The Electric Slide
The magnetic force is doing the spinning. Everything else is about getting the magnets in the right place with the right polarity; nature does the rest.
This is critical, so we’ll say it again. A combustion engine carries its fuel, which it burns, fighting thermodynamics by converting heat to motion, so it is less efficient. An electric motor
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Electric motors are one type of electric actuator (devices that convert electrical energy into mechanical motion). Actuators themselves are a subset of transducers or energy-conversion devices, which convert energy from one form to another.
The Electric Stack converts electricity into motion , but also into heat (induction stoves), into magnetic
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The four key Electric Stack technologies were invented at various points between the 1960s and 1990s in America, Japan, and the UK, and reached critical maturity around the same time in the 1990s.
Then, in many cases, we sold the future. GM sold its neo magnets division, Magnequench, to China for $70 million. A123 Systems, which invented the Lithium
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You need to feel, in your bones, that research, great ideas, without the manufacturing might to turn them into scaled products is no moat.
Packy McCormick • The Electric Slide
Every year, the number of things that can economically go electric increases as their components get cheaper and more performant. Every year, China grows its Electric Stack capabilities relative to the West. Taken together, that means that more of the physical cutting edge will be Made in China.
And as humanity infuses machines with intelligence,
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America is, implicitly or explicitly, making a bet that whoever wins intelligence, in the form of AI, wins the future.
China is making a different bet: that for intelligence to truly matter, it needs energy and action.
If you control energy and action, making intelligence abundant strengthens your position.
Packy McCormick • The Electric Slide
And in the immortal words of Joel Spolsky, "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.”
Packy McCormick • The Electric Slide
A couple of years ago, Isaiah Taylor, the founder of nuclear company Valar Atomics, told me something that’s stuck in my head ever since:
There are only really three pillars to anything around us, as far as consumable goods. We've got energy, intelligence, and dexterity .
I would generalize “dexterity” to “action.” Everything we see around us, and
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