David Kinney

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Can we please reform emergency powers now?

[David Kinney @DavidNAKinney]

@MC_of_A It got better.

[Hemant Mehta @hemantmehta]

The word religion appears in the Constitution twice.

Both times, it’s preceded by the word “No.”

[M. Nolan Gray 🥑 @mnolangray]

I think it'll be a lot harder to ask people to take a principled stand against media piracy in a world where big companies can arbitrarily strip you of legitimately purchased media.

[David Kinney @DavidNAKinney]

@MC_of_A See you there!

[Jessica Riedl 🧀 🇺🇦 @JessicaBRiedl]

Absolutely terrible. The biggest tax hike in decades, and 100% of the revenue would go to (often wealthy) retirees so that they can keep collecting more than they paid in.

Oh, and it keeps Social Security out of deficit for just 4 years. What happened to the Republican party?

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of NYC, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970.

Since then, land values have grown by 30x but land reclamation has ground to a halt.

This failure follows the spread environmental law around the world rather than any geographic, technological, or economic constraint.

Thus, our lack of land reclamation and the severe land constraints in our most important cities are self-imposed and avoidable. We should make more land!
https://t.co/J9zghvLkz2

Land reclamation was common practice in American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Charleston, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, DC, Oakland, and LA all had major land reclamation projects that extended residential living space or infrastructure or both.

The Bay Area alone reclaimed an area of land equivalent to ten Manhattans between 1850 and 1957, at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330,000 per acre. Today, an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million. Even if the cost of land reclamation grew faster than inflation, despite technological leaps in dredging and construction technology, there should be plenty of room for profitable arbitrage.

And yet, land reclamation is extinct in the Bay Area as well as in every other American city. This isn’t because we ran out of good spots to reclaim: Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than Boston’s Back Bay was when it was reclaimed in the 1860s. Nor is it because of better transportation: We’ve used up all of the easy suburban expansions enabled by the train and the automobile so prices are rising even in outlying suburbs.

Instead, land reclamation’s death is due to environmental law. Evidence for this claim shows up in the coincident timing of land reclamation’s demise across dozens of cities in the US and in the environmental compliance process of the few reclamation projects still inching along today, but the best evidence is found internationally.

No country has more experience or more reason to reclaim land than the Netherlands. The Dutch built 5% of their country out of the sea over the first half of the 20th century and by 1975 they had another artificial lake in the Zuiderzee ready to drain at the flip of a switch, which would have made tens of thousands of acres of land just east of Amsterdam. But a 1969 environmental review law, similar to NEPA in the US, stopped the project before it was finished and the site is now a protected bird sanctuary. Their one major reclamation since, the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the port of Rotterdam, took 11 years and 6,000 pages of environmental review before construction began.

Inversely, countries without these laws, like China, Singapore, and Japan have continued major land reclamation projects into the 21st century. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers since 2000, including a city of half a million outside Shanghai and Singapore has grown by a quarter since 1975.

Every major American city has a land shortage. But we have more than enough shallow water, dredging capacity, and market incentive to make more land, just like we did 150 years ago. The only obstacle is our own choice to make making land illegal. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

[Ben Fowlkes @benfowlkesMMA]

You know I’m starting to think that maybe we accepted too easily that the president of our entire country lives in an alternate reality of his own conjuring and that’s just how it is. That probably should be a bigger deal.

[Tahra Hoops @TahraHoops]

Cost of living is the #1 financial problem Americans name, by a mile. So naturally, Trump just canceled the housing bill signing until they pass the SAVE Act, a bill most have never heard of.

Trump reminds us again he does not care about the financial issues of Americans.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

The main energy constraint on data centre buildout is not the price of electricity, it is the time it takes to get connected to the grid. Fixing this would cost billpayers and taxpayers nothing, reduce electricity prices, and make it vastly faster to build new data centres in America, Britain and much of Europe.

In a new Works in Progress article we explain the problem and how to solve it. https://t.co/Cim7bgf4rv

In Texas alone, there are 143.5 gigawatts of data centres in the queue to get connected, compared to total peak demand in Texas of 85.9 GW. It is a problem on the supply and demand side. The wait time to connect a generator to the grid has risen from 20 months in 2005 to 55 months.

Some of this is fake: 72 percent of generator connection requests since 2000 were eventually withdrawn. You grab your place in the queue and wait until you reach the front before you have to actually deliver. The queue thus becomes congested and slower for the most valuable projects that could move fast if they could pay for fast-track access.

xAI's Colossus project in Memphis was offered 8 MW of grid power – enough to power a few thousand toasters. It built 422 megawatts of onsite gas turbines instead. Most projects are considering this approach now, but this is more expensive and less reliable than the grid, and makes data centres noisier for locals.

Adding data centres to the grid usually lowers costs for everyone else, because they spread the fixed costs out and they absorb cheap excess electricity that is produced at off-peak times overnight and on sunny days.

Many data centres would be happy to disconnect when there is very high demand and run off batteries and gas. One study found that 76 gigawatts’ worth of new loads could be added (across an area covering most of the US) if these new loads were willing to disconnect during just 22 hours per year.

The solution is simple: add a paid-for fast track option so high priority projects can pay to get connected immediately, and give grid access in exchange for unplugging during periods of peak demand. This would add massive amounts of new electricity supply and make it faster to build the gigawatts of data centres that we need.

Solving high electricity prices is very hard. Solving slow grid connections is very easy. We can do it right away and *reduce* bills for everyone.

[Logan Dobson @LoganDobson]

In 15 years states will be scratching their heads wondering why they didn’t build more of the magic buildings full of computers that throw off millions in property taxes while consuming minimal water and helping pay for the modernization of the electric grid

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

We should never ever assume superiority is permanent.

America’s scientific dominance was built through deliberate investments after WW2 - NIH, NSF, universities, and immigration.

Countries like China and India are playing the long term game.

And it is starting to show.

[David Kinney @DavidNAKinney]

@MC_of_A Where is that graphic from?

[Asher Perlman @asherperlman]

Happy Father’s Day

[David Kinney @DavidNAKinney]

@RichardHanania Why not just use a laundry pick-up/delivery service now that you are rich?

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

Interest payments on US debt are now ~15% of the total budget, and ever-increasing. No end in sight.

But any serious deficit reduction would require broad tax hikes on the middle and upper classes AND major cuts to mandatory spending. Both parties hate that, so good luck.

[Jay Bookman @jaysbookman]

The Texas screwworm story is a version of this. The Reflecting Pool fiasco is a version of this. The Iranian war is a very large and ongoing version of this.
Everywhere you look, incompetence is having its natural consequences, with more to come. Much more, I'm afraid.

[Armand Domalewski @ArmandDoma]

SF, a city of nearly 900,000 people, approved about 1,600 market rate units in 2025, way below pre-pandemic levels, but NIMBYs like 48 Hills still think the problem is that it's TOO EASY to build housing in SF

[Preston Cooper @PrestonCooper93]

Workers such as secretaries, registered nurses, police officers, and firefighters have become more likely to hold college degrees.

That’s in part due to a strange legal regime which privileges college degree requirements in hiring. But a new DOJ opinion could change that.

[Conor Sen @conorsen]

SEC schools understand this, feels like northern non-Ivy schools have to catch up.