Ukraine under attack from the ‘weak man’. How the Jevons Paradox impacts the green transition. How AI is turbocharging chipmaking. Spring clean to avoid bureaucratic creep. The dangers of doom scrolling.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Timothy Snyder, Beware the Weak Man
(Substack, 22 February 2024)
The renowned academic shares his thoughts from the Munich Security Conference. The weak man, a metaphor for all those seeking excuses not to help Ukraine, now pervades the US MAGA crowd and Republican party. This piece summed up in one quote: “Ukraine could win, if Americans would help; but our weak men have cut off the weapons. Musk spreads Russian propaganda. Vance amplifies Russian foreign policy. Trump follows Putin’s wishes. Johnson maneuvers for months to block a vote on aid to Ukraine. And so the Ukrainians, fighting for their lives, run out of artillery shells, and must withdraw from losses from Avdiivka.” This is where we currently stand: the weak man, ignorant of the lessons of history, is selling out democracy and US allies (free access, reads in 6-8 min).
Click here to read the full article
Ed Conway, The Paradox Holding Back the Clean Energy Revolution
(The New York Times, 22 February 2024)
In the 1990s, the hope was that newly invented LED lights would greatly reduce the amount of electricity we use, yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as in 2010. Global population and economic growth are part of the explanation, but also, as technology has advanced, we’ve grown more wasteful. LEDs are a symbol of the coming collision between our climate goals and our seemingly insatiable appetite for stuff. This is called the Jevons Paradox – the economist who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased. This is our perennial problem: instead of banking the efficiency savings we make as technology advances; we go out and spend it (gifted article, reads in in 5-6 min).
Click here to read the full article
Ina Fried, Nvidia’s boom, Intel’s big plans show how AI has turbocharged chipmaking
(Axios, 22 March 2024)
A primer on Nvidia’s recent boom (the chipmaker market value just surged by more than $275 billion in response to its ongoing surge in profits – the biggest single day market cap gain in history) and how AI is driving the tech industry. As Nvidia’s CEO explains, demand is surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations.” The world seems to be needing ever more AI compute, prompting chip producers to double down on manufacturing. Estimates that the chip industry will grow to $1 trillion a year, once seen as aggressive, now look like they might be way too conservative (free access, reads in 4-5 min).
Click here to read the full article
Adrian Wooldridge, Every Corporation Needs a Marie Kondo
(Bloomberg, 14 February 2024)
There are plenty of reasons that explain the growth of managerial clutter: the default position of human beings is to add complexity (particularly when more people are involved) and most managers unthinkingly impose small tasks on workers without considering their collective costs. In addition, few people have ever built great careers by asking themselves “what can I subtract” rather than “what can I add?” Technology also plays a paradoxical role: by making it easier to communicate or assign a task, it adds to organizational pollution. The columnist proposes an antidote for this bureaucratic creep: an annual spring cleaning to prune long-winded reports, time-sucking meetings, and value-destroying managers (gifted article, reads in 6-8 min).
Click here to read the full article
Casey Plett, My Guilty Pleasure: I’m Addicted to Bad News
(The Walrus, March – April 2024)
About the danger of “doom-scrolling”. News used to be about the assuredness of the world’s continued presence, about keeping an eye on what’s going. And then, in the early 2010s, with the advent of social media, the habit of keeping up with the news switched from “being well-informed” to a kind of self-destructive behaviour. Then, “reading news became reading too much news, like pressing a button that caused one to get punched in the face over and over again by a cartoon glove marked “DREAD” (free access, reads in 3 min).
Click here to read the full article
