odell

🚨 SAM ALTMAN: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

Tried this. Didn’t work. Spreadsheets are GOATed, sorry nerds. If you want, try actually designing the ideal financial modeling product from first principles. The result, I promise you, will be a spreadsheet.

The Jones Act has 4 requirements: Vessels must be U.S. built. Vessels must be U.S. owned. Vessels must be U.S. crewed. Vessels must be U.S. flagged. The crippling part of the Jones Act is that U.S.-built U.S. shipyards, for a variety of reasons, are incredibly inefficient. We don't have that many of them, and they cost about five times what a ship from South Korea would cost. As a person who actually believes in trade, I fully would love for South Korea to become our US shipyard. We just buy ships from them because they're good at making them. Coastal water transport in the U.S. could be 60% cheaper. Because of the Jones Act, it's actually cheaper to ship goods from the U.S. to a foreign country and back to the U.S. than between two ports, which is completely bonkers insane! As a byproduct, we have killed all of the growth within the Mississippi, which should be the most powerful inland economic advantage in the world. Maintaining the requirement of U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed, and U.S.-flagged is perfectly fine and in line with my general national security concerns, but U.S.-built has destroyed our shipping industry. There's tens of billions of GDP lying on the table here, and a direct step in reducing our dependency on foreign suppliers. It's also how you kickstart rebuilding an American shipyard industry. If you 10x the number of U.S. ships working in ports, you start building all of the maintenance businesses at U.S. ports, and the demand increases. The U.S. bill requirement of the Jones Act is horrifically destructive to America and, in particular, horrifically destructive to middle America, and it should be destroyed.