ZD 25.09: Feeling the Boom Boom
The go-go 80s are coming back around in all ways. So are tariffs.
Link-heavy week featuring notes about Africa’s hustle generation, our housing polycrisis, trade war guidance, the problems with Deep Research, train heists for Air Jordans and a definition of Boom Boom.
The Distilled Spirit
Around the World
🌍 Africa’s Hustle Generation (
)Africa’s population is young and growing while much of the world is seeing negative growth. The sheer amount of young people entering the workforce each year is pushing many into entrepreneurship. This generation hustle is growing up with and embracing the internet. Africa might be a bit behind, but digital leapfrogging could enable the continent to become an engine of growth later in the 21st century and beyond.
🧟♀️ Unitary Executive v Administrative State Explainer (
)The Unitary Executive - the idea of a president with supreme powers over the Executive Branch - has been fully embraced by this administration. If they are to be believed, it is a pitched battle against the Administrative State. Gabe Fleisher does a brilliant job of contextualizing and explaining how both of these concepts came to be starting with the New Deal and previews how this battle might play out.
😢 RIP Skype (Xda Developers)
Skype will shut down in May. This is not a suprise, nor even an event. The world has moved on to other platforms — it was ultimately a technical dead end, skipped over by mobile native platforms. WhatsApp won the war. We should take a moment and recognize it — being able to call internationally on the internet was pretty magical and even life changing for a time. The video side provided many live remotes and powered more than a few podcasts. It will be fondly remembered if not missed.
Economic Thinking
)People from all sides have finally started to agree there is something very, very wrong with the housing market in America. Part of the challenge is there is not a single thing wrong — there are three co-morbid events taking place. There are multiple layers of housing shortage, housing accessibility and then zoning-limited housing choice. Fixing these is going to take a lot of work on many fronts. And a lot of homebuilding.
🚢 Understanding the Trade War (
)The White House is promising 25 percent tariffs or more on many if not all US trading partners. Apricitas wades through the details and looks at what the effects could be. Using clues from the last round of tariffs, they make some sense of what to expect in the coming months.
📚 Econ Book Reading List ()
Noah Smith shares a well curated list of popular economics books covering a wide range of subjects. He covers basic introductions, helps you find some works looking at specific bits of history and specific ideas. Most important is the not to read section — popular economics has a lot of things to avoid too.
⛏ Filling out Forms is Corvée Labor (The Diff)
Historically, taxes were often paid not by coin but buy labor donated to the state — corvée labor. We do pay our taxes in coin these days but the state extracts labor through all the work of regulatory compliance. The rich might not fill out paperwork — but they often have a high burden and have a highly paid individual doing it for them. One of the ways we tax the poor is through long and complicated forms and compliance to get benefits. Measuring government spending in terms of time as well as dollars could help things make sense here.
🦺 Professional Catastrophe Insurance ()
We all make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are career derailing. Short of getting fired, the cost of missing a promotion or raise compounds over time. What if there was some sort of insurance to cover this? No Dumb Ideas takes a look into if and how this could work in the real world.
The AI Boom
🌪 Whirlwind Weeks in AI ()
DeepSeek created a lot of action in the AI world. Grok3 is big and bad. Claude 3.7 is impressive. ChatGPT 4.5 is expensive and not quite so impressive but could be an important stepping stone as OpenAI unifies engines. Things are becoming real, and Bojan shares some solid advice about how to take advantage of it.
🔍 The Deep Research Problem (Benedict Evans)
Deep Research is an amazing feature, but it does not replace good analysis. It falls down a bit when looking at the source behind the source — the parts that are not on the page. The places where experienced people know what to take with a grain of salt and what is really being measured. Will that get fixed? And will the foundation labs be able to really build defensible products out of these tools? More to come.
👁 What Your Photos Say (Ente.io)
Ente is a privacy-focused photo storage service. They want you to know what you are sharing with Google when you use their services. To do so they created a tool where you can upload a photo and see what Google infers from the image.
Culture Corner
💥 Boom Boom Era (The Cut)
Fetishization of the past is one way to describe many current trends. It even extends to fashion where we are seeing a return to 1980s style looking like you’ve spent money because you have money. The fringe is already playing a part — subverting the look in almost comical ways. Fashion never stops moving.
👟 Train Heists for Kicks ()
Sneakers have become a valuable commodity, particularly Jordans. Many varieties resell well over retail. And they tend to rived across the country in relatively insecure freight cars through some very lonely desert. Thieves have figured this out and are doing large-scale, Red Dead Redemption-style train robberies to walk away with millions of dollars worth of kicks.
😜 WTF is mewing? (LifeHacker)
Lifehacker has a really good guide to Gen Z slang. Keep it handy for the times you need to communicate with your child, their friends or some junior co-workers.
🎸 How Many Artists did the Beatles Kill? ()
1964 was the line between new and old music. The arrival of the Beatles pushed sound in new directions. Chris Dalla Riva looks at the charts to get a sense of what happened and when. It seems that things were brewing before the British Invasion and that music was already changing. The 1990s witnessed bigger changes and music and acts and probably more change in pop music.
The Look
Five years ago, the COVID stock market crash started. Over the course of a month the S&P 500 lost a third. If you had panicked, sold and run for the hills you would have come out way, way behind. The best days are hard to find and really expensive to miss, you need to have money on the table to win. Time to HODL?
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