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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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most high-skilled Europeans are happy to pay even high taxes, provided the government does a great job in return.

  Europegovernment

  Their words

  I think most high skilled Europeans are happy to pay (even high) taxes That is, if the government does a great job like Singapore or Dubai or Korea or Japan and most things work well You pay the government for a service and you get safe cities, great public services and great healthcare back

  levels.io

Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Launch is getting harder to buy even as it gets cheaper: demand for orbit has outrun the supply of rockets.

  Their words

  Paradoxically, though, there is a growing crunch in launch availability.

  arstechnica.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Some historical raiders destroyed conquered cities for destruction's own sake, not to seize land, treasure, or slaves.

  Their words

  The Sea Peoples did not invade lands to claim them as their own, or extract treasure or slaves to bring back to their homeland. They seemingly torched the great capitals of the Bronze Age just to watch them burn.

  The Uses Of Terroradjacentpossible.substack.com

Editor at Works in Progress writing on architecture, urbanism and housing policy, and a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies and Create Streets. Has worked in think tanks, academia and government in Britain.

From one piece Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

  Their words

  Without densification restrictions, housing shortages will only ever be serious in cities where land is really intensely scarce, as in Hong Kong.

  worksinprogress.news

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  Zoning is a European invention: German and Austro-Hungarian cities wrote the first rules protecting rich suburbs from denser building.

  Europe

  Their words

  In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.

  worksinprogress.news

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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  Cesare Borgia's conquered cities loved him because an outsider with no local faction gave them the first neutral justice they had seen in generations.

  Their words

  And everyone says, "Why are they liking this man? He is a cruel murdering tyrant." And the answer is for the first time in generations, they have had something close to fair justice.

  youtube.com

Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

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  Humans cannot out-compete AI by trying to match or exceed its raw output volume.

  Their words

  Humans will not win by trying to outrun the AIs. They are more powerful slop cannons than you are.

  🌻 the old world is dyingjasmi.news

Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.

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  An electric robotaxi is not simply one more car, and the people who dislike cars in cities are wrong to treat it as one.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  Self-driving cars seem to be just more cars, and people who dislike cars don't love that. But the electric robotaxi offers much more potential

  ideas.4brad.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

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  Spreading jobs into a polycentric region does not cut commuting: transit ridership is weaker there than in cities with one strong centre.

  Their words

  Nor does polycentricity solve the problem. Indeed, ridership in polycentric regions is weaker than in monocentric ones.

  pedestrianobservations.com

Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Invisible Cities

  Their words

  I'm going to have to include Italo Calvino's Oulipian novel Invisible Cities (trans. by William Weaver), since it is a foundational text for me.

  countercraft.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  If the industrial stack is not off fossil fuels within ten or twenty years, the country gets poor twice over — the way Britain did when its coal ran out, and again when Florida floods.

  energy

  Their words

  the meta problem here is if we don't move our industrial stack off fossil fuels in 10 or 20 years, first of all, we'll get poor the same way you UK did, right? Because they ran out of coal basically. And the second thing is we'll get poor because we'll flood our coastal cities in Florida underneath climate change.

  youtube.com

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  Cheap synthetic fuel made from sunlight and air would help China more than America, because it frees China from the oil it has to import.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  It absolutely asymmetrically helps China. We're not currently working with China. They don't plan to, but like the physics is very obvious, you know, and synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years.

  youtube.com

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

From one piece Keyu Jin: China's Economy, Tariffs, Trade, Trump, Communism & Capitalism | Lex Fridman Podcast #477 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  US export controls produced China's chip breakthroughs rather than preventing them: while China could comfortably import American chips, its own industry stalled for twenty years.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  And remember that DeepSeek happened in times of crisis, urgency, not in times of comfort. A lot of these technological breakthroughs and leapfrogging happens in times of crisis. This is called crisis innovation. And you got to thank the US for that. When the Chinese were comfortably importing chips from the US, the whole industry stalled for 20 years.

  youtube.com

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  Chinese industrial policy worked, and the evidence is that the cities which pushed hardest on a sector ended up best at both production and patents.

  China

  Their words

  Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.

  youtube.com

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Settled civilizations only improve inside a fixed way of doing things; Genghis Khan had no fixed way of thinking, and that is why he could absorb any technology he met.

  Their words

  I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  American cities chose subways over elevated railways knowing they cost two to four times as much, because nobody would live under an el.

  America

  Their words

  Cities began to prefer subways to elevateds, despite the fact that they were two to four times as expensive to build as elevated trains.

  Why we stopped building subways cheaplyworksinprogress.news

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The copyright problem in AI training already has a legal solution nobody is taking: train the models in Japan, where copyright does not apply to training data.

  energy

  Their words

  So, Japan has a law which you're allowed to train on any training data and copyrights don't apply if you want to train a model, A. B, Japan has 9 gigawatts of curtailed nuclear power. C, Japan is allowed under the AI diffusion rule to import as many GPUs as they'd like.

  youtube.com

Economist, senior research fellow and director of the Urbanity project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, working on housing and land use.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The American cities with the highest housing prices have the worst homelessness, and that correlation is the strongest evidence the two are connected.

  America

  Their words

  The American cities with the highest housing prices have the worst homelessness problems.

  worksinprogress.news

Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Cars people own will double as driverless taxis when the owner is not using them, in ten major US cities, some time from the mid-2020s.

  Their words, before

  Such "taxi" services where the cars are also used with drivers at other times and with extended geography, in 10 major US cities NET 2025

  Their words now

  This is unlikely to happen in the first half of this century.

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Neither running everything through the founder nor pushing decisions down is the better way to run a company; each only works if it fits that company’s own resources and values.

  Their words

  Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.

  “Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmakingcharity.wtf

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A city's first rail line comes in at a reasonable cost and every line after it does not, because the follow-up outgrows the in-house team that oversaw the pilot.

  Their words

  So Portland managed to build one very small line for fairly reasonable costs, but they were not cutting edge; this is a common pattern to Western US cities, in that the first line has reasonable costs and then things explode, even while staying self-funded and self-directed.

  Low Spanish Costs are not About Decentralizationpedestrianobservations.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

From one piece Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America | Lex Fridman Podcast #446 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Classic Maya cities emptied because people got sick of kings.

  Their words

  But then we have the interesting case of in the Postclassic, they shed the idea of kings. They don’t like kings anymore. That’s probably a big part of why the Classic disappearance and the abandonment of all those cities happened. People just got sick of kings.

  youtube.com

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  The Maya did not collapse; they moved a few kilometres out into perishable houses, and archaeology could not see it.

  Their words

  I think it’s a failing of archeology to properly see what was happening. I think that most of those cities populations moved no more than 20 to 40 kilometers out and started their own farm, and they lived in perishable houses.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  It is only in dense cities that land dominates the price of a home, and there the land is expensive because of the rules limiting what can be built on it.

  Their words

  It’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area.

  What Makes Housing So Expensive?construction-physics.com

Investigative journalist; wrote Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain and Nuclear War: A Scenario, reconstructing what secret programmes actually did from interviews and declassified records.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Atomic weapons destroy cities and thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations, which makes the decision to build the thermonuclear bomb more confounding than the decision to drop the first two.

  Their words

  I mean even projects within the Manhattan Project defined thermonuclear weapon, the thermonuclear weapon as the evil thing. It was evil. It’s a weapon of genocide. Atomic weapons destroy cities, thermonuclear weapons destroy civilizations.

  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.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Widgy

  Their words

  You can import the 2nd pic into Widgy to install it to your Apple Watch

  levels.io

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The 2021 crackdown was a bounded correction, and it would take more than a regulatory campaign to defeat China's economic dynamism.

  China

  Their words, before

  My view is that it’s going to take more than this regulatory campaign to defeat dynamism in China.

  Their words now

  What I did not sufficiently appreciate is that a state that would so casually decapitate a sector like online tutoring would also have the will to visit catastrophe upon whole cities.

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

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  Cities are not alive: they cannot propagate themselves, and can only exist as the product of something that does.

  Their words

  And cities and all these other forms that look alive and could be described as alive, because they can’t propagate themselves can only exist as the product of something that did propagate itself.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rents adjust to match what a region earns, which is why cities with flat or falling populations still get more expensive.

  Their words

  There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that housing prices tend to adjust to match regional incomes.

  Is There a Housing Shortage or Not?construction-physics.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  America's pursuit of efficiency left it with neither the factories to make more goods nor the logistics to import them.

  America

  Their words

  The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports.

  2021 letterdanwang.co

Civil engineer and land use planner, founder and president of Strong Towns, author of Escaping the Housing Trap. Argues that the American pattern of development since the Second World War does not generate enough wealth to maintain the infrastructure it obliges cities to keep.

From one piece The Power of Growing Incrementally 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Cities have only ever built wealth incrementally, by many small improvements over a long time, not by big projects.

  Their words

  Yet, incremental investment is how cities have always built wealth.

  The Power of Growing Incrementallystrongtowns.org

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  The break in how cities are built is that places used to be improved continuously and are now built once, at scale, to a finished state.

  Their words

  Pre-Depression development was incremental on a continuum of improvement while post-War development is built at a large scale to a finished state.

  The Power of Growing Incrementallystrongtowns.org

Civil engineer and land use planner, founder and president of Strong Towns, author of Escaping the Housing Trap. Argues that the American pattern of development since the Second World War does not generate enough wealth to maintain the infrastructure it obliges cities to keep.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  American cities built roughly two dollars of public infrastructure for every dollar of private investment, and that ratio is what bankrupts them.

  America

  Their words

  This thinking is how you end up with two dollars of public infrastructure for every one dollar of private investment.

  The Real Reason Your City Has No Moneystrongtowns.org