Link Nexus for June, part 2
more links,, for June
Amazon drone delivery is finally testing. tacocopters... soon
lots of space nuclear this month. NASA's program announced its awards for moon nuclear. Europe is doing a program for space RPS (nuclear decay batteries). and private firm Atmos continues to move forward on its plan to launch a small fission reactor into space
excellent 80,000 Hours podcast on information security. they also talk quite a bit about infrastructure design & hardware for big ML systems. not that much AI safety or traditional EA stuff
new PERC report, about wildfire policy. my favourite piece was by Jonathan Wood, which gets into some of PERC's recent work on NEPA & the perversity of environmental review hindering good forest management. many ppl are talking now about NEPA & its damaging effects on infrastructure, housing, transit, mining & clean energy development, which is great. PERC reminds us that this problem touches all sorts of other environmental areas, & state capacity generally. it's particularly sad because the US Forest Service was an early pioneer in the creation of high-functioning bureaucracy (Fukuyama has a great essay on this)
relatedly, USFS is really struggling with firefighter staffing & morale issues. to some degree this is just a function of low unemployment. in the current macro environment, you need to raise wages & improve working conditions to attract workers (which is a good thing! capitalism & markets working as they should to create broad prosperity). but govt agencies especially are less nimble & often reliant on slow-moving legislatures to appropriate money. so you run into problems. one interesting tidbit here is that USFS is losing personnel to state firefighting agencies, which apparently are moving faster to boost pay, etc. it certainly reinforces my view that public land management should be more local. fedgov controls way too much space out west
nice Economist piece describing the state of artillery technology, in the context of Ukraine
Canary update on Mainspring Energy, which is pursuing no-combustion gas generators that can supposedly also run on hydrogen, ammonia etc. (technically it is a combustion reaction, but it's low heat with no explosion). initially commercial-scale, aiming to compete with fuel cells as 'clean backup'. this seems like it could be pretty successful if it really works & a clean fuel supply chain actually appears. but you never know...
interesting post about the US Marine Corps' proposed strategic redesign. i'd read a bit about this previously, still seems like a good idea
pretty good NYTimes profile of NET Power, which recall is testing out a zero-carbon natural gas plant in Texas. hope it works and can be scaled up at reasonable cost. i joke that this technology is a 'nuclear-killer', because it would allow gas to preserve its role complementing fuel-saving wind & solar by reducing pollution. but i think honestly at this point, there's so much momentum behind nuclear & geothermal & hydrogen (& the idea of mostly eliminating fossil fuels) that even if it succeeds it would only be transitory while the costs of these other clean firm resources inevitably decline in the long run. it's also worth keeping in mind that even if the generators can be built & operated cheaply, the infrastructure needed to deal with the excess carbon is an additional cost & policy uncertainty
Saloni Dattani started a newsletter, on science type stuff. self-recommending
The Joule Thief is another new newsletter, focused on energy finance. looks real good
WSJ article on NextEra's new clean energy goal. i don't really pay much attention to these targets tbh. setting goals is easy, actually building stuff is what matters. but it is important i suppose. when companies & govts make these commitments, it does drive investment. if in ten or twenty years NextEra & many govts sheepishly push back their targets, presumably it will still have helped accelerate the technological changeover to cleaner energy
Fønix: some effective altruists in Sweden are going to try and build bioweapon shelters as a civilizational resilience thing. very cool
Scott Alexander reviews San Fransicko (very long). i briefly reviewed it back in my Nov. 2021 links post, had some similar impressions
Mitt Romney re-released his child benefit proposal, with two Republican cosponsors (one of whom is retiring this year). basic idea is to consolidate a bunch of tax credits & brackets into a simple cash benefit, paid monthly. this is standard in many countries, & is an obviously good idea. i won't rehash the arguments for it. the bill also reduces marriage penalties in the tax code & is budget-neutral. Romney's added an income phase-in which is stupid imo. but if that's what it takes to get support from standard anti-welfare fuck-the-poor Republicans, it's fine. it would still be a huge improvement over status quo. Niskanen did a good writeup here
problems at Running Tide, which is the Maine-based firm pursuing carbon removal by growing & sinking kelp onto the ocean floor. funded by Stripe & others. it's a clever idea but more and more i think direct air capture is the way to go despite being expensive & industrially-demanding. nature-based carbon removal just seems more scientifically uncertain & harder to verify. although the entire field is early in its development so nobody really knows
update on that Australia-to-Singapore undersea energy transmission cable project, to export solar. the whole thing is kind of absurd. but honestly it's great. megaprojects are cool. who knows if it will actually be cost-effective in the end, or robust against seafloor volcanoes or whatever. i think UK recently had a fire at a cable substation that knocked out a link for maybe months or even years. so it's inappropriate to consider long distance international transmission equivalent to domestic production, for energy security purposes. but it can provide substantial benefits in cost, supply, pollution reduction etc. and the more links you have the more diversified & resilient your imports can be. so it's just a question of tradeoffs. certainly Singapore is land-constrained in the extreme, & doesn't have tons of good options. but as Southeast Asia continues to grow you'll get more regional integration, & Singapore will more easily be able to get clean resources nearby, e.g Indonesian solar
pretty good opinion column about indoor farming, laying out many of the clearest benefits. the main catch is basically just energy. so the takeaway is we need more and cheaper clean electricity
amusing rumination on Vince McMahon, from Ben Sixsmith
overview of the clean steel market, from Ars Technica. there seem to be multiple viable options for making it, & the main barrier isn't really technological. it's more about the economics & infrastructure. many such cases. probably it will happen but it'll take 50-100 years, & be one of the last big industrial areas to totally switch away from fossil fuels. along with concrete, this stuff is just vital & long-lasting & safety-critical, so going slow is probably okay
good Economist article about the state of the US uranium industry. i favor way more domestic mining & processing in general, especially for energy-related commodities. it's worth bearing the additional environmental harms/risks. at least up to a point, which we're nowhere near. process reforms to speed mining development are needed
new thinkwert twitter game. space-themed. dalle images.
good Monetarist Maia post on epistemology & causal inference in economics
amusing cartoon here. the post argues that nuclear can add lots of value to a clean grid by simplifying things a lot, & making high penetrations of wind & solar work better. i agree, at least in the near-term. but i also want to comment on a related meme floating out there, which is that wind/solar heavy grids are 'Rube Goldberg' machines with lots of complexity & hidden costs & failure modes. i actually agree with that, for the most part. the clean energy utopia that some ppl imagine & model is undeniably more complex. you have many more interacting technologies, intermittency & weather dependence, new technical grid management requirements, various storage tech, demand flexibility, lots of interconnection, transmission... the list goes on. where i break with wind/solar critics is in stepping back to view the broader context. yes, the complexity of these new energy systems will bring new costs & failure modes. but they will also bring countervailing benefits, which will very probably outweigh the costs by huge margins. all else equal, simple systems are appealing. but all else is never equal. complexity is how we grow and evolve and become stronger, as a species. complexity often creates new capabilities which overall make us better-off & ultimately more robust
i guess i am just pretty optimistic about humanity's ability to confront & address the new technical challenges arising from more wind/solar & cleaner energy systems. i am constantly bemused by the techno-pessimism of some anti-wind/solar nuclearmaxxers, who explicitly identify in opposite terms. as i see it, being pro-innovation, pro-technology, pro-growth does not mean you angrily condemn all but a select set of approved technologies or growth patterns. technological progress is a highly uncertain discovery process. grokking its power demands an open-mindedness, flexibility & serenity that isn't really compatible with strident, super-confident condemnations of entire categories of technology, especially those that are still relatively new to the world & are evolving rapidly
books
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. i read Heart of Darkness a few years ago and really liked it, so i thought i'd check this out. it was okay. the first half is kinda slow, follows a group of scheming European aristocrats in a fictional South American country (early 1900s). then it picks up. you can read the wikipedia plot summary, but basically it involves a highly competent & ambitious local manager, Nostromo, hiding a bunch of silver to keep it from revolutionary forces. he eventually gets consumed with resentment about not being able to climb the colonial status hierarchy, & ends up dying pointlessly while on a trip to the secret silver stash which he's been drawing from gradually, to avoid suspicion. i've never read The Count of Monte Cristo but there are some definite similarities
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective by Bernard Grofman, Arend Lijphart, Matthew Shugart, Steven Taylor. this is a polisci book analyzing various US govt institutions, & comparing to other countries. it drives home the point that US govt is quite unusual in its design, particularly when it comes to the sheer number of 'veto gates' needed to do national legislation (combining bicameralism, presidentialism, federalism (state power), unsynchronized legislative elections, & common law with strong judicial review). primary elections for party candidate nominations is also a fairly unique US thing. there's tons of fascinating info here & historical digressions into the drafting of the constitution. a lot of USA's weirdness is simply because the Founders had no real template; some of their choices turned out well, some didn't. subsequent democracies have learned & innovated. the authors are pretty measured & dispassionate, but it's fairly clear that they think US govt design is suboptimal & often dysfunctional. which i agree with. parliamentary & more-proportional multiparty systems with fewer veto gates aren't perfect, but i think it's clear they are better than our system across a wide range of dimensions. i love America & don't want to do anything insane like tear down the govt. but there are many ways to incrementally move towards a more functional system that i'd like to see. it's easy to get carried away with the politicsculturewar & view problems & social/ideological cleavages as deeply fundamental. understanding how contingent it all is — the formal design of govt institutions heavily determines our politics — is an underrated & powerful perspective