Assorted Links

The Hipster Antitrust movement scares me, possibly more than anything else to do with the tech industry. I believe that a bipartisan coalition is building to move against Silicon Valley, and destroy the last remaining sector of innovation in the western economy.

Tyler Cowen has an excellent piece on Guangzhou. Matt Yglesias offers some good commentary. I've often thought that GDP improvements are a useful metric to understand physical space change. US GDP per capita growth is roughly ~2.5%, while urban India's is roughly 7%. This roughly translates to 'Indian cities change in 10 years about as much as American cities change in 30'. I haven't been to Guangzhou, but its higher GDP growth rate sustained over an even longer period of time means that it's changed in the last 30 how much an American city has changed in the last 150 (i.e. a de novo city was created and the analogy is no longer meaningful at that scale)

NIPS sold out in record time this year (I mean the 2018 conference, the community itself sold out years ago). I'm tentatively going to hang around Montreal during NIPS 2018 this year as a plus one, so I'll probably liveblog my experiences then.