(2025-03-17) Zvim Monthly Roundup28 March2025

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #28: March 2025. I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups – I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas. That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’ and not ‘there are not things worth mentioning.’

Table of Contents

• Bad News.
• While I Cannot Condone This.
• Good News, Everyone.
• Opportunity Knocks.
• For Your Entertainment.
• I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets.
• Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game.
• Sports Go Sports.
• The Lighter Side.

Bad News

Dylan O’Sullivan: Napoleon once said that the surprising thing was not that every man has his price, but how low it is, and I can’t help but see that everywhere now.
You destroyed and betrayed yourself for a handful of clicks.

Disney shuts down 538, Nate Silver offers a few words. You can get all their data off of GitHub. It is a shame that 538 could not be sustained, and I am sad for those who lost their jobs, but as Nate Silver notes their business model was unsustainable inside Disney. Hopefully Silver Bulletin and others can carry the torch in the future.

Restaurant productivity technically rose 15% during the pandemic and sustained that gain, but it turns out it is entirely attributable to the rise of takeout and delivery. That’s not a rise in productivity, that’s delivering a different product that is easier to produce and also in general worse. If anything this change is bad.

Zeynep Tufekci, who has been on top of this from the beginning, reminds us of the massive efforts to mislead us about the fact that Covid-19 could have come from a lab. We don’t know whether Covid-19 came from a lab, but we do know it very much could have, that there was a massive coordinated operation to suppress this fact, and most importantly that this means that we are continuing to do lab research that is likely to cause future pandemics.

While I Cannot Condone This

Aditya Agarwal models a person’s ambition as something you can unlock and unleash, but not fundamentally change. I think I mostly agree with a soft version of this. There are plenty of people who are ambitious but haven’t been given or felt opportunity, or you can remove something blocking them, but if an adult is at core not so ambitious you should assume you can’t fix that

A perspective on what does and does not cost you precious Weirdness Points. The particular claim is that being vegan while respecting others preferences costs very little, whereas telling others what to eat costs a lot of points

The general pattern of ‘telling others to do [weird thing] costs vastly more than doing it yourself’ definitely applies, but the [weird thing] can still be expensive.

The Dead Planet Theory, the generalization that most of life is showing up, if showing up includes attempting to Do the Thing at all. As in, yes You Can Just Do Things, and the reason you can is that you almost certainly won’t, which means little competition. (More Dakka vs Acting Dead)

The ritual ritual.
Ashwin Sharma: Basically, Joseph Campbell taught me to ritualize almost everything I considered mundane. Like my morning coffee, my afternoon walk, and my bedtime reading. I learned over time that this is because ritualizing ordinary moments makes them sacred. And when something becomes sacred, when you give it meaning, it gives meaning back to you.

I wrote Bring Back the Sabbath, so I’ve long been a supporter of this, and I agree. The more rituals you can make work for you, the longer you can sustain them, the better. There are of course costs, but consider this a claim that the Ritual Effect matters more than you think it does.

I didn’t like The Great Gatsby (the book) either when I was forced to read it, not great at all, do not recommend. I don’t put it in ‘least favorite book’ territory like Tracing Woods does, but I respect that take. My least favorite book, by this criteria, would probably be One Hundred Years of Solitude. Absolutely dreadful. It’s actually amazing how consistently awful were the fiction books schools forced me to read.

Good News, Everyone

Washington Post will be writing in its op-eds every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets

As a very strong supporter of both personal liberties and free markets, I love this.

In response to this, there were a bunch of people on the left who got Big Mad

To which I say, thank you for letting us know who you are and what you think of free markets and personal liberties.

• or maybe many people think the results will be stupid rationalizations of BigWorld?

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets

Suzy Weiss argues that comedians should not be hot. I strongly disagree

The idea that people who are hot, or otherwise advantaged, don’t have problems to use for material, is Obvious Nonsense. What you don’t want is for the hot to crowd out the not hot.

Consider music. In music, the product is fully audio, and yet being hot is increasingly a huge advantage that crowds out the not hot

Timothy Lee: Weekly driverless Waymo trips

it’s a real shame to see the latest +50k take a full four months. We need to be on an exponential here, people! This now looks kind of linear and I am not here for that, very literally.

Meanwhile, where the self-driving matters most, trucking unions attempt to fight back against the inevitable self-driving trucks.

Walks are great. The best walks are aimful walks, where you have an ultimate destination in mind from which you will gain value, but ideally you can proceed there and back at a leisurely pace and wander while doing so. However your amount of physical activity is not fixed, so you can and should also go on aimless walks, which both help you stay active and can help you think better about various things. (walking)

Opportunity Knocks

For Your Entertainment

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

Sports Go Sports

Sports have an analytics problem, in that teams and players are Solving For the Equilibrium, and that is often resulting in less appealing games. What to do? (spectator sports)

As always, don’t hate the player, change the game. The rules have to adjust. The tricky part is that it can be extremely difficult to preserve the things that make the game great, especially while also preserving the game’s traditions and continuity.

MLB largely solved its ‘games take forever’ problem, but has a pitchers being pulled too early problem rapidly getting even worse, and a severe strikeout problem.

The NBA has a 3-point shot problem. An occasional three pointer is fine, but things are very out of hand. The math on 3-point shots is too good, and the weird part is how long it took everyone to notice.

Or at least I think it’s out of hand. Many agree. Others like the current game.

The NFL’s major shift is teams go for it more on fourth down, but that’s good. They warn that there are shifts towards pass-heavy games, but that’s the kind of change that you can fix with rules tweaks, as the NFL has lots of ‘fiddly bits’ in its rules, especially regarding penalties, that are already constantly adjusted.

US sports betting (gambling) revenue grows from $11.04b in 2023 to $13.71b in 2024, with sportsbooks holding onto 9.3% of each dollar wagered (up from 9.1%). We have passed that awkward ‘every single ad is for a sportsbook’ stage but growth continues.

The Lighter Side