Why Gas Prices Go Up Fast and Take So Long to Fall

Fine NY Times piece about the economics of gas stations--and why prices take longer to come down than to go up.

"'I don’t like to shake up the customers every time they drive in, that it’s a different price,' Mr. Nietsche said."

(Gift link)

I don’t think it works that way.

A friend in tech, when asked why tech firms are firing engineers in favor of AI, suffering calamities when AI does something crazy that's not caught by engineers, then rehiring the engineers:

"Managements reason in much the same way AI's do. They don't think, just complete thoughts plausibly."

Rubin bags 11,000 new asteroids! This is just the beginning, too. There are more millions more out there waiting to be seen.

The Vera Rubin observatory has already discovered 11,000 *previously unknown* asteroids... and the proper observing sessions haven't even begun yet!

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/rubin-bags...

🧪 🔭

Excerpt from article: In an email from department chair Kristi Sweet, Peterson was given two options: either remove “modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” or be reassigned to teach a different philosophy course. “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented … You are making Texas A&M famous—but not for the right reasons,” Peterson said in his response to Sweet, which he shared with Inside Higher Ed. The Plato texts include passages from his Socratic dialogue Symposium that discuss patriarchy, masculinity, gender identity and the human condition. In one excerpt, the “Myth of the Androgyne,” the Greek playwright Aristophanes says, “First, you should learn the nature of humanity … for in the first place there were three kinds of human being and not two as nowadays, male and female. No, there was also a third kind, a combination of both genders.”

The Plato objection is to teaching Plato's theorizing about sexuality. From an earlier article:
www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

The cool thing is that it took scholars 100 years to realize--to their shock--that classical Greece was, by contemporary standards, a really weird place.

Now a new generation of Texas-educated students will get to make this exciting discovery all over again.

Chart of measles cases per year shows 1,780 cases already this year. Last year, a record, had 2,279.

RFK, Jr., FTW!

Measles cases are already well on their way to surpassing last year's record. In addition to the Texas and S Carolina outbreaks, there are new cases in Florida, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. vaxopedia.org/2026/01/16/t...

A really good interview. I’ve changed my perspective on Will Self over the last couple of years.

“I wasn’t as famous as Brad Pitt,” Mr. McInerney said, “but for a writer, I was insanely famous. I would walk down the street, and people would ask for my autograph. It’s something that only happens in Paris now.”

Jay McInerney, still with the knack for the unfortunate utterance.

Never change, J.M., never change.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/s...

The Secret Techniques of a 150-Year-Old Soy Sauce Maker Yasuo Yamamoto is the last man in his family upholding a 150-year-old family business, preserving a culinary technique of brewing in wooden barrels.

A pal sends over this charming WSJ interview with the guy who runs a 150-year-old soy-sauce-making firm on a remote Japanese island (gift link).

I, for one, would like to see much more soy-sauce-making content in my legacy media.

Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems

Amazing that the New York Times didn't give this story some version of the obvious headline:

Yale Report on Universities’ Problems Fingers a Perp--Schools Like Yale. (Gift link)

Yes. But in that case the river is much smaller. Here the surprise is that some of the fish spawned in places that are many miles from their natal ground.

100% correct. Fish biologists have known for a while that some salmon don't migrate to their natal grounds--that's how they get into new waterways, avoid inbreeding, etc. But biologists have told me they're surprised (and happy) at the speed with which the Klamath recolonization is happening.

Ugh--I wasn't being clear. The Link River and Keno dams, on the far upper Klamath, in Oregon, provide irrigation to a bunch of farmers around Klamath Falls, many of them from families of vets who were sort of given the land as thanks for their service. The fights over those dams have been vicious.

The Shasta is in some ways a harder case, because the Klamath dams weren't used for much irrigation--which is why the irrigation-providing Link River and Keno dams remain. But I should also note that removing the Klamath dams took 40 yrs, and people also said it would never happen, so maybe..

It's in a test tube full of water with a measuring stick inside. That's how they've been measuring salmon fry since at least the 1980s, when I first saw this. Jeez.

The stuff on the McCloud River is an infuriating mess but still very fixable at this stage.

I should make clear that I was joking when I said the link might be the other way. The disparity between the two groups is almost certainly due to chance. The real story, according to the article, is that autism and acetaminophen seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Excerpt from statement: The c’iyaal’s are showing us the way forward. They have returned to a place that was taken from them. In this, they are not so different from the Klamath Tribes. The survival of these fish, along with c’waam and koptu, was promised to the Klamath Tribes in the Treaty of 1864. We continue to fight for this land and the revival of all treaty-guaranteed resources promised to us through the Treaty and the United States Constitution Article VI, Clause 2. This milestone signifies another step toward restoring a sustainable fishery in the Upper Klamath Basin and reconnecting Klamath Tribes members with an essential source of medicinal and cultural resources, and subsistence to feed the people. The c’iyaal’s survival is not just an environmental story. It is a continuation of our own.

The Indigenous nations on the river, who led the decades-long effort to remove the dams, have been issuing touching statements: klamathtribes.org/the-klamath-...

Chinook salmon found naturally hatching in Upper Klamath River for first time in a century The Klamath Tribes are celebrating evidence of Chinook salmon spawning in Klamath River tributary.

After big dams on the upper Klamath River in far northern CA were removed in 2024, Chinook (king) salmon migrated upstream for the first time in 100+ years--and now they have hatched.

Cover of book titled "President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man--THE CHRIST," with "the Christ" in all-caps. It's written by somebody named Helgard Muller.

Just learned that this is a real book that was published in 2022 and is sold on your local online retailer.

Potentially important because RFKJr has stirred up what is looking like an entirely unmerited alarm about taking acetaminophen (Tylenol's active ingredient) during pregnancy. As a result, pregnant women who could benefit from its use may be avoiding it to their harm.

Acetaminophen Exposure During Pregnancy and the Risk of Autism in Offspring This cohort study evaluates the potential association between prenatal acetaminophen exposure and risk of autism in Danish national registers.

Big Danish study (1.5M+ children) in JAMA Pediatrics finds no association between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy. If anything, the link is the other way: Autism was diagnosed in 1.8% of exposed children and 3% of unexposed children.

The question is not about the decline per se, because that's real, but whether it is accelerating. The acceleration is the cause of the recent natalist panic--and this argues that the acceleration may not be as big as feared, or be happening at all.

A fantastic place in many ways. But for decades its leaders paid almost no attention to building up its endowment--or, really, anything to do with its financial stability. The administration changed focus in the last decade and worked hard to shore up the place, but the effort was way late, alas.

Devastating: Hampshire College is permanently closing following the Fall 2026 Semester. A beautiful institution & community that has done so much for so many. My child is a current Hampshire senior. Hampshire's approach to education is so unique, humane, & exciting—I've seen it first hand. Tragic

The Effects of California's $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage on Prices Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Poking around some more, I found a third study, which found negative effects. But the Berkeley guys substantively criticize it--much of the supposed negative effect on employment, for instance, occurred before the law was put into place. Here's that study:

This is the second economic study to find this--or, rather, the second study that I'm aware of. The other. from '24, was from Kennedy School and UCSF researchers.

The implication is that, at least for now, that employment and prices are relatively insensitive even to big hikes in the minimum wage.

So far, new Berkeley economic study says, CA's new $20 hourly minimum wage has not reduced employment and has had smaller-than-predicted effects on prices (with the size of the pass-thru apparently governed by monopsony effects, so would likely be smaller in more competitive situations).

The main previous study directly measured exposure, but not at community levels--they focused on super-high levels of exposure, hoping to see a signal. They did see one, but this study is saying it's irrelevant at realistic levels of exposure. We need more evidence to be sure, but this is good work.