534: US Special Economic Zones, FERC vs AWS Nuclear, Zuck vs Bees, Nadella's GPUs, Inflation, Oil, TSMC, Google, Apple, and Buster Keaton

"a concept worth injecting into the zeitgeist"

The person who gets 1 shot needs everything to go right.

The person who gets 1000 shots is going to score at some point.

Find a way to play the game that ensures you get a lot of shots.

–James Clear

💪🏋️‍♂️ The constant use of my Nüobell adjustable dumbbells and REP workout bench convinced me it was time to expand my basement gym and progress further with my strength training.

November is a good time to purchase home gym equipment. Many vendors have Black Friday sales, and I had been waiting for this opportunity to place a few large orders (my value investor gene can’t resist when things I would have bought anyway go on sale).

What did I get? This power rack from REP Fitness (PR-4000):

Plus a barbell and a set of bumper plates from Bells of Steel, a Canadian company that is also having a sale right now.

Once I’ve set it all up and used it for a while, I’ll update you on my experience.

🛞❄️☃️ Yes, there is such a thing as being a tire nerd — not a tired nerd, but you know, that rubber thing on car wheels…

With winter approaching in the Northern Hemisphere, you should really get good tires for your family’s safety. They make a HUGE difference. Here are the top all-season and winter tires according to the best tire nerd YouTube channel I could find:

• 🛞 The BEST All Season Tires for 2024/25

• 🛞 The BEST Winter Tires for 2024/25

My EV6 currently has Pirelli Scorpion Winter tires, but I’m already taking notes on what I’ll replace them with when they wear out (the Michelin Pilot Alpin 5 and the Continental WinterContact TS 870P are at the top of my list 🤔).

📺 ✋Someone needs to build a website/app that only does only one thing:

Let you know when to stop watching a TV show because it has jumped the shark.

The closest thing is probably TV Charts, which I’ve written about before (thanks to Andrew Ruiz for reminding me of it!) and allows you to see at a glance when things turn to crap.

For instance, here’s Game of Thrones:

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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴

🦅🇺🇸 🏗️👷‍♂️🛠️ The Case for Special Economic Zones in the United States🤔🗺️👩‍🔬🧪

In an era where innovation and economic growth are increasingly constrained by bureaucratic complexity, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) — designated areas with streamlined regulations and simplified administrative procedures — have proven successful globally (Shenzhen, China’s first SEZ, grew from a fishing village of 30,000 people to a metropolis of over 17 million in four decades) and, while certainly not a new idea, should be considered in the US.

Multiple people have proposed variants on the model — Marc Andreessen has been involved with the “California Forever” project (they bought 50,000 acres in Solano County). Balaji Srinivasan’s network states concept envisions acquiring physical territory for this purpose. There’s the charter city movement, even the seasteading folks that I used to read about years ago… It doesn’t matter if some of these won’t succeed — what matters is to experiment and that the ones that *do* work can have an outsized impact.

So I think it’s a concept worth injecting into the US zeitgeist again.

Ben Thompson (💚 🥃 🎩) and Andrew Sharp recently discussed it on Sharp Tech, and I couldn’t help but think that with the confluence of events lately, it’s probably a rare opportunity window when the odds are highest for it to happen — if the right person catches the ear or the right person inside the new US administration and frames it in the right way, I could see it happen.

These zones could serve as laboratories for policy innovation. A way to iterate faster than at the state or federal level, and in a small area that is opt-in (ie. you create the SEZs in unpopulated areas so that people have to explicitly move there). The most successful ones will get copied and reproduced and the unsuccessful ones will naturally be forced to adapt or disappear.

The potential impact extends far beyond the zones themselves. If successful, these initiatives could be the first domino that catalyzes broader economic reform across the United States, similar to China’s experience with its special economic zones. Success in one region is proof-of-concept for others and often creates pressure for reform in others; once people see someone succeed over there, they often want some of that over here.

✋🔌⚛️ Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blocks Amazon from buying nuclear power from Talen Energy

I haven’t yet recorded Part 2 of my discussion about Big Tech and energy with Mark Nelson, but this is something that I definitely want to ask him about: