as i think about buying property sometime in the near future, i’ve been forced to ask a harder question: where do i actually think the world is headed over the next 10–20 years? it’s hard to watch the world’s best places be politically squandered, an unforced, civilizational-scale error. competence isn’t disappearing, but systems that protect and compound it seem increasingly fragile. a singapore-like state inserted into the right climate zone would dominate. a vandenberg autonomous region? a new city-state in southern africa? maybe it’s just tel aviv. i suspect many people would trade civic freedom for market freedom and basic safety, if there were a place that reliably delivered both, especially in a great med climate. people don’t want utopia; they want things that work. the world is shaped by a very small, relatively fixed cohort of people — maybe 10k. that number doesn’t scale much with population; it’s constrained by trust, relationships, mentorship, and the limits of high-level coordination. everyone else lives in the wake of their decisions — we call that history. renaissance periods happened when a large share of that group clustered in one place long enough for ideas to collide and mature. this is where I, and many others, want to be. the real question is where competence is still allowed to take root and compound over decades. many point to austin, miami, and similar cities. as for me, cali is still worth trying to save a little longer. civilization pushed west until it found one of the most productive and progressive places in history. CA is civilization’s terminus. maybe we can hold on here a little longer. we are at the end of the map, there’s nowhere else to go