We all get songs stuck in our heads (this is my current one), but I also get ideas stuck in my head. I learn about it and it just tumbles around for days. Like a song, I can’t escape it until I’ve shared it with enough people, passing it on to them. These are the ideas that lived in my brain for far too long in 2024.
- The US is facing a massive real estate value adjustment – Climate change is increasing the pace of natural disasters, insurance adjusters are just now catching up, and real estate values will soon follow. Florida is already suffering, as well as everywhere else on the Gulf of Mexico. Places that will benefit? Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, which suffer relatively few floods, hurricanes, and wind storms.
- China’s Economic Malaise – Americans are generally totally unaware of what’s happening to the Chinese economy. And with good reason! China does everything it can to hide the facts: State-controlled banks are awash in debt, after a massive build out property values have crashed, and domestic consumers aren’t buying. This, more than anything will determine Chinese foreign policy and we should be paying attention.
- Drones and AI are changing warfare – In Ukraine local drone manufacturers are rolling out new AI and signals management every six weeks in an effort to defeat enemy systems. Cheap, ever present drones have made tank warfare, helicopters, and surface warships obsolete. A swarm of drones is cheaper than most missiles or fighter aircraft. We’ve entered a new world where aircraft carriers, tanks, and even fighter jets are liabilities.
- Ultra cheap solar panels are changing everything everywhere but the US – China’s solar panel factories are producing product at a loss, causing companies to stack up unsold panels. The US has tariffs up to 237% on Chinese solar panels, so we’re missing the revolution. Elsewhere in the world, solar has become so cheap that in Germany they have a thing called balconkraftwerk, where people just slap up panels on their apartment balconies and produce their own electricity.
- The New York Times is a gaming company – The majority of users engage with Wordle and other games, not with the news. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who looked at newspaper reading habits in the last century. Readers picked up local papers for the movie listings and classifieds, not the city hall news. The NYT has simply replicated that old fashioned model.
- Media is a personality cult – “Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small,” is basically how media of all types (newspapers, TikTok, newsletters, etc) works now. The internet has atomized media to its most basic form: popularity contests.
- The inability to picture things in your mind – Last year my wife realized that she was living with aphantasia, after realizing it wasn’t a figure of speech, the rest of us did actually picture things in our minds. This year I’ve been working to communicate with her differently and appreciate how she – a practicing architect – works differently.
- JWST is making us question how the universe started – The James Webb Space Telescope, launched just a few years ago, is able to sense such dim light that astronomers are able to see galaxies formed just a few hundred million years after the start of the universe. And they’re seeing galaxies and massive black holes that don’t make sense. So…how did it all begin? It turns out, the more we learn, we realize we know less than we thought.
- Generative AI “gives you infinite interns” – Investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI development, which so far has provided more promise than actual revolution. It “will make the expensive things cheaper” says a surprisingly insightful Ben Affleck. Is that what all the expensive data centers are good for? So far, nobody has made a strong case otherwise.
- You can choose your social media – When X was briefly shut down in Brazil, millions of users switched to Bluesky, and then stayed. Now about 30% of Bluesky activity is in Portuguese. Bluesky use has exploded in recent months, but Mastodon continues to grow, as does Threads, and even Truth Social continues to exist. Clearly people are choosing different platforms for different needs. We live in an increasingly fractured society.
- There’s an Antarctic accent – Isolated and holed up together, scientists in Antarctica have developed an accent.
- Paw paw trees – This fall my wife and I planted North America’s best native fruit you’ve never heard of. They weather Midwestern winters, have a sweet, custardy fruit, but bruise easily and are difficult to transport, which is why you never see them in grocery stores. In five years we hope to have our own fruiting trees.
- Train rides to other American cities – Amtrak had a record ridership in 2024, and this year I rode trains from Chicago to Saint Paul, Minnesota and Milwaukee. Last year I rode from Chicago to New Orleans, Boston, and New York City, and took Acela from New York to Philadelphia. It was all easy, fun to board in downtowns, and awesome to not have to deal with security lines. The new Chicago-Twin Cities train, launched last summer, turned a profit within six weeks. MOAR TRAINS!
- You can write a book – Last year my buddy Rick wrote a book, a memoir about his struggle with cancer as a young man. I’d never thought of Rick as the literary type, but it’s pretty good! “I just sat down and wrote a thousand words every weekend,” he told me. The thing is, that’s how things get done. I’ve always been intimidated by the idea, but dang it, Rick made it seem so easy, and he wrote something inspiring – and won an award doing it.
- Catfish are covered in tongues – I mentioned Ed Yong’s book in my last email, but this one idea has stayed with me: Catfish bodies are covered with taste sensors, so that every square inch of their bodies are tasting all the time. They perceive the world through taste. Now imagine how you would think about things if taste, rather than sound or light, was your primary sensor.