Alvaro Villasante

Spain’s high-speed network, the world’s longest after China’s, was once a source of national pride. Now Spaniards are in shock economist.com/europe/2026/10…

1/3 🇧🇷⚡ ¡Un nuevo hito para el Grupo Energía Bogotá en Brasil! Junto a La Caisse (@lacaisse_ ) formalizamos la creación de Verene Energia, una de las cinco mayores compañías de transmisión eléctrica de ese país. Una alianza que fortalece nuestro crecimiento internacional.

🚨ICYMI: The Energy Department announced $50 million in federal funding for electric transmission upgrades in western Virginia cardinalnews.org/2026/10/17/…

Francia hoy. La caída de Occidente representada en un video. El que no lo vio venir, es simplemente porque no quiso o porque fue cómplice. Era todo muy obvio. Esperemos que no se siga expandiendo al resto de Occidente como muchos quieren.

Hubo un tiempo en que el mundo funcionaba con inventos europeos. En Londres, en 1851, casi todas las máquinas de la Gran Exposición eran nuestras. Es una pena que hayamos perdido aquel liderazgo, y hay culpables. Fuimos la leche, ¿quién lo dejó escapar? 🧵

El Niño de 1877 dejó 50 millones de muertos en todo el mundo. ¿Qué aprendimos entonces para afrontar este tipo de desastres climáticos? bbc.in/4s7VC3L

Avec l’Allemagne, nous avons trouvé un accord pour assurer l’avenir du secteur automobile européen. Nous portons une ambition claire : réussir la transformation de notre industrie automobile, tout en maintenant notre ambition climatique et notre production en Europe. Notre cap ne change pas : réduire fortement les émissions de CO₂ et produire en France et en Europe les futures voitures électriques. C'est cela la préférence européenne. Nous souhaitons que cette dynamique franco-allemande puisse aboutir à un accord rapidement avec nos partenaires, pour nos emplois et notre industrie. L’Europe doit être un continent qui innove, qui investit et qui produit tout en protégeant le climat et en préservant nos emplois, c’est le sens de notre engagement.

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.