October 17, 2022 • #
Norway is in the planning stages on a tunnel for ships to bypass having to sail around the Stad peninsula, an infamously dangerous spot with high winds, rough waters, and foul weather. It’s a 2km pathway under the base of the peninsula. Based on rough map calculation, it’ll save ferries and other ships over 30 miles of rough sailing into the open Atlantic.
When you look at the fjord-laden coastline of Norway — a thousand miles of sliced up mountains and deep chasms — it’s sort of surprising that this hasn’t been attempted before.
✦
August 24, 2022 • #
In his newsletter, Brian Potter started a new series looking at why the construction industry seems to lack economies of scale, like you find in IT, media, and nearly every manufacturing business.
When you look at the data on construction, you find that there seems to be no or little advantage to scale when it comes to price or efficiency. A single-family residence costs about the same per-square foot to build as a high-rise condo (holding equivalent things like build quality, materials, etc.).
I thought this was an interesting figure — it also turns out that construction is a very diffuse...
✦
May 5, 2022 • #
The construction market for startups (one that I’m fairly involved in, but only as a segment of our market) has been a historically tough nut to crack for technology companies.
This is a great breakdown from Brian Potter on the past couple decades of construction startups and funding amounts, with a useful segmentation by category into slices like builders, materials, energy use, construction software, digital twins, and more.
It wasn’t surprising to see builders taking such a huge proportion of the funding — after all, trying to scale a soup-to-nuts homebuilding company is enormously capital-intensive. Management software scoops in an ~8%...
✦
August 13, 2021 • #
Brian Potter wonders why work as taxing and seemingly-mechanically simple as brick masonry is difficult to automate:
Masonry seemed like the perfect candidate for mechanization, but a hundred years of limited success suggests there’s some aspect to it that prevents a machine from easily doing it. This makes it an interesting case study, as it helps define exactly where mechanization becomes difficult - what makes laying a brick so different than, say, hammering a nail, such that the latter is almost completely mechanized and the former...
✦