Hi Lunch Club!

Today's stories trace power through American spaces. In Louisiana, a parish poisoned by petrochemical plants watches the Trump administration gut environmental protections and historic preservation simultaneously. Two Pennsylvania cities show how infrastructure can erase or preserve immigrant communities depending on who fights back. Austin's streets become a proving ground for competing visions of machine perception and safety. And economists challenge assumptions about inherited wealth, finding it reduces inequality more than the taxes designed to curb it.

Happy Reading,

Brett

St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana faces cancer risks 47 times higher than the national average, with over 762,000 pounds of toxic chemicals released annually from 11 plants. Robert Taylor watched cancer kill four family members near a neoprene factory that emitted 115 tons of carcinogenic chloroprene yearly. The Trump administration dropped civil rights litigation against the polluting company Denka, halted historic preservation efforts for River Road plantation districts, and cut Whitney Plantation museum funding.

For three centuries, this tiny industrial hub has mirrored American conflicts over memory and exploitation. The parish's trajectory from sugar plantations worked by enslaved laborers to petrochemical "sacrifice zone" reveals how disputes over monuments, education, and clean air merge into ideological warfare. What unfolds here confirms an administration hostile to residents' heritage and democratic will when it contradicts preferred narratives.

Read here.

Thanks to our friends over at The Sunday Long Read for this excellent original story.

Pittsburgh's Chinatown was razed in 1921 when the city built Boulevard of the Allies, displacing 300 Chinese residents who lived in a self-sufficient enclave around Second Avenue Park. Philadelphia's Chinatown survived the 1991 Vine Street Expressway because residents organized. In August 1973, Mary Yee and 19 activists climbed rubble to halt bulldozers demolishing Winter Street homes. Their protest forced PennDOT to suspend demolition and scale back the expressway design. Chinatown Development Corporation used time and media as weapons, stalling projects through lawsuits and environmental reviews until costs ballooned. The neighborhood fended off stadiums, casinos, and arenas while remaining the center of Chinese American life in Philadelphia. But Trump's 2025 budget cuts eliminated $150 million in federal funding for the Chinatown Stitch project, which would have capped the expressway with parks. Without civic engagement and political power, communities disappear. With them, they endure.

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Two robotaxis cruise Austin streets with radically different sensor philosophies. Waymo uses spinning lidar rigs, radar arrays, and cameras to build detailed 3D models, while Tesla's Cybercab relies solely on eight cameras and neural networks. This clash over sensor fusion versus vision-only systems will determine the robotaxi future. Tesla argues humans drive with eyes alone, so cameras plus compute should suffice. The company abandoned radar in 2021, betting its billion-mile data advantage would train superior neural networks. But vision-only systems struggle with glare, darkness, and depth perception. Tesla vehicles in supervised mode show disengagement rates an order of magnitude worse than Waymo. In Austin's unsupervised pilot, Tesla averaged one crash per 2,300 miles compared to Waymo's dramatically better safety record. Quietly, Tesla reintroduced radar in 2023 while Waymo adopted end-to-end neural networks, suggesting convergence. The real question isn't cameras versus lidar but whether we accept human-level safety or demand better.

Read here.

Vanguard just projected public markets may return only 5% annually over the next decade. In a 2024 report, Goldman Sachs forecasted the S&P 500 may return just 3% annually for the same time frame—stats that put current valuations in the 7th percentile of history.

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Rising inheritance values across Western economies have fueled fears of an "inheritocracy" where idle heirs dominate through birthright. Annual inheritance flows now reach 10-15 percent of national income in France, Sweden, and the UK. Yet this trend reflects prosperity, not feudalism. While inheritance ratios have climbed from mid-century lows, they remain below early 1900s levels. More importantly, 40-60 percent of European wealth is now self-made within a generation, compared to 80 percent inherited a century ago. Recent research reveals inheritance actually reduces wealth inequality among heirs because modest bequests transform middle-class recipients while barely registering for the already wealthy.

Swedish data shows inheritances cut the Gini coefficient by 7 percent. Inheritance taxes have repeatedly failed, raising barely 0.5 percent of GDP while creating liquidity crises and valuation nightmares. Countries from Sweden to Canada abandoned them for capital income taxes targeting profits and dividends. Rather than curtailing inheritance, expanding who builds wealth through education and entrepreneurship proves more effective.

Read here.

The internet gives you everything and helps you understand nothing. The Lunch Break Reads Weekend Edition solves that problem. Every week we pick one theme that actually matters and build you a curated reading list that goes deep instead of wide. Underground book markets. Deep-sea mining's geopolitical consequences. The kind of stuff that makes you dangerous at dinner parties.

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