noahpinion.blog

Why shoplifting is bad

Every time you shoplift, in other words, you're stealing from the people who work at grocery stores and drugstores and discount stores. You're stealing from the communities that those stores serve. You're contributing to food deserts. You're raising unemployment. You're making food less affordable for the most vulnerable.

lennysnewsletter.com

What Claude Design is actually good for (and why Figma isn’t dead yet)

The practical limits of AI design tools (spoiler: you'll hit credit limits fast)

noahpinion.blog

Updated thoughts on industrial policy

Dismissing the whole idea of industrial policy out of hand — as the World Bank and others did in the 1990s — is simply a policy of self-imposed ignorance.

stratechery.com

2026.16: Servers, Satellites, and Stars

The key to understanding and analyzing tech has been appreciating the implications of zero marginal costs, which govern the economics of everything from chips to software to services. AI services generally fall under the same rubric — fixed costs in terms of data centers and chips matter more than marginal costs (mostly electricity) — but the worsening shortage in compute means it is opportunity costs that matter more than ever.

wired.com

Heatbit Maxi Pro Review: a Space Heater That Also Mines Bitcoin

Electricity rates have gotten so atrocious that this Heatbit wants to offset your costs with bitcoin mining. But the math doesn't add up.

noahpinion.blog

Maybe you should have bought an electric car

If you drive a gas-powered car, you are economically vulnerable to these periodic price shocks. If you drive an electric car, you are not vulnerable. It's as simple as that.

noahpinion.blog

Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI

The fact that we call most of the new tasks "services" doesn't change the fact that the set of new human tasks seems to have expanded faster than machines have replaced old ones.

readtrung.com

6 Takeaways From Citrini's Viral AI Doomer Article (and a Bunch of Rebuttals)

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

noahpinion.blog

Something feels weird about this economy

From a bird's-eye view, this economy looks pretty normal and healthy. Under normal circumstances, I'd be inclined to not even write a post about the macroeconomy this month. But underneath the surface, two interesting things are happening.