Dane Carlson

AI, economic development, business, industrial development, and geopolitics • Host of @Econdevshow • @Sitehuntio CEO

[Houstonomics @Houstonomics]

Houston is quietly becoming one of the most important manufacturing markets in the U.S.

The mega-deals landing here are staggering:
- Eli Lilly: $6.5B pharmaceutical plant (1M SF, 600+ jobs)
- Bristol Myers Squibb: $1B pharma campus (500 jobs)
- Foxconn/Nvidia: $450M AI supercomputer factory
- Apple: expanded to 500K SF for Mac mini + AI servers

🔗 https://t.co/Sd2cHah8yS

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

I think it is really worth reading this piece on RSI at Anthropic.

There is a bit of navel-gazing, some marketing, and a lot of very sincere beliefs about what Anthropic thinks is likely in the near future of AI that you probably want to be aware of. https://t.co/A5yxryBjHv

[Dane Carlson @danec]

Yeah, it’s the phones.

[Alec MacGillis @AlecMacGillis]

"In country after country, the birth rate plunged after introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn--a mirror image of phone usage patterns."
@jburnmurdoch, so persuasive: https://t.co/sh7bW7JJgS

[Matt Mullin @matthewwmullin]

NASA HAS RELEASED OVER 12,000 IMAGES OF THE ARTEMIS II MISSION.

Unbelievable perspectives captured by the Crew! The aurora on the eclipse is incredible.

[Conor Rogers @conorjrogers]

No one is ready for the real solution to Gerrymandering:

A return to the Constitution's original standard of 1 Member of Congress for every 30,000 Americans, resulting in an 11,000-member House with city-council sized districts so small you can't Gerrymander them if you tried.

[sick public transit, gloria @seungylee14]

this is why magical realism thrives in Latin America

[Dane Carlson @danec]

The ⁦@Tesla⁩ @Robotaxi is live in a tiny sliver of Houston.

[Michael Whyman (ミカリウィマノ) @Whyman5Whyman]

We are learning whale using science

[Dane Carlson @danec]

Post 2002, the sender paid $0.10 - $0.25 to send an attachment with MMS (sms + attachment) and the receiver paid per kilobyte. 😈

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

What's the worst way you've seen someone quit a job?

One of my favorites:

A guy wrote a program that texted his boss every second until he got paid... with a 200MB picture attached.

[Dane Carlson @danec]

“The deeper truth is that Houston is one of the clearest expressions of American hard power inside a city. Energy complex. Port complex. petrochemicals. aerospace adjacency. medical scale. construction. immigration. Business formation.”

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Houston is what happens when the physical world starts mattering again.

That chart is a regime signal.

A metro that large adding that much real GDP that fast means capital is flowing toward throughput, energy, logistics, engineering, fabrication, and movement of actual molecules. Houston is not winning because it has better vibes. Houston is winning because the economy still runs on power, pipes, ports, chemicals, steel, freight, and scale.

That is the part a lot of people still do not get. The last cycle trained everyone to worship abstraction. Apps, media, software, branding, financial engineering, digital prestige. Then the world got more constrained, more fragmented, more inflationary, more physical. Suddenly the winners look different. Power matters. Land matters. shipping matters. Industrial competence matters. Houston lives there.

The deeper truth is that Houston is one of the clearest expressions of American hard power inside a city. Energy complex. Port complex. petrochemicals. aerospace adjacency. medical scale. construction. immigration. Business formation. It is one of the few places in America where the old industrial world and the new compute world can actually shake hands. AI can talk all day about transforming civilization. Civilization still needs electricity, cooling, concrete, gas, transport, and buildable land. Houston sits closer to those choke points than most of the prestige cities that dominate the cultural conversation.

That is why this growth matters at size. Small boomtowns can rip for a while on one narrow driver. Houston doing this means the underlying machine is broad. It has enough depth to convert population, capital, infrastructure, and commodity advantage into real output. That is a very different thing from a tourism bounce or a housing sugar high.

The highest coherence read is simple.

America is rotating back toward cities that can do hard things.

Not talk about them.
Not regulate them.
Not aestheticize them.

Do them.

Houston is ugly, functional, rich in substrate, and built for scale. In a serious era, those traits start compounding.

That is what this chart is really saying.

The future is getting more physical again.

Houston was already there.

[Dane Carlson @danec]

We just need a costume for everyone on the recovery team!

[Spaceballs The X Account @Grunt2A]

Now that Artemis II has launched we have 10 days to get everyone on Earth a Planet of the Apes costume so we can do something hilarious when the astronauts return 😁

[Dane Carlson @danec]

The future is going to be weird... and awesome.

[Natalie Fratto @NatalieFratto]

One of these things is not like the other…

The other day @PratapRanade brought home 3 RF circuits. Ok “10GHz band pass-filters” he says, to be precise. The first two are human-made, the third is what they’re calling “an alien geometry” 👾

Look how funky it is.

That’s the world’s first-ever AI-made RF circuit achieved by the electromagnetism foundation model @arenaphysica.

No human would have created it this way. It’s odd, it looks random, but it really works & it might be the future guts inside every satellite, radar, microwave etc one day.

[Dane Carlson @danec]

I think only one Artemis II crew member drinks coffee. Because 1.075 cups per person per day isn’t going to cut it.

[NASA @NASA]

Brisket and cobbler and quiche, oh my!

Curious what astronauts eat on a 10-day trip around the Moon? Read about how we design and prepare meal plans for Artemis II: https://t.co/eVNGSQpM04

[Alan Peterson SBA @AlanPetersonSBA]

BREAKING: @SBAgov Announces New “Made in America Loan Guarantee” to Restore Manufacturing Dominance - Here is what you need to know to move the needle. 🧵1/5

[Dane Carlson @danec]

@KjeldsenOliver @PeterZeihan So many and so small. You can build a Shahed drone in a garage.

[Foster @foster_type]

Killing the Jones Act would make the war a strategic US victory in its own right.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

"Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed."

[Dane Carlson @danec]

@ks_kulk @elonmusk Mike is already under development. He just hasn't woken up yet. Except in this timeline his name is Grok.

[Brent Beshore @BrentBeshore]

I had some thoughts about AI, the nature of work, and regaining our humanity tumble out of me. This is very much an exercise of thinking in public and I'm not sure I got it right. I'd love to hear your feedback.

[Dane Carlson @danec]

@BrentBeshore Thank you for this calming perspective on the absolutely massive changes we’re living through. “If AI can out-output you, then you’re forced to locate your dignity somewhere else, which is exactly the point. Your dignity was never up for competition ... Your dignity is bestowed.”