Patch Notes #16

Rushtok, cyberpunk, gila monsters

• Bama Confidential by Anne Helen Peterson:

  Kylan came to Bama for the same reason so many beauty queens do: because they match pageant scholarship dollars, and over her decade plus of competing in pageants, Kylan had amassed a sizable fund. Alabama is one of the only major universities that offers this match, but it’s honestly a brilliant recruiting strategy. How do you get more traditionally beautiful, academically invested, proficient public speakers to come to your school? Recruit them where (many) of them gather: on the pageant circuit. 

  I love reading stories about deep subcultures I know nothing about, and University of Alabama sorority rush is up there in terms of alien to me. The advent of TikTok makes the whole thing seem like a crowdsourced reality TV show.

• The Strange Saga of Kowloon Walled City

  

  As the blocks began to merge together, the city became less a collection of buildings and more a single structure, a solid block filled with thousands of individual units designed to meet every requirement of a city: living, working, learning, production, commerce, trade, and leisure. Increasingly, residents were physically sealed off from the outside world. Light did not penetrate down to the narrow lanes leading between the high-rises. It was the beginning of the City of Darkness.

  You will never convince me that there is anything more cyberpunk than the Kowloon Walled City.

• Sphere gets the OK to emit loud noises. Neighbors aren’t happy:

  In a 3-1 vote, the board allowed the Sphere, which sits on The Venetian’s property, to emit loud noise until midnight on 18 occasions throughout the year despite an uproar from residents of Park Towers, a high-rise apartment complex nearby.
  […]
  On July 3 and 4, a “test” was conducted at the Sphere which sent out sound waves that rattled windows and spirits in the apartment complex.

  Ok, maybe the Sphere is a close second for IRL cyberpunk, and it does have the added advantage of still existing. I, for one, welcome a future of glowing megastructures covered in LED screens emitting all manner of bleeps and bloops throughout the night.

• Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? (Astral Codex Ten) is a good read on Ozempic and how it seems to help, maybe, everything? But the part that shocked me was the origin of Ozempic and all GLP-1 drugs. GLP-1 is a hormone naturally produced by your body that tells your body you’re full and to release insulin.

  Diabetes involves excessive blood sugar, so this is the profile you want for an antidiabetic drug. But natural GLP-1 decays within a minute or two, so there’s no way to use it as a medication.

  So of course somehow we found a chemical in Gila monster venom that fixed this problem?

  In 1992, scientists discovered a chemical in Gila monster venom which looked like GLP-1, activated GLP-1 receptors, but lasted a whole two hours. This became exenatide, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist (one of my favorite paper names is Exenatide: From The Gila Monster To The Pharmacy). By playing around with its structure, Big Pharma was eventually able to create liraglutide (twelve hours), semaglutide (one week), and cafraglutide (one month).

  

• China’s Brute Force Economics: Waking Up from the Dream of a Level Playing Field (from Noah Smith’s excellent New Industrialist Roundup):

  The time has come for the United States and its allies to abandon the notion that competing on a level playing field with China’s state-led economy is possible and confront the reality of what I am calling the country’s brute force economics. I use this term as an analytic frame to summarize the aggressive, evolving, and often opaque web of policies and tactics that Beijing employs to give its national champions — corporations acting to advance government policy — an advantage and seize a dominant global market share in strategic sectors. The litany of specific practices is long: market access restrictions in strategic sectors, massive subsidies that fuel domestic overcapacity and enable Chinese firms to wipe out foreign competition, requirements for foreign firms to transfer technology in order to access the Chinese market, economic coercion, intellectual property theft, cyber- and human-enabled espionage, and forced labor.

  I’ve always been confused by the arguments against some sort of trade restrictions / tariffs / etc against China under the logic that anything short of free trade is hampering US companies and hurting US consumers by not requiring competition. A common example I’ve heard is if we apply tariffs to Chinese EVs, then US firms won’t have to make as good cars, and consumers will suffer. That might be true in isolation, but it’s not like US companies are competing on even ground given Chinese state sponsorship and subsidies, corporate espionage and hacking, etc. Why should we expect a non-state US company to compete? Ford is a big company, but China is bigger.
  
  It reminds me of the heyday of mobile gaming when some game companies we were competing with seemed to be massively overbidding for users and acquiring them at negative unit economics. We would try to run a conservative user acquisition strategy that maintained positive margins for every user we acquired (shocking, I know) but then would struggle to get installs due to getting outbid by “irrational” competitors. They were presumably doing this to build up a portfolio of users that they could leverage via promotion into other games, or to inflate DAU numbers to drive a higher valuation. Whatever the reason, it made it very difficult to compete. Just like China and the US, we weren’t playing the same game.

• This summer, we went on a trip to Montreal for the first time. My wife, who speaks French, pointed out that all the license plates say “Je me souviens”, which is the official motto of Quebec and directly translates to “I remember.” What do they remember you might wonder. I thought surely it would be some foundational bit of history like our Independence Day or Bastille Day, or some important battle or massacre, but no, it’s actually not entirely clear what people are supposed to remember. You can build an entire state mythos out of vapor!