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And it's even worse than that

The 33kWh per kilo of hydrogen - that's the absolute physical limit of green hydrogen production via electrolysis, assuming 100% efficient production, no leaks, no labor, no maintenance, no electricity losses, frictionless transportation and infrastructure that just magically pops up where needed. It's not the case that technology will push the price down - this is the best anyone can ever hope for

A relatively recent discovery points to macroscopic multicellular life as early as 2.1B years ago (1), right after the Great Oxidization Event. We only have fossils of a single specie. Given the complexity of the specimens, it's unlikely to have been the only specie in existence. The rest of the biota is probably lost to time.

The fossil record for Ediacarian biota (pre-Cambrian age) is also very sparse. It's only after the evolution of endo/exoskeletons that we start to get proper fossil records

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francevillian_biota

Unfortunately, noise pollution is at the very bottom of public agencies' priority list.

Even in Europe, with stricter regulators and less tolerance towards loud and obnoxious behavior, it's way too common to hear tuned motorcycles blasting 110dB engine screeches at 2AM, keeping everyone in the neighborhood awake. In theory it's not allowed, in reality the bikers can do it with impunity any time they please. Drones would at least provide some beneficial service.

imho this is the correct answer. It's also the reason why Apple seemingly can't make up their mind - making the phone thinner, wider, taller, shorter, camera notches, buttons, colors, etc. It's intentional - there must be some easily identifiable way to tell apart those with money and status from the pauper peasants who embarrass themselves with last year phones. BMW plays the same game with the grill on their cars. And the whole fashion industry is basically 100% built on this dynamic.

Just several years ago, Facebook IPO-ed at ~$90B valuation, before sliding all the way down to ~$45B. Facebook was already a giant global corporation with close to a billion active users, nearly all of them from western countries.

AfterPay's valuation puts it at two thirds of mid-2012 Facebook. Up until now, I've never heard of them

it really is much harder to self host than it used to.

90s: ask your ISP for a public IP, register your domain, start Apache and off you go

Nowadays: getting a public IP is iffy. All good domain names are taken. Emails from your self-hosted mail server go straight to spam/junk. Fiddling with TLS certificates is close to mandatory. The moment you start your server, you're bombarded by a flood of gratuitous requests, trying out every known vulnerability under the sun. etc. etc.

Based on my only social contact working in trades, the income follows a bathtub distribution - a lot of people taking below average, and a sizable minority getting upper middle class incomes, with almost nothing in between. This is the reason why we get the contradictory narratives of great fortunes in trades on one hand, and the statistics telling the opposite on the other hand.

Allegedly, the talent pool is really shallow - with a modicum of intelligence, passion and human skills, it's not that hard to make it. But most of the guys who end up studying trades are the bottom of the barrel who would do badly in any endeavor (or so I was told).

Well, it doesn't end with China. Around ~2010, once you scrub off the weasel word hedging, The Economist was predicting an imminent Eurozone breakup. It didn't predict the entirely predictable austerity recessions of 2012-2015. They were fairly bullish on Abenomics in Japan. They were very bullish on the future of BRICS around ~2008, out of which Brazil, Russia and South Africa are stagnating ever since.

Then, there's a very important tool in forming editorial slant - omitting reporting on inconvenient facts. Italy and Spain, the putatively sluggish laggards strangled by overly strict labor protection laws, have somehow overtaken the allegedly dynamic UK in labor productivity. Ireland, the purported economic wonder, have a household disposable income (a fairly good metric of material standards of living), lower than Italy and much lower than France. We keep hearing about the importance of education, competitiveness, R&D and ease of doing business, yet somehow Finland, which tops the rankings, is in year 14 of it's economic stagnation. Have you heard any of this from The Economist?

Because those better yields are there for a reason. That reason isn't lack of intermediaries, it's high inherent risks.

Economy has a risk-free rate of return, that of 1-year treasuries, at 0.05% currently. Anything above that involves risk. A rate of return of 7%/year means there's 7%-0.05% chance of the instrument being worthless after one year, ~14% chance of it losing half its value, ~28% chance of it losing a quarter of it's value, etc. There's no free lunch, and there's no financial arbitrage

This. 5-year-old state of the art is today's incubator open source, and a commodity 2 years from now. There's no reason to think autonomous driving will be an exception.

There's a large and perhaps unsolvable problem of the state of the art solutions that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should - even if the car can safely handle 99% or 99.9% of the situations, the algorithms are not really able to detect if they're in the last 0.1%. The car will slam into stationary trucks, suddenly brake for no reason, consider the tollbooth to be a bus - all with utmost confidence it's doing the right thing.

In other words - the value of proposition of autonomous driving would be completely fine if the car gives up on unarguably difficult situations and alerts the driver to take over. As of now, however, the car will boldly do something stupid and dangerous.

Since the early 2000s, the world is in a savings glut (1) situation. That means you shouldn't ask yourself a question of is asset X worth its valuation?, but rather ask the question do savings have anywhere else to go?.

Also - ignore crypto, it's a distraction. Zooming out, it's just a simple wealth transfer: dollars in => black box => dollars out. Dollars out go to miners, exchanges, scams and the lucky few who cash out. Nothing in the black box can conjure up new dollars. Once the dollar inflow stops, it's over. Crypto is not worth $1.5T, not even close, there's at most a few dozen billions in the ecosystem - a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

US tech stocks are overpriced, US startups ridiculously so (savings glut faucet flooding a small sector in search of something, anything). Real estate in a few selected locales is a bubble, but not overall.

The worrying part is not the asset prices, but what it tells us - that the largest wealth funds and corporations in the world cannot find anything worth investing in.

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut

I believe something like the following would create an uncheatable system, and therefore will obviously never be implemented:

Does a corporation want to sell their products and services in country X? Very well, they must agree to the following regulation. The country X reserves an option to, at any point in time, buy up any subsidiaries or parts of the corporation, for value based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). For example, if the accounting profit of Microsoft Germany is $0 over the past decade, the country has an option to purchase Microsoft Germany for its fair GAAP price - $0. After doing this, the country also has an option to reverse the trades the subsidiary has done. So, if Microsoft Germany sold its IP to Microsoft Ireland for the total value of $100, the country X can buy it back for $100. Repeat with Microsoft US, Microsoft UK, etc. The shareholders will be left with their extremely valuable (according to GAAP) Microsoft Ireland and Microsoft Singapore.

Any sufficiently large country with sufficiently motivated government can pull this off. No revolutionary overhaul of the existing tax system is necessary. The regulation is clear and fair. But again, it's never gonna happen.

And the "minor" difference that corporations are taxed on profits, whereas individuals are taxed on revenue

> Power2Gas for seasonal storage is a key part of all plans for decarbonization that I'm aware of

That's my understanding, too; amongst the technocrats and field-experts, power-to-gas is taken very seriously. However, amongst the public and the press, even the pop-science press, it's scarcely ever mentioned. Hydrogen, batteries, biofuels, carbon capture, and even fusion all enjoy vastly more attention. I cannot think of any explanation that wouldn't be cynical or sinister

I'm surprised why this path isn't discussed as a viable option forward, especially given how much attention is given to hydrogen, despite mountains of likely insurmountable engineering challenges that surround H2.

Production of natural gas is a somewhat inefficient, but infinitely scalable battery for renewables.

My cynical take is that there's no hype to be generated around power-to-natural-gas, and people hyping up hydrogen don't want the public to know that most of originates from breaking fossil fuels.

The question is - why did this trend arise specifically in German-speaking countries?

Chernobyl/Pripyat is in northern Ukraine, on the border with Belarus.

Ukraine is totally fine with nuclear power. Belarus plans to expand the existing plants. To the west, Slovakia's grid is mostly nuclear and is currently doing finishing touches on their new reactors. Hungary is also pro-nuclear.

The radioactive plume from Chernobyl then moved northwards, towards Baltics, reaching the populated parts of Scandinavia. Well, the grids in FIN and SWE are heavily nuclear-based, Finland is about to launch another 1500MW reactor.

So - the countries most affected by the Chernobyl disaster are unanimously pro-nuclear, while DACH countries, basically unaffected by it, are somehow in panic-mode whenever the word 'nuclear' is uttered.

Or, to put it to intuitive human scale - a cubic meter from the very core of the Sun outputs 270W - about the consumption of a single gaming console, not enough to power even a vacuum cleaner.

Coincidentally, it's roughly the power output of a square meter solar panel.

This has been the saddest part of the pandemic to me. The epistemology of health policy is completely broken - fully reliant on arguments from authority, impervious to contrary evidence, initial beliefs clutched onto until the bitter end. Opinion makers are unable to distinguish between entertaining an idea and embracing it.

This lead to predictable debacles on mask usage, airborne spread, everyone's pet theories of innate population immunity, seasonality of the virus, virus origins, etc.

And yet - there are zero calls for introspection, blameless post-mortems. Nobody seems to care.

The economy as a whole is definitely not a zero-sum game, there's plenty of evidence of that.

However, that doesn't in any way invalidate the claim that parts of the economy are in fact zero-sum. How large are those zero-sum parts - 10%? 20%? 40%? 80%? Nobody truly knows. Needless to say, the optimal survival strategy in a world of 80% zero-sum is vastly different than in the 10% world.

Also, although there's no data to back it up, I believe the zero-sum games as a proportion of our society are growing, and quite rapidly at that. It's a very worrying trend.

Battery supply is the bottleneck currently. Even if they wanted to, the automakers cannot switch to even 20% production being electric. If they offer an attractive, affordable EV, they immediately render the rest of their fleet obsolete and 90% of their factories go idle. Price is used to modulate the demand.

The writeup is brilliant, and the engineers have certainly done heroics to find a software fix for an issue that should warranted a recall.

But that doesn't exonerate Tesla in any way. Tens of thousands of customers got cars gimped with no official explanation from Tesla. It's been close to two years - that's a significant part of the vehicle's lifetime. Tesla still hasn't admitted any issues and still hasn't compensated the owners - absolute radio silence from them. It's abhorrent

Something doesn't fully add up. Ford's $40k truck is allegedly based on a 125 kWh battery. Tesla's numbers are similar. The only cars anywhere close to such a huge battery all cost close to double.

If we look at the car models with both EV and ICE versions, the EV markup tends to be huge. Hyundai Kona EV is 23k€ more than the ICE version, for 64kWh battery. Peugeot e208 is 16k€ more, for 50kWh battery. Volvo 20k€ more, for 75kWh.

And it's not just automakers. Tesla Powerwall is $8k for 13kWh. LG battery is $7k for 9kWh. Just for the battery pack, it doesn't include installation or any other equipment necessary.

So, one of these must be true:

* Ford/Tesla are overly optimistic about the battery price trajectory and the base version(s) will be a paper launch

* the public/journalists/policy makers are overly pessimistic about the battery prices and there's a huge price drop imminent

* Ford/Tesla will sell these truck at a large loss. But why?

* Consumers are being price-gouged. But why would trucks be an exemption to this?

Also, both the truck and Ford Mustang Mach-E are huge energy hogs - where are they going to source the batteries from?

Is the Netherlands in any way culpable in this - do they go the extra mile to help facilitate the evasion?

My layman understanding of the tax evasion schemes is that there's nothing special about Ireland or the Netherlands. They're chosen due to other factors, like English proficiency, stable and well known legal framework - but the essence of the schemes could be done in nearly any western country.

US economy was almost a full autarchy in the 50s and 60s - imports and exports as percentage of GDP were at all time low - at about 3-4%. Meaning 96-97% of the economy was done by Americans for Americans - it was a closed system.

The stagnation in standards of living since the 80s is fully engineered - it's a choice. Tax cuts, regulatory changes, disarming the antitrust, union busting, deregulation of finance and similar changes redistributed $47 trillion to the top 10% from 1975 through 2018 (1), enough to give every worker in the bottom 90% a raise of $1140 per month.

(1) https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...

Wealth tax, implemented properly without obvious loopholes (1) would be incredibly popular, as long as it shifts taxation from income to wealth. However, wealth taxes are unpopular when they're introduced as an additional tax burden.

It's a bit similar to how the car industry introduced gimped, ugly, overpriced electric vehicles to "prove" the public doesn't want them. The same principle - badly thought out wealth taxes in return for nothing - just to prove the public dislikes them. Malicious compliance on political level. Nothing unites mainstream political parties as much as the dislike for taxing wealth.

(1) proposals like radical markets wealth tax create an uncheatable system

The technical term for this is 'situational awareness'

> Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status

There's an bearish case to be made - not only are the state-of-the-art algorithms nowhere near this - it takes kids quite some time to acquire this skill. Playing ball games with my kids, I've noticed even a 3yo still doesn't intuitively grasp Newtonian mechanics - they're trying to catch the ball where it is now, not where it's going to be in a few seconds. 8yo - notably better, though not fine tuned yet. Heck, I know some adults who're lacking in this respect.

Reading this discussion thread makes one psychological quirk clear. People, even well informed professionals, are rarely comparing Apple to the best available alternative on the market (arguably Ryzen U line processors). They're comparing 2021 Apple products to their last experience with an alternative, which for many ppl stuck in Apple's ecosystem could very well be from 2010.

So what's Apple's end-game? Milking (predominately US) professional class in perpetuity. It's not like they're going to switch, especially if they perceive the alternative to be sluggish heavy bricks whose battery barely lasts 2 hours. For sales, perception is more important than reality.

> why have the greater financial markets become so wonky, why has the behavior of investors changed so radically

Since the global saving glut (1), the best question to ask of crazy asset valuations is not "does it reflect the fundamental value?", but "does the money have anywhere else to go?"

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_saving_glut

> BitCoin's major purpose is as a hedge to massive fiat printing

Do you know what else is a great inflation hedge? An index of stocks. Unlike BTC, the stocks also pay dividends, are backed by real economic activity, enjoy massively lower volatility, don't suffer from large fees, are never going to be banned, aren't tainted by endemic fraud and scam, and even produce a tiny bit of societal good. Stocks are objectively a better inflation hedge than BTC in just about every aspect, apart from not being a novel tech bro toy.