Covid-19 pandemic. Battery and EV manufacturers began to look for alternatives.
CATL launched its first-ever sodium-ion battery in July that year, and the move “triggered high industry interest”, says Phate Zhang, founder of the Shanghai-based EV news outlet CnEVPost. Lithium’s prices continued to soar in 2022, driving more cost-conscious Chinese companies towards sodium, he notes.
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China is just ridiculously far ahead in renewable technologies. Ridiculously.
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At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work • The New York Times
Noam Scheiber:
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Three Amazon engineers said that managers had increasingly pushed them to use A.I. in their work over the past year. The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new A.I. productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
Amazon said it conducts regular reviews to make sure teams are adequately staffed and may increase their size if necessary. “We’ll continue to adapt how we incorporate Gen A.I. into our processes,” Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said.
Other tech companies are moving in the same direction. In a memo to employees in April, the chief executive of Shopify, a company that helps entrepreneurs build and manage e-commerce websites, announced that “A.I. usage is now a baseline expectation” and that the company would “add A.I. usage questions” to performance reviews.
Google recently told employees it would soon hold a companywide hackathon in which one category would be creating A.I. tools that could “enhance their overall daily productivity,” according to an internal announcement. Winning teams will receive $10,000. A Google spokesman noted that more than 30% of the company’s code is now suggested by A.I. and accepted by developers.
The shift has not been all negative for workers. At Amazon and other companies, managers argue that A.I. can relieve employees of tedious tasks and enable them to perform more interesting work. Mr. Jassy wrote last year that the company had saved “the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years” by using A.I. to do the thankless work of upgrading old software.
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Sure, managers argue that. Actually, it feels a bit Luddite to say that. It is very hard to figure out the balance between “let the machines do the tedious coding” and “humans need to do the coding”. Obviously it should be much more of the first. But how do you keep it interesting for the people checking it? How does it not become assembly-line work?
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RFK Jr.’s fluoride ban would ruin 25 million kids’ teeth, cost $9.8bn • Ars Technica
Beth Mole:
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Once hailed as a triumph of public health, water fluoridation is now under intense attack in the US.
Despite decades of data proving its efficacy at protecting teeth from decay—particularly children’s teeth—two states have now banned the use of fluoride in public water, and communities around the country have followed suit or are considering doing the same. The current US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is known for his anti-vaccine advocacy and for peddling conspiracy theories, has pledged to remove fluoride from US water.
Now, a pair of researchers at Harvard—Sung Eun Choi and Lisa Simon—have modeled exactly what will happen in the US if Kennedy follows through on his pledge: The number of cavities and decayed teeth in American children and teens (ages 0–19) will increase by an estimated 7.5 percentage points over the first five years. That means there will be 25.4m more rotten teeth in the mouths of children and teenagers. The dental bills for the added decay will total at least $9.8bn in that time. Other costs, such as loss of work among parents, were not included, making the financial estimate conservative. But children will also be more miserable, with an estimated loss of 2.9m quality-adjusted life years.
After ten years, the number of additional decayed teeth would be 53.8m at a cost of $19.4bn.
The analysis, published Friday in JAMA Health Forum, drew from real-world dental utilization and oral health data from a national health survey. It also modeled tooth decay as a function of age, sex, race, ethnicity, and income. The model was calibrated against real dental decay prevalence. Costs for dental work were based on standard rates from the American Dental Association, insurance claims, and prior analyses.
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All one can say is: let’s hope this all gets reversed extremely fast when RFK Jr gets fired for.. something or other.
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The Bezos Cannes-tastrophe • Discoursted
Louis Pisano:
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Let’s talk about this floating metaphor for hubris. [Jeff Bezos’s yacht] Koru is a 417-foot schooner with its own backup yacht , a shadow vessel that follows behind like a luxury parasite, carrying toys, staff, and most notably, the helipad. The main yacht is too elegant, too precious, to be burdened with such practicalities.
Together, the vessels burn through hundreds of gallons of diesel per hour. According to researchers from Indiana University and Oxfam, Bezos’s sailing yacht Koru emits approximately 7,154 metric tons of CO₂ annually, the equivalent of emissions from around 1,500 average cars. A single transatlantic trip emits about 230 metric tons of CO₂, roughly equal to the annual emissions of 50 average cars.
You know – the same cars [Bezos fiancée] Lauren Sánchez’s environmental foundation would like you to give up.
And it gets better, or worse, depending on your tolerance for hypocrisy. Turns out, Koru’s gleaming deck may be literally illegal. Its signature honey-toned teak, the kind that gleams in billionaire real estate porn and yachting magazines, may have been sourced from Myanmar, a country under strict EU and U.S. sanctions since a violent 2021 military coup. The teak industry there is notorious for deforestation, forced labor, and enriching the very junta those sanctions are trying to weaken.
Dutch shipbuilder Oceanco had promised in 2019 to stop using Myanmar teak. But according to a new investigation by Dutch prosecutors, they may have broken that promise while building Koru. Not intentionally, they claim, just through good old-fashioned negligence.
The wood for Koru’s deck was supplied by a German partner; the furniture and interior finishes came through a Turkish firm. Oceanco now says it’s “impossible” to trace the origins of the teak used, a claim as convenient as it is damning. In other words: Jeff Bezos, the richest man alive, might be sailing on wood harvested in defiance of international sanctions, wood that helped finance a dictatorship.
So let’s just take stock: a $500m megayacht, burning diesel and lined with possibly illicit teak, floating into the Riviera so its passenger can be honoured for protecting the environment. We are through the looking glass.
The yacht never even docked. It didn’t need to. Its presence was felt, looming offshore like a passive-aggressive ex. And as Koru lingered, massive, menacing, and somehow smug, it became clear: the week’s most absurd plot twist wasn’t even on land yet.
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There is screw-you money, but there’s also screw-you attitude, and the latter is not attractive.
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How the little-known “dark roof” lobby may be making US cities hotter • The Guardian
Amex Alexander:
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It began with a lobbyist’s pitch.
The Tennessee representative Rusty Grills says the lobbyist proposed a simple idea: repeal the state’s requirement for reflective roofs on many commercial buildings.
In late March, Grills and his fellow lawmakers voted to eliminate the rule, scrapping a measure meant to save energy, lower temperatures and protect Tennesseans from extreme heat.
Grills, a Republican, told Floodlight that he introduced the bill to give consumers more choice.
It was another win for a well-organized lobbying campaign led by manufacturers of dark roofing materials.
Industry representatives called the rollback in Tennessee a needed correction as more of the state moved into a hotter climate zone, expanding the reach of the state’s cool-roof rule. Critics called it dangerous and “deceptive”.
“The new law will lead to higher energy costs and greater heat-related illnesses and deaths,” state representative Harold Love and the Rev Jon Robinson said in a statement.
It will, critics warned, make Nashville, Memphis and other cities hotter – particularly in underserved Black and Latino communities, where many struggle to pay their utility bills. Similar lobbying has played out in Denver and Baltimore and at the national level.
Industry groups have questioned the decades-old science behind cool roofs, downplayed the benefits and warned of reduced choice and unintended consequences. “A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t consider climate variation across different regions,” wrote Ellen Thorp, the executive director of the EPDM Roofing Association, a DC-based national group that represents an industry built primarily on dark materials.
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I suppose that calling it “Their Dark Materials” wouldn’t have worked for the search engines.
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News influencers on Bluesky versus X/Twitter • Pew Research Center
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The news influencers from our 2024 sample who are on Bluesky are largely people on the political left. Among those who explicitly identified as liberals or Democrats or who supported Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in summer 2024, 69% now have a Bluesky account. This compares with 15% of news influencers who identified as conservative, Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. About half of news influencers without a clear political orientation (47%) have a Bluesky account.
At the same time, most news influencers across the political spectrum have not left X. Three-quarters of left-leaning news influencers have an X account, as do 87% of right-leaning news influencers and 83% of those without a clear political orientation.
There is also evidence that news influencers on Bluesky are using the site more than they were at the beginning of the year. About half (54%) of news influencers on Blueksy posted there in the first full week of January, but this share grew to 66% in the last full week of March.
During the same period, X remained popular but saw a small decline in activity: 92% of news influencers on X posted there in the first full week of January, compared with 87% in the last full week of March.
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Not sure that Bluesky is going to get any real traction. It’s too echo chamber-y.
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Business Insider recommended nonexistent books to staff as it leans into AI • Semafor
Max Tani:
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In an email to staff last May, a senior editor at Business Insider sent around a list of what she called “Beacon Books,” a list of memoirs and other acclaimed business nonfiction books, with the idea of ensuring staff understood some of the fundamental figures and writing powering good business journalism.
Many of the recommendations were well-known recent business, media, and tech nonfiction titles such as Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin, DisneyWar by James Stewart, and Super Pumped by Mike Isaac.
But a few were unfamiliar to staff. Simply Target: A CEO’s Lessons in a Turbulent Time and Transforming an Iconic Brand by former Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Jensen Huang: the Founder of Nvidia, which was supposedly published by the company Charles River Editors in 2019. Semafor could not find any evidence that either book exists.
The list also recommended a book called Mark Zuckerberg Autobiography: The Man Behind the Code, supposedly written by an author named Jasper Robin. While a Goodreads page exists for the book, which claims it is only 61 pages long, the page has no reviews or other information. It is not available for purchase on Amazon or from any other retailers.
Another recommendation was The House of Morgan: An Intimate Portrait of the Most Powerful Banking Family in the World by Fredric Morgan, though no such book exists. The company likely meant to recommend The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow. Snapchat 101: Everything You Need to Know about Snapchat for Business by Andrew MacCarthy was on the list of suggested reads, though no such book exists.
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Hard to know if it’s a hazing ritual (“did you read all the books?” “Yes” “You’re fired”) or yet another bad use of AI.
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Google and DOJ tussle over how AI will remake the web in antitrust closing arguments • Ars Technica
Rya Whitwam:
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During testimony in early May, Mehta commented that the role AI plays in the trial had evolved very quickly. In 2023, everyone in his courtroom agreed that the impact of AI on search was still years away, and that’s definitely not the case now. That same thread is present in closing arguments.
Mehta asked the DOJ’s Dahlquist if someone new was just going to “come off the sidelines” and build a new link-based search product, given the developments with AI. Dahlquist didn’t answer directly, noting that although generative AI products didn’t exist at the time covered by the antitrust action, they would be key to search going forward. Google certainly believes the AI future is already here—it has gone all-in with AI search over the past year.
At the same time, Google is seeking to set itself apart from AI upstarts. “Generative AI companies are not trying to out-Google Google,” said Schmidtlein. Google’s team contends that its actions have not harmed any AI products like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and at any rate, they are not in the search market as defined by the court.
Mehta mused about the future of search, suggesting we may have to rethink what a general search engine is in 2025. “Maybe people don’t want 10 blue links anymore,” he said.
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Google is ducking and diving on this, but this is now about remedies, not findings.
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 