Links for August 10th, 2025
This week at TVO, another accidental coincidence: two pieces about parks. First, about Biidaasige Park in Toronto’s Port Lands and how it’s nice to have an actual optimistic feeling about this city occasionally:
The most recent transformation in the Port Lands is the opening of Biidaasige Park, creating a new green space from Commissioners Street to the ship channel. It is still very much a work in progress: the open portion is only phase one, with the city optimistically hoping to open phase two next year. But a recent bike trip down to the park gave me a sense of the potential, the promise, of a new park in what was once the heart of the city’s industry. The trees planted by the city are too young, their branches too thin to offer meaningful shade under a blazing summer sun — but give them time.
North of the city, I wrote also about the proposal to sell a portion of Wasaga Beach provincial park to the town of Wasaga Beach. It bears keeping an eye on but short version is I’m not convinced this is a disaster in the making, since the province isn’t exactly a model landlord.
Elsewhere:
Designing Communities for the Middle Class: A Six-Question Test [Missing Middle Initiative]
To facilitate big-picture thinking, we have begun walking policymakers through a series of six questions related to middle-class housing. These questions are at the community level, and we use the community in which the policymaker resides, regardless of the level of government they work for.
Here are our six middle-class related housing questions for policymakers.
Demand based zoning [Mountain Doodles]
Even though many complications remain to refined modelling, given both our provincial models and the crude estimates here, it’s safe to say that current zoning for residential floor space in the City of Vancouver is still far below demand in most parts of the city. Fundamentally that means official city policy is weighted against allowing people to share land for housing and toward forcing them to compete for it. It is unfortunate that when discussing reforms like multiplex zoning, demand estimates tend to either enter as a force to be countered (e.g. purposefully reducing potential land value to slow redevelopment), or never enter the discussion at all.
The Powerless Brokers: Why California Can’t Build Transit [Circulate San Diego]
In recent decades, many reforms were adopted to prevent the abuses of Moses-style planning. Those same reforms have created their own challenges, adding an array of new hurdles and veto points, limiting state capacity to get projects done quickly and cost-effectively.
For California to secure abundant public transit, it must empower transit authorities to build.
If nothing else, “The Powerless Brokers” is a great title for a report of this kind. Related: I’ve finally gotten around to grinding through the 99 Percent Invisible book club on Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and it really is excellent.
Exclusive: Tesla's brand loyalty collapsed after Musk backed Trump, data shows [Reuters]
The data, which has not been previously reported, shows Tesla’s customer loyalty peaked in June 2024, when 73% of Tesla-owning households in the market for a new car bought another Tesla, according to an S&P analysis of vehicle-registration data in all 50 states.
That industry-leading brand loyalty rate started to nosedive in July, that data showed, when Musk endorsed Trump following an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on the Republican nominee.
Abundance for the 99 Percent [Jacobin]
As a federal entity, TVA must clear all projects through the gauntlet of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a requirement that no other electric utility in the country faces. These procedural demands compound an already lengthy and complex grid interconnection procedure that TVA, like all grid operators, must follow. In fact, almost every single major planning decision at TVA — not just developing a new land-altering hydroelectric facility or a pollution-spewing fossil plant, but also releasing a new integrated resource plan or updating their price methodology — must undergo the NEPA process. Even solar farms built by third parties that connect to TVA’s transmission system must undergo a full environmental study, usually taking one to two years….
Another New Deal example of public abundance is the Public Works Administration, which helped build public infrastructure like housing, schools, hospitals, airports, and power plants all across the country. Today, each of these projects would constitute federal actions that trigger NEPA and other such laws. Even if we assume progressives would get behind such an agenda, could they also defend it against vetoes of individual projects by the Groups — or from obstruction by private firms empowered by the very procedural mechanisms they support?
For a response that doesn’t get much more sophisticated than “nuh uh”, see: Abundance Socialism Is an Oxymoron.
The biggest animal welfare victory of the 21st century, explained in one chart [Vox]
In just one decade, a longtime fashion mainstay has been relegated to the sidelines of both haute couture runways and bargain clothing racks: fur.
In 2014, over 140 million minks, foxes, chinchillas, and raccoon dogs — a small, fox-like East Asian species — around the world were farmed and killed for their fur. By 2024, that number plummeted to 20.5 million, according to an analysis from the nonprofit Humane World for Animals using data from governments and industry.
We’ve been wearing furs longer than we’ve been farming animals for food. This is kind of a big deal!
How the diamond industry lost its sparkle [Financial Times]
On a sweltering summer afternoon in Zhengzhou, capital of the central Chinese province of Henan, Feng’s Jiaruifu diamond factory hums with energy. Inside, 600 machines, each larger than an African elephant, simulate the crushing geological pressure and diabolical heat deep in the Earth’s surface, where diamonds grow. The machines can turn out three-carat diamonds, the size of a large engagement ring, in just seven days.
“We can mass-produce diamonds,” Feng says, proudly pointing to the rows of machines. He has another two factories working around the clock. “Currently, I produce about 100,000 carats a month,” he adds.
…This year the future of natural diamonds is being put to a public test as De Beers, the storied diamond company founded by Cecil Rhodes, has been put up for sale by its owner, London-listed Anglo American. Anglo American values the unit at $4.9bn in its accounts — but falling sales mean it could fetch far less. First-round bids from potential buyers are due next month.
…Today, a three-carat lab-grown stone sells for just 7 per cent of the price of a mined equivalent, according to analyst Paul Zimnisky.
The Personalist Penalty: Varieties of Autocracy and Economic Growth [NBER]
Across eight GDP series, eight autocracy codings, and six measures of personalism, we observe a consistent pattern: Whenever an "autocratic penalty" emerges, it is concentrated in personalist regimes. The growth performance of institutionalized dictatorships, in contrast, is statistically indistinguishable from that of democracies. We document evidence that the "personalist penalty" is driven by some combination of low private investment, poor public-goods provision, and conflict. These findings emphasize the analytic payoff of unpacking autocracy and highlight the different incentives facing leaders with narrow and broad bases of power.
But, what if none of this works? What if AI companies are just allowed to keep going with this unethical practice? Of course no one can predict the future, but it only stands to reason that this would eventually spell the end of any other commercial content business. Film and television, for sure. Professional journalism, as well. The new and vibrant creator economy of today’s YouTubers, podcasters, newsletter writers, all gone. I’m not saying people won’t make stuff anymore; I’m just saying they won’t be able to earn a living with what they’ve made. Because as long as an AI company can copy all of our content into their model at no cost and spit out quasi-new content for close to no cost, there’s no logical business case for paying human creators anymore….
We creators might be some of the first to feel the threat, but anyone who does their work on a computer is in the same crosshairs: people who work in marketing, or logistics, or finance, or design, just to name a few. And while white-collar jobs will be impacted earlier, blue-collar jobs will follow soon enough, especially as autonomous vehicles and robotics come into further use. Employment as a plumber is considered safe for now, but perhaps not for our kids’ generation. And how will an autonomous plumber-bot know how to do its job? The AI powering it would be trained on data that came from millions of human plumbers doing their jobs. Wouldn’t those humans deserve some compensation? Not if Silicon Valley gets its way. The decisions we make today really could commit us to a future where any valuable work done by any human being will become fair game for a tech company to hoover up into its AI model and monetize, while that human being gets nothing.
Such evidence can shed new light on apparently dramatic collapses. Take the fall of the Late Bronze Age in the Near East and Mediterranean, which offers the archetypal tale of a golden age that descended into a dark age – a story told in popular trade books and various documentaries. In the space of a century or two, the Mycenaeans (the palace-dwelling overlords of Greece) fell apart and gave way to the Greek dark age, the pharaohs of the New Egyptian Kingdom lost power, and the Hittite Empire fractured into a set of squabbling rump states. Yet, despite being called a collapse, it was no apocalypse, nor even an entirely bad thing for citizens.
In Mycenaean Greece, kings were on average 6 cm taller than their peasant counterparts (172.5 cm, compared with 166.1 cm). Similarly, pharaohs and their wives (in a sample of 31 royal mummies) were taller than men and women in the general ancient Egyptian population. Once these empires fell apart, the heights of men began to grow across the Eastern Mediterranean, while the heights of women, which had been increasing slowly, accelerated.
Grantianism, Continentalism and Love of One's Own [Ben Woodfinden]
This is going to necessitate turning inwards and forging closer national ties. In economic terms, it means a serious effort to finally build an east-west economy, and not a series of interconnected north-south economies, which is how our current economic arrangements actually look. But to do this, it’s going to require blood, sweat, and sacrifice. It isn’t going to be easy. And as momentum invevitably fades for the kind of nation building projects and efforts that are popular right now, it’s going to require political willpower and determination to actually keep pushing in the medium and long term.
If we’re going to do this, we need to reforge our cultural ties and consciously come closer together. We need a new pan-Canadian spirit that can drive us to make the sacrifices we need to build one nation from coast-to-coast. I don’t think a thin and purely oppositional patriotism will be enough to sustain this. So, if we’re commited to making ourselves less self reliant on the United States and more able to stand on our own two feet, it cannot just be an economic project. It has to be a cultural project as well.
The Drone and AI Delusion [History Does You]
If there is one dependent variable that shapes the trajectory of a military revolution or evolution, it is constraint. Military innovation is rarely a product of pure technological opportunity or creative genius in isolation. Instead, it is most often driven by pressing limitations, such as shortages of manpower or material, logistical bottlenecks, battlefield attrition, or the inability to achieve desired strategic outcomes using existing means. Whether on the battlefield or behind the lines, in supply depots, factories, and war ministries, constraints compel adaptation.
Consider the German development of the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44) during World War II. German forces operating on the Eastern Front faced overwhelming Soviet numbers and increasingly close-range engagements. Traditional bolt-action rifles lacked sufficient fire rate, and submachine guns lacked range and versatility. The result was an intermediate cartridge rifle, explicitly designed to bridge this tactical gap —a compromise solution born of battlefield necessity rather than long-term doctrinal planning. Similarly, the British adoption of radar in the 1930s was less a product of technological foresight than of dire strategic constraint. Britain could not match the Luftwaffe bomber force plane-for-plane, so it built a defensive system, the Chain Home radar network, that allowed fewer fighters to be vectored more effectively….
The fundamental question, however, is not whether drones are helpful; it’s how to integrate them effectively within a broader, combined-arms framework. In other words, how can drones enhance rather than substitute for traditional capabilities like armor, artillery, infantry, and airpower? How can they support maneuver rather than merely serve as tools of attritional harassment? How do they enable coordination across domains: land, air, sea, and cyber, rather than exist as isolated capabilities? A battalion commander in the Ukrainian Army stated to me a few weeks ago that even in the Summer of 2025, the single most decisive factor in his unit’s ability to hold and take ground is the number of infantry. Not drones, not technology, just dudes with a rifle in a dugout.
Inside the automated warehouse where robots are packing your groceries [The Verge]
It’s the lack of noise you notice first. There’s no clatter of equipment, rumble of engines, or chatter of coworkers. Only the low hum of electronics. For an industrial space, this is eerily quiet, but it makes sense in a building where robots might outnumber people.
I’m at a warehouse — or customer fulfilment center (CFC) — operated by online grocery company Ocado in Luton, just outside London. You might not have heard of Ocado, but it may still have delivered your groceries. Its technology handles online orders for Kroger across 14 US states, Sobeys in Canada, and both Morrisons and its own delivery brand in the UK, with other clients across Europe and Asia.
We know how to decarbonize energy. The food sector should take notes. [Canary Media]
It’s also important for governments to act on what they learn, rather than continuing to invest in the flowers that fail to bloom. The classic example of throwing good money after bad in the energy space is farm-grown fuels; there’s still bipartisan support for giving the farm lobby the biofuels mandates and tax credits it wants even though they increase food and fuel prices, accelerate global hunger, turbocharge deforestation, and destabilize the climate. Biden was a vocal cheerleader for corn ethanol, and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, while obliterating tax credits for truly clean energy, expanded Biden’s tax credits for biofuels. It is not easy to stop Washington from trying to make this kind of fetch happen.
The troubling decline in conscientiousness [Financial Times]
Some studies suggest the advantage of conscientiousness is growing over time, and it’s easy to imagine why. When contemporary daily life is full of temptations — from always-on mobile internet and the lures of social media and online gambling, to hyper-palatable foods — the ability to ignore it all and put long-term wellbeing ahead of short-term kicks becomes a superpower.
Generative artificial intelligence could supercharge this dynamic. An industrious student who is not deterred by a challenge might use a large language model as a personal tutor to strengthen their knowledge of a concept; their less conscientious counterpart might task the same LLM with writing their essay, foregoing knowledge acquisition altogether.
All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.
Okay I started with an optimistic note about my city but this all just makes me weep: