Curious. Climatetech investor in NZ. Help host @MicromobilityCo. Ex @uber @blackbirdvc. Fellow: @ehfnewzealand
Wellington City, New Zealand
Joined February 2009
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Why should you be paying attention to #micromobility? Because it represents a fundamental rethink of transport as we've known it.
I presented at the @motnz yesterday about this very topic. It tied a lot of what we've discussed on the podcast, so thought I'd share here. 1/n
oliver bruce retweeted
Simply put, the problem of combustion engines in the clean energy transportation system is their inefficiency.
U.S. transportation uses 27,5 Quad Btu energy out of only 21% is put into a meaningful use today.
79% of the energy is lost. 1/4🧵
oliver bruce retweeted
Wellington officials were massively confused about why the port infrastructure for the Inter-islander ferries became so expensive. Yet no one asked the simple question. What was the minimum viable upgrade for the mega-ferries? interest.co.nz/public-policy…
What a mess! Conflicting advice from government entities that don’t trust each other. A working group adding more confusion. The result may cost us all, not just $$. More freight on roads, damaged Korean relations, and worse inter-island links.
rnz.co.nz/news/political/522…
oliver bruce retweeted
TIL: there are more transistors in the AirPods Pro than in the CPU of a MacBook Pro from 2010
One is a professional laptop, the other earphones running on a battery weighing about 1 gram
Moore's Law's one hell of a thing
oliver bruce retweeted
Giant 400Nm actuators still aren’t cheap but the price will fall fast. It’s just 3kg of steel, aluminum, and neodymium (nothing magical) but the base motor isn’t a common machine-wound drone motor size. Scale will fix the price.
400Nm is almost double that of a Honda Accord.
oliver bruce retweeted
Excited to announce Surgical Robot Transformer🪡: Automating delicate surgical tasks with end-to-end imitation learning.
It's still mind blowing to see robot autonomously tying knots, a task I did not think is possible even a few months before.
Sharing some learnings in 🧵:
Introducing Surgical Robot Transformer (SRT):
Automating surgical tasks with end-to-end imitation learning.
On the da Vinci robot, we automate:
- Knot tying
- Needle manipulation
- Soft-tissue manipulation
Collaboration between @JohnsHopkins & @Stanford.
oliver bruce retweeted
New: The Government has somehow produced an Emissions Reduction Plan that will see New Zealand do *less* than its predecessor, including fail to meet the 2050 net zero target.
newsroom.co.nz/2024/07/17/nz…
oliver bruce retweeted
Stunning number of Chinese car brands.
Among the EV players, only BYD and Li Auto are profitable today.
In a market economy, most of these would have disappeared by now. But China's system of state capitalism encourages more players.
People have been talking about "consolidation just around the corner" since the 1990s. What we have seen is the opposite.
oliver bruce retweeted
At the height of the dotcom bubble, Cisco was worth 5.5% of US GDP.
Today $NVDA market cap is worth 11.7% of GDP, over 200% higher...
Nortel & Cisco's collapse during the Dot-com era by the use of "vendor financing", where a vendor loans $ to customers so they can buy their products...
Exactly what Nvidia $NVDA is doing right now.
youtube.com/watch?v=sDdC3-LT…
oliver bruce retweeted
An eye opening chart from the NZ Infrastructure Commission. Two-thirds of road spending is government subsidy!
A lot of folk claim that not only are roads are all paid for by drivers, but they subsidize everything else too. If that ever was the case it sure isn’t now.
oliver bruce retweeted
An important gap we’ve noticed at council in discussions on urban form is the need to show and actually communicate visually what good higher density housing looks like. So we’ve published a toolkit for high quality higher density housing with WSP today.
thepost.co.nz/nz-news/350342…
Honoured! Just the sort of discussion Urbanerds was created for!
"For people who care about ... building a better Wellington, there is no better place to be than the monthly Urbanerds drinks" 😊🫡 Stoked to hear this about our nerdy gatherings from @JoelMacManus Eh @mr_mccallum @oliverbruce @fixiebelle ! thespinoff.co.nz/wellington/…
oliver bruce retweeted
"For people who care about ... building a better Wellington, there is no better place to be than the monthly Urbanerds drinks" 😊🫡 Stoked to hear this about our nerdy gatherings from @JoelMacManus Eh @mr_mccallum @oliverbruce @fixiebelle ! thespinoff.co.nz/wellington/…
oliver bruce retweeted
How on earth do these two stations cost $500,000,000?
#StationNews: KiwiRail has shared two new renders of Drury & Paerātā Stations with @NZTransitBuzz.
Main construction contracts are currently out for tender, and KiwiRail expects construction to begin towards the end of 2024.
oliver bruce retweeted
"It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential."
oliver bruce retweeted
This op-ed lives up to the hype in my TL
Claim: Chinese industrial policy flattens supply curves -- creating, e.g., a "Cambrian explosion" of EV firms --while in the West we cheer on our tech monopolies, confusing corporate profits with consumer surplus.
asiatimes.com/2024/07/chinas…
oliver bruce retweeted
“Yes, China’s EV industry is barely scraping a profit. So what? For a measly $231 billion in subsidies, China has created $5 to $10 trillion in value for its consumers.”
Best thing I've read today: full-on troll of Western capitalism through lens of Adam Smith.
"The saddest creatures in late-stage capitalism are cheerleaders who own little equity but root for mega-cap companies like sports teams."
More 👇
asiatimes.com/2024/07/chinas…
