* “Construction is life.” Sentiments too infrequently heard in this age of stasis and complacency.

* Legalize housing, not tent encampments: consistent with many pieces you’ve read around here, and I have a review of Homelessness is a Housing Problem coming up too.

* “Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History.” An amazing, and depressing, story. It’s also consistent with me writing about institutions in 2020.

* What kind of people want to become censors? It seems that the urge to censor will never go away.

* What happens to landfills over time.

* “Sooner or Later, Ability Rules:” a rant about efforts to remove standardized testing and other forms of rigor from the education system, and the peculiar stated reasons for those attempts.

* “The complexity of knowledge and skill transfer.”

* On fusion energy.

* Vitalik’s guide to living out of a 40L backpack.

* Why America Will Lose Semiconductors. Notice:

The US national, state, and local governments have created tax and regulatory policy that makes investing in new manufacturing capacity for semiconductors incredibly difficult. It takes mountains of money and many years to even get through the process of permitting and approval to being a project in the US. Furthermore, while these policies intend to protect the environment, they actually don’t. They simply slow down the process and increase costs.

The regulatory environment, which makes building anything hard, including housing, is important. Eric Schmidt sounds similar notes in another venue.

* “Affordable housing in California now routinely tops $1 million per apartment to build.” That may have something to with its deficit, and with California’s high homelessness rate.

* “The most pressing diversity issue in publishing? Groupthink. The industry has a responsibility to platform all kinds of views—not just politically fashionable ones.” Many forms of art go through strong periods and weak periods, and, in publishing, we seem to be going through a weaker period, apart from Substack.