Links: Gory details of an acquisition
+ praising Amazon, a screen time paradox, and more
1 | This first-person account of how Waze got acquired by Google is a great sausage-getting-made story. I’m amazed at how contingent the outcome was: Waze only reached out to Google in the first place because it was trying to do a partnership with Facebook, which was so scared of Google that it asked for the right to match any acquisition offer from only that company, so Waze notified Google before signing the deal. Then it became a bidding war, and at that point Facebook was still the first choice—but when they started working on deal terms, Waze's founders determined their personalities clashed too much.
2 | Amazon gets a lot of hate from the media (and now the FTC), but it's beloved by normal people (in one poll it's literally the most-liked institution in America). One example of why: A while ago I noticed at checkout there's an "FSA card" option, which will automatically apply your FSA card to only the eligible items in your cart. Not only that, when I tried to use up my funds before the June 30 deadline—not even a very common expiration date—this warning popped up, prompting me to choose a different shipping option that worked.
3 | A new study shows that setting limits on screen time can backfire. The logic: we tend to set relatively high limits, with a thought process like "usually I spend 30 minutes a day on TikTok and that's okay, but sometimes I spend two hours and that's really bad, so I'll set a one hour limit to be safe." But after setting a limit, we can go all the way up to it guilt-free, so we spend the full hour every day. Unless you're willing to set a limit that's meaningfully lower than your average day, don't bother.
4 | AI imagines a typical home in every state. Some of them look odd in ways you'd expect (New York's puts an NYC brownstone on a downstate plot of land in upstate weather), and some are harder to explain (why is nearly everything three stories high?), but New Jersey's looks exactly like a house down the street from me.
5 | Periodic reminder that we are making progress against climate change (via Marginal Revolution):
6 | Elon Musk's plan to turn Twitter into a "super-app" isn't entirely without successful precedent: several Asian apps, including WeChat (China), Grab (Singapore), Rakuten (Japan), and GoTo (Indonesia) have become their market leaders in multiple digital sectors like social networking, e-commerce, gaming, and payments. Musk's plan to follow their footsteps is absurd; the biggest problem is that those companies generally became the first to dominate their industries, which is much easier than displacing leaders in a US market that's already mature. (The second-biggest problem is that the biggest key to running such a platform is being a trusted partner for individuals and small businesses to work with, and Twitter under Musk is not exactly a trusted partner.) But even if you think that’s surmountable, The Economist reports that those Asian super-apps have lost their luster as rising interest rates force companies to focus on profitability.
7 | Whatever other apps X does or doesn't create, they'll never match Twitter for comedy:
8 | People are eating less ice cream; and scientists keep finding that ice cream has medical benefits but they don’t know why. You do the math to solve America’s health crisis.
9 | I'm already drowning in daily games—from the common (Spelling Bee, Immaculate Grid) to the obscure (Hoopuh Doopuh)—but I like the international-flavored 10 Sports World Rankings, even if the end seems to come down to luck.
10 | Dylan Matthews at Vox once wrote that PEPFAR is probably the best US government program of the last 50 years—it’s credited with saving over a million lives from HIV/AIDS, mainly in Africa, at relatively low cost. Republicans are now interfering with reauthorization of the program, which was created under George W. Bush, over purported indirect links to abortion. I don’t know what the right intervention is, but I’ve seen enough non-party-aligned people raise it that it seems more promising (and more important) than most polarized fights.
11 | Somehow I only learned this week that the world's best bowler throws the ball two-handed, and many top junior players are emulating his style. Perhaps this is a Fosbury Flop moment for bowling?
12 | Favorite books I've read this summer: The Savage Detectives and Save Me the Plums.