Ian Mulvany

December 23, 2023

Some interesting facts to close out 2023.

This is a great list of factoids.

Here are my favourites, and what I think about them.

Global inequality is reducing. This goes against my intuition, which tells me I remain have strong biases about how the world works and the current state of the world

37% of the worlds population has never used the internet, which tells me we are only part of the way into reshaping the attention economy of the worlds and there will are many more hyper scale companies that have yet to be built on that.

40% of shipping is dedicated to moving fossil fuels around. That means that investment in renewables will have a compounding effect.

Insurance is reducing house sales in Florida and California, which tells me that we can’t bluff our way out of climate change and that these real economic impacts could puncture through right wing FUD.

In 2023 investment in solar will overtake investment in oil which tells me that the future direction of our economies are towards renewables, so electric engineering will be a very very attractive future career choice.

Fab 18, one of TSMC’s 13 foundries, carves and etches a quintillion transistors – “more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world”. [Wired] which tells me that I have not thought clearly enough about what production at scale looks like.

China wants to launch 13k low earth satellites. There are currently only 4500 there now. See previous thought and add to it that there remains a looming set of problems around access to space and we will probably fuck it up first and have to clean up after ourselves later.

More fish are now farmed than caught, which tells me that there might be a path forward to protect marine biodiversity.

Thanks to digital payments, India hit its 80% financial inclusion goal 41 years early. [GPFI] which tells me that digital systems can have outsized effects on economies of applied well.




About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!