1. brine extraction firm Aquafortus raised some money. political barriers to traditional mining are massive, so anything that can be done to bypass these issues is sorely needed
2. argument that US Congress should extend the status quo limiting FAA's regulation of commercial space flight. i certainly agree. would be tragic to fuck this up by prematurely cracking the whip. regulatory uncertainty is generally bad for business. but there are some ways in which it can be beneficial, & this is a plausible example. if govt retains the threat of near-term regulation, you can get the best of both worlds: hands-off free market dynamism but with a strong commitment to safety & good-behavior by firms. net neutrality is the classic other example here: pro-nn doomsayers were embarrassingly wrong in their predictions about firms doing crazy anti-consumer shit. but plausibly if the political issue became truly settled & govt firmed-up the regulatory settlement, some might try
3. there is no great stagnation, sauna sausages edition
4. launch thread for Figure, pursuing humanoid robots. pray to the machine god to deliver us from toil
5. very good Fast Company piece on the struggles of vertical farming. unfortunate, but i think ultimately a bump in the road towards our glorious closed-ecosystem fully-automated luxury food production utopia
6. good Jeff St John summary of that big BNEF yearly report on global energy trends
7. heata, an amusing effort to provide building water heating using colocated servers that form a decentralized cloud computing service. there's a whole existing "heat your home while mining crypto" niche market that (i think?) exists, & trying to mainstream it by emphasizing climate change seems reasonable. i probably wouldn't bet on their success. but in the long run, cogeneration systems like this seem relatively promising (though probably more suited to large-scale centralized systems)
8. pvillion, doing fabric-based solar canopies & surfaces. highly mobile, rapidly deployable. bullish on this stuff even though all these firms will surely fail. the dream of solar as a dirt-cheap commodity that you can roll out & staple down anywhere basically guarantees low profit margins & a brutal competitive environment
9. related, pour one out for Sion, the latest pv-integrated EV firm to crash and burn. once again, the technological strategy is sound. but it just makes no sense to have an entire separate firm based around it. traditional big EV companies will gradually add pv surfaces if (or rather when) the technology, economics & customer experience makes it rational
10. Return magazine had some interesting short essays on AGI timelines. here’s Deepfates. here’s roon
11. and Robin Hanson summarizes his AI safety view
12. nice Progress Forum post on brain-computer interface
13. Wired has a pessimistic take on NuScale. as does Jack Devanney. it’s still the most promising new nuclear US firm. but i am adjusting my views towards the microreactor folks having a better shot, despite being less far along in the regulatory journey. i'm hopeful about a US nuclear resurgence in the 2030s. but it might simply be the case that progress will have to happen first in other countries like Poland. if others can demonstrate reliable, safe, on-time, on-budget projects it could provide an external “shock” to the US political system that results in us finally reformulating our regulatory regime root-and-branch. USA mostly doesn’t like to feel left out of new technological trends. but as i always like remind, the longer it takes for new nuclear to deploy, the farther its economic viability target moves, since other clean energy tech is improving too. this is true for wind/solar/storage/transmission/demand-flexibility, but also other clean firm resources like geothermal & clean gas which arguably compete most directly with nuclear in terms of grid role. i believe in the fundamental technological value & promise of nuclear. but at the same time, if nuclear fails to gain a foothold in the US only because other clean energy technology is crushing it and functioning well, delivering great pollution reduction, reliability & access at low costs, then that's ultimately a happy story
14. speaking of not being on the cutting edge, i enjoyed this NYTimes piece on India's rapid & successful adoption of digital payments, piggybacking on its impressive biometric identity program. this is one area where USA has really lagged, compared to Asia & even Europe. we only recently switched away from paper checks & magnetic-strip cards, and cash still rules in many contexts. one idea is to give every USian a bank account at the Fed. this could help move a category of unbanked ppl into the present, alleviating one source of political opposition to mobile payments. it would also allow welfare & transfer programs to function much better. concerns about privacy, hacking, govt abuse, centralization fragility etc are all well-founded. but ultimately the benefits outweigh the costs imo. the idea of a national id card sometimes pops up in US politics & gets shot down, but it's a stale debate with meme arguments at this point. the social security number infrastructure we use is absurdly decrepit; framing poor state capacity & bureaucratic dysfunction as positives is the worse impulse of a certain strain of libertarianism
15. Jessica Lovering opinion piece calling for western-aligned multilateral development banks to support nuclear power, to counter Russia & China's near-monopoly here. seems right
16. devarbol on Soviet support of Cuba & socialist economic history generally
17. interesting Economist piece on US govt strategy for mining in Africa
18. 3d-printed homes in Austin, by Icon. very cool. here is the archive link, although many of the images didn't load
19. wtf i love Trump now
20. article about a bizarre trend of local municipalities banning dollar stores. they are perceived as being undesirable because of low wages for employees, selling unhealthy food, having crime etc. of course no attempt is made to establish causation here, or compare equilibrium costs & benefits to the counterfactual of not having the stores. this genre of journalism/politics is so annoying. firms that serve the low-end of markets & operate in poor locations often get inappropriately blamed for the problems & pathologies of poverty & crime. re: unhealthy food specifically, i am actually somewhat open to more govt regulation & taxation here. obesity & population unhealth are serious problems. but policy solutions must be designed at the broadest possible scope, to minimize distortions & unintended consequences. targeting a single type of retail store brand is really stupid. if you're going to be paternalist, at least be libertarian about it
21. interesting Nature piece about autonomous shipping & the practical challenges involved with implementing it. surely will happen eventually. but shipping is a very complicated & dysfunctionally parochial industry. unsurprising that naval drones seem to be advancing more rapidly
22. Politico reports on some conflict over whether to relocate US Space Force command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville Alabama. on the face of it CO makes sense: it's close to NORAD & the region seems to be an emerging industry cluster for aerospace & military. not to knock Alabama too much — Huntsville is also an aerospace hub — but frankly CO has a more highly educated workforce & scores better on various quality-of-life amenities that seem helpful for attracting & retaining good personnel. this episode recalls the Bureau of Land Management fiasco, which i believe settled with the hq moving back to DC while retaining a big office in Grand Junction. that city was a bad location for a big federal agency (smaller & more remote vs Colorado Springs), even though the overall concept of having BLM out west was sound. transition issues of worker relocation are overstated imo— the long-run benefits & downsides of locations should dominate decisionmaking. but the arguments some ppl make in the Politico article about state abortion laws are unfortunate & highlight a serious risk with opening up any big federal office to relocation: partisan politics. if every relocation ends up as a front for national partisan politics & leads to a ping-ponging based on which party holds the White House, then it's best to heavily favor the status quo. unfortunately this doesn't really solve the Space Force issue, since the status quo hq location is simultaneously in Colorado and Alabama (in the sense that keeping it in CO would require divergence from the status quo plan)
23. i am always in the market for interesting or weird new energy storage technologies, so enjoyed this Utility Dive piece listing out the winners of some DOE grant project
24. robotic lawnmowers for utility-scale solar. solar is already quite low-opex compared to its competition, but still there are opportunities like this for incremental gains, great to see
25. this piece about the success of Fox's free ad-supported streaming ("FAST") product bolsters my view that broadcast tv & radio should be obliterated as unique technology-specific regulatory categories, with the spectrum opened up to auction. fears that free entertainment would disappear without the status quo protection are unfounded, even if you believe that this is a worthwhile aim for government to ensure
26. interesting argument from Matt Bruenig that tax-advantaged retirement accounts like 401ks are a better target for "budget cuts" vs social security. idk about this specifically, but in general the whole constellation of "submerged state" tax credits the US relies on is extremely dysfunctional. you don't have to be a socialist to agree that upward-distributionary programs are bad (& you have right-coded arguments against them too, like Dream Hoarders & anti-PMC stuff). doing policy through explicit on-budget transfers is better in most ways. and as Niskanen people will tell you, it actually serves libertarian ends by re-linking the growth of government to the cost of government, thereby making it more politically difficult to expand programs
27. very long but good Philippe Lemoine piece on western military assistance to Ukraine. i'm not totally sure where i stand on the overall question. he makes some great points, though some are stronger than others. one idea that doesn't truly receive a deep dive is that support for Ukraine is about demonstrating the continued power of the west, which helps keep marginally-aligned states within our political/economic sphere. it's hard to operationalize the costs & benefits of this — it has shades of the "credibility" meme that Lemoine aptly skewers. but i think it's different enough to be worth putting some weight on. overall though, Lemoine is surely right that military support is more about moral/cultural/emotional factors than hard-nosed material security & power calculations
books
Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns by Gregg Colburn & Clayton Aldern. i mostly agree with the high-level claim that across-city variation in homelessness rates is largely determined by housing costs & vacancy rates. not sure how much i trust their data & statistical analysis. but they do a pretty good job discussing how other factors fit into the causal story, e.g weather, policing, public space management policies, demographics, poverty rates, mental illness, drug addiction. that said, i found a lot to disagree with. the authors feel trapped by their clear affiliation with the leftwing urbanism memeplex, & it leads them astray in multiple ways. they don’t emphasize land-use regulation or nimbyism when it comes to housing costs. & they overemphasize solving the "root cause” of homelessness, discounting interventions at other levels. the entire qualitative aspect of homelessness is ignored. they largely dismiss public space quality-of-life issues, & view enforcement efforts (e.g moving encampments away from central spaces) as merely “concealing” the problem. so the book doesn’t quite align with my views on the subject, but still a solid & enjoyable read
The Claw of the Conciliator & The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe. books 2 & 3 in the Book of the New Sun series. both excellent. reading these made the first one better in retrospect. though still largely fantasy at a surface-level, the novels are filled with easter-egg scifi details that are a pleasure to tease out (though increasingly it’s just a straightforward scifi). i’ve not read Gulliver’s Travels but it feels similar: a hero goes on a journey & stumbles through a succession of strange & absurd situations, battles weird monsters & enemies, & meets a motley assortment of characters. there’s a strong comedic element throughout the books which is great. the way the protagonist describes his job as a lunch-pail torturer and executioner evokes “just trying to make the trains run on time” Eichmann / Banality of Evil concepts. he’s constantly horny & falling in love with every women he meets, usually those he’s supposed to be torturing. a funny detail is that everyone is constantly drinking maté, since the book takes place in a far-future dystopian South America despite this fact not really being relevant in any other way