Month: June 2025

Service costs aren’t exploding anymore

Noah Smith shared a thought-provoking post on service costs in the US.

It started with a famous chart that many of us have likely seen about how service costs seemed to be exploding even while the cost of goods was coming down.

Interestingly, these service costs seem to be leveling off. This is spending on healthcare.

Also hospital services.

Medical costs have slowed down too.

College tuition has also leveled off.

While it is hard to pinpoint why with trends like this, it is likely that markets have reached some form of equilibrium. There’s only so much a student is willing to pay for college after a point.

It also helps that labor has also been more productive over time.

This doesn’t mean all services are in a good place – childcare has gotten expensive for example.

But these charts point to a good outcome for the quality of life for normal people.

And that’s a good thing.

Reducing toxins

I’ve written a bunch about the impact Dr. Casey Means’ Good Energy has had on our diet and exercise. One area I haven’t covered is around reducing toxins. We’ve made a few simple changes that have reduced our exposure to chemicals.

(1) Soap: Switched to Dr Bronner’s Castille soap – we love it.

(2) Dishwasher: Replaced plastic dishwasher tablets with Blueland tablets. Goodbye chemicals and plastics.

(3) Laundry: Replaced plastic laundry pods with Costco’s “Ultra clean” with no perfumes or dyes.

(4) Deodorant: Switched to an Alum stone Deodorant. This has been magical for me.

(5) Farmer’s market: We’ve added a farmer’s market stop on our weekend grocery run. I never knew fruit could be so tasty.

(6) Water: We’ve been using a filter for a few years but we realized it doesn’t work for some of the more harmful chemicals in our tap water (thank you EWG’s tap water database). After a bit of research into reverse osmosis (which we learnt removes contaminants and helpful minerals), we’ve gone with Rorra. Its impact has been discernible.

The impact of small changes have a way of adding up and then compounding over time.

40% for the first time since the 1940s

Ember Energy’s Global Electricity Review 2025 made for fascinating reading. 3 takeaways –

  • Clean power passes 40% of global electricity for the first time since the 1940s. This is amazing to see because we are only getting more electricity hungry as a society.
  • Solar doubled in three years – nearly half of the boom came from China
  • The growth in fossil fuels came because of hotter temperatures and more cooling needs.

It is fascinating to reflect on the self-perpetuating nature of choices.

Hotter temperatures force more cooling and more carbon for peak loads. The more we use carbon, the hotter the temperatures get, and so on.

I’m hopeful we’ll see this graph go to 60% clean electricity by 2030 – powered by solar. The business case is as simple as it gets – cheap energy from the sun. And this exponential growth makes me optimistic that the picture will look a lot better in a decade.

Merging HR and Tech

Moderna, the biotech company, decided to merge its Tech and HR divisions. From the article –

“The biotech company late last year announced the creation of a new role, chief people and digital technology officer, promoting its human resources chief Tracey Franklin to the spot. 

Franklin said she is redesigning teams across the company based on what work is best done by people versus what can be automated with technology, including the tech it leverages from a partnership with AI giant OpenAI. Roles are being created, eliminated and reimagined as a result, she said. 

One of the implications of the rapid increase of AI capabilities coupled with the rapid decrease in cost is that organizations are going to find different answers to the question – which workflows would be cheaper if solved by compute vs. humans?

It is important to remember that these questions have been asked by organizational leaders for the past hundred years.

The difference, however, is that the answers are different now.

Exponential progress

I saw 3 noteworthy graphs about AI progress in Azeem’s Exponential View newsletter.

The first is the crazy progress in Math and Coding in the past 12 months.

The next is that task length is doubling every 7 months. More complexity is now the norm.

Finally, the cost efficiency curve is wild. Electricity costs per token are plummeting as models are getting efficient.

In effect, AI models are getting smarter at doing more complex while becoming cheaper. And it is all happening on an exponential scale.

We don’t intuitively understand exponential scale as humans – we grasp linear improvements more intuitively. So I won’t pretend to have fully grasped the implications of these developments.

Except to say that they’re going to have seismic consequences for what we do every day in a matter of years vs. decades.

Sweet girl

This photo, taken in Mo’orea, French Polynesia in 2024, captures the eye of a humpback whale named Sweet Girl, just days before her tragic death. Four days after I captured this intimate moment, she was struck and killed by a fast-moving ship. Her death serves as a heartbreaking reminder of the 20,000 whales lost to ship strikes every year. We are using her story to advocate for stronger protections, petitioning for stricter speed laws around Tahiti and Mo’orea during whale season. I hope Sweet Girl’s legacy will spark real change to protect these incredible animals and prevent further senseless loss. | Rachel Moore

The UN World Ocean Day photo winners features some riveting photos. This was the deserved and poignant winner – a reminder to us that other incredible creatures bare the brunt of our choices.

Choose thoughtfully, we must.

Distraught on the air train

I was on the “air train” between the parking lot and the terminals at the airport at San Francisco (SFO). As I stared out of the train, I vividly recalled a similar journey I’d taken over a decade ago.

Only that time I was distraught.

For three out of my four college years, I’d worked on a start-up that didn’t pan out. A big part of that experience was a shared desire to scale and make it to the Bay Area. That was the place to be if you were attempting to build a technology start up in the mid 2000s.

That dream stayed with me. After 3 years of working as a consultant following graduation, I’d gotten an opportunity to interview in a strategy role at a large tech firm which was, crucially, open to sponsoring a visa. It was quite literally a ticket to a dream.

I had finished up a day of interviews. All of them had gone really well – except the last one with the person who led the group. That conversation had felt like a car crash. And I hoped that the rest of the interviewers would save me. But a call just as I reached the airport confirmed that it was indeed a disaster. 

I vividly remember the conversations I had with friends as I was headed out. I was either in tears in some of them or close to tears. That continued into the flight.

As it was a long flight back to Asia, the company had flown me business class – a rare experience. It was both incredibly comfortable and deeply unenjoyable. There was a lot of tossing and turning amidst tears on that flight.

I think about that experience from time to time because it gives me a lot of perspective.

First, what felt like a debilitating failure at the time wasn’t one. I did make it to the Bay Area – 3.5 years and a couple of failures and detours later. Failure is definitely not the falling down, it is the staying down.

Second, it is an experience that never fails to remind me that things don’t often work out in the time scale you hope.

Third, comfort and luxury can’t help us if we’re not at peace mentally.

Finally, it reminds me to never take my day-to-day for granted. It was but a dream once.