This is worth pinning

Trump’s vision for “energy dominance” has one big problem: fossil fuels have totally lost in the marketplace. Since 2010, the cost of solar has fallen 89%. Batteries are down 93%. Wind is down 63%. Solar generating capacity has now surpassed coal globally. Battery storage has surpassed pumped hydro. And this isn’t just happening in China or rich countries — clean electric technologies are expanding across South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The money has noticed: global investment in electrotech is now roughly twice investment in fossil fuels. The countries that understand that are building the industries of the future. The United States should be leading that race — not pretending we’re still in the 19th century. nytimes.com/2026/09/23/clima…

We need a vehicle weight tax. If you can buy an $80k, 3,000 kg SUV to haul one bag of groceries, taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing your pavement wear/tear plus the added danger to our streets. If you can afford the payments, you can afford to stop asking society to subsidize it.

Any coordinated international emergency action in the pipeline to stop warming from hitting 1.9-2°C by 2027-31? No. Any major emitters prepared to actually radically cut emissions? No. Would that even be enough to save ecosystems & biomes? No. Are we ready for 2°C and rising? No.

With a top speed of 19 mph and range of 46 miles, the Fiat Topolino isn't even street legal without an optional pack to raise its top speed. insideevs.com/news/800902/to…

Contributing the initial endowment for new Prizes. amideiprize.org

A request: What are your favorite examples of people (yourself or others) spending money to make the world more awesome that don't look like normal charity or profit-maximizing investment? (Spending money on a personal project can count)

What every voter and apparently, the NY Times Editorial Board, should know about housing policy: 1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand. Or you can add supply. 2. There is no amount of money that any big city government could feasibly spend that would add materially to supply. This is because, depending on the location, new apartments cost $250,000-1,000,000 to develop… building even a few hundred of those starts to stress any city budget, and many big cities need tens or hundreds of thousands. 3. On the other hand, investors (including pension funds and endowments, insurance companies, rich families, etc.) can collectively **easily** provide enough capital to build as much housing as we need **so long as they are confident they can get a reasonable return**. To get those investors to fund the creation of the housing our society needs, we must do two things: 1. Dramatically reduce the time & complexity associated with securing governmental permission to develop housing. This means reviewing and simplifying the overlapping regulations that constrain housing production: zoning codes, building codes, parking, ADA, etc. But it also means changing the cultures within the relevant governmental agencies from “default no” to “how can we help you?”. 2. Provide certainty around on-going regulation of apartment operations. The way investors get a return from building rentals is as follows: They hire managers to lease the apartments, collect the rents, pay operating expenses and any mortgage payments, and then send the investors the cashflow that remains. But governments all over the country have been restricting the manner in which apartment buildings can be operated in all kinds of ways. For example: Cities have been making it harder to screen tenants, while also making it much harder to evict tenants who don’t pay. You can see why both of those measures are politically popular. After all, who doesn’t want people to get second chances? And who wants anyone to get evicted? But, as a manager, the combination of those two regulations makes it much harder to predict, with any certainty, that the rent will get paid… and that makes it very difficult to get investors to provide capital to create more housing. Another example: Rent control. Again, I understand why renters love rent control and why politicians want to give it to them. But, if, as has been the case in NY, LA and San Francisco, city governments hold annual rent increases below the rate of growth in the operating expenses of the buildings, the cashflow payable to the investors shrinks… making them much less likely to invest capital in building more apartments. In conclusion: For ~every other good or service in the economy, we allow the market to function, and the result is that we have a surplus of choice at all price points (think of food or clothes or cars), which is spectacular for the consumer. If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it. And that means allowing investors to build rental apartments *and* allowing them to operate those apartments in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit. Remember: Every developer of rentals is either a landlord-in-waiting or hoping to sell to one.

We all love Japan, don’t we folks? But eventually, we need to discuss how feudalism transmogrified into a soul crushing corporate structure inside Japanese businesses that absolutely stifle innovation, motivation, and anything approaching efficiency. Boomer god-bosses at 10 person businesses, 5 of whom are basically human calculators doing the work of a single Excel table. Basically zero startup culture, almost no entrepreneurial spirit. That’s not to say you find zero startups or entrepreneurs in Japan, but they are the rare exception. We have a new Japanese executive on his 3 year stint in America as a Director. Took him to some of our customers- he was shocked - guys in garages with 2 or 3 of our machines pumping out $1M+ in revenue. “You just get this L L C on a computer and can start business?” He had an aneurism when he saw my home shop. These things simply do not exist in Japan… Imagine if they did? My point is; based, old-school Japan is awesome, but there are hidden costs.

Average voter: housing here became too expensive, we can’t afford it anymore Economists: your city needs to build more housing to increase supply Average voter: I don’t want more housing, I want housing to be more affordable That’s basically the state of the discourse

“We’re facing the largest supply shortage of lubricating fluids in the modern history of America. Realistic, middle-of-the-road estimates are for our average available supply in this product category to drop by 40%.” Internal AutoZone Memo

Get your act together USA 🌞🌞🔋

I keep trying to explain to people, but America doesn’t have a viable 3D printer company because we don’t have any of the underlying architecture. Shocking how many people think a complex product is some singular thing you build at a “factory.” A 3D printer is really just a featherweight CNC mill, so much so that they speak yeh same language (G-Code). You need: - micron accurate linear rails - Sub micron bearings for those linear rails. - High resolution servo/stepper motors. - Motion control chips and boards and stuff. - Sheet metal, injection molding, various coatings. America has *no* industrial base for *any* of this at consumer product scale. We invented or definitively innovated everything above, then the McKinsey set came in and convinced us to ship it all to China for the last 40 years. So yea, sure… you can screw a 3D printer together in America, at great expense… but you are doing so with primarily Chinese components. What we need is a bunch of uninvestible (by venture funds) businesses that are boring and competently supply a bunch of even more boring, medium margin, no-moat components.

Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel. It now captures 90% of the market for new generation of electric power. EVs are getting cheaper better every year. LFP batteries provide the lowest cost, fastest to charge and longest life. New sodium batteries offer wider temperature range longer life and just now in production. They are projected to be 90% cheaper than LFP within 3 years.

Tesla just solved the most annoying problem in public EV charging: the awkward parking lot standoff trying to figure out who's actually next in line Tesla launched a pilot for a digital Waitlist feature at 5 Supercharger sites This is how Tesla is smartly solving the problem: → If stalls are full, join a virtual queue directly from your car's screen → Check exactly how many cars are ahead of you and your estimated wait time → The system literally tracks and notifies users if someone tries to skip ahead Just a seamless, efficient digital line. And yes, even non-Teslas can use it through the app Tesla is once again solving real-world parking lot chaos with pure software…

Data centers aren't uniquely energy-hungry. One aluminum smelter draws as much power as all of Nashville. Utilities used to build power plants to meet that demand but today, regulations & litigation make that almost impossible. We need more power plants, not fewer data centers.

For what it's worth, Gmail claims that the Climatebase Weekly email contains links to websites that host malware. Ymmv, not to be confused with yummy.