Nate Foss

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting in the past few months some real bangers this month: media manipulation, megaprojects, strategy gospel, and great civilization cycles reading-log.npfoss.com/p/the-best-wor…

Excited to announce the what I have been spending all my days (and nights) on for the last many months! Bullish on inexpensive and reliable robots built for general intelligence. If scaling thousands of robots sounds fun to you - please reach out :)

As far as I know, the election we just ran is the first time an American elected office has been decided in a majority-digital vote, open to all registered voters, despite party affiliation. Results were just announced: utahnewsdispatch.com/2025/12/12/uta… Interesting highlights ⬇️

I’m excited today to share Grapevine, a system that makes it really easy for AI agents to search company knowledge across, Slack, Notion, codebase, and more. The first app we’re launching with it is a company GPT that works remarkably well, better than any alternative today.

@patrickc but I agree with - criticisms of the un-nuanced takes - expertise/supply chains are very overlapping (though idk about stuff like pens, textiles, etc) - it's *really* important to have some supply chains onshore, enough to sacrifice some wealth/GDP per capita

@patrickc counterpoints - if we don't import, we can't export (where will buyers get USD?) - specialization makes you richer - avg productivity of domestic jobs~=GDPPC~=QoL, & different industries have different prod so prioritizing what you onshore matters a lot; security-wealth tradeoff

A recent reflection, based on conversations with economists and policy leaders, is that there are two superficially similar but importantly different perspectives one can hold with respect to US manufacturing: * Affinity for manufacturing and physical production is an anachronistic fetish, embodied by populists with outdated attraction to hard hats and clanging forges. A great deal of manufacturing has departed the US, which is certainly fine and probably even quite good. It's unpleasant labor, and countries ought to each specialize in their respective comparative advantages. * Manufacturing is the ultimate network effects and economies-of-scale business. As services are substituted by AI, and as datacenter deployment accelerates, the relative importance of manufacturing is likely to grow. To think that one can pick and choose sectors in which one will excel ("let's win in drones but not in dishwashers") is a fallacy. Manufacturing is hence of paramount strategic importance. However, we don't know how to make the US the world's preeminent manufacturing power (given its cost base and given the current center of gravity in China) -- indeed, we don't know whether it's even possible -- and this is a significant strategic problem for the country. I have zero direct expertise here, but my outside view is closer to #2 than #1: it seems that the ecosystems and supply chains create strong gravity across the board. I also asked @elonmusk, who has clearly done more over the past decade to advance sophisticated US manufacturing than anyone else, and this appears to be his view. Most economists, on the other hand, are much closer to #1, and I don't think that the economics profession considers the absence of good ideas for reviving US manufacturing to be a problem of particular significance. (There are lots of snide epithets about the efficacy of industrial policy.) It seems to me that there's even some amount of backwards reasoning happening, where, because we don't know how to do #2, #1 is subconsciously a much more comfortable position to hold. Talking about winning particular manufacturing sectors feels to me a bit like talking about winning individual biological research sectors or winning particular software sectors. That is: it seems that the strong default assumption should be that "the place that is best at biology research sector X will also be best at sector Y", and similarly in software, because the skills and inputs needed are so transferable. As such, my guess is that if the US seeks meaningful sovereignty or preeminence in any of drones, robotics, solar, batteries, pharma, etc., we need to bite the bullet, and win at manufacturing across the board. Overall, I'd love to read more arguments for and against these perspectives, particularly from those with direct expertise.

@turboblitzzz @DrewPavlou The distribution of deeded vs leased land isn't great, but with federal gov support (namely BLM sales) this could be a decent spot to do it

@DrewPavlou @_npfoss

Somebody should buy this and do what Lee Kuan Yew did.

@mattyglesias this doesn't change your conclusion, but fwiw: cities are agglomeration flywheels much more than transportation hubs. People/business want to move there overwhelmingly for the large markets induced by everyone already there, not transport costs

Alarmingly plausible timeline I'd expect it to play out a bit slower than they do, but the overall trajectories seem pretty convincing actually?

bonus shoutout to the new @SentinelTeamHQ newsletter -- really high quality, better signal-to-noise ratio than any news publication by far a massive public good I'm proud to do my part in supporting

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting in the past few months quality takes on nuclear waste, construction costs, AI, individualism, DOGE, startups, energy, cults, sci-fi, cities, and catastrophic risk reading-log.npfoss.com/p/the-best-wor…

@kave_rennedy @saulmunn right now federal revenues are way higher than state and local, eyeballing it ~70-18-12% fed-state-local, so maybe start there. Lots of that is passed through to be administered locally (e.g. medicare, education), but this may be desirable redistribution between rich/poor states

@_npfoss @saulmunn Any thoughts on what you'd argue for?

I've often been confused: suppose you move to a world with a 100% tax on unimproved value of the land. How much is supposed to go to each level of government? City / County or State / National?

@saulmunn @kave_rennedy I always figured the Federal government would just top-down decide the splits and everyone would argue about it constantly

@kave_rennedy @_npfoss

@leilavclark There is No Antimemetics Division is great and has an extra unusual format which augments it scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-d… (also +1 Unsong)

What is the modern version of HPMOR/Worm? i.e. long internet serial fiction that is surprisingly good given the format

I've been collecting these notes and ratings for four years -- and everything is in a nice, searchable table here: reading.npfoss.com

7/7 - Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed - @RayDalio best articulation of this I've heard; very important npfoss.notion.site/Why-and-How-Ca…

Signal boosting some stuff I found novel and/or interesting last month 👇