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Cake day: April 25th, 2026

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  • Valve is legendary for being a good employer. I remember hearing about an employee who tried to tender a resignation when he was diagnosed with something chronic and debilitating. Can’t remember what. Anyway, point is, he decided he couldnt do his job, tried to resign, Newell refused to accept it and told him “your job at Valve is to get better. Come back when you’re better.” So the employee kept his pay, his benefits, all of it. And this was right around the release of HL2, so Valve was not yet the monopoly market maker it is today. Gabe Newell is a billionaire. He may or may not be a good person. But he is a forward thinker and a good boss.













  • Fuck if I know, all I know is you can sit next to a blender in a busy office full of crying babies and barking dogs while writing a dissertation on an electric typewriter and the person on the other end of the line would never be able to tell. Professional headsets (like in the $300-$500 range) are honestly pretty incredible. If these silicon valley offices are too noisy for a high end EOS to handle, or if they genuinely have that many people constantly talking all day to the point that it’s a problem then they need to go back to the drawing board. Steno masks have their place but for anything a garden variety techbro is doing they’re either performative bullshit or a lazy bandaid. I guaranfuckingtee bossman has no interest in putting one of these on.




  • Those transmission losses don’t have immediate health and environmental costs, though, and even discounting those there’ll be conversion losses on both ends (e: for chemical energy carriers) if what we want to get out of it is usable electricity from renewables. Dont take my skepticism for poohpoohing btw, this kind of counterintuitive thinking is one of the more fascinating things about economics. Or maybe I just like to argue :P

    I’ll look up the paper, this is an interesting topic.


  • Pipelines are cheap because we already build a lot of them. We already use them to move multiple products. It’s a somewhat generic technology (which is very impressive, dont get me wrong).

    I’d be interested to learn how the capex breaks down for the HVDC lines. Is it labor? Procurement? Those can both be optimized with scale. Expand the qualified workforce and incentivize competition among suppliers. If it’s raw material cost it might be a little harder. I imagine right of way costs are also quite a bit higher owing to the large footprint. But then once you acquire the RoW it stays there in perpetuity. Still, I bet my favorite hat that once you consider the externalities and conversion losses the transmission lines are a clear winner. The electrical grid really only causes fires when its neglected, whereas gas infrastructure leaks constantly.