E94: NFT volume plummets, California's overreach, FBI meddling, climate change & national security

OpenSea’s NFT trading volume had fallen from $406 million on May 1 to roughly $5 million on August 28—down 99%—only nine months after a $13.3 billion valuation. The panel’s useful conclusion was that NFTs behaved less like a new economic category than another narrative-driven speculative market.

The California fast-food bill under discussion targeted chains with 100+ nationwide locations through a 10-member council empowered to set sector-wide standards, including wages up to $22 an hour. The panel’s central forecast was that higher mandated labor costs would accelerate automation rather than merely redistribute profits to workers. (Civil Rights Department)

The strongest concrete automation example was Cafe X: two robotic-coffee units at SFO reportedly generated $73,000 in one month after the company struggled during the pandemic. That made the automation argument tangible: machines were already becoming commercially viable substitutes for repetitive service labor, not merely a distant possibility.

Chamath Palihapitiya relayed Adam D’Angelo’s framing that Moore’s Law had effectively “shifted to GPUs,” with parallel computing enabling machine-learning problems CPUs could not economically handle. Combined with cloud computing and huge training datasets, that acceleration also created an unresolved commercial question: ownership of AI-generated derivatives trained on copyrighted work.

Zuckerberg said Facebook reduced distribution of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting for roughly five to seven days after an FBI warning about a prospective Russian-information operation, calling the reduction “meaningful.” Crucially, he said he did not remember the FBI specifically naming that story, a distinction the episode’s broader accusations sometimes blurred. (theregister)

Friedberg connected extreme weather directly to economic bottlenecks: Sichuan hydro shortages were shutting factories, China had endured 70 consecutive days of record temperatures, and roughly one-third of European ammonia plants had shut. His point was practical rather than ideological—the immediate climate risk was disruption to food, energy and manufacturing supply chains.

The energy crisis was already forcing a reassessment of nuclear power: California moved to extend Diablo Canyon, while Japan announced plans to restart more reactors and explore next-generation plants. The episode treated this as evidence that energy security and grid reliability were beginning to override post-Fukushima assumptions about nuclear generation. (Investing.com)

The strongest Gorbachev insight was that perestroika was driven partly by the Soviet economy’s need for restructuring and reduced military burdens, not simply an ideological conversion to Western democracy. Reagan nevertheless recognized him as a negotiating partner, and their summits produced the 1987 INF Treaty eliminating an entire class of nuclear missiles. (history.state.gov)