Latest posts
- Reading List 05/09/2026May 09, 2026Brian Potter
Trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more.
- Reading List 05/02/2026May 02, 2026Brian Potter
Chilling effects in the build-to-rent sector, how fast could robot manufacturing scale up, PJM’s new interconnection queue, the backlash against battery storage, and more.
- How an Oil Refinery WorksApr 30, 2026Brian Potter
Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
- Reading List 04/25/26Apr 25, 2026Brian Potter
Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.
- Construction Costs Rarely FallApr 23, 2026Brian Potter
Not long ago we looked at construction productivity trends for the US and for countries around the world. We found that in the U.S., and in most other large, wealthy countries, construction productivity is stagnant or declining. Unlike manufacturing and agriculture, or the economy overall, which generally show improving productivity over time, in the field of construction we find that productivity
- Reading List 04/18/2026Apr 18, 2026Brian Potter
A quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more.
- Reading List 04/11/2026Apr 11, 2026Brian Potter
Is the Strait of Hormuz open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more.
- Helium Is Hard to ReplaceApr 09, 2026Brian Potter
The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore.
- Reading List 04/04/2026Apr 04, 2026Brian Potter
Aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more
- Information and Technological EvolutionApr 02, 2026Brian Potter
I spend a lot of time reading about the nature of technological progress, and I’ve found that the literature on technology is somewhat uneven.
- Reading List 03/28/26Mar 28, 2026Brian Potter
Plastic price jumps, crypto-backed mortgages, a proposed AI data center pause, US battery manufacturing, and more.
- The Age of the AmplifierMar 27, 2026Brian Potter
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.
- Reading List 03/21/26Mar 21, 2026Brian Potter
Damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more.
- How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?Mar 19, 2026Brian Potter
Every day there’s some new story about the enormous amounts of investment in building AI data centers.
- Reading List 03/14/26Mar 14, 2026Brian Potter
Closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more.
- The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated HomeMar 12, 2026Brian Potter
It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods.
- Reading List 03/07/2026Mar 07, 2026Brian Potter
Data centers disconnecting from the grid, solar PV efficiency records, repairs for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Ford’s EV missteps, former OpenAI CTO’s new startup.
- A History of Operation BreakthroughMar 06, 2026Brian Potter
Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using factories and industrialized processes, instead of assembling them on site using manual labor and hand-held tools.
- Reading List 02/28/26Feb 28, 2026Brian Potter
LA permitting costs, trickle-down housing, Panasonic stops making TVs, robotaxi remote operators, geothermal progress.