More Links for October

hyperlink harvest

1. Whisper Aero released an electric leaf blower, which is amusing. this is an eVTOL engine supplier that's trying to create super-quiet small aircraft. presumably there are concrete benefits to testing their tech out, & if you see an opportunity to make a bit of side-profit & grab some publicity, why not go for it? but like Boring Company’s flamethrower, i think probably there’s also an internal culture benefit here to giving your product engineers & designers etc a fun little Building task to go wild with

2. relatedly, Eli Dourado did an excellent post on some proposed FAA regulatory changes for personal aviation that will plausibly boost the eVTOL & autonomous flight market. as the article discusses, this really supports the tinkering culture in aerospace engineering, which is fantastic (and is in extreme contrast with, say, nuclear engineering)

3. amusing update on Energy Vault. i think literally everyone thought that their initial block-stacking concept was goofy & unrealistic af (everyone except Masayoshi Son & Softbank, that is). it’s anticlimactic to see them pivot so hard into boring, mature storage tech. but i suppose i’m happy that they found a way to survive. and maybe the gravity storage idea will even come back at some point, who knows

4. some progress in bionic arms, very cool (SciAm)

5. update on Zeno Power (radioisotope power systems for space & (eventually) remote terrestrial applications (seabed, arctic etc))

6. good piece on post-quantum encryption (NYT)

7. IFP's Caleb Watney testified for a US congress committee, pretty neat. they’ve come a long way in a short time

8. we’re now arming the robot dogs (which i support)

9. PERC published their fall report, focused on the Endangered Species Act. if you're not familiar with their critique, it's definitely worth checking out. the first article here is a decent overview. but this one on how new technologies can aid in species recovery was great as well

10. K2 Space, betting big on Starship working out & massively increasing launch capacity at lower costs. you just have to respect the risk appetite here. it speaks to the awesome power of entrepreneurial capitalism & finance to Go Fast: one might imagine a different economic system where everyone sorta waits around until Starship is actually proven before investing in the space economy boom that it can unlock

11. Alice Maz essay on governance, ai, other things... good as always

12. short-seller Iceberg did a post on NuScale. seems bad. but also nothing truly devastating here that wasn’t known previously, i think. but regardless, if NuScale does fail.. it's really all over for US nuclear. not forever, of course. but like, probably any kind of major nuclear resurgence would have to happen overseas first, then only later come to USA. would be a shame. i guess i can imagine a scenario where US nuclear endures a NuScale failure & keeps limping along with subsidies until TerraPower or Westinghouse or whoever actually gets deployment of an SMR. but it’d be a rough journey

13. Prospect has a piece about consolidation in the HVAC industry, naturally framing it as a Bad Thing. while i have a lot of sympathy for the long-tail small business yeoman ideal, in this case i really must disagree: scale is good. i won't recite all the arguments, but large corporations have tremendous benefits for all stakeholders (customers, employees, owners etc) and i highly doubt there's much of any anticompetitive price appreciation effect here. free market competition & consumer welfare are more subtle concepts than merely maximizing the quantity of unique suppliers. and i think here having fewer, bigger firms doing HVAC & home energy services would be beneficial. home retrofit/repair/construction stuff is a weird industry in the US, and it's highly dysfunctional & low-productivity. everyone is familiar with the hassle of trying find good people, having fractured services (electrician, plumber etc). more consolidated firms that can offer multiple services is good & convenient, and they can harness scale efficiencies & synergies, e.g implementing tech like online scheduling. they can also better capture govt subsidies, which (for better or worse) will make the retail price lower for customers. the research is clear that bigger firms on avg offer higher wages, better benefits, more schedule flexibility, more advancement opportunities, better workplace protections vs small businesses. the article highlights this quote: "Manufacturers of heat pumps are acquiring regional distributors at a rapid clip, and prices have risen dramatically". this is funny because of course even if true, it doesn't really tell you about the direction of causality. perhaps the boom or forecasted boom in demand for heat pumps is causing the shortage & higher prices, which is leading to the acquisitions that will ultimately be part of the supply-expansion solution (“the solution to high prices is high prices”)

14. the connection to Ukraine was a bit forced, but i thought this piece about Russia's colonial history in Alaska was pretty interesting

15. good update on Boeing. what a mess (Seattle Times)

16. Latecomer Magazine, a new online publication focused on technology, futurism etc. all the inaugural pieces were great. Casey Handmer's post was fun (though nothing new if you are familiar with his solar maximalism view). & this reflection from James Yorke on the past 50 years of mathematical chaos theory was really nice

17. brief 2022 FBI crime data writeup from Jeff Asher. pathetic how slow this data is to get published

18. Austin Vernon post on closed-loop (advanced) geothermal (e.g Eavor). i've been thinking that enhanced geothermal (fracking; e.g Fervo) is probably a better bet initially, simply because of costs & technological risk. but this post made me a bit more optimistic about closed-loop (which has obvious advantages). but both seem great & surely can coexist for a long while even if one wins out eventually. it would be interesting if EGS takes off in USA, but AGS wins elsewhere. the comments at the end about heat-only geothermal are also interesting

19. the whole trinity of center-left wonk bloggers responded to Andreessen's techno-optimist ‘manifesto’:

• Noah Smith’s was pretty decent

• Matt Yglesias’ was okay. i like Yglesias a lot, but his takes on technology are usually mediocre. his narrow point here is true. but the fallacy is undermined in practice because there's so much uncertainty about the effects of new technology. taking each case on its own doesn’t really work. one's views on new tech cost/benefit depend a lot on your ideology & priors. and i tend to want to give new tech a very wide berth, accepting more risk in exchange for more possible reward. the precautionary principle would be at one extreme end, & at the other extreme you have (according to Yglesias) Andreessen’s "all new tech is literally guaranteed to be net-positive in general". there is another issue here, which is that new technology & the pace of progress has spillover effects, on the culture & in many other areas. fast progress inspires ppl to develop even more new stuff, affects the payoffs for people making decisions about what to spend their time on, what human capital to develop etc. so that positive externality of a faster pace & more permissive environment for new tech further moves me towards accepting more technological risk, in exchange for faster/more progress

• Ezra Klein's piece was perhaps the most interesting, even if i quibble with much of it. i've posted often about the strange affinity & overlap many pro-nuclear anti-renewables, self-avowed pro-technology ppl have with degrowth, anti-tech environmentalism. & Klein's concept of 'reactionary futurism' captures some of this, i think. i am really looking forward to Klein's upcoming book on these topics (NYT)

20. good Michael Goff post on deep ecology

21. somewhat depressing post on the US submarine industrial base (it’s not in a good place)

22. & also at War on the Rocks, a great piece about urban warfare in Gaza (or sieges, more specifically). last year i read Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century by Anthony King, which was excellent. i've been trying to find a free copy of Underground Warfare by Daphné Richemond-Barak, but so far no luck. i might just break down and actually buy a copy. it’s all very fascinating

23. good article on China's moves in seabed mining. i support this and don't really see it as a winner-take-all market where China moving first would hurt parallel efforts from other nations. the longrun demand for metals is so huge thanks to the energy transition, there's plenty of demand for everyone. i suppose China could corner the market on specialized input technologies, that would be unfortunate. but my biggest fear is still that western countries will just straight-up block seabed mining using the UN, for misguided environmentalism reasons. and this has nothing to do with China really (WaPo)

24. and Ars had a piece on space mining. someday..

25. profile of Coolbrook, pursuing clean ethylene ('e-cracking') in Netherlands. neat

26. no link here, but i wanted to note for posterity that i finally went to the Texas State Fair in Dallas after many years of hearing about how it wrestled with Minnesota for the title of biggest & most impressive. i can now confirm that the rivalry is total hogwash and MN's fair is clearly larger across all dimensions. i grew up in MN and so this was quite a relief for my home state pride. TX's does last twice as long as MN's, so it is conceivable to me that it has more total attendees or perhaps gdp contribution or something. but in terms of physical size & quantity & diversity of activities, buildings, foods etc, MN has clearly the bigger fair. not that TX's is unimpressive, though: it's still huge and was really fun. i’ve not been back to the MN fair in probably 5+ years, so perhaps i should make a point of going next year, just to make sure

books

Counterweight by Djuna. a Korean space elevator cyberpunk novel. fairly short, pretty enjoyable. obviously i love the space elevator plot, but overall it was fairly generic (megacorporations, nefarious mind-control biotech, etc). not much more to say