Anybody who says renewable energy is a drag on the economy or a hoax is either misinformed or lying. Below are the numbers, from Financial Times.
The fossil fuel industry is fighting for its life through propaganda and bribery of public officials (which is legal in the United States). They can’t win in the end, but they may be able to obscure the truth from at least the U.S. public for a few more decades, which may take our entire planetary civilization down with them.
This article is called “Cities and states are turning to AI to improve road safety“. Basically the concept is to pay private vehicle owners to install dashboard cameras which take video of street conditions and feed it into a central database. What makes it “AI” seems to be computer-assisted analysis of the videos.
This all makes sense to me, although I wonder if you just put this technology on all the public fleet vehicles out there (buses, police cars, fire trucks, public works vehicles, maybe partner with utility companies) if that would be enough.
I do like the idea of focusing more on the infrastructure itself when it comes to safety, rather than vehicles and their drivers which is essentially blaming the victim. With gradual advent of autonomous vehicles, I see a shift in attitudes towards zero tolerance of deaths and injuries. Early on, my thought was that this was unfair because human-controlled vehicles cause so many deaths and injuries and we tend to think of these as inevitable. But as I have thought about it more, the public has essentially zero tolerance for deaths and injuries on any form of public transportation, whether trains, buses, or planes. It is time we held motor vehicles and the infrastructure they are traveling on to this same standard, and the trend seems to be in that direction.
The other positive trend here is a core principle of asset management itself. We all know infrastructure is expensive and difficult to build and maintain, but it does wear out and need to be repaired and eventually replaced. Each time you do a repair or a replacement, you have a chance to upgrade at low or sometimes no extra cost. Any single piece of infrastructure lasts a long time, but there are always things wearing out here and there throughout the system. So if you have a solid vision of where you want to go and you make those repair/replace/upgrade decisions consistent with it, small changes can add up to big system change over time, and this can be done cost-effectively. We don’t need “AI” to do this necessarily, but if calling it AI helps us get over the psychological hurdle to actually make it happen, let’s go for it!
This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.
Recessions have become more rare in recent decades, and you have to leave it to the Economist to suggest that this might be a bad thing. Well, the Economist and Joseph Schumpeter, who is my personal favorite economist.
Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, argued that they provoke “creative destruction”. Failing firms leave the market, capital decamps to more promising technologies and workers move to more productive jobs. The result is short-term pain and long-term gain. Schumpeter did not argue that politicians should deliberately engineer downturns. But nor did he think they should try to prevent them. “Depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress,” he wrote. They represent “something which has to be done”.
In my many grade-school years of American history (which seemed to be the only kind of history I ever got, unless you count that one year of Virginia history I had to take), I remember my eyes glazing over when hearing about “the panic of 18XX”. Where “XX” represents pretty much any odd numbered year during that century. It just seemed to be a wild and woolly time with no central banks, regulation, or consumer protections. Lots of people got rich, and lots of people lived in what we used to call “third world” conditions.
It makes sense to me that businesses should not be overly insulated from the consequences of the risks they take, while ordinary people mostly should. So this points to not a lot of bailouts for inefficient industries, coupled with robust social insurance like unemployment and disability. In the U.S. though, what I see is big business capturing the government and successfully insulating itself from the consequences of risk taking, which suppresses competition and Schumpeter-esque innovation. We do sort of seem to get the unemployment thing right though, when push comes to shove, which worked out pretty well during the pandemic. People who were employed when the pandemic hit seemed to do okay. People who were not employed fell through the cracks of course, as they tend to do in our system. And if they turned to drug or alcohol abuse, they fell even further due to our lack of universal health care.
So my quasi-libertarian prescription here, which I think Schumpeter and even Hayek might approve of, is to let the companies compete and innovate, or die. Let them hire and fire at will. But workers need to be protected by robust unemployment, disability, health care and child care programs. The government needs to raise and then redistribute revenue to do this, but everybody comes out ahead in the aggregate except a few fat cats at the top who would rather use their wealth and power to rig the system in their favor than have to compete and innovate. Recessions are also the time to double down on infrastructure, research and development, education and training funding which underpin long-term productivity growth and innovation of an advanced economy. I think Schumpeter’s ghost would love that!
“The Line” is essentially an attempt to realize the “ribbon arcology” concept from Science Fiction in real life. Design and construction are underway, although ambitions are already being scaled back and aspirational timelines extended, as tends to happen with visionary projects. This Financial Times article takes a somewhat sneering negative tone, in my view. My thought is that a linear project gives you the ability to plan/design/construct in phases, scale up and down, and change timelines as economic conditions and technologies change during its construction. It has been referred to as “multi-generational”, so the fact it hasn’t been built in the first few years after it was conceived does not constitute failure, in my view. Still, I doubt it is particularly fun to work on a project like this, and I especially wouldn’t want to be a in a high-profile responsible position on the project.
Such was the gravity-defying spirit of Neom — the vast mega-project with The Line at its heart — that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hoped would redefine life in the kingdom and beyond. The chandelier was just one part of The Line, a 500 metre-tall mirror-glass structure running 170km across the sand and designed to house 9mn people: a city built into a wall higher than the Empire State Building.
Of course, I am particularly interested in the transportation, water, energy, and food aspects. If you build something linear like this, how do you avoid problems with bottlenecks or breakdowns somewhere in the middle affecting the entire system?
I like this post on reading and memory from Horace Bianchon.
…the value of reading lies less in retention than in integration. A good book tweaks your internal models and you begin to see a familiar problem in a new frame. You revise the assumptions behind a mental shortcut or you absorb a phrase that becomes part of your vocabulary of thought.
I read for two reasons. First, it’s my favorite leisure activity, one of the only times I achieve the “flow state” that is the key to happiness in the moment for me. But second, yes, it is about tweaking my “internal mental model” of the world. Over time, that will change how I perceive and react to the world and the small and large decisions I make and ultimately how I live my life. I am a different person than I was 5 or 10 years ago, and I will be a different person 5 or 10 years from now (unless I’m dead), and that is largely from those tweaks to my mental model of the universe I am part of. Because that mental model of the universe IS the universe for me. We are each living side by side and interacting with each other within our unique mental models of the universe. Now, I would argue that for practical human purposes, we should assume that there IS such a thing as objective reality, even if we can’t measure or agree with perfect clarity on what it is. We can keep searching for it and approaching it, and some of our mental models are going to be a lot closer to the true reality than others.
I admit to being ignorant of this. I know the Oval Office is in the West Wing of course. Yahoo has a rundown of the East Wing. The main thing it seems to have housed is official offices of first ladies over the years. But not Hillary Clinton, who insisted on being in the West Wing, or Melania Trump, who doesn’t seem to do office-y things. And there was also a theater with a really big TV where presidents and guests could watch movies and the Super Bowl. But given how busy I am as a normal middle aged working parent, I can’t imagine presidents are often able to sit down and dedicate a 2-3 hour chunk of time to watching a movie or sporting event.
The east wing “colonnade” was essentially a hallway.
The iconic outdoor photos we often see of world leaders are typically taken in the outdoor West Wing colonnade.
There are also the east and west porticos, which are basically covered porches. Photo captions online seem to mix up the porticos and colonnades at times.
I hear people “questioning the value of a college degree” in the media. Sure, education is getting more and more expensive at a time when wages seem to be stagnating and there is some uncertainty whether career prospects for today’s graduates will be similar to those of past generations. But the numbers say (paying to study and not work for four years and) getting a degree is still a much better investment than not getting a degree and going right to work after high school. Sure, you could borrow the cost of four years of college and bet it on cryptocurrency or the Super Bowl, and you might come out ahead, but you might also come out living a short life under a bridge somewhere. You could also train as, say, an electrician and probably have a decent income and successful career, but you would still probably do better in the long run as an electrical engineer.
Anyway, this is from the Financial Times, which I still seem to have residual access to from my own recent student career.
To determine whether recent graduates are having an especially tough time in 2025’s low-hiring environment, the comparison we should make instead is with others who recently entered the labour market for the first time, regardless of age. A newly job-seeking graduate might be in their mid-twenties, but someone entering the world of work straight from high school will be several years younger.
Once we do this, it turns out that those without a degree are actually having a much harder time of it. In the US, unemployment among recent college graduates is up 1.3 percentage points from its mid-2022 low, but by almost double that among recent labour market entrants without a degree, who have seen a 2.4 point rise. This is very different to the much more modest 0.7 point rise among the frequently — but inappropriately — cited group of non-grads in their mid-twenties who are sheltered from today’s harsh hiring conditions.
But evidence for the kind of large-scale AI-driven displacement of early-career knowledge-sector jobs that would explain broad-based graduate malaise remains conspicuous by its absence….When viewed instead as a broader cooling of the labour market, in which inexperienced workers of all stripes bear the brunt (and especially those with the least skills) we don’t need to reach for such exotic explanations. The unwinding of extremely tight post-pandemic labour markets, rising input costs from inflation, tax changes and tariffs, plus the broader economic uncertainty during Donald Trump’s second term, are sufficient to explain what we’re seeing.
AI-related changes to the job market and wider economy are almost certainly coming, in my view, but we may be perceiving a causation between today’s technology and economic/political headlines that is not quite happening in real time.
I have thought about this concept on my own, but didn’t know about the work of Alfred Kahn. Basically, the idea is that many small daily decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can lead to drift from the organizations mission or goals, and ultimately undesirable outcomes or even failure. All these individual decisions can seem rational and well-intentioned to the people making them.
This all makes sense to me, and I have seen it play out in organizations. I do think it is a strong argument for planning. Organizations that don’t have appropriate decision making processes in place are going to fail. For even for organizations that do, the people making the decisions need to understand the goals and mission of the organization, and the larger systems that organization is embedded in. That means you need a plan, and the plan needs to be periodically reviewed and communicated so that it stays in the forefront of peoples’ minds. And there needs to be a process for continuity of the plan when the people involved inevitably change over time. I don’t think embedding the plan only at the highest level of management works very well – it needs to be embedded at all levels of the organization, particularly mid-level management but even the rank and file, in my view.
Yes, Charlie Stross continues to rant, enjoyably and correctly, in my view. I’ll share a brief quote and then encourage you to read his long post. And I’m still bothered by the idea that he is 61 and “never expected to get to be this old”. That is not that old, dude! Possibly I feel that way because it is not all that much older than I am! And I am not yet ready to concede that I am old.
The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it’s cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.
The idea of fossil fuels as “stranded assets” has faded from the US press, but he is surer than ever. And I think he is right, and it is industry and political propaganda (which are, of course, one thing at the moment, or maybe always one thing but different industries get the upper hand depending on the politics) that is hiding this fact from us here in the United States, which is rapidly downshifting to developing country status relative to the world’s most advanced countries.
