New on elidourado dot com:
Dozens of human societies have collapsed, going from a high level of sociopolitical complexity to a much lower one—rapidly, within the span of a few decades.
Would we know if it was about to happen to us?
The 2009 stimulus put $8 billion into high-speed rail, which hasn’t resulted in any high-speed rail after 13 years.
It costs infinity dollars per mile to build high-speed rail in the US.
People.
Bitcoin does not solve banking or bank runs.
Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second.
If 300 million Americans wanted to do one Bitcoin transaction each it would take 496 days.
Agree with Balaji. Elon is singular.
He also shares his engineering secrets. I think nothing would please him more than if a thousand other hardware founders rigorously followed his five-step process.
Hardware is hard.
That’s why Elon is by far the greatest founder of all time.
Remember — countless startups die just while trying to put stationary beige boxes on desktops. Very smart people get crushed by supply chain disruptions, or China tariffs, or lockdowns, or shipping…
mRNA cancer therapy works (in mice).
Original paper:
“Nineteen of 20 mice treated with the four-component mixture had complete tumor regression.”
Human trial now recruiting:
This is $820 per U.S. household. A Starlink terminal costs $499.
How about we just buy a Starlink terminal for every household that wants one and doesn't have access to fixed broadband?
Would save $80B.
Obviously not everyone wants to live in one of these. But if we had a few of them placed in high-priced city centers, that would mean lower housing costs for everyone, including people in idyllic suburbs (if that’s where you want to live).
The Regent International apartment building in Hangzhou, China, has over 20,000 people living in it. The building is 206 meters tall and has 36 to 39 floors. It has swimming pools, barber shops, nail salons, medium-sized supermarkets, and internet cafes.
Crazy idea you all will hate for solving ransomware:
Make ransomware legal except you can only charge individuals $100 and organizations $5000.
Legality induces entry into the ransomware industry so that we quickly find all the obvious security holes without catastrophic cost.
My son knows that the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire and that the Galactic Republic became the Galactic Empire, and now he’s worried about the Dominican Republic.
This winter is going to suck.
- Russia is going to invade Ukraine
- Europe is going to freeze
- China’s Zero Covid policy + ineffective vaccines are going to fail against Omicron in a massive wave
- Supply chain fallout from 👆 could be legit
Happy solstice. Buckle up.
New blog post:
Is the Great Stagnation ending?
What technologies am I watching in the decade ahead?
Are we going to get life extension treatments soon?
5700+ words on all of this. Please read and share!
Non-space people, pay attention, this is huge.
SpaceX is building a factory to churn out a Starship—the most powerful and most advanced launch vehicle in history, capable of taking 150 tons to Mars—every 72 hours. For $5M/each.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975.
In the entire history of the agency, no license initially submitted to the NRC has yet begun operations. 🤯
This looks stupidly unsafe yet amazingly cool.
It’s an ultralight sold as a homebuilt kit, so highly unregulated, no pilot’s license required.
$92k. First deliveries in 2022.
Today is the 50th anniversary of one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history: the ban on supersonic flight over the US.
It's why we're not flying NY-LA in 90 minutes.
Congress can end the ban this year. Make America boom again.
OK, folks, here it is:
The absolute best place to track the election tonight is on my site.
All data refresh every 2 minutes. You get an electoral map, a state-by-state Monte Carlo simulation, and lots of sortable tables.
Go ahead, melt my servers.
I had never considered before that we might solve terrorism by becoming so collectively stupid that no one can agree who perpetrated the attack. No point in terrorizing if you don’t get the credit!
In most countries, if they want college-educated people, they have to grow them from scratch and pay all the K-12 expenses, etc.
Here in the US they just fall into our lap fully formed.
It would feel like cheating, if only we were smart enough to take full advantage.
Body fat has 37 kJ of energy per gram. Converting to battery units, that’s 10,278 Wh/kg.
The best lithium-ion battery packs on the mass market today are around 270 Wh/kg.
So human biology is still 38x as good as lithium-ion batteries.
A lot of room to get better.
I'm fascinated by the fact that cargo airships get more efficient as they get bigger, forever.
How far can we push it?
My friends and I hired an engineer to design us the biggest flying object ever to find out.
Healthcare is 18% of GDP. Housing is 16% of GDP. Together 34%.
There is no amount of protectionism or “good jobs” policy that will help the working class more than dramatically increasing productivity in these two sectors.
Air pollution reduces global life expectancy by 2.2 years on average.
That’s more than alcohol use, unsafe water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS, and malaria combined.
Is everyone posting their ChatGPT custom instructions? Can we make that a thing? Here is my current set:
I don't need caveats about safety or complexity of the topic, warnings that I should consult an expert, or other disclaimers. Please just answer the question as directly as…
EPIC. FDA has agreed that
@loyalfordogs
’s first drug supports a reasonable expectation of large dog lifespan extension.
Congrats
@celinehalioua
and team!
The damage from scientific institutions not being 100% honest with the public is massive. Want to know why some people don’t trust science? It’s because some scientists are playing (crappy, ineffective) politics.
A lot of people think we should inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool the earth.
They’re wrong.
We should inject calcium carbonate. It’s more reflective.
This is some real clown shit from the Biden administration. Complete betrayal of our allies while producing negative climate value as Europe will mine more lignite.
FULL STATEMENT: And it's official. The White House announces a "temporary pause" on pending approvals of American LNG export terminals.
The statement is below, and links here to the comuniqué itself: and a White House factsheet:
An amazing thing about Elon is that he will tell you the specifications of his product as it’s under development as well as his thought process about it.
He knows none of his competitors can take that info and catch up. He is completely unafraid of that.
I haven’t blogged about cryptocurrency in a couple years, so here’s a 4200-word weekend post summarizing my current thinking. Basically, I think Ethereum is the only game in town. This is sure to make me a lot of friends.
Unpopular take: I think we will come to regret doing a bunch of infrastructure subsidies (easy) before figuring out how to make it easier to build infrastructure (hard).
Order matters.
One of my motivating beliefs is that a lot of people are stupid and it’s up to the smart and competent people to *actually deliver growing prosperity for everyone* so that the stupid people don’t feel the need to roll up their sleeves and get involved in policy.
China has 70k+ people who are now immune. Free visas for anyone who has recovered from COVID who wants to work in NYC hospitals or other surging places.
My latest:
If we want to avoid possible looming stagflation, we must turn away from boomer clown policies and act now to increase the productive capacity of the economy.
Omg. Article 7 requires every “economic agent” to accept bitcoin.
It’s going to be interesting since the entire Bitcoin blockchain only has enough throughput to allow every Salvadoran to do one L1 transaction every 20 days (assuming no one else in the world uses it at all).
Daughter after counting her small money stash: Daddy, money’s not the most important thing, right?
Me: Right, real resources are the most important thing.
This thing (well, a bigger version of it) is going to fly much sooner and for way less money than you think and the market size is a hell of a lot bigger than space launch.
I've kept a pretty low (online) profile of what I'm building, but word's getting out.
My company Astro Mechanica has invented a new kind of jet engine. Unlike any existing engine, it's efficient at every speed. Because it's efficient at every speed, we can use it in a new way:…
DARPA selected us to further develop the concept of building a moon-based railroad network that would transport humans, supplies and resources for commercial ventures. Learn more:
Nice column from
@ezraklein
.
If Democrats want a concrete supply-side agenda:
Unlimited clean energy <2¢/kWh
Healthcare costs <10% of GDP (w/ quality improvements)
Median home price < 3x med household income
All infrastructure permits issued <6 months
Twitter needs to do a better job of protecting these OSINT accounts. Russian controlled accounts are reporting them for fake violations and Twitter has been algorithmically suspending them for 12 hours.
Twitter is part of the battlefield now.
What really worries me the most (and IMO was demonstrated today) is that any Russian invasion will almost certainly include some form of mass reporting in order to disable smaller OSINT accounts.
Politico: “Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change.
Two years later, the program has yet to…
Want to know another totally predictable catastrophe we are underprepared for?
A large solar coronal mass ejection. There would be no electricity and no Internet access for months as we tried to replace long-lead-time equipment like power transformers.
Have a nice day.
For the first 99.9% of human history, the wealth of the wealthy was taken through plunder rather than made through meeting others’ needs. But Bezos didn’t plunder anyone. The increasingly expressed desire to cut down billionaires is a result of obsolete evolutionary conditioning.
Monday: Protein folding solved
Tuesday: Ethereum 2.0 launches
Wednesday: SpaceX Starship hop to 50,000 feet (space gods willing)
A lot of pressure on Thursday right now to be honest.
It is absolutely mind-blowing to me
that in this age of deep polarization
the one thing our Members of Congress can agree on
is that they must punish
the only industry that is doing what it is supposed to be doing.
Bad way to start 2023: realize that you had $3.5M in Bitcoin stolen from you yesterday.
If a Bitcoin developer can’t safely store his own keys, normal people can’t either. We are very far from scaling self-custody in crypto.
It’s conceivable that AI will help us discover new, highly-targeted drugs at a very rapid pace.
It seems very mismatched with our current drug approval regime.
It's weird that consciousness can result from matter, but what really makes my head explode is wondering whether the universe has other consciousness-like phenomena that we don't experience but in principle could.
Re-upping this.
Biden’s Council on Environmental Quality is trying to amend NEPA implementing rules to give weight to Indigenous Knowledge instead of just science.
Among many other changes that increase environmental review’s legal attack surface.
Have never seen gas fees on Ethereum this high. $70M burned in the last hour. Turns out the ape jpeg people are getting scammed into to buying fake ape land or something.
How to make everyone rich:
1) Clean energy too cheap to meter
2) A step change in transportation speed and quality
3) Abundant housing supply
4) Much longer life expectancy
If you don't know what to do with your life, consider working on one of these.
NEW POST: I have a nagging worry that AI will be like smartphones. It will change our lives, but it won’t address the major bottlenecks in the economy. If we’re complacent, stagnation will continue.
also underappreciated: reading actual textbooks long after you’ve left formal school
I have a whole spiel about the chasm that is adult learning. Remarkably few people continue to digest structured or didactic content when they don’t “have” to
Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this.
As a member of
@SenateAgDems
and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers. 🇺🇸
Literally every part of the economy is hampered by insane rules that only rise to national consciousness when the situation reaches crisis levels.
A great way to run a country. This will end well.
1) Repeal all baby formula tariffs (tariff rate quotas)
2) Require the FDA to allow the importation of any formula approved by a competent regulator (EU, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, etc)
3) Reform WIC (eg, no more sole source contacts)
Glioblastoma is a kind of brain cancer that until now has been a swift death sentence.
In a trial in human patients, a therapeutic mRNA vaccine appears to work!
.
@cgousu
's Dr.
@elidourado
testifies before the Joint Economic Committee: “There is a slogan that represents one vision of the future: ‘Electrify everything.’ Like all slogans, it oversimplifies.”
Libertarians: We want open borders, upzoning, occupational licensing reform, criminal justice reform, drug decriminalization, school choice, and taco trucks on every corner.
FDR-worshipper (!): Clearly this is all a racist dog-whistle.
FDA says it will take three weeks to review/approve Pfizer’s EUA application, but they should just approve the application immediately and then revoke the authorization if they discover anything worrying in the paperwork in the next three weeks.
Cryptocurrency will never work because if you make a mistake sending money it’s impossible to reverse the transaction like in the legacy banking system. Oh wait.
Any energy abundance agenda is inherently low carbon.
A Kardashev Type I civilization powered entirely with Earth’s fossil fuel reserves would last only 45 days.