Links: Week of 11 Jul 2026

Missing women on Indian streets

How absent are women from city streets in the developing world? We answer this question using GPS-linked wearable cameras and randomized street audits across ~900 kilometers of roads in greater Mumbai. Across 4000+ street images containing 23,000+ visible person observations, women account for 16.4% of visible people in Mumbai and 14.7% in Navi Mumbai, far below their population shares. We estimate pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets. This pattern holds across road types, and private mobility does not explain the gap; women’s share on two-wheelers is lower still (8.4% and 5.7%). These results provide the first large-scale measurement of gender disparities in urban public life that self-reported data cannot capture.

Here is the actual paper.

The 20 Most Interesting Ideas We've Found in 2026

We translated an all-star panel discussion about the state of Chinese AI, in which panelists argue that China’s success with open source cannot compensate for the persistent and widening gap with US closed models. Qwen’s former tech lead estimated that there’s only a ~20% chance (“already very optimistic”) that the leading AI model in 3-5 years will be a Chinese one.

and

How Much AI Does $1 Get You in China vs America? In February, Aqib calculated that American chips are so much better than Chinese ones that, even with cheaper Chinese electricity and construction, $1 gets you more FLOPS in the U.S. (24 GFLOPS/$) compared to China (14 GFLOPS/$). We found that construction and chips account for almost all of the cost of running a data center, and other bills like electricity and water are basically rounding errors.

Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

Over the weeks that followed, Whitten got bills from both hospitals. Everything was roughly what he expected, and all of it would be covered by his insurance plan. But a few months later, Whitten got another bill—this time from American Medical Response, the ambulance provider that had transferred him between hospitals. The ambulance ride, he learned, would cost him $12,873: $737 for the miles traveled, $314 for monitoring his heart on the trip, $151 for infection control, and $11,670 as a “base rate.”

So why are American ambulances so expensive?

The standard answer is greed: rapacious ambulance operators, owned by villainous private equity firms, exploit patients at their most helpless. But I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on. Ambulance providers are chronically unprofitable businesses; margins are thin, crews are underpaid, and operators exit the industry every year. Whatever is being extracted from patients like Whitten, it isn’t padding anyone’s pockets.

David Oks strikes again. The depth and breadth of his blog is unmatched. Read the whole thing.

This is a textbook example of why, when you read yet another article about the "greed" of corporations being responsible for one of our problems, you should be skeptical. It "sounds" true, but usually is as far from truth as it gets.