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Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

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  AI data centers function mainly as a new way to sustain natural gas demand for an oil-and-gas industry facing declining gasoline demand.

  data centers

  Their words

  one way to understand a data center is that it's a device for burning natural gas, the latest excuse (after Ukraine and Iran) for the fuel that Big Oil is counting on to keep its business model afloat even as the world turns away from internal combustion cars and crude demand begins to drop.

  The Two Horsemen, Riding in Formationbillmckibben.substack.com

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

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  The financial payoff from a college degree has stopped growing and may be declining.

  Their words

  The value of a degree is in question, as tuition costs have increased in the last few decades while the college premium-the expected benefit from getting a diploma-has flatlined and possibly even declined in the last few years.

  derekthompson.org

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  Launch costs are on a declining trajectory comparable to Moore's Law-driven chip cost declines in the 1990s.

  Their words

  One reason Starcloud has been so successful at fundraising is that it's a bet on launch costs decreasing, and that's like betting on Moore's Law in the 1990s.

  @paulg on Xx.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

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  Physical systems change abruptly past a threshold rather than declining gradually

  Their words

  But that's not how physical systems work. You push them and then past a certain point things change.

  Reality intrudesbillmckibben.substack.com

Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.

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  The late stage of the Big Debt Cycle shows itself as long rates leading rates up, the currency falling against gold, and the treasury shortening maturities.

  interest ratesgovernment

  Their words

  Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.

  raydalio.substack.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  The global fall in births over the past two centuries is mostly explained by falling child mortality, and that part of the question is settled.

  Their words

  The main cause of falling fertility globally over the last 200 years has been declining child mortality.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  By every objective metric Stripe can see, there has never been a better time to start a business.

  Their words

  Uh, business are uh, the time to revenue for new companies incorporated with Atlas is declining. And so, by all the kind of objective metrics we can look at, uh, it seems to be a better time than ever to start a business.

  youtube.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

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  Big AI is cannibalising the app businesses indie hackers used to build, and their revenue and traffic are falling as a result.

  Their words

  I'm seeing a trend here of declining revenue and traffic with indiehackers On my own projects too Maybe big VC products too but I wouldn't know cause they don't share revenue To me it seems clear BigAI is cannibalizing everything that used to be apps

  levels.io

Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.

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  Google declining to use io_uring in its own products (ChromeOS, Android, production servers) holds back the technology's broader adoption.

  Google

  Their words

  The feature is disabled by Google in ChromeOS, Android and in production Google servers which certainly holds back some use of it.

  Workshop Basel day threedaniel.haxx.se

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  A History of Biology

  Their words

  The chapter on medieval Islam wasn't very deep, otherwise this is truly excellent, particularly when covering the very complicated 20th century. I don't have much more to say, because it is so good, except that I should try to get my brother to review it.

  bactra.org

Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.

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  Criticism as a field of writing is declining today.

  Their words

  David Remnick, who has given me free rein at a time when criticism is withering away

  Personal notetherestisnoise.com

Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.

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  The way to invest in semiconductors is to find where the bottleneck is, and right now the bottleneck is power and thermal.

  Their words

  So I think power, thermal, those become the bottleneck. So I think I always look at from what is the problem we try to solve? Is it real? Is customer crying for it?

  youtube.com

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  Corrupting the church was a prisoner's dilemma: a duke who declined to bribe the pope while his enemies bribed him was simply beaten.

  Their words

  It even becomes a kind of a prisoner's dilemma system because if you're the duke and you don't manipulate the papacy, if you don't bribe the pope, if you don't work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you're screwed.

  youtube.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  Opening school to everybody necessarily made average measured performance look worse, because the students who used to be excluded are now in the data.

  Their words

  But if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Author of The Simple Path to Wealth and of the jlcollinsnh.com stock series on index-fund investing.

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  The United States' share of global GDP and equity markets will keep shrinking, and that decline is accelerating.

  America

  Their words

  For these reasons, I see that declining trend of the US share of the world economy described above accelerating.

  JL Goes International, and to ETFs…… Oh my!jlcollinsnh.com

Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.

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  The Four Things That Matter Most

  Their words

  Someone recommended this book after my brother passed away. I didn’t want to read a bunch of books about grief, but this one struck a chord. I wish I had read it before he died.

  awealthofcommonsense.com

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  This is Spinal Tap

  Their words

  This is Spinal Tap offers a lot of joy. It is one of the funniest movies ever made, a movie that can make you laugh until you cry, and also, make you laugh even if you have been crying.

  whatever.scalzi.com

China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

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  A declining manufacturing share of GDP as an economy matures reflects economic success rather than decline.

  China

  Their words

  Both of these trends are a consequence of economic success, in terms of higher output and productivity: at least some of what is decried as "de-industrialization" is good actually. It is also good for China's planners to recognize that reality and not distort the economy in pursuit of an impossible outcome.

  China bows to de-industrializationandrewbatson.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

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  Something is broken in how people pair up in the West, and that shortage of couples and marriages, not money, is why there are too few children.

  Their words

  The empirical evidence strongly refutes the idea that rising opportunity costs of childbearing are driving low fertility. Declining marriage due to exogenous technology and economics shocks is tanking fertility irrespective of child direct or opportunity costs.

  Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

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  The fall in cancer mortality is not mostly the fall in smoking: stomach and colorectal cancer were already declining before smoking was.

  Their words

  In my view, without smoking, we probably would have seen cancer mortality decline much earlier.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

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  The return on UX design work is declining because the usability battles have been won: the low-hanging fruit was picked and interfaces are now reasonably good.

  Their words

  UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.

  Declining ROI From UX Design Workjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

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  Hiring a head of growth to reverse a declining business is destined to fail, because the cause of the decline is deeper than the missing team.

  Their words

  If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.

  youtube.com