To refer back to the trite business book section - making something new is a Blue Ocean Strategy approach. Fighting for existing market share is a bloodied Red Ocean approach that Thiel called “competition is for losers”. So both benevolent and be greedy approaches recommend the same. Make a new puddle for everyone to swim in and you can focus on empathy instead of defense.
I’ve had several senior neighbours who passed away, after decades of living alone. We’ve always helped each other in one way or another and when they passed, in all cases I thought back about the last time we talked. In all cases the conversations remembered involved kindness. Either from then to us or from us to them and them being grateful. It’s what remains.
Giving kindness is most satisfying. It makes the receiver happy, but it makes you happy as well in a wat that kind of lasts. It’s an interaction that compounds on both sides. I think that’s why church groups, and mentorships, ans teaching, and advisory roles are satisfying. Teaching, giving, coaching all make life far more vibrant emotionally, and far less lonely.
Giving grows the pie, while zero sum games see it as affixed. Trying to compete in the latter will make you lonely. Trying to grow the pie in any kind of local community might make you see things differently.
I'll counter this comment with "watch who you spend your time with". I picked up that nugget from a successful (and happy) guy in North Carolina who does development and has really turned around the small town he lives in with his strategy for revitalization.
He also said to make your bed every morning, which I have done for years. Highly recommend this as it is an act of self care.
Yes, kindness is great, but so is being direct and knowing what you want for yourself. There's literally zero point being kind to someone who is going to take your energy.
If you have community, being kind is a great strategy, but if you are alone then it can be hard (and somewhat risky) to try to go include yourself in a group, especially if you are hurting. The risk is predatory behaviors from others seeing your weakness.
Personalized ads enable personalized lying by advertisers. Politicians in the 2016 election would target voters for party with enraging content while the other got shadow posts that lied to them about their candidate in a way that would not be seen, to discourage them from voting (Source: Careless People book).
Need is valid. The site is showing mostly flood watch warnings - maybe cluster topics? Also don’t mess with the scroll bar - maybe the ads are doing it, but it froze and wouldn’t move down for a while.
Thank you -- yes, the non-signed in front page needs some work. There's a lot of flood warnings, but if you choose topics with an account it should be a better experience.
And thank you for flagging the scroll thing. I hadn't seen it, but will check.
If everything is local, why the subscription? That 150 is instant incentive for me to prompt my own on Claude and get a more personal outcome right away. Margin comes from a moat, and local LLM is the opposite of that, especially if you need internet to verify subscription for local use at any point.
Fun fact - some of it may be a subset of all data and with trimmed outlying points, so when you set some stop loss conditions they get tripped in the real world, but not by your dataset. Get data from my sources.
Rare earth minerals are often all over the place, they are just very messy to get to and that gets in the way of EU pollution regulations. China is not a sole producer - they are just cheap enough to make mining elsewhere not worth the hassle. That will change fast if they bottleneck the supply.
There's a big find in Norway, largest in Europa according to new estimates[1].
The updated estimate shows that the total rare earth oxide (TREO) content in the mapped resources (Indicated and Inferred) has increased from 8.8 million tonnes in 2024 to 15.9 million tonnes in 2026 – an increase of approximately 80 percent. For the first time, parts of the resource are also classified in the Indicated category, reflecting a higher degree of geological confidence
The WSP report further shows that the proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (NdPr) can be increased from approximately 17 to 19 percent of TREO. These REEs are regarded by the European Commission as the most critical raw materials in terms of supply risk and are important in the manufacturing of permanent magnets for EVs, green energy and defence.
There's no mine there yet though, and they haven't yet determined if it's economically viable. So yeah.
And once enough panels start nearing the end of their lifetime, it's likely that we should be able to recover nearly all the rare earth minerals from them with proper recycling. They don't actually get used up the way, say, fossil fuels do.
Solar panels contain negligible amounts of rare earths, compared to the amount used in wind / gas / steam turbines. They're also still used in oil & natural gas refining (though less than in the past).
Fossil fuel generators are most reliant on them, wind less so, solar barely at all.
Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
> Oh, I completely agree—but they're so frequently used as a gotcha for why the rise of solar is just trading one "foreign master" for another. "Oh no, solar panels rely on rare earth minerals, so that means you have to kowtow to China!!!"
> And it's true that there is some in them, so it's good to have at least a long-term answer for how we deal with them.
It's the old saying about a man and fish and giving vs. teaching.
Solar panels bought now, at least the quality glass-glass kind, doesn't really go bad in a way that makes them depreciate at-all-quickly.
If in locations that are not themselves at a premium, so lower yield only matters if maintenance overhead per yield becomes so bad it's cheaper to replace& upgrade, they can be expected to stay there for 30~50 years depending on how fast they'll mechanically fall apart after their warranty expires (which is expected to be the duration until which most stay alive). I'd guess something like an agricultural east/west fence install would stay more towards 50y and get individual modules replaced when they break, as they're easy to get to unlike roof/wall installs and the like where they're hard to get to and given they are very low complexity in mounting system ("fence panel") there's little engineering complexity in retrofitting a plain new future panel of the same physical size and sufficiently similar voltage/current.
I grew up in a world that didn’t have secure corporate jobs as a thing. That’s most of the world outside the US. There, you could get secure government jobs (if you come from the right family or connections) or you had to learn how to build a business yourself. Anything else, paid barely livable wage if at all.
The way to survive it was to 1) move to a village/small town where you could have a garden for fruits, vegetables, corn, chickens, maybe a pig or two for winter. 2) Young people lived with their parents while the parents saved up to build/buy their children their own flat or house. Children whose parents saved up enough would often start a family after getting their own place. Those who didn’t, co-lived with parents.
The secure middle class corporate employment in the US is getting severely downgraded by AI. While there is talk of universal basic income the reality is that many many companies depend on the surplus that middle class families enjoy spending and without it, vast swaths of industries will get starved as well. The solution is to show people quickly how to hunt and gather and farm as makers instead of just employees. Figuring out what is needed, taking on a small corner of needs somewhere in meat space or online, and planting there. AI has been fantastic at helping even solo founders with that. They need to encourage a cornucopia of ideas and experimenters as early as k12. They need to set up more favorable conditions for handling the admin side as well.
If the US government does not encourage cornucopia of AI-powered small business entrepreneurship and lets monopolies squash that early, they will end up with far FAR worse conditions. Any monopoly who keeps pitching “universal basic income” while actively avoids paying taxes, will end up forced into more taxes.
Big tech needs to make room for people to build and grow businesses (looking at you, Apple, for copying every successful app with a native, and you Meta for eating every social competitor) or they will end up paying for everyone’s universal basic income and then some.
If this country wants to survive the AI era, it needs to remove the pink glasses of “secure corporate job” and teach people how to plant, hunt, and gather as independent players in the market really fast.
Putin’s war ambitions profit most from the scare around Hormuz. His sanctions get removed to provide alternative supply, he can charge exorbitant prices, and he gets leverage. Since he is also providing targeting information for Iran to shoot at, it feels like this is an avatar joystick war for him to distract from his Ukraine disaster.
Always strange how the Trump administration’s policies always seem to have a benefit for Russia… Just a fluke coincidence that keeps happening I guess.
They already won the war in Ukraine when they got the US to drop support. Greenland “war” pro Russia. Iran, oh what a surprise, Russia gets a fuel waiver from the US. All of this is a net benefit to Russia, yes. With all blame going to the US. The fact Russia is //providing targets// to the US shows this is definitely something they are excited about.
The Trump administration is slowly strangling Russia and China’s allies. First Syria, then Venezuela. Cuba is struggling without Venezuela oil. We’re bombing the life out of their drone supplier Iran.
The Trump administration is slowly strangling it's European allies.
And China is buying oil on the global market with money just like everyone else. Unless you are advocating for an oil embargo on China in which case congratulations you just started WW3.
> The Trump administration is slowly strangling it's European allies.
Perhaps, but this is ultimately orthogonal to the discussion “is this good or bad for Russia?”
I’m not sure what the intent of your reply is here but I’ve not advocated for violence. Simply pointed out that it’s countering the Russia-China bloc countries.
Putin mainly benefits from the increased price of oil - black-market oil prices are a discount relative to standard-market oil, so he'll have a much healthier budget, even if his sanctions stay "airtight".
China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.
> China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land,
No, they don't. 54% of their oil comes from the middle east. Only 20% comes from Russia.
China does have a healthy oil reserve at the moment, so this may be marginally less bad for them. And yes, their electricity comes from renewables, but like in any other country, all of their logistics run on diesel.
By starting this war, the United States, unsatisfied with flipping the table on bilateral trade with other countries just flipped the table on multipolar international trade. What a time to be alive.
But at least for now, their fret trains have limited reach. They have a big country, with sparse population once you leave the coastal areas. I think this will help them push their railroad infrastructure though.
It's not a sparse population until you're significantly further inland than Chengdu. A billion people are living in an area that's roughly comparable to west-of-missippi USA. It's cities and high-density farmland, nothing else. If there's a few square meters of unoccupied space, somebody planted vegetables there.
The ability to transfer a lot of money in the physical shape of brand watches costing 200k per piece may have added to their appeal. AppleTV’s show Friends and Neighbours upselling their value as Jon Hamm tries to steal them from neighbours may be product placement. But these were all tactics from the 50s and 60s where relatively few media sources meant you could buy your way into the hearts of the masses with an ads campaign.
Today we have a massively accelerated pace of society burning through fads and information - largely due to social media. The artificial scarcity trick is no longer an MBA secret. A brand, especially an AI brand, can burn in and out of favor in days. Transparency in society helps maybe bring out authenticity. Advertising of the past was often “advertising to your weaknesses” and that game is over.
If we can structure the transparency and apply it to politicians and other less transparent institutions that count on “Brand” to the list (especially ones with high margins and large networks) maybe the world will see true competition that benefits everyone more. Lack of transparency (and liqidity, and availability) are what make trust bubbles that distort markets.
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