Reverse osmosis desalination plants cost about $40/W and the learning rate is low.

Does anyone here have good intuition for how we can make them at least 10x cheaper?

Those who dedicate their careers to public service are some of the best of America. There has been a decades-long, false smearing of public service employees, because the lie that public service is bad serves those who want power without accountability. Public service is good.

Confidence in 'the press' declines linearly with getting your news from social media.

Multi-causal, but one cause is online news commentary is overwhelmingly antagonistic (''they' are wrong, I am right'), so everybody likes their news, which tells them to distrust The News

“X won’t solve Y” is a good rhetorical sleight of hand.

Quitting smoking, exercising more, and getting a good night’s sleep won’t solve all your health problems but it’ll help a lot!

People keep asking 'do I need to learn coding since AI is getting good?' I don't think there is any reason to avoid learning anything as a result of AI

Will careers in coding change as a result of AI? Probably, quite possibly for the better. But avoiding learning won't help you

Why should we assume AIs will become extremely power seeking?

Most humans aren't very power seeking. And it's not clear the most competent ones are.

Feels like the base rate of very competent beings ignoring the rule of law is pretty low recently.

What should I read?

I love how Sam D'Amico and Impulse are going about demonstrating that their induction stove is just a *better* stove. This is how clean tech wins. By being better and cheaper than dirty tech.

SpaceX is radically reducing the cost to send stuff into orbit. arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/…

Fantastic article by Michael Dunne - I’ve always been so impressed by his thoughts on the Chinese auto industry.

The Chinese auto industry is coming for Detroit…

newsletter.dunneinsights.com/p/the-sudden-d…

This is underappreciated but perhaps the greatest accomplishment of modern-day economists.
graph via Lee Coppock

ICE auto factories are being closed in China. Why?

Sales of ICE autos are down 37% from 2017 peak. Why?

EV sales skyrocket, displacing ICE vehicles.

Zombie car factories on the rise in China as buyers opt for EVs ft.com/content/b255d7… via @ft

Last week, we launched Data Insights, our new brief format on Our World in Data.

We just published our seventh Data Insight — 'Declining child mortality, fast and slow'.

ourworldindata.org/data-insights

My admiration for Macron grows. Who would have thought the French would be firmer against Russia than the Germans?

If you want to claim your data center (or anything else) is powered by clean electricity, it ought to be *new* clean electricity generation.

Just crazy. We can build solar and wind. They're cheap. But we can't get them connected to the grid.

Wind power is limited, in part, by the size of blades you can move to a site. Radia, un-stealthing today with $100m in funding, is solving that by building the world's largest plane:

(Disclosure: I'm an advisor and former exec there.)

wsj.com/business/energ…

OK so let’s talk about the TikTok vote today. Because the amount of woefully misinformed calls and social media outreach over the last two days PROVES that we had a problem. Thread:

With global temperatures now in for February, its still looking like it will be roughly a coin flip whether 2024 will surpass 2023 as the warmest year on record:

The Radia announcement, using planes to fly turbine blades the size of the Eiffel tower is really really cool.

Wind is dependent on geography, more than solar, and an asset to balance a clean grid.

'Gigawind' offers the potential to pack more punch in more places.