Assorted Links Thursday

Peter Zeihan on Hurricane Ida and natural gas prices:

Hurricane Ida made landfall in southern Louisiana as a Category 4 storm on August 29. In its wake it left a trail of damage that Americans living on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts have found depressingly familiar. Total recovery costs will not be known for weeks, but $80 billion is being floated by some insurance firms as a likely figure.

For those not living along Ida’s path, there are still impacts. Ida was the first major tropical storm system to hit the Gulf of Mexico energy space dead-on in quite some time. Oil and natural gas production throughout the entire Gulf have gone offline. Natural gas prices have already bumped up by some 15% to roughly $4.60 per 1000 cubic feet, the highest in years.

I’m not worried. Not even a little. If anything, this is great!

‘No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers: Colleges offer support as young people aim to devote their lives to battling the crisis

Skilled workers are scarce, posing a challenge for Biden’s infrastructure plan: One estimate says the bill would add $1.4 trillion to the U.S. economy over eight years, but without enough workers, efforts to strengthen roads and public transit could be set back.

Amazon to pay full college tuition for front-line employees: Amazon’s more than 750,000 operations employees in the U.S. are eligible for fully funded college tuition, including cost of classes, books, and fees.

These are the states where used cars cost the most:

Vast expansion in aid kept food insecurity from growing last year: Despite the economic downturn, government figures for 2020 show no overall rise in hunger of the sort typical in past recessions. But some groups still suffered.

21 experts on the future of expertise: How is expertise being redefined in the modern era?

Why US housing prices aren’t as crazy as you think:

I remain firmly entrenched in the camp that this isn’t another housing bubble. There are structural and market forces that are causing these price gains, even if it all feels out of hand. But there’s another reason the housing market isn’t as crazy as you think — housing prices in the rest of the developed world have outpaced prices in the U.S. for some time now.

We want things to be normal so badly that we’re resorting to magical thinking: Rationality has taken a backseat to the promise of comfort and normalcy.

How the pandemic turned humble shipping containers into the hottest items on the planet: Renting a shipping container for this route usually costs between $1,500 and $2,000. This time, they had to shell out more than $10,000.

Visualizing global shipping container traffic (pre-COVID):