Casey Handmer's mental models

Their wordsAnd the bottleneck prior to what we call the industrial revolution was uh metabolism, right? It's just like how much like oats can a human or a horse physically digest and then convert into useful mechanical output for you know their their um their peasant overlord or whatever.

Their wordsThey're focused on the chips, right? Because they understand like the key bottleneck is the chips, not the solar power, right?

Their wordsYet solar development is hopelessly snarled by dozens of different development regulations which begin with the assumption that it will permanently and severely harm the environment unless proven otherwise, at exhaustive length.

Their wordsIn terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.

Their wordsChina is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.

Their wordsCheap solar is the unlock that brings human progress and climate action from the realm of fundamental incompatibility to complimentary inevitability.

Their wordsA dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost.