Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Somehow, I’d turned the thrilling prospect of a better life into a sequence of lifeless tasks I had to execute – and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Of course, I realise that any meaningful goal entails *some* less-than-thrilling tasks. But these top-down, willpower-heavy systems sucked the joy from *everything*, even the theoretically thrilling bits, leaving no room for spontaneity, or the rhythms of inspiration, or my shifting moods.
No moment could better capture the fundamental irony of Trump's second term: a populist revolution that begins with the people outside pressing their faces against the glass.
The Power of the Perfect Pause
A more interesting question—a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before—is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
This new infrastructure will additionally require regular inspections and maintenance by trained staff to ensure integrity. But, these protocols would not be widely dissimilar to current kerosene handling processes – and with time would become the norm.
The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.
Let’s start with what Altman is doing right: physically writing stuff down. I love my colleague David Pierce, but he is hideously wrong about basically every productivity tool because he insists on using a computer. At this point, we have multiple studies showing that writing by hand is better for learning and memory. You want to remember something? Write, don’t type.
I’m not quite as bullish as some of the public statements around how quickly we can ramp up the system, but in the medium to long term—ten years out—I’m actually quite bullish. I think this is a mode of transportation that will eventually become quite frequently used. It will be safe, it will save many of us time, it will be sustainable—so there’s a bright future to look forward to.
Advances in low-carbon and renewable hydrogen production also will be crucial to the maturity of the PtL value chain. Lowering the levelized cost of hydrogen (which includes renewable-electricity input but excludes transport and distribution) to less than $1 per kilogram would reduce the cost of PtL to $1,200 to $1,800 per ton, depending on the carbon source, amounting to a 40 percent reduction in average cost by 2030. While this cost is still higher than that of fossil jet fuel, it is within range of alternative SAFs. Low-carbon hydrogen, sometimes referred to as “blue,” is derived primarily from natural gas using carbon capture and storage, while renewable or “green” hydrogen is made with renewable electricity. Low-carbon hydrogen is more cost-competitive than renewable hydrogen today and can be used as a transition technology to scale PtL faster. Although low-carbon hydrogen has lower production costs, it requires capturing CO2 twice to produce PtL—once in the hydrogen production route and again in the fuel synthesis step. Since this is an inherently inefficient system, renewable hydrogen can be prioritized for PtL production over the long term.
Hydrogen aircraft could enter the market in the 2030s and scale up through 2050, when they could account for roughly a third of aviation’s energy demand. With current aircraft designs, hydrogen aircraft could be range limited to up to 2,500 kilometers. Redesigning airframes and storage technology might unlock longer ranges without reducing the number of available seats. If hydrogen aircraft enter the market around 2035 and achieve longer ranges, they could gain a market share of up to one third by 2050. The estimated market share drops to 13 percent by 2050 if they enter the market by 2040 and only achieve shorter ranges. Assuming breakthroughs in battery chemistries, battery-electric aircraft could potentially power regional aircraft on flights up to about 1,000 km by mid-century.
Beyond these major hubs, about 36,000 regional airports, suitable for smaller aircraft, provide coverage for less traveled routes. Lacking the facilities and landing strips required for large aircraft, regional airports are typically underused, even during busy travel times. They nevertheless serve as essential links in the transportation chain and often provide other services—from flight training to recreational flying and aerial firefighting to skydiving.
More than 50 companies are developing battery-electric, hybrid, and hydrogen powertrains; new and retrofitted aircraft designs; advanced avionics; operations and booking platforms; and other important enablers of the RAM ecosystem. More than $1 billion has been invested in these RAM start-ups to date and the first retrofitted aircraft are slated to enter service in the mid-2020s. Simultaneously, an ecosystem of operators, consisting mainly of established airlines and regionally focused start-ups, is coming together to drive the industry forward.
Battery-electric- and hydrogen-powered aircraft could make up between 21 and 38 percent of all aircraft by 2050, representing 15 to 34 percent of the sector’s overall energy needs.
65% of U.S. airports will have less air service in October 2024 than they had in 2019, with 30% of U.S. airports losing more than one in four of their commercial flights and 12% losing more than half of their flights. With
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own big ideas.
Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.
Mesa’s struggles have come amid rising doubts over the future of regional airlines, which account for roughly 40% of scheduled departures in the U.S.
They are, however, united by their self-mythologizing as “free thinkers” and a sense of alienation from mainstream liberal discourse. This brand of tech bro is proud of his heterodoxy, despite the fact that the worldview he articulates seems to have been passed top-down from a cadre of influential Silicon Valley executives.
Great founders are ferociously productive. It does not feel strange or silly to refer to them as an “animal.” Look for people you could describe with a straight face in this way.
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
Four of the five delays were caused, at least partly, by failures to document work for certification or similar failures. As a result, development cost ballooned to 350 billion yen (US$3.17 billion) implying that the project might never be able to fully recover its costs.
The scope clause's goal is to protect the union pilots' jobs at the major airline from being outsourced by limiting the regional airlines' passenger capacity.1(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause#cite_note-1) These clauses exist primarily in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Here is where I should confess that I secretly want Marszalek to succeed. I like technology. Especially technology that comes
You will be amazed howmany windowshoppers you’ll deal with.
Big companies are rarely well-oiled innovation machines, and it certainly doesn’t feel like you’re constantly outpacing the competition.
Productivity—always an issue—has also become a greater pain point. With most aerospace companies focusing on immediate supply chain and labor issues, few have explored long-term strategies for increasing efficiency. They now significantly lag behind other sectors in digitizing manual processes, and the gap widens each year. Operational excellence remains elusive, with many airframers and suppliers struggling to meet their commitments.
The awareness of a sustainable/green economy and long-term energy security has given rise to substantial global momentum in the search for alternative energy sources. The carbon-free nature of green hydrogen production and use, and the versatility of both hydrogen production sources, as well as its end-use applications, have resulted in an unprecedented focus on hydrogen. In 2022, 26 countries have set national hydrogen strategies which forecast 145–190 GW total green hydrogen production capacity by 2030
Hydrogen fuel cells offer a zero-emission power source solution for future sustainable aircraft and are a competitive technology for eVTOL, CS-23 and CS-25 class aircraft, (potentially up to 100 seats), as well as for APUs within future wide body aircraft. Aircraft manufacturing primes Airbus and Embraer have launched their own hydrogen fuel cell aircraft development programmes, ZEROe and Energia respectively, in order to leverage the benefits of hydrogen.
An additional headwind was the nearing U.S. election. “If [Donald] Trump were to win, investors saw a significant risk that the massive green hydrogen subsidy enacted as part of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act would disappear,” Eremenko wrote.
For commercial long-rage airplanes, however, employing fuel cells will be limited due to the replacement of the axillary power unit (APU) in the foreseeable future. Using fuel cells to propel such large airplanes would necessitate redesigning the airplane structure to accommodate the required hydrogen tanks, which could take a bit more time.
When I asked, “What are you working on?” the first words out of his mouth was his fund raising progress. Sigh… What I should have been hearing is the search for the business model, specifically the progress on product/market fit, but I hear the fund raising story first at least 90% of the time. It never makes me happy.
When no is not an option, you gaslight yourself into saying yes and convincing yourself that this yes is authentic.
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!).
According to the report, the hydrogen aircraft market was valued at $27.7 billion in 2030, and is estimated to reach $489 billion by 2050, growing at a CAGR of 15.4% from 2030 to 2050.
We are not taught as kids to feel okay in the wide expanse between what we want to happen and what happens because the bigger that gap, the bigger the failure.
Yet the truth is that, while it’s important to stay on schedule if you want to get to kickboxing on time, what’s *not* remotely important is getting to kickboxing on time. It just doesn’t really matter.
There is a gap, too, between the tools that exist and the future we’re being sold. The innovation curve, we’re told, will be exponential. The paradigm, we’re cautioned, is about to shift. Regular people, we’re to believe, have little choice in the matter, especially as the computers scale up and become more powerful: We can only experience a low-grade disorientation as we shadowbox with the notion of this promised future. Meanwhile, the ChatGPTs of the world are here, foisted upon us by tech companies who insist that these tools should be useful in some way.
The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in an version of *Freejack* in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.
And if you keep looking further and further, it turns out, the sparkles emoji goes *all* the way back to Emoji 1.0 in 2015
There are many of you with kids younger than mine—dads who find themselves deep in what a close friend recently called The Tunnel: the place every parent remains whilst their kids are four and under; when keeping a small child alive and under control takes all that you have. Parents in The Tunnel can cycle through bliss and despair on a turnaround that would give non-parents whiplash.
now I’m paying for duplicate services, terrified that I might wipe out precious memories if I cancel one.
• It’s not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity.
The “size” of a leadership episode could be measured as a product of *stakes* and *energy.* Ie, the value of what’s at stake times the energy output rate (in the sense of Andy Grove’s idea of “high-output management”) that needs to be put in for the duration, to make something happen. Here’s the 2×2 with the resulting for BDFxing archetypes (which are transient *roles,* not personalities).
Some people tend to be more systematically curious than others. Those curious minds are generally adventurous, creative, less risk-averse, and seem to seek and enjoy exploration more than others.
In the presentation, when Jobs did the world’s first “swipe to unlock,” the audience made an audible gasp. A minute later, he brought up a list of artists in the phone’s “iPod” app and asked, “Well, how do I scroll through my list of artists? I just take my finger and scroll.” Another audible gasp. It’s weird that something so normal today was jaw-dropping 17 years ago.
On how important physical space is to my happiness, productivity, and sanity—and preparing for baby #2.
With nesting on the brain, today I'm curating some of my favorite home items and hacks from this last month. Please enjoy!
This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet.
I began writing this essay instinctively thinking I failed all of my 2023 goals. Turns out I should give myself a little grace.