Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (@eortizospina) • Threads, Say more

Two billion people in the world don’t have safe water to drink.

But we can’t survive long without water; so what exactly does that statistic mean? What are people drinking instead, and how does that work in daily life?

This article answers these questions: ourworldindata.org/what…

ourworldindata.org

Two billion people don’t have safe drinking water: what does this really mean for them?

eortizospina

08/11/25

When the World Bank publishes new poverty estimates, it makes headlines. But making sense of these numbers is harder than it looks! Inflation, PPPs, national poverty lines, real incomes…There’s a lot going on.

This article explains where the new numbers come from and what changed ourworldindata.org/new-i…

ourworldindata.org

$3 a day: A new poverty line has shifted the World Bank’s data on extreme poverty. What changed, and why?

eortizospina

07/24/25

1/ I’ve been thinking about how societies adapted to big technological changes like AI in the past. Cars, for instance, took us from the Ford Model T in 1908 to over a billion vehicles today, reshaping cities, routines, and daily life. I think there’s something useful here for understanding the rise of AI 🧵

eortizospina

07/24/25

2/Cars are a helpful comparison for thinking about AI, because they are useful, powerful, potentially very dangerous, and extremely common. In just over a century, we moved from the first mass-produced car to about 1.2 billion cars on the road. When you unpack this transformation, you see how complex the rewiring has been: highways, urban planning, traffic laws, licenses, commuting, fuel infrastructure, insurance, parking. Many, many things were built or reshaped.

eortizospina

07/24/25

3/ Cars brought enormous gains in mobility, independence, and convenience; but also noise, pollution, CO₂ emissions, and deaths. Much of the surrounding system was built to manage these costs. And still, ~1.2 million people die in road accidents each year.

eortizospina

07/24/25

4/ Today, very few people would want to give up cars. Our cities, routines, and connections all depend on cars. With hindsight, the tradeoffs feel acceptable to most people. But if you’d shown this to someone in 1900, convincing them to embrace it would’ve been a hard sell.

eortizospina

07/19/25

Engineering isn’t the same as plumbing or car mechanics. In fact, you can be a great mechanic without designing the machine, or a great engineer who’s worse at repairs than a mechanic.

It took me a while to realise this applies to software too. And with AI, that distinction is getting more relevant