Zoning adds $300 - 500k to the price of a home in cities with good jobs. High-speed rail takes 30 years to build. New drugs cost $2B. We pay 5-10x what peer countries do for the same infrastructure.

People call this "regulation." It isn't, exactly. It's stranger and worse. 🧵 Concrete example: NYC's Second Avenue Subway Phase 1 cost $2.5 billion per mile. That's 8-12x more than comparable subway projects in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Korea, or Turkey

Asked Claude:

'There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the US? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented.' 1. Legalize housing (zoning reform / kill single-family-only zoning, parking minimums, FAR limits) Confidence: very high. Housing costs are the single biggest driver of US inequality, immobility, homelessness, declining fertility, and even a chunk of carbon emissions (sprawl). Make it legal to build apartments near jobs and rents fall. Why not done: localism. Homeowners are the median voter, vote in off-cycle elections, and treat their house as a leveraged retirement account. Federalism means DC can nudge but not mandate.

I’ve had several predictions like this come true - sadly I don’t call most shots publicly.

Sometimes I just know a company will be huge. My startup investments are up well over 10x.

People keep rediscovering my 2011 tweet about Bitcoin changing the world. It was at $0.92.
🧵1/n

https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/2046262213036671457

It took a long time to trust my own predictions. I didn’t invest in BTC until years later.

My first investment was Airtable. I literally couldn’t sleep the night I was pitched because of manic racing thoughts about the product. I only put in $5k. Last valued at $11.7B.

Claude Code made me the CRM I've wanted for ten years. Automatically updates from text messages, email, iPhoto, calendar, etc. Shows all interactions in one place.

Most of us have decades of data on interactions with thousands of people that just sits there unused.

I call it Palantini - as in a tiny Palantir.

🧵1/7 I can do arbitrary analytics, like these graphs of all my relationships as they rise and fall over time:

I’m scared of AGI. It's confusing how people can be so dismissive of the risks.

I’m an investor in two AGI companies and friends with dozens of researchers working at DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Brain. Almost all of them are worried.

🧵 Imagine building a new type of nuclear reactor that will make free power.

People are excited, but half of nuclear engineers think there’s at least a 10% chance of an ‘extremely bad’ catastrophe, with safety engineers putting it over 30%.

Reading a great summary of survey on economic literacy.

"If you compare otherwise identical individuals with very different income levels, their average degree of economic literacy is about the same."

1/n highlights from a great essay by @bryan_caplan

mercatus.org/uploadedFiles/… "The survey also shows that on balance conservative Republicans are no more economically literate than liberal Democrats. [...] The typical economist is a moderate Democrat, not a staunchly conservative Republican."

1/ Sorry New York Times, I decline to be interviewed.

The harassment of @bariweiss and Scott Alexander are only two of the more recent reasons I no longer trust your paper. Helping elect Donald Trump is another. I encourage others in tech to #BoycottTheNYT 2/ The data makes it plain that the NYT has abandoned its commitment to nonpartisan reporting. When the internet threatened their business they made a devil’s bargain to amplify outrage and us-vs-them psychology. Racism wasn't a new problem in 2014 but their stock being down was.

Here's the script for an episode of Spongebob Squarepants written by William Shakespeare. It's similar in style to MacBeth.

Page 1.
Enter Spongebob.

[AI from here:]
Spongebob: To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; no more. And by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.