Andy Zhang

To paraphrase the CEO of Norges: AI is only good when it agrees with me.

Wouldn't surprise me if most infrastructure spending going forward is climate-related. Looking at my area of expertise, most of the electric rate increases in CA are directly attributable to wildfire spending.

When all those bad real estate loans to climate-vulnerable spots (cough Miami) inevitably happens, the Fed is gonna say they never saw it coming

The “That's On Me, I Set the Bar Too Low” meme, but edited to reference Brassica oleracea. Text as follows: Jake: I'm an expert on vegetables Jess: Oh yeah? Name ten vegetables Jake: Brassica oleracea Jess: That's on me, I set the bar too low.

This isn’t actually a thread of different posts. It’s all just different cultivars of a single post

Just caught up on this. Compelling argument from @adamposen.bsky.social here.

Feels like if we're literally gonna just prop them up w/ state money, might as well go with the original proposal and buy the refineries. It'll be selling for pennies on the dollar anyways.

Worst news ever

Not 100% sure but I thought SA had some of the lowest production costs in the world. In any case, what happens is anybody’s guess. Doesn’t seem like anyone is planning for anything except “drill baby drill”

Unless oil stays at like $15/bbl, why would Aramco/Rosneft/Statoil turn off their money printers. It’s like having an atm in your living room.

Waiting for the day state-owned fossil goo companies actually reduce production to meet their climate “goals”

Sounds like capital markets are functioning and capital allocation is spot on these days. :)

Curious how this plays out if (or when i guess) this chaos leads to greater capital repatriation and weaker dollar/dollar assets. Does relative yields even matter when you have such high political risk?

Maybe not quite that low, since MiUSA garment producers are highly efficient/automated. Although a plain shirt does run you like $50+ easily. I wonder what American Giant's margins are. Must be wafer thin.

Technology is good, who knew! Basic income (or jobs guarantee or whatever)+ automation is the way forward.

“Hard to abate”, i.e. “but I don’t wanna change any behavior”.

Banerjee (2013) wrote a paper about vertical farming and the CAPEX cost of vertical farming is like 650k/acre (adjusted for efficiency gains from VF). That is a ludicrous expense and would only be viable in a very select number of markets.

Whenever I read “Postcapitalism” by Paul Mason, it’s just so prescient.

Front-loaded finance is important for energy. Even in o&g, futures contracts to buy do not incentivize production as much as cash/finance upfront for exploration/developing reserves.

We don't want a world where some centralized corporate entity controls the energy consumption of people to maximize their profit margins (cough*). We want a world where we can optimize human health and comfort, and ensure people have adequate electric service.

Even just applying this narrowly to the climate movement, it is evident that a transition to a world of DERs, smart-managed grids is one that is heavily dependent on the free flow of information. Companies whose profit depends on private ownership of load data, or other such info is not it.

Paul Mason still being absurdly relevant.

At the end of the day, consumers should be mad. My whole research paper started b/c I noticed Whole Foods was making bs claims about norwegian/tasm salmon. Told the truth, I imagine there would be a great deal of economic damage, especially from the health concious crowd...

Oh, it is completely insane how Tasmian finfish industry is allowed to claim there is no environmental damage. They don't have any baseline comparisons to make that claim! They literally make this shit up!

I wrote about this 7 years ago, but it still is a massive conflict for the aquaculture industry to be regulated by a department that views the "success of the fin-fish aquaculture industry is inextricably linked to the future economic prosperity of Tasmania". nre.tas.gov.au/Documents/sa...

Apparently spatial and tabular data from the Census was unavailable last week. Not sure of current status but if that's even on the chopping block....

what makes this even cooler is that Meta will let ads through for effectively anything

And the consultants sometimes don't even get paid that much. Place I worked at previously doled out $500k for a consulting contract w/ 2 positions and I spoke to the actual employees and they were only being paid $70k. Even assuming benefits that's 60%+ pocketed by the company.

Tiktok is Gen Z’s mental infrastructure

Love me some beans. My first ful medames was life changing tbh