Anti-agglomeration Policies

 The entire developed world is facing an extremely acute housing crisis; as agglomeration effects drive more global talent into a smaller number of international supercities, local incentives bias towards increasing real estate values. These incentives are in direct conflict with a clear national and international interest in increasing the rate of technological development, as real estate extracts an increasing amount of value from the innovation created via agglomeration.

Historically, technology development was widely distributed - the unique geographic features of distinct regions and the high cost of transportation allowed individual cities to leverage their unique natural environment to facilitate the development of localized supply chains and innovation hubs. Toledo was a glass city, producing windows and windshields for Detroit; Pittsburgh's access to iron and coal made it a natural place where steel could be produced.

However, with the rise of container transportation, global air travel and widespread internet access, goods, people and information are now able to move across space much more quickly. As a result, the physical barriers to agglomeration have been largely eliminated - the natural result is a drive towards consolidation around a smaller number of winning cities.

This effect is particularly acute in America, a country accustomed to boomtowns and their inevitable busts. But it is not limited to America. Innovation-driven capitalism naturally optimizes for agglomeration as density creates the human connections which fuel the development of new ideas and creation of new products and services.

One obvious solution is to examine the spatial distribution of major government functions. The United States is a federal republic; our government does not need to be geographically localized in Washington. By intentionally picking new locations for critical government agencies, policymakers could redirect their employees to communities which need investment. Much like universities can create geographic gravity wells around college towns, moving large swaths of the federal government into states would create similar hubs - helping agglomeration revitalize cities across the country that have been left behind by our increasingly globalized logistics systems and airborne travel networks.

It should be easy to organize a dedicated lobbying effort to rally Congressional support to eliminate all executive presence in Washington, DC. The Department of Agriculture could move to Des Moines; HHS could move to Cleveland; the Department of Energy could move to Houston; the Department of the Interior could move to Bozeman. Put each agency close to a city which already has an affinity for that kind of work, but which has lost population over the past 50 years. Critically, this should be extremely popular within the legislative branch - with the exception of Virginia and Maryland, every state could be a winner of a meaningful part of the ever-expanding federal bureaucracy.

Cyclists, Drivers, Runners and Pedestrians

One challenge for urban designers is that cyclists exist in an awkward superposition state between pedestrians and drivers - bikes are larger than people but smaller than cars; cycling is faster than walking and slower than driving.

Across the road network, therefore, we've generally accepted that dedicated bike lanes are an appropriate compromise - they create dedicated space for bikers ranging from 10 mph to 25 mph at the cost of ~6 horizontal feet.

The rise of electric scooters and bikes, however, necessitate a similar segmentation on mixed-use trails - because electric assistance increases the median speed of a bike has increased from ~10-15 mph to 15-20mph, the gap between both walkers and runners and cyclists has become much larger. Especially on highly-trafficked trails, situations in which two cyclists at different speeds are trying to pass pedestrians is becoming increasingly common.

The solution is to split off a packed gravel running and walking trail from an asphalt-based cycling trail. It should be well-graded to support strollers and ideally isolated from the biking trail as much as possible - e.g. by putting a pedestrian trail on one side of a river and a bike trail on the other side.

Leaving Palantir

Most well-known technology companies achieved their initial success by creating a singular breakout product which dominated an emerging category. Each story is different, but the pattern is similar.

But even after twelve years, the uniqueness of Palantir’s story continues to fascinate me – the lack of explicit hierarchy inherent in the company’s design creates a superposition of possible company structures, each only accessible from a different vantage point. And the symbiosis between us and our customers makes untangling what we do from what they do especially challenging.

Studying Palantir has been something of a hobby of mine over this past decade, and over the past few months, as I’ve started to feel my time here coming to an end, I’ve tried my best to distill my reflections down into something transmissible.

In my time here, I’ve been right about many small things, but I was wrong about one big thing – programs, not products or platforms, are the defining concept at the heart of Palantir.

Shrink-wrapped SaaS products may be good businesses, but they are a bad way to shape the world predicated as they are on an end of history worldview which implies that zero-sum optimization and financial engineering, not positive-sum growth and technology development, will be the defining activity of our generation.

Cloud-based computing platforms are also good businesses, but their optimism is indeterminate in nature, with a teleology defined by their users; a platform is a tool, but it has no intrinsic purpose. Great platforms always are always a consequence of successful products, and their value is always defined by the next generation of products built on top of them; they are supporting actors solidifying known patterns into a strong foundation, not prime movers pushing on the ceiling into the unknown.

Programs – living cybernetic systems consisting of data, logic, and action – are the things that Palantir has learned how to build, at extreme cost. Programs are n-of-one entities; instances which are members of a class, but with unique identities, designed to be different and therefore to differentiate. We have collectively built these programs as an output of a tightly integrated business model – our best BD work combines elements of strategy and technical consulting, and our best PD work intentionally blurs the line between traditional software development and a classic services approach.

Producing programs is what Palantir was designed (has evolved?) to do.

But perhaps our work here has an even higher purpose, bordering on the spiritual – to challenge those of us who pursue it, and prepare us for our next adventures. Why did PayPal and General Magic, not Google and Facebook, spawn Silicon Valley mafias? Where are the Snowflake and Databricks founder mafias? Why did my brothers and I work for ABL, Tesla and Palantir, not Boeing, Ford, and Microsoft?

Culture, not technology, may end up being the main thing these institutions end up contributing to the world; people may turn out to be their most enduring legacy.

Palantir has a very special culture – of agency in the face of bureaucracy, of engagement with the world, of curiosity about how things work coupled with an optimistic belief that the future can be better, in concrete and achievable ways, than the present. A community of pragmatists, programmers, and philosophers. It’s a quintessentially American culture that transcends American geography, a melting pot of ideas and people whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We are, and have been for some time, in the early stages of going supernova – spreading this unique culture across the broader industry and society, and I’m excited to join the diaspora.

Since I joined Palantir twelve years ago, there’s never been a bad time to join, and there’s never been a good time to leave; my work here isn’t complete, partially because it isn’t the kind of thing that is completable. The beauty of building a mission-driven company is that even as each campaign ends, the movement itself regroups to focus on the work ahead.

And yet the time has come to leave - to peddle my wares on the open market of late-stage capitalism and sink my teeth into a new challenge. I'm stepping onto the well-trodden path from software to hardware, joining an exquisitely capital-intensive space company and hoping to help them build an integrated hardware + software product strategy, something I've always been fascinated by theoretically; but as they say - in theory, there's no difference between theory in practice, but in practice, there is!

Perhaps I can even bring an ontology into my new board room, and into our new operations centers - the most forward-deployed engineer.

VLR!

Eight Sleep Thoughts

I've recently acquired an Eight Sleep, and have been enjoying it.

But broadly speaking, it also creates a culture of intensity around sleeping and bedtime which seems ill-advised.

A few things in particular have been bothering me: an imposition of various values on the user (namely not spending time in bed without sleeping), the lack of couple-oriented features and analytics, and the requirement of having a phone near bed to control the device at all times.

More generally - by definition, the people working on products are more focused on them than users are. Users use a wide range of products in conjunction with one another. 

I love reading before bed. And sometimes, I like lounging in bed in the morning. I'm not a robot pro-athlete / weirdo tech bro trying to optimize my every minute; I'm a hard-working white-collar worker who sometimes likes to relax in bed.

I want to get great sleep. I want to sleep well, and I want to develop good routines. But imposing sleep-centric values on me is generally frustrating, and candidly makes me less likely to feel good about the product and less likely to refer it to other friends.

Strava Adventures

Currently, Strava's feed is composed of activities. Increasingly, however, athletes participate in multi-activity adventures - think bikepacking trips, hiking journeys and ski touring adventures.

Adventures pollute the activity feed by over-posting, and reduce the amount of social behavior by partitioning comments and discussion across semantically related activities.

Strava should introduce a new concept (an adventure) which groups together contiguous activities for the purpose of increasing the prominence and engagement on the feed while also helping users remember particularly meaningful adventures by selecting key photos to highlight the experience.

Excel-based Azure Functions

The world runs on excel, and increasingly, Excel documents are store in O365 / Sharepoint / OneDrive - in the cloud.

Microsoft should support turning any Excel document into the source code for an Azure Function so that you could have lambda functions for every single macro in Excel, easily available for developers to hit.

This would continue to drive people into Excel while also supporting the transition of businesses towards interconnected API-based companies.

The pathology of Google's carbon-based flight metric

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Google recently added a number of fairly odd features to their flight booking system that claims to help travelers learn how much carbon a given flight will release into the atmosphere (link).

But the numbers are misleading.

It's not exactly clear how they are computed, but even if they were correct on average, the irony of the feature is that a set of uncoordinated but climate-conscious consumers could end up increasing the aggregate amount of carbon for a given set of flights if they used these numbers as part of their decision-making process.

In fact - it's almost certainly true that price is a better predictor of the actual carbon emissions of a given route than the made-up Google metric. The cost of a flight is composed of a bunch of fixed costs which the airlines then try to make up on the margin by selling every seat on the plane. A full plane, broadly speaking, is the most carbon-friendly plane: and it's also the cheapest plane for everyone onboard.

Carbon emissions are obviously always lower for a direct flight assuming a full plane, but more direct flights between the set of airports would result in planes which are, on average, less full. There's some bin packing math to do here, but the basic premise is that while the naive calculation for me may imply that the direct flight from London to Austin only costs 731 kg of carbon dioxide, occupying one seat on both of the London to NYC and NYC to Austin flight may end up with fuller flights, thus reducing the per-capita cost of travel: both in carbon and dollar terms.

If consumers were to use this tool, therefore, the result could actually be to push airlines away from more efficient hub-spoke routes towards direct flights with lower utilization.

Of course, it's hard for me to actually believes that anyone actually think this matters: once you've chosen to fly to London, you've basically made the call that you're going to use a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide no matter what route you pick. And implying that the choice of flying direct is 20% better for the environment is just lazy - if you can book the flight, the planes are already taking off with or without you.

Climate change is not a problem that will be fixed by individual action: if we want to fix this problem, we need to pursue unpopular policies to increase the cost of carbon. As a consumer, trying to do multi-variate optimization for every choice is an exhausting way to make decisions; it's why having the almighty dollar, rather than a cryptocoin for every commodity, is the way we evolved out of a primitive economy into one based on the free exchange of goods and services.

Which leads me to the question: why did anyone at Google green-light this project?

The most cynical answer: it lets rich people (like Google employees) who can afford direct flights feel good about their ability to pay more money for convenience by giving them a hedonic boost when they book "carbon-friendly" direct flights (which again, they were going to do anyway, because they are actually paying for convenience).