New Year's Eve Links

• Another thing, in which Mr. Malthus attempted to clench Wallace's argument, was in giving to the disproportionate power of increase in the principle of population and the supply of food a mathematical form, or reducing it to the arithmetical and geometrical ratios, in which we believe Mr. Malthus is now generally admitted, even by his friends and admirers, to have been wrong. There is evidently no inherent difference in the principle of increase in food or population; since a grain of corn, for example, will propagate and multiply itself much faster even than the human species. A bushel of wheat will sow a field; that field will furnish seed for twenty others. So that the limit to the means of subsistence is only the want of room to raise it in, or, as Wallace expresses it, 'a limited fertility and a limited earth.' Up to the point where the earth or any given country is fully occupied or cultivated, the means of subsistence naturally increase in a geometrical ratio, and will more than keep pace with the natural and unrestrained progress of population; and beyond that point they do not go on increasing even in Mr. Malthus's arithmetical ratio, but are stationary or nearly so. [William Hazlitt]
• Which brings me back to the Haywood Algorithm for Business Success: make a list of everything you need to do, and then do all of it. It sounds like that could maybe, barely, work when you’re running yet another B2B SaaS company, or when you’re in charge of “Uber, but for fish antibiotics.” But it sounds like complete insanity, the height of hubris, perhaps even a category error to apply that advice to a rocket company. It’s all well and good to say, “We’re just going to do what we need to do and will not let anything get in our way,” but when the things that get in your way are national governments? The laws of physics? Really? What does that even look like? It looks like SpaceX. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• Delos David "D. D." Harriman, "the last of the Robber Barons", is obsessed with being the first to travel to—and possess—the Moon. He asks his business partner, George Strong, and other tycoons to invest in the venture. Most dismiss Harriman's plans as foolhardy: Nuclear rocket fuel is scarce as the space station that produces it blew up, also destroying the only existing spaceship. The necessary technology for a chemical-fueled rocket stretches the boundaries of current engineering. The endeavor is both incredibly costly and of uncertain profitability. One skeptic offers to sell "all of my interest in the Moon...for fifty cents"; Harriman accepts and tries to buy the other associates' interests as well. [The Man Who Sold the Moon]
• Mine is a mixed marriage: I love C. S. Lewis and my husband much prefers G. K. Chesterton. This probably won’t surprise anyone who reads our Substack, because it’s very clear where the two of us fall on the autistic-to-schizotypal spectrum,1 and if you’re familiar with those great twentieth century Christian apologists you’ll know that Chesterton is the one way down at the “painting with a broad brush of metaphor and joie de vivre and enthusiastic, impressionistic riffs” end of things.2 I am at the other end. I do like Chesterton — I wrote about him a bit here, and I’m very fond of his poetry — but he’s not the one who (as the Quakers say) speaks to my condition. I like my nice neat arguments. I do not have the soul of a poet or a Gothic cathedral. Lewis is also a wonderful stylist, but his writing is clearer, more pointed — something neoclassical, perhaps, if we’re to continue this architectural metaphor. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf] 
• The most important manufactured goods in the world today are microchips, and the specialized tooling that make them (lithographic, ion implantation, CVD, and other tools). One Dutch company, ASML, uses American research to make $200mm EUV lithography tools with 400K+ moving parts; this in turn is used to make high-end chips which one Taiwanese company, TSMC, dominates the manufacturing. This history goes into why Americans lost the manufacturing of their semiconductor and EUV research to these 2 countries and the geopolitical importance of the chips and supply chains, as these are the most important inputs for AI systems. [arun rao]
• To be a winner, you must do two things, which, as of five seconds ago, I call the Golden Dyad. You have to work hard, and you have to get done everything that has to be done. I can hear you choke with rage, and say that is obvious, and I am wasting your time. Ah, but I will tell you why you are wrong. The empirical reality is that at least ninety-five percent of people can’t do both of those things, and usually can’t even do one. This is partially because many people are lazy, but much more so because working hard is not just doing hard work. [Charles Haywood]
• Uber is able to detect vertical acceleration — what we might call a bump. The more it bumps, after adjusting for speed, the rougher the road. They can take this, and the fact that Uber drivers are on the clock, and estimate a dollar value for road roughness from how much drivers slow down when faced with a rougher road. They find that a road with the median level of roughness costs a driver $1.05 per mile, with a totally smooth road costing $0.74 per mile, and a one standard deviation increase costs a driver an additional $0.23. We now have some idea of when it is optimal to repave roads! Simply multiply the number of drivers by the expected change in quality, and pave whenever the benefits exceed the cost. Tullock’s farmers, eat your heart out. This is especially relevant because, as they decisively show, road repaving is scarcely related to road roughness, or any other economic objectives, at all. To even approximate what Uber has, the NTSB has to send out cars to measure road roughness, and this lacks any estimate of the value which people assign to roads. [Nicholas Decker] 
• Whenever we build a new, more powerful telescope, we discover new and strange and wonderful things. Things that have been there all along, but invisible to us with our puny eyes and primitive technology. There’s an old joke that the quality of the astronomer is proportional to the size of the telescope. Instead of wasting the careers of scientists, engineers, and technologists on three decades of dead-end paper studies that teach us nothing about our universe and dissipate what little practical space telescope knowledge we already have, we can raise the scope of our ambition and build an exquisite instrument at the limit of physics, capable of imaging alien planets as though they were as close as our Moon. [Casey Handmer]
• Our techno-capital machine is a thermodynamic mechanism that systematically hunts for and then maximally exploits the cheapest energy it can find. When it unlocks cheaper energy, first coal, then oil, then gas, and now solar, it drives up the rate of economic growth, due to an expanded spread between energy cost and application value. [Casey Handmer]