Most of Europe has not yet absorbed what AI is about to do to us. The few who have are not saying it loudly enough. We wrote Europe 2031: a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance, how AI is driving it, and what can still be done to change course.

Frog put the shares in an SPV. “There,” he said. “Now we can transfer these shares freely” “But Anthropic can still exercise its transfer restrictions” said Toad. “That is true,” said Frog.

Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? worksinprogress.co/issue/why… Part of the answer is that Japanese railway companies don't just operate trains. They run hospitals, supermarkets, department stores, amusement parks, office complexes, and retirement homes around their railway stations. One of them co-built Tokyo Disneyland. Another owns a baseball team. A third created its own all-women musical theater in 1914, which is still running today. The logic is elegant: a railway increases the developable value of land around its stations, but normally that value accrues to landowners, not the railway operator. Japanese railway companies captured this value by owning and developing the land themselves. About half of the revenue of Japanese railway companies comes from ‘side businesses’ like these. Allowing railway operators to capture more of the value they created meant that more lines were profitable, making a far larger system financially viable. This may sound like a radically novel approach. But in fact, an exactly similar system existed in nineteenth-century America. The success of Japanese railways does not lie in some unreplicable feature of Japanese culture: it lies in good policy. If they learnt the right lessons from it, many countries could replicate Japan’s success. Read more (much more) in @Borners1's & @carto_graph's new piece for @WorksInProgMag Issue 23.

you can finally have both

Who called it "Effective Altruism" and not "Crazy Rich Bayesians"?

One of the often slept-upon benefits of attending the University of Chicago is that they make you read Marx as part of the core curriculum, which is why this article gave me flashbacks of taking SOSC 114 as a freshman. Marx, writing during the Industrial Revolution, predicted capitalism would periodically devour itself: firms replace labor with machinery to boost profits, but competition diffuses the technology, drives prices to marginal cost, and the gains get competed away. Meanwhile, displaced workers lose purchasing power, hollowing out the demand the whole system depends on. Production rises but no one can afford to buy what's produced - the contradiction between production and realization. Citrini's piece describes this exact dynamic, then declares there's "no natural brake." It's the most Marxist piece of financial analysis written in years, and makes the same errors Marx did. Schumpeter offered the obvious rebuttal 80 years ago: creative destruction doesn't just destroy, it creates industries we can't yet conceive of. Everyone in the replies is already making this point, and I think they're right. But the sharper rebuttal is Hayek's: prices are the brake Citrini says doesn't exist. Who funds $200bn / qtr in AI capex when equities are down 38%, private credit marks are in the 50s, and consumer demand has collapsed? Cost of capital rises. Incremental build-out becomes uneconomical. Capital gets destroyed and reallocated. Citrini also unknowingly describes Marx's proletarianization of the petite bourgeoisie: the $180k PM driving Uber is textbook. But the article claims this collapses consumer demand, and that's where it breaks. The top decile drives 50% of spending and their wealth is in equities, not W-2 income; they're long the hyperscalers posting records in Citrini's own model. Blue collar is insulated because AI replaces cognitive labor, not physical. The professional middle class gets crushed, but aggregate demand doesn't. The spending class IS the capital-owning class. The K-shaped recovery they fear actually stabilizes the demand base they say is collapsing. In the stable aggregate demand, the petit bourgeoisie finds ways to reinvent itself. I think the Citrini piece is excellent and worth reading. But history has repeatedly shown that periods of transformative productivity gains ultimately accrue to the consumer through lower prices, more leisure, and higher quality of life. Marx's error wasn't diagnosing the disruption, it was underestimating the system's ability to adapt.

Lets just take a minute

wait this graph is crazy BART installed anti-fare-hopping gates and the amount of station maintenance and cleanup they had to do went to basically zero strong evidence that the poor condition of public transit is fairly easy to fix caused by a very small group of people

I will never get over how the banking lobby looked at GENIUS' yield prohibition and said "Looks good. You kids have fun with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you're playing with" and now Jamie Dimon is losing it on Brian Armstrong now realizing the implications.

Huge from the PM. Starmer accepts the Fingleton Review *and* pledges to extend it to other infrastructure: data centres, railways, tramways, towns, labs, and more. Massive, and a big shift from the Treasury's equivocation. Implementation will be a big battle, but we can win.

Britain needs nuclear power. Our nuclear projects are the most expensive in the world and among the slowest. Regulators and industry are paralysed by risk aversion. This can change. For Britain to prosper, it must. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister appointed me to lead a Taskforce to set out a path to getting affordable, fast nuclear power Britain. Our final report today sets out 47 recommendations, among them: - Creating a one-stop shop for nuclear approvals, to end the regulatory merry-go-round that delays projects at the moment. - Simplifying environmental rules to avoid extreme outcomes like Hinkley Point C spending £700m on systems to protect one salmon every ten years, while enhancing nuclear's impact on nature. - Limiting the ability of spurious legal challenges to delay nuclear projects, which adds huge cost and delay throughout the supply chain. - Approving fleets of reactors, so that Britain’s nuclear industry can benefit from certainty and economies of scale. - Directing regulators to factor in cost to their behaviour, and changing their culture to allow building cheaply, quickly and safely. - Changing the culture of the nuclear industry to end gold-plating and focus on efficient, safe delivery. If the government adopts our report in full, it will send a signal to investors that it is serious about pro-growth reform and taking on vested interests for the public good. A thriving British nuclear industry producing abundant, affordable energy would be good for jobs, good for manufacturing, good for the climate, and good for the cost of living. And it could enable Britain to become an AI and technology superpower. Britain can be a world leader in this new Industrial Revolution, but only if it has the energy to power it. Our report is bold, but balanced. Our recommendations, taken together and properly implemented, will forge a clear path for stronger economic growth through improved productivity and innovation. This is a prize worth fighting for. gov.uk/government/publicatio…

☢️ NEW: The Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce has submitted a radical plan to fix nuclear policy in Britain. It could save taxpayers billions and cut UK build costs from the world’s highest to cheaper than France and Finland.  It contains example after example of how disproportionate regulation has made it more expensive to build new nuclear plants.  - £700m was spent on fish protection at Hinkley Point C to save a tiny number of fish at a cost of £280,000 per fish - £60m was spent building a pipe to pump groundwater 500m offshore because naturally-occuring metals in the water breached Environment Agency rules.  - GE-Hitachi had to fight the Office for Nuclear Regulation to avoid being forced to radically change the design of their reactor (despite it operating safely abroad) because it wasn’t like the last plant built in the UK. - One British vendor waited 241 days to get a license to export something to Norway. - Sizewell C’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was 44,000 pages long. In the 1980s, four-fifths of EIAs were less than 100 pages long. It recommends big changes: - Nuclear plant builders could pay £1m per acre to fund nature recovery and avoid the requirement to build expensive nature mitigations like ‘fish discos’ - Major reform of As Low as Reasonably Practicable (ALARP), the key Health and Safety principle that has led to over-regulation of nuclear, including abolition of the concept of ‘gross disproportion’. - Re-assessing the levels of radiation exposure regulators target to bring them in line with other risks. - Raising the Aarhus Cost Caps, which allow NIMBYs to delay nuclear projects with JR and special measures to tackle the rise of ‘crowdfunded lawsuits’. - Fixing planning so fleets of SMRs do not have to constantly re-assess settled matters. - Changing outdated siting rules so nuclear plants can be built in more places like ex-coal plants. - Reverse legal judgements like the Finch ruling for low-carbon tech to avoid pointless bureaucracy and legal risk. - A new nuclear commission that sets above regulators and resolves disputes so disagreements can’t delay projects. This is the best Government-commissioned report I’ve ever read. The Chancellor will respond to it on Wednesday. She should implement it in full. And she should keep the team together and tell them to figure out what the hell went wrong with HS2 next.

I proudly present the internet's nerdiest and prettiest tax calculator. Other calculators just calculate your tax. This one calculates your tax now, and under various Budget proposals. And draws a pretty chart showing the marginal and effective rates for *everyone*.

Seeing is believing - we just published a new piece detailing the massive scale and investment implications of the Stargate project. This is just one, xAI’s and Hyperion are even bigger. If any of you had any doubts - a year ago, most of this was dirt:

To do list: ✅ Take over Twitter ✅ Take over Times Square

NEW POST. All my thoughts from the weird and wild world of toddler fatherhood. waitbutwhy.com/2025/10/toddl…

We started building Echo around 2 years ago in an attempt to try and change the market dynamics around crypto fundraising. Today, we're joining Coinbase, but the mission stays the same. We're gonna use the firepower of this behemoth to provide better opportunities to investors and better fundraising options to founders. Just getting started. Cheers. Cobie

Anyone that ever invested in a deal on Echo should be eligible for Monad airdrop. Sending instructions on how you can add your claim to their site shortly. Gmonad.

i am in europe, there is no such thing as tech, only cone full of ham