Phil BuildTheFutureNow

Is it smart to have gasoline prices and oil companies determine US foreign policy and military deployment?

NYC is making America Great Again #skytok

The BYD Seagull is the MacBook Neo of cars. a 4-seat EV with a 250-mile range. For $9,700.
It’s minimalist, efficient, and makes every other “budget” car look like a 2008 Android tablet. The future is already here, just not in the USA. And it’s embarrassingly affordable.

What NYC needs is a billionaire attraction strategy
If the plan is “tax the rich,” then the supply of rich people matters
Double the billionaires
Double the tax base
Problem solved
Socialism, funded by capitalism
NYC: come for the penthouses, stay for the municipal redistribution

Investors are not ready for a true shock The consensus view of the impact of the Iran war on equities and bonds may well prove too sanguine

Investors are not ready for a true shock ft.trib.al/tWMyNkv | opinion

Oil price jumps after Qatar minister warns all Gulf production could stop Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi says energy prices for everyone will rise if the Iran war continues.

“If ships were unable to proceed through the Strait of Hormuz, Kaabi said that in two to three weeks the price of oil could soar much further to $150 a barrel”
www.bbc.com/news/article...

NYC gives up billions in revenue to fund transformative public goods, more buses, better schools, green spaces, just to provide a free place for people to leave metal boxes.
“Free” parking isn’t a free market at all. It’s collective ownership and subsidy that primarily benefits one specific group

the ultimate socialist policy: the means of storage (streets) are publicly owned, and the profits (value of that storage) go to one group, car drivers.
Everyone pays for streets w taxes, but only some get to store their private property on them for free

For decades, NYC has run one of the largest, most unacknowledged welfare programs in its history, for suburban car owners.
By giving away 3 million street parking spaces of expensive public real estate for free, it’s a multi-billion dollar annual wealth transfer that drives up city debt

The greatest trick the NIMBYs ever pulled was convincing the world that building new homes raises rents

Does the Iran War Put America First? Podcast Episode · Interesting Times with Ross Douthat · March 5 · 59m

This is a wild and eye opening talk about Iran.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

People are treating this like just another news cycle. The scale of what’s actually unfolding right now is… a lot bigger than that. History-book level bigger.
But sure, let’s keep scrolling.

Inside the Trump administration’s scramble to support its own war One State Department official said too few people were read in on war plans.

“What we’ve seen is a completely ad hoc operation where it appeared that nobody actually understood or believed that military action was imminent,”. “It seems like they woke up on Saturday morning and decided that they were going to start a war.”
www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

Only difference is one building sits on land… and the other sits on $21 billion worth of government paperwork and concrete. 🏗️

Market-rate apartment in the outer boroughs: about $350k to build.
One “Affordable” Apartment in the proposed Sunnyside Yard Redevelopment: roughly $3M+ once you stack the rail-yard deck, subsidies, and tax credits.
Same drywall. Same plumbing. Same New York.

With time running out, snow drought and warm weather raise wildfire risk in the West The snowpack is well below average in nearly all Western states, as higher-than-usual temperatures make for a warm, dry winter.

Bodes ill: With time running out, snow drought and warm weather raise wildfire risk in the West.
The snowpack is well below average in nearly all Western states, as higher-than-usual temperatures make for a warm, dry winter.
www.nbcnews.com/science/scie...

PhilBuildTheFutureNow (@philbuildthefuturenow) The U.S. national debt is like $38.56 trillion, about $113,354 per person. A huge chunk of that comes from wars tied to oil and energy geopolitics. Here’s how petroleum-linked conflicts quietly reshap...

Gas is expensive. The U.S. national debt just hit $38.56 trillion. That’s about $113,000 per person. Brown University estimates the post-9/11 wars over oil cost ~$8 trillion. A big chunk of that was financed with debt.
Now layer in new oil wars of 2026, plus interest on past wars

The only thing that stops a bad landlord is a high vacancy rate

How many homes does a parking lot take away?
www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8xK42oC/

YouTube video by Phil Sustainability NYC #yimby #urbanism

#yimby #urbanism
youtube.com/shorts/mmokN... #skytok

Algorithm rage bait
vs.
Editors, fact checks, context.

Hot takes from Russian bots
vs.
Reporters whose names are on the door.
In 2026, the real flex isn’t having an opinion. It’s knowing what actually happened. 🗞️

It’s time

After the strike: The danger of war in Iran | Brookings Brookings experts break down what the war in Iran means and what's at stake internationally and domestically.

“The United States must therefore prepare for the likelihood of Iran’s full implosion, fragmentation, and the spread of a chaos that would make the aftermath of our misadventures in Iraq and Libya look like a picnic”
www.brookings.edu/articles/aft...

75 years ago, roughly $1 out of every $20 earned by the poorest US households went to transportation. Today, that burden has exploded to nearly $1 in every $3.
What was once a minor cost of proximity has become a massive, mandatory tax on simply getting to work.

“As the Iraq experience has made so clear, the institutions of a repressive regime are unlikely to stay in place and function semi-normally once the regime is decapitated. “

“The Bush administration went into both Iraq and Afghanistan largely on the grounds of protecting and advancing other national security interests, with little expectation these efforts would involve a decade-plus of nation building”

Lessons Learned: The Iraq Invasion A decade after the removal of Saddam Hussein, we still appear reluctant to embrace one of the central lessons of Iraq: that regime change necessitates nation building. This lesson—and the many subsidi...

They didn’t ask anyone about Iraq. “because no law was believed to be larger than Hussein’s regime, with his departure, the country lapsed into lawlessness almost overnight.”
www.belfercenter.org/publication/...

NYC’s fiscal policy has a trap built in. The debt limit and property tax cap are tied to real estate values. If those values drop w AI unemployment, the city hits its ceiling, triggering a fiscal crisis. To grow our revenue base, it needs new market-rate homes.

You don’t need a dictator, but you absolutely need a functioning government to hold a country together.

The difference is Adult Supervision.
Venezuela: We removed one guy, kept the structure intact.
Iraq & Afghanistan: We smashed the entire structure. Chaos followed.
So what happens after we yoink the system in Iran?