Misc Links December 2025

Don’t get cross with NIMBYs. Make deals with them argues that we should try to co-opt NIMBY's by changing incentives around development. I agree. Localized energy pricing, or at least discounts for people living near generators, rebates from developers to surrounding residents, council estate in the UK or Israeli style "vote to demolish your current building and the developer will give you nicer apartments in the new one they build" policies all seem good to me. As would reforming local council funding in the UK to actually spend money on things most voters care about (not mostly social care for the old and dealing with bad children) and to ensure councils incentives are aligned better by letting them keep the majority of local revenue. That being said, I have my doubts. If there's space for rent seeking, the incentive is always to extract maximal rents. Even if most voters in a given area are in favor of a development it currently only takes a small group to lodge dozens of planning complaints or mount a legal challenge. Often those groups are ideologically motivated. Sometimes a single individual is enough to impose massive costs on a major national project e.g: Chris Packham suing HS2 in the UK. Money won't change this. It really feels like regulatory change to stop spurious objections, lift the maze of stacking obligations on any development and to hold people who sue projects liable for full costs/damages if they fail is necessary to unlock most real growth.

Silicone Continent on EU housing regulations

Berlin’s Pankower Tor development, as Fergus McCullough recently tweeted, is what Europe needs to solve its housing problems: two thousand homes in dense, livable perimeter blocks on what is currently a disused meadow besides a railway line. Along with the homes will come schools, offices, daycare centers, shops, high-speed bike paths, and a tram line. One third of the apartments will be affordable.

Unfortunately, construction at this site has been blocked since 2022, after the Berlin administrative court ruled that it was illegal to move the natterjack toads who live there. The natterjack toads have not been in Berlin for a long time: they only arrived in 1997, likely by riding along with a gravel truck. Only a few hundred of these toads live at this site. But, as they are listed in Annex IV of the EU’s Habitats Directive, it is illegal to capture or kill them, and, under Germany’s implementation of the directive, ‘significantly disturb’ them by ‘deteriorating the conservation status of the local population of a species’.1

(... other stuff)

The natterjack toads are causing more problems. The Obere Naturschutzbehörde (environmental authority) requires a planned storm drain in the development to first build a five hundred square meter magnetic pool that will attract and protect the toads. It has tentatively given the go-ahead for otherwise removing the species. The local environmental group is now suing to block that too. The project has been ongoing for over sixteen years. So far not a single shovel has entered the ground.

The natterjack toad problem may solve itself. The disused land is home to a growing population of willows, birches, and poplars. This makes the habitat unsuitable for natterjack toads, who dislike wooded land. The efforts of environmental groups to block the construction will likely guarantee destruction of the habitat.

In another post Silicone Continent asks why the EU makes so many rules and laws compared to other parliaments. The post then goes through a pretty great political econ style analysis of how a system initially set up with multiple overlapping veto's and meant to ensure any decision was slow and by consensus turned into a legislative paper mill. The answer is in practice extreme concentration of power in a tiny committee, very limited accountability to voters and a rotating presidency where commission waits until the the current leading country supports a given measure before pushing the policy package.

Bits about Money is one of my favourite finance newsletter. The other two are The Diff and Money Stuff Matters. Perpetual futures, explained was both a fun read about how perps work and yet another fun story about how messed up the crypto ecosystem is. Speaking of Money Stuff, an issue two or so weeks ago covers the logic behind partial defaults and lenders being in a prisoners dilemma-ish situation

Prof Serious writes about Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Interesting mostly because I'm interested in the tech itself as an enthusiast. I'm less optimistic about the implications. Even if we do get homomorphic compute or true zero knowledge proofs, I don't expect privacy to meaningfully improve. The largest batters to privacy at the moment seem to be political (chat control in the EU, universal ID requirements, widespread decentralized censorship partially etc...), not technical. That being said maybe I'm too pessimistic. The existence of E2E encryption has probably made the world much more private and much freer than in a counterfactual world where all communication could be accessed by the platform owners who could in turn be pressured/subpoenaed by the government. Maybe future privacy tech will be similar. I wouldn't bet on it though.

A few things on consciousness. Like pretty much every rat software engineers, I've long been a computationalist. In brief: The mind is a program/system/computation of some kind. The specific substrate it runs on isn't relevant. I would expect computers running the right calculations/simulations to be able to host conscious minds. Over the past year or so I've encountered a few strong problems with that view.

• The first was a conversation with a trans Jane Street trader at Lessonline. She told me about the triviality objection. Basically, given sufficient interpretive freedom any physical system can be mapped onto any computation
• The second was reading Permutation City which played around with computational consciousness a fair bit. Partly with slowed down/sped up/reversed/out of order simulations. Partly eventually with triviality/multiple-realizibility and the implications this has for ontology
• The third was reading Jessica Taylors post about Homomorphically encrypted consciousness and its implications, which I kinda see as a variant or close relative of the triviality objection, or at least getting to the same conclusion via a slightly simpler path.
  I'm not sure where I stand now. I still think consciousness being computational in nature, the mind as a program, is the most appealing explanation. I also think there are large unresolved problems with it. Food for thought I guess. (Also, I really need to go back and work through Unstable Ontology at some point)

Noahopinion has an article titled The Future of Drone Warfare but the more interesting part is a claim that technological determinism is kinda true. Tech, and especially military tech, determines what kinds of societies are competitive. Given aggressive inter-society competition. the majority of the human race soon falls under the control of whatever form of social organization best matches that equilibrium. At some point that was disparate tribes and bands. Then primitive states and chiefdoms. Then autocracies. Then empires. Then feudal regimes. Then with the advent of gunpowder, commerce and communication we get the nation state and democratic governments with widespread social buy in and a common identity. I buy that tech shapes society. I'm not sure I buy fully that there's a single equilibrium state, that the slopes of the competitive landscape are that steep, or that war is the main determinant vs other things (e.g: ability to control a large territory, tech enabling/disabling centralization etc...)

Three Construction Physics deep dives on how a US government think tank trained the first generation of software engineers, how ASML got EUV and an engineering history of the manhatten project. I find construction physics, and the extended progress studies universe generally, to be one of the few places that fills me with hope and gratitude for the world I live in and the feats our species achieves.

Inquisitive Bird on how northwestern europe achieved modern homicide rates by 1750. Strengthens my belief that poverty doesn't cause crime, rather the kind of people who become criminals are also much more likely to be poor. Also, ACX round N on the heritability gap between twin/sibling studies vs GWAS.

Casey (formerly NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Wrote a bunch of fairly great articles on space and engineering, including the one on starship being transformative for space travel/industry) wife writes a post on his blog about their plans for raising ~4 children while they both run startups.