P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #258

Some kind of loophole. “Its tiny train slowly bumps back and forth, going approximately nowhere. And it’s now at the center of a massive court battle between its operators and the U.S. federal government.” | learn more

This city does not exist. Imagine a webpage that uses AI to invent an entirely new satellite map every time you hit refresh. Reminiscent of this word does not exist from late 2021. | learn more

Cunningham’s law. “The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” | learn more (but not much more)

The future of Candor Ventures. Congratulations Noah, Peter & Raul on this big step! “We are working together to build the "Y Combinator” for fintech companies through a fund and studio model. To accomplish this we’ve created a $125M fund structure with $90+M committed.“ | learn more

Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. “The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.” | learn more

A horse’s ass designed the space shuttle. A valuable lesson on path dependency. Or why “we’ll just change it later” is a strategy with risks. | learn more

How respiratory viruses evolve to become milder. By Matt Ridley: “If mutation can make a disease more dangerous, why have rhinoviruses never turned into killers?” | learn more

Solving chronic pain via the kitchen, not the medicine cabinet. “In our chronic pain clinic, we noticed that some people who had changed their diet for other reasons, such as weight loss or diabetes management, started to report a reduction in their nagging pain problems. And one diet in particular kept coming up: the ketogenic (or ‘keto’) diet, which involves eating low levels of carbohydrates, moderate levels of protein, and higher levels of fats.” | learn more

Amazon to close 68 physical retail locations. The company is closing all of “its brick-and-mortar bookstores, pop-ups and shops carrying toys and home goods in the United States and United Kingdom.” The TechCrunch article speculates (like, totally speculatively) that the timing might relate to a union push at an Amazon Fresh grocery store. | learn more

How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff. There are graphics of various retail floorplan designs in here that I appreciated. “The home furnishings giant enlists a maze-like layout, cheap food, and crafty psychology to get you to fill up your cart.” | learn more

Direct-to-consumer landing pages. A collection of the web pages that top consumer brands use to sell their products. | learn more

Happiness spreads across a social network. “People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals.” | learn more

Microbes convert industrial waste gases into commodity chemicals. “Chemicals cost more than just money: Today, petrochemical production spews out nearly 2% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now, researchers have taken an important step to vastly reduce that footprint, by using bacteria and waste gases from steel plants, rather than petroleum, as the starting ingredient for dozens of commodity chemicals.” This seems like a good place to plug our friends at Genecis Bioindustries, who turn food waste into bioplastics. | learn more

McDonald’s ice cream machines and a $900 million lawsuit. A company called Kytch was helping franchisees deal with the oft-broken ice cream machines. McDonald’s corporate crushed their business. Now they’re suing for $900 million in damages. | learn more

Physicists forced to rethink structure of nature’s laws. This is complicated and I’m certain I haven’t grasped the full extent of it. Definitely big ideas! “As physicists confront that failure [to explain nature], they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff.” | learn more

Michael Jordan’s NFTs. “HEIR, a Solana-based fan engagement platform launched by Michael Jordan and son Jeffrey, launched its first NFTs today.” They cut the number of NFTs from 10k to 5k, presumably due to slower-than-expected sales. | learn more

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