Sam Bowman
@s8mb
1.4K Following 72.2K Followers
#RIP# Patrick Stewart of Star Trek and X Men ...
On 12-4-1997, after getting a @PressClubDC coffee mug, he was asked, "Just from a purely logical point of view, why is it that a Captain whose name is Jean-Luc Picard have a perfect English accent?"
Patrick Stewart answer here:
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We’re delighted to announce that @danwwang is making his debut as a contributor, with a column for this issue of @WorksInProgress.
Few people understand the China–US contrast as well as Dan Wang, and fewer still write about it with so much talent. His book Breackneck has introduced the now famous meme of China as a “country of engineers” and United States as a “country of lawyers,” to explain the differences in building capacity and physical world stagnation we are seeing between the two polities.
In his new column for us, he takes up one specific thread in the long-running debate over how China and the US compare and argues that both owe part of their power to being polycentric.
One observation is that both the American and US capitals are not their biggest cities. Vienna, London, Seoul and Paris dwarf their countries’ second cities, by four to seven times. By contrast, Beijing isn’t China’s largest city, and DC isn’t even in the top five in the US. Does this make US and China lame, for having smol capitals? No! On the contrary, Dan thinks that this friction between political and economic centers is important and at least partially explains why both countries can combine dynamism with strong states.
But the two countries are polycentric in very different ways. China’s regions are culturally distinct and are shaped heavily by geography. While coastal provinces tend to look outward, mountain areas like Sichuan and Chongqing are characterized by evading the center’s edicts. Dan also points out some misconceptions: yes, China has central control, but it is weaker than it look. Local officials often ignore or quietly subvert senseless directives from Beijing, with enforcement thinning out quickly beyond the big cities.
The characteristic feature of American polycentrism is how well it sorts people into domains and “sends” them to specific cities: this is reminiscent of the point @patio11 has made around “The Sort.” In America, the smartest and most driven tend to cluster in a handful of cities, above all New York and San Francisco, with Washington and Boston are slightly behind them. More than this: each field has an obvious center: AI has its capital in SF, for policy and politics you have DC, for finance New York and for biotech Boston and more recently, SF.
Different cities in America also prize different things: Miami values looking good, Boston being intelligent and bookish, LA how famous you are and New York how rich you are. There is so much variety in terms of who you can choose to become in America. And the city you decide to live in might end up shaping who you are, moreso than in any other country!
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The UK has the deepest capital market in Europe and several of the world's top universities. Its governments make it ever more difficult to build anything. We at @LSEPublicPolicy and @LSELaw are co-organizing an event with Works in Progress on how to get Britain to grow again.
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This is good from the Chair of Shelter:
"Every tenant is now incentivised to challenge any rent increase because they could get a significant rent reduction and not just a rent freeze."
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It is a joy to see people making beautiful things.
We have the tools to end mosquito-borne illness. Why don't we use them?
My latest for @WSJFreeEx
This is good, factoring in system costs of new renewables before buying them. It should also mean using "firm power" costs, ie the cost of reliable electricity under any weather conditions – which, for wind and solar, has to include the cost of the backup fossil fuel generation.
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This Budget is the start of a new energy pathway that the 10 Year Plan will build on. The priority is to bring energy costs down to help British business to compete, and British households to cope. And cheaper electricity will boost electrification, increasing our energy security and helping to decarbonise the whole economy.
What does this mean? First, it means a focus on levies and policy costs on bills. The Conservatives added £100 to everyone's bill via levies in their last decade in power. Labour has cut £150 from bill costs already. But today, John Healey has drawn a line in the sand, with the announcement that we will add no new costs to energy bills, with a comprehensive cost control framework to follow at the spending review. The Chancellor is also junking plans, first set out by the Tories, to add on up to around £10 a year on bills to pay for hydrogen projects.
Second, it means taking account of the interaction between the pace of grid build-out and the pace at which renewables are added to the grid. The NAO have said that investment in expanding the transmission network declined in real terms between 2016 and 2020, just when it was clear that more intermittent power meant we would need more capacity. It is now forecast to rise to over £10bn a year. But with growing constraint and distribution costs, it's right that the system costs of all new power are considered. That is why we will only procure clean power through AR8 (the next auction round) if we are confident it will lower bills. And we will reform the contract for difference by AR9 to support building the lowest cost system, fixing market distortions and siting assets in the right place.
The evidence is clear, clean power is an essential part of the route to cheap power, and the overall approach of seeking to get ourselves off the gas-price rollercoaster to the right one. Gas is setting the electricity price less and less every year. If it wasn't for adding renewables to the grid in recent years then the current Iran price shock would have been worse for families and businesses. The Conservatives and Reform's ideological anti-renewables approach is the wrong one and fails in the face of evidence on how to protect bill payers from shocks and the need to make ourselves less reliant on foreign dictators. We'll take a pragmatic approach to get bills down.
Getting electricity prices down, ensuring new clean power does not run ahead of the grid, is also the credible route to reaching our net zero goals. The decarbonisation that we want to enable in our homes, on our roads and in our businesses, is six times larger than that still to be achieved from getting to a clean grid. Unless we make electricity cheaper relative to other energy sources, we will struggle to increase adoption of EV and heat pumps.
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We’re also hiring a Head of Events for @WorksInProgMag — based in either NYC or SF:
Please apply if it seems like a fit!
British AI application companies are only lagging behind American ones by revenues by about 50%, adjusted for nominal GDP. European ones are at 20%.
We at Stripe Press are looking for a new Managing Editor, based in New York City. Come and join the most exciting publisher in business.
I’m hiring an NYC-based Managing Editor for @stripepress. The ideal person for this role has substantial editorial experience at a publishing imprint or another publication and is fluent in our universe of ideas, but ideally isn’t my (or our) ideological twin.
Stripe Press is a small team with an unusual amount of autonomy. Right now we’re obsessively focused on the future: expanding our catalogue, rethinking our assumptions about the kinds of books we publish (fiction!?), and thinking about how to connect our readers w/ one another beyond the pop-ups we’ve been hosting since 2022.
Hoping to meet a lot of brilliant people who love books and are excited about building a world-class publishing institution:
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We should make cars free and roll the costs into petrol prices so we encourage people to drive less.
CONFIRMED. Gas Standing Charges to be scrapped. I've just come out of a meeting with the Chancellor. The gas standing charge will be scrapped in 2027 (my guess, either for 1 Oct price cap or the 1 Jan 28 price cap). Having campaigned against the moral hazard of standing charges for years, I'm pleased.
It's currently £108 a year. That cost will be shifted onto unit rates. We don't know how much yet, but I suspect just under 1p per kwH.
The Chancellor also said he will be talking to Ofgem about how they get rid of the charge on electricity as well, but that is 'trickier' apparently and will take longer.
This is primarily about the price cap standing charges. There will still be an open market, so other firms can offer other forms of prices with or without the standing charge. My suspicion is that once it goes on the price cap, it will tend to be reduced on other tariffs as well.
As for those on fixes: if you get a fix now, the rate of your fix is fixed, so this should not affect it. You will pay what you pay and if it has standing charges they will continue (some asking if they should delay fixing because of this, no if a fix is right for you and will save you money, don't let this change that - this is about the structure of bills, as opposed to the actual costs on bills).
About 60% of people will pay less due to this, 40% more. My guesstimate is the dividing line will be somewhere around 12,500 kilowatt hours of gas (can't know until there is actual pricing). According to a study by Nesta, this switch would leave the majority of people in all income groups under £100,000 better off.
Of course, when this does come in, if we're still in the nightmare that we are right now, there will need to be support put in for vulnerable higher users, who will have to pay more. Though hopefully by then the mid-east will have calmed and energy prices lower.
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That's all long term. The biggest issue in energy right now is that we're expecting a 27% rise in the price cap in January. I asked the Chancellor whether he will be intervening on that. He told me I'd have to wait for the budget, but reading between the lines, yes, there will be an announcement today.
Whether it's an increase in the Warm Home Discount, or whether it's council tax banned, or whether it's done via a payout for people in say council tax bands A-D as a proxy for household income as Rishi Sunak did who knows.
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Bad idea. The problem is that energy infrastructure will always have fixed costs (wires and pipes don't vanish when energy isn't flowing through them).
if fixed costs are recovered with usage-based charges, you create a lottery.
If usage is higher, profits are higher than they would've been if the charges were fixed.
if usage is lower, there's a risk variable payments don't cover fixed costs.
Energy companies will price this risk in as a premium... and bills will go up 😐
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Good job here.
I’m hiring a Chief of Staff to be my right hand across everything I do at Cosmos.
That starts with Cosmos Institute (@cosmos_inst), the nonprofit I founded after selling two AI companies, having two kids, and thinking hard about the good life and the good society. Through the Institute, we do research internally and with fellows from @GoogleDeepMind, @AnthropicAI, @OpenAI, @Microsoft, and academia, have given out 200+ grants to build fast prototypes, and we’re launching a big new in-person bet for higher education in 2027. This side of my work also includes @UniofOxford, where I co-teach a graduate seminar on philosophy and AI and support the Human-Centered AI Lab (HAI Lab), as well as a book I’m writing on human autonomy in the age of AI.
On the venture side, you’ll work with me across Cosmos Ventures (@cosmos_vc), our new $77.6M fund backing founders building new institutions for the AI age. Our early portfolio includes companies like AIUC (@aiunderwriting), @PrimeIntellect, and Workshop Labs (acq. by @thinkymachines), with several more to be announced soon. We’re also going to be incubating new companies in 2027.
You’ll come in, do this well for two years, and if you want to build a thesis-aligned company or a nonprofit next, we will back you, or place you at a top company in our community. The role is based in Austin, with relocation provided.
To apply, read our essays and tell us where we’re wrong:
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Price discrimination is good and output-increasing.
Dario Amodei: some tokens Claude produces are worth a few cents, others could be worth tens of millions of dollars.
His examples:
1. Telling someone to restart their Mac: the model has said it 10 million times, worth a dollar or less
2. Telling a pharma company to move an aromatic ring to the other end of a molecule: potentially tens of millions
3. Expect pay-for-results pricing, or labor-like pricing by the hour
4. It's a new industry, so many models will be tried
Today pricing is simpler: per the S-1, usage-based pricing was 80% of H1 2026 revenue and subscriptions 20%.
Full breakdown here:
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I read God of the Gaps from @WorksInProgMag just before visiting Rome and Venice. The entire trip I was spotting turbine squares and thinking: "Sitte would've *loved* this" or "tsk tsk tsk Sitte would've hated this"
We stayed at an apartment that bordered a turbine square in Rome. Every morning locals would fill the square with farmers market booths, then tear it all down. From evening to past 2am the square would transform into a hangout spot for teenagers (there was even a fight one night!). Both locals and tourists seemed to eat dinner there. The square went through a full metamorphosis everyday, the most alive little city nook I've ever experienced.
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Against a target of 1.5 million homes built in five years, we are on track for 856,000 (57%). Such an abject failure would in any other venture require an urgent change of strategy. Here, they just quietly abandon the target.
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I’ve been left a little cold by personal agents so far but Grok Bot is really good. Don’t be put off by the name (“Grok” still seems like the worst branding possible to me) - the Twitter access makes it a really useful tool.
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Last week, we removed the need for a developer account and X API credits to use the X connector in Grok Bot
Ask @bot to manage your bookmarks, go over your DMs, or draft an article for you free of additional charge
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One of the many potential biases in Song dynastic history: the court diarists were stationed too far away and, during audiences, often couldn’t actually hear the emperor, so would just report that he said nothing.
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People noticed this change in mores during WWII and coined new terms to describe sexually active young women: khaki-wackies, victory girls, and good-time Charlottes.
I don't see how we can infer much from them quarantining hospitals and using hazmats. If there is a deadly lab leak, these sound like precautions you should take initially whether the outbreak is treatable and controlled or not.
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Russia's five-hospital quarantine, FSB involvement, and reported hazmat use in response to the death of a single researcher at a weapons-lineage Irkutsk lab are inconsistent with a lab-acquired plague infection, which would have been treated with prophylactic antibiotics.
1/4
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