Excellent to emphasize: "Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support."
and Indian progress has come with generally what the Lefty proggy sneer at as neo-liberal reforms loosening up the "License Raj"
Regarding Wind (speaking here as a real-world RE financier): that Twitter/X post opens with something stupid "I suspect the details might give away why the Trump administration seems so opposed to wind." - anyone suspecting that is giving idiotic levels of credence to an analytical coherence for Trump - he hates wind because he fought over it relative to a branded golf course and lost, and he's that petty and that dim. (there's zero economic policy rationality in actively sabotaging - notably via completely transparent and of dubious regulatory legality directives and orders - existing advancing wind asset developments even if one took an energy mix skepticism on wind.) such a suspicion is at best naive sane-washing if not at worse being an active dupe.
I think the overall neg side eval on wind there is excessive by far, although not untrue - certainly wind has a number of important scaling issues that solar PV doesn't and the asset-cost basis of wind installations has run into something of a wall in the way solar PV panels has not (also installation scaleability - harvesting more power (ceteris paribus) means taller mega-installs and the ability to cost-effectively scale that including the logistics of getting them in place is a much different problem than panels.
And some of his bads are... extremely dubious (intensity of rare-earths? Bad? Well amigo that's Elec Tech Stack )
Further the Poster later comment about wind & solar increasing system wide costs is... well suggestive of a person with a certain view as it were as a half-truth (depending).
I think there are legitimate points in there but there are a number of items that are quite to me deformed and questionable. [noting yes attributed to an anon German energy trader but follow-ups suggest more - not that the way Germany has done energy in past 15 years says great coherence, thanks to Grunen and some spinelessness of the general parties, as shutting nuclear
On the net out migration of the plains, this is a story I have lived and is not necessarily bad news. The county in Northwestern Minnesota where I was born is an agricultural breadbasket and yet the population peaked in 1940 while continuing to fall. All my life, 68 years, the vast majority of the residents have lived a comfortable life with all the modern amenities and good to excellent schools, so why leave. This really is a success story of the productivity explosion in farming since WW2 and a strong work ethic combined with good education. The labor needed per acre of farmland has dropped by 90% while yields per acre increased by 2 to 4 times. This is the classic job loss due to productivity. So what of the people? The vast majority of outmigration was and is not due to deprivation but opportunity. With good education and work ethic it was and is easy to leave the area for higher paying employment. Those who remain tend to be in farming at scale, in a business that taps into the economy outside the area, or simply choose to stay close to family. The two main drivers of out migration continue to be productivity in agriculture and a social/education foundation for success outside the area. Ironically those residents with below average education and skills have a higher net standard of living here than by migrating as housing costs especially are so much lower and the social safety net stronger than sunbelt states. How long can this go on? No one really knows but the urban/suburban magnet is still pulling strong.
I just listened to your recent podcast. It was interesting because I felt you tackled the AI argument a little differently than you do in writing. One thing that struck me more than usual was that you seem to underestimate the power of AI. And potentially I am in the minority here in both believing in the extreme power of AI, being generally optimistic (given the proper path), but also being existentially terrified - like standing at the top of a terrifyingly steep and beautiful cliff. It's likely that all well-documented knowledge fields will be irrelevant within the next decade. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The last hold-outs will be hands-on-jobs, but that will only last until robotic articulating sausages are perfected. Then we just become irrelevant sacks of watery meat, some kind of outmoded bio-cybernetic progenitor.
As it currently stands we are looking at the potential enshittification of humanity. And it can feel a little like gaslighting to talk about robot friends and ignore that it is at least possible that within the next decade all human work will be meaningless. And I agree that may be exciting and good for humans in the long term, but I live in now, and I would like to live my full life in relative peace without being killed early in the transience of the biggest revolution humanity has ever seen.
People point to the pandemic as some kind of marker for overhiring in tech but IMO overhiring has been going on since the end of the financial crisis due to increased investments in tech in the zero percent interest rate environment. If you look at some of the top tech companies, the revenue is still concentrated in some areas and most employees are working in BUs that don’t make any money. Ever since Musk blew up Twitter and showed that you don’t need so many employees to run an app/web company, there’s been an increased focus on efficiency.
Excellent to emphasize: "Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support."
and Indian progress has come with generally what the Lefty proggy sneer at as neo-liberal reforms loosening up the "License Raj"
Regarding Wind (speaking here as a real-world RE financier): that Twitter/X post opens with something stupid "I suspect the details might give away why the Trump administration seems so opposed to wind." - anyone suspecting that is giving idiotic levels of credence to an analytical coherence for Trump - he hates wind because he fought over it relative to a branded golf course and lost, and he's that petty and that dim. (there's zero economic policy rationality in actively sabotaging - notably via completely transparent and of dubious regulatory legality directives and orders - existing advancing wind asset developments even if one took an energy mix skepticism on wind.) such a suspicion is at best naive sane-washing if not at worse being an active dupe.
I think the overall neg side eval on wind there is excessive by far, although not untrue - certainly wind has a number of important scaling issues that solar PV doesn't and the asset-cost basis of wind installations has run into something of a wall in the way solar PV panels has not (also installation scaleability - harvesting more power (ceteris paribus) means taller mega-installs and the ability to cost-effectively scale that including the logistics of getting them in place is a much different problem than panels.
And some of his bads are... extremely dubious (intensity of rare-earths? Bad? Well amigo that's Elec Tech Stack )
Further the Poster later comment about wind & solar increasing system wide costs is... well suggestive of a person with a certain view as it were as a half-truth (depending).
I think there are legitimate points in there but there are a number of items that are quite to me deformed and questionable. [noting yes attributed to an anon German energy trader but follow-ups suggest more - not that the way Germany has done energy in past 15 years says great coherence, thanks to Grunen and some spinelessness of the general parties, as shutting nuclear
On the net out migration of the plains, this is a story I have lived and is not necessarily bad news. The county in Northwestern Minnesota where I was born is an agricultural breadbasket and yet the population peaked in 1940 while continuing to fall. All my life, 68 years, the vast majority of the residents have lived a comfortable life with all the modern amenities and good to excellent schools, so why leave. This really is a success story of the productivity explosion in farming since WW2 and a strong work ethic combined with good education. The labor needed per acre of farmland has dropped by 90% while yields per acre increased by 2 to 4 times. This is the classic job loss due to productivity. So what of the people? The vast majority of outmigration was and is not due to deprivation but opportunity. With good education and work ethic it was and is easy to leave the area for higher paying employment. Those who remain tend to be in farming at scale, in a business that taps into the economy outside the area, or simply choose to stay close to family. The two main drivers of out migration continue to be productivity in agriculture and a social/education foundation for success outside the area. Ironically those residents with below average education and skills have a higher net standard of living here than by migrating as housing costs especially are so much lower and the social safety net stronger than sunbelt states. How long can this go on? No one really knows but the urban/suburban magnet is still pulling strong.
I just listened to your recent podcast. It was interesting because I felt you tackled the AI argument a little differently than you do in writing. One thing that struck me more than usual was that you seem to underestimate the power of AI. And potentially I am in the minority here in both believing in the extreme power of AI, being generally optimistic (given the proper path), but also being existentially terrified - like standing at the top of a terrifyingly steep and beautiful cliff. It's likely that all well-documented knowledge fields will be irrelevant within the next decade. Then the undocumented ones will become documented, and they too will go. The last hold-outs will be hands-on-jobs, but that will only last until robotic articulating sausages are perfected. Then we just become irrelevant sacks of watery meat, some kind of outmoded bio-cybernetic progenitor.
As it currently stands we are looking at the potential enshittification of humanity. And it can feel a little like gaslighting to talk about robot friends and ignore that it is at least possible that within the next decade all human work will be meaningless. And I agree that may be exciting and good for humans in the long term, but I live in now, and I would like to live my full life in relative peace without being killed early in the transience of the biggest revolution humanity has ever seen.
People point to the pandemic as some kind of marker for overhiring in tech but IMO overhiring has been going on since the end of the financial crisis due to increased investments in tech in the zero percent interest rate environment. If you look at some of the top tech companies, the revenue is still concentrated in some areas and most employees are working in BUs that don’t make any money. Ever since Musk blew up Twitter and showed that you don’t need so many employees to run an app/web company, there’s been an increased focus on efficiency.