Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Still Working

Economist Noah Smith dissects prevailing theories about the future of work. He concludes that – despite AI, robots, WFH, and laziness – full-time employment isn’t going anywhere:

Science fiction futures are fun to imagine, but as things stand right now, pretty much every American company still needs lots of labor from lots of human workers. If all the janitors, food service workers, farmers, construction workers, checkout clerks, receptionists, security guards, cooks, warehouse workers, food delivery people, and other working-class people in the economy vanished tomorrow, advanced technological society would simply collapse, and those software engineers and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who didn’t starve to death would find themselves scratching out a meager living from unforgiving soil in short order.

2. The Undefeated Grill

According to an online survey, 93% of all respondents have either owned a George Foreman Grill or have a family member who has. The Hustle, in recognition of the 30th anniversary of America’s most popular indoor grill, traces its history, starting with the prizefighter’s first appearance on QVC:

Foreman improvised, grabbing a burger fresh off the grill, placing it between two buns, and taking a bite on live TV…Suddenly, the phone lines were overrun with callers. QVC shifted into emergency mode…[it] sold an astounding ~40k grills in the next three minutes.

That was just the beginning: “One year before Christmas, [CEO Leon Dreimann] visited a warehouse in Long Beach, California, where grills were stored after they arrived from China.  He saw a line of trucks – waiting to drop off shipping containers with grills – backed up for nearly two miles.”

3. That Purple Haze Sound 

Loz Blaine makes the case that the Fender Stratocaster, launched 70 years ago, reinvented the electric guitar and “unlocked new sounds that have reverberated through the decades.” No one knew it at the time:

Neither Buddy Holly nor Fender himself had any idea what this three-pickup guitar would go on to achieve sonically. Rock 'n' roll was still wearing suits and bow ties, turning up on parents' doorsteps asking daughters out on ice cream dates…"Part of the reason it's become this timeless thing," muses [Fender’s VP of Product], "is because so much of it was just right. It wasn't intentional. It was built to be a Spanish guitar – it was even called a Spanish guitar! It was built to sound clean. It wasn't built for the delay effects that would come, the fuzz tones, the distortion ... Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock? That was the furthest thing from Leo Fender's mind in '54, he had no idea the guitar could do that!"

4. The Essential Ingredients of Fentanyl

Reuters has produced a fascinating report showing how easy and profitable it is to make fentanyl. The biggest challenge to stopping the “endlessly inventive and ruthlessly efficient global industry” is that most ingredients are legal:

Many of the same chemicals used to make fentanyl are also crucial to legitimate industries, from perfumes and pharmaceuticals to rubber and dyes. Tightly restricting all of them would upend global commerce. And because of fentanyl’s potency, even small quantities of these precursors can produce vast numbers of tiny pills using a simple manufacturing process – rendering the ingredients, the final product and the supply chain easy to conceal from authorities. Anyone with a mailbox, an internet connection and digital currency to pay the tab can source these chemicals.

5. Fastball

In 2023, when MLB instituted a pitch clock to speed up games, a long decline in baseball viewership reversed. Scientific American notes that while game times fell, injuries to the hardest pitchers shot up:

Baseball has never been faster. The games fly by in two hours, and more pitchers are throwing harder than ever before. When Aroldis Chapman entered the league in 2010, he was seen as an anomaly for throwing above 100 mph. (He still holds the official record for the fastest pitch ever thrown, at 105.8 mph.) Since Chapman debuted, the average fastball speed has jumped by two miles per hour, and the number of pitches reaching the 100 mile per hour threshold has quadrupled...But there is concern among baseball’s top minds that the financial pressures to maximize velocity on every pitch, combined with the shortened recovery time between pitches, poses new risks.

It's a great time to be a pitcher, the article reports, “but it’s also a great time to be a surgeon.”

6. The Complex Incentives of a Guaranteed Income

Open Research, part of OpenAI, has conducted the most comprehensive study of guaranteed basic income. They gave low-income Americans $1,000 per month with no strings attached – and tracked the results for three years. Wired describes the outcome:

What critics of assistance programs fear, though, is that instead of investing in the future, people eventually give up on working completely and become ever more reliant on support. OpenResearch found “the total amount of work withdrawn from the market” was “fairly substantial” in its experiment.

Chris Giles of the Financial Times has a less charitable view: 

The most that could be said was that the recipients spent some of their extra leisure time thinking about starting a business without actually doing it. These results were much worse than a group of experts predicted before the study and, interestingly, than ChatGPT predicts when it reads the first half of the paper’s abstract.

Websites Worth Reading

Major Sociological Theories: Defining the field's big ideas

Unexpected Poetry: A collection of acknowledgements in PhD dissertations

Construction Physics: Essays about buildings and infrastructure

Feeds We Follow

The Future of Tennis: According to Djokovic

@pmarca: Marc Andreesen’s “little tech” agenda

@TracesofTexas: Texas culture