Crawdad
5.4K posts

Crawdad
@bensthinks
Cars, Brewing, Music and Building a New Life in France

You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.

Elon Musk said saving for retirement becomes pointless in 10 to 20 years. Not speculation. Math. Musk: “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like ten or 20 years. It won’t matter.” We passed the event horizon. Retirement savings assumes scarcity persists. It won’t. AI and robotics collapse labor costs to zero. Living costs follow. You’re not saving for security. You’re saving for a world that stops existing. Musk: “If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”










Am I a real economist? The Rory Stewart debate






