444: Cloudflare Q2, Meta Kills Protein Folding Lab, CoreWeave + Nvidia, SpaceX, UK vs Mississippi, Energy Inflation, and Dunkirk

"Bell Labs was an anomaly."

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

—Albert Einstein

👀🚘🚙 This one could save your life:

I had almost automatically assumed that freeways would prove to be the deadliest place to drive because of the high speeds involved. But decades' worth of auto accident data reveal that, in fact, a very high proportion of fatalities occur at intersections. 

It's typically a T-bone or broadside crash, and often the driver who dies is not the one at fault.

The good news is that at intersections we have choices. We have agency.

We can decide whether and when to drive into the crossroads. This gives us an opportunity to develop specific tactics to try to avoid getting hit in an intersection. We are most concerned about cars coming from our left, toward our driver's side door, so we should pay special attention to that side. 

At busy intersections, it makes sense to look left, then right, then left again.

Via Peter Attia’s book Outlive.

🏋️‍♂️💪 Speaking of Attia’s book, in a previous Edition I mentioned that the book was a catalyst for me to make some life changes.

Well…

Yesterday was my first time going to the gym!

A friend of mine who has been working on his health and recently started seriously working out acted as my guide. That made it much easier — there’s always an intimidation factor when you start something new in a new place, with new equipment, and a new culture and social norms…

It’s easy to feel out of place, but I know I just have to get used to it. Anyone good at something was also a beginner at some point.

There was a lot to learn at once, but it went smoother than I expected. And it’s always fun to have a buddy to joke around with!

We did 5 mins of cardio to warm up and then:

• Hack squat

• Military presses

• Lat pulls

• Dumbell presses

• Goblet squats

• Pallof presses

3 sets of 12 reps for each, with the hack squats/military presses and lat pulls/goblet squats as supersets.

It was challenging — as it should be, especially for someone untrained like me — but I felt great afterward. I don’t know if it’s the sense of accomplishment or the endorphins, but I can see why gym bros like it.

🪶❄️🐿️ A while ago, I bought a huge bag of birdseed from Costco (10-15kg..?).

The plan was to put it in feeders in our backyard, but after thinking about “birdseed capital allocation” and what the most “undervalued opportunity” was, I decided to use it differently. (don’t worry, I don’t take it that seriously, I’m just having fun..)

Next winter when I hike in the woods, I’ll bring some seed and scatter it in a few select spots on my route. It’ll make a bigger difference to various birds and chipmunks during the lean season than during the summer abundance.

👶🎉 It’s been a while since I had a ‘good news corner’, so here we go:

I’m very happy for friend-of-the-show and Extra-Deluxe supporter Byrne Hobart (💚💚💚💚💚 🥃) and Pamela!

Great work combatting the global fertility crisis by creating more humans, you two!

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🇬🇧 ‘Without London, the UK would be poorer than Mississippi’ 😬

It will surprise nobody that London accounts for an outsized share of Britain’s output, but the magnitude of the UK’s economic monopolarity is remarkable. Removing London’s output and headcount would shave 14 per cent off British living standards, precisely enough to slip behind the last of the US states. Britain in the aggregate may not be as poor as Mississippi, but absent its outlier capital it would be.

By comparison, amputating Amsterdam from the Netherlands would shave off 5 per cent, and removing Germany’s most productive city (Munich) would only shave off 1 per cent. Most strikingly, for all of San Francisco’s opulent output, if the whole of the bay area from the Golden Gate to Cupertino seceded tomorrow, US GDP per capita would only dip by 4 per cent.

Note that the graph’s vertical axis is a log scale and amounts are adjusted for PPP!

What about the impact of Brexit? Have the elites in London suffered the most? Of course not:

There were fears that the capital would suffer more from Brexit than most regions, but thus far the opposite has been true. Exports of services have held up relatively well while trade in goods has cratered, and London’s economy is 4% larger today than it was in 2019, bucking the broader national trend of stagnation or decline.

h/t Alec Stapp

🕵️‍♂️ Cloudflare Q2 Highlights 🩻

It’s been a little while since we had a look at Cloudflare, so I thought we could look at some highlights from their recent Q2 earnings: