link roundup (from late February)
1. https://ew.com/woman-suffered-crushed-spine-from-harry-potter-ride-awarded-7-25-million-11686593
A California federal court earlier this month ruled in favor of 74-year-old Pamela Morrison, awarding her $7.25 million in damages after she says she suffered a crushed spine after slipping getting off of a ride at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Hollywood.
According to court documents, per the LA Times, during a September 2022 trip to the theme park with her grandson, Morrison had been asked to get off the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride after her harness failed to buckle. She then slipped when attempting to step from the moving walkway and onto solid ground, resulting in her injuries, which included a lower back fracture and a significant tear in the muscles around her hip.
In said documents, Morrison described the fall as thus, per the report: “The belt was still moving, and so my foot went on that belt and then ... my other foot went on to the stationary floor, and it knocked me off my feet."
Per a scheduling report filed in the suit and obtained by Entertainment Weekly, the plaintiff sought monetary damages "for various acts of negligence (including premise liability and negligent hiring and supervision) resulting in multiple and severe injuries to plaintiff while she visited the premises at defendants’ amusement park – Universal Studios in Los Angeles, CA."
The coverage is minimally useful. The injury happened when stepping orthogonally off of a moving walkway. 💡 ( details will be forthcoming later, but this is less natural than stepping forward off a moving walkway) But, the injury is described as a simple "fall". 🔥 ( it would be inappropriate to speculate about her pre-existing health conditions that might have increased her injuries from a fall) 💡 ( it would be less inappropriate to note the Catch-22 that Universal Studios would also be sued if they didn't let her attempt to ride)
2. https://gizmodo.com/chegg-sues-google-says-ai-search-results-are-killing-its-business-2000568061
Chegg is sort of on its last dying breath at this point, but it will go out fighting. The online education company, which started out renting textbooks and later expanded into online homework help, sued Google on Monday for anticompetitive practices, saying it is unfairly scraping material from Chegg for its AI-powered search results.
The lawsuit is not anything groundbreaking or novel—Google has been attacked over the years by the likes of Yelp over claims it uses its search dominance to copy products and keep users on its own website. Chegg argues that by scraping websites and surfacing snippets directly in the search results page, Google is killing demand for original content and eroding the financial incentives for companies like Chegg to actually invest in producing the material that powers AI programs. It will be all AI models of dubious quality citing other AI generated content of dubious quality.
While big tech companies have lined up in support of President Trump, some of the new administration remains skeptical of the industry, so it is not a guarantee that Google will be able to dodge the case. Though, it is notable that Chegg’s stock is down 30% the day after the lawsuit was filed.
💡 not even their own shareholders believe it. This is a dying gasp of a dying company.
The claim isn't that Google is using Chegg's content. No, they are simply complaining that Google is no longer giving them traffic.
Chegg cannot have a property-right to search-engine traffic as they are demanding.
💭 the story of the first Chegg (an Iowa State-based Craigslist-like site) is not one I remember well enough to tell right now. The Wikipedia article has some revisionist history and advertorial content.
3. the Shrimp Wars continue.
The argument is, roughly, that preventing cruelty to small animals is more important than large animals, because there are more small animals. This ... is mind-bogglingly stupid.
Many bloggers have suggested that the primary advocates (one "Bentham's Bulldog", and the infamous Richard Hanania) are doing it as deliberate trolling or psy-ops.
And now it is in "respectable" outlets like Asterisk Magazine ⚙️ ( it's unclear whether there is an actual magazine, or just their substack) : https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/yes-shrimp-matter
I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?” ...
These numbers wouldn’t matter if shrimp didn’t have the internal experience associated with suffering, but a growing body of evidence suggests that they do. A comprehensive review commissioned by the U.K. government found strong evidence of sentience in decapods, which includes shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and crabs. Evidence was particularly strong in true crabs.8 Crabs can learn. They can make trade-offs and act to protect themselves in flexible, complex ways. Everything we know about the structure of their brains suggests that they feel pain. While shrimp have been studied less extensively, the evidence suggests that they have similar capabilities.
🔥 the evidence does not suggest this.
But it is also a way to get other people to beclown themselves. Lyman Stone, for one: https://substack.com/home/post/p-157972723 . The post summarizes as I surveyed 450 people and none of them agreed with the shrimp advocates. Which doesn't prove anything.
4. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/elon-musk-joe-rogan-doge-rcna194294 💡 ( the full story would be too politics, but one detail is relevant here)
Musk had Rogan ask Grok, the AI chatbot built by Musk’s company, xAI, whether “all the gold was in Fort Knox.”
“Are you a f------ conspiracy theorist?” Grok responded, drawing laughs from Musk and Rogan.
When even Musk's own version of the machine points out that he is being stupid, you would think he would listen. But ... no.
5. https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/what-if-we-spent-billions-improve-access-instead-gridlock
Between 1993 and 2017, roughly 30,500 lane miles of freeway were added in the largest 100 urbanized areas of the U.S. — an increase of 42%. The expansion outpaced the 32% population growth of those areas during that time, yet traffic delays grew by 144%.
In Houston, where the population increased 77% from 1993 – 2017, freeway lane miles were expanded by 28% and delays increased by 221%. An even more extreme example is Brownsville, which saw a 73% increase in population, a 287% increase in freeway lane miles and a 1230% increase in delays.
💡 with numbers like that, you know something other than induced demand is at-play.
⚙️ one should expect traffic to be O(n log n). there are various intuitive explanations (either just "sprawl", or the size of a Clos network)
And, the cause of the percentage gap is the "low baseline" fallacy: https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/national_transportation_statistics/table_01_69 shows that delays increased from 2 HPY ⚙️ ( Hours per Person per Year) to 24 HPY over a similar timeframe. Meanwhile, Los Angeles went from 50 HPY to 80 HPY. ... most cities went up by about 20 HPY.
This is a field filled with bad data, especially from the "transit activists". But they don't matter; the Trump policy is going to presumably be roads roads roads.