Yes, Rolf Degen's tweets are an excellent example of that. Twitter format is a great match to his purpose, providing succinct summaries of scientific journal articles in Psychology.

The notion that "If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it" is differently attributed to various famous smart people, Einstein and Feynman, among them.

Forcing an explanation into a Tweet-sized limit plausibly improves clarity. Strunk & White exorted "“Omit needless words!” and nothing motivates precision like a hard character limit.

So what would be the economics of adapting rail freight to Boring Company tunnels? Consider the costs and benefits of underground vs above-ground long-distance rail freight.

Costs:
- boring tunnels

Benefits:
- no contention for rights-of-way and its concomitant construction delays.
- reduced expenses (less time, less rail, less energy) from more direct routes. under, instead of around cities. under, instead of around geological barriers (rivers, hills, mountains, rivers).
- no bridges overpasses, underpasses to construct, inspect and maintain.
- no eminent-domain land seizures
- no vehicle intersections to maintain
- no accidents at intersections
- invulnerability to weather
- arbitrary location of spur lines, reducing intermodal transfer from trains to trucks.
- reduced maintenance of rail infrastructure outside of weather.
- no track obstructions from falling trees and rock.
- confined derailments
- greatly reduced opportunities for theft and vandalism.

Assume you did not just run trains as-is through tunnels but adapted rail technology to make electric freight trains in long-distance tunnels practical. And running stuff at freight speeds, you could throw out the rediculous complexities of hyperloops, because at lower speeds air compression ahead of the moving vehicle is not a big deal.

It's freight. Slowish, without a view, completely automated, without a lot of emergency human evacuation provisions is ok. The freight does not care.

So, accounting for all the costs and benefits, how low does the cost of boring need to drop to get to breakeven with above-ground rail anywhere? Of course, congested areas such as up-and-down the east coast would be the most advantageous.

The full video interview is here.

“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” --Milton Friedman

repatriations --> reparations

Well, I agree, but would add that Russia will likely suffer effects more devastating from sanctions than those of prolongation alone. Sanction hysteresis is a real thing; historically, they have not been removed when crossing backward across the same condition that provoked them. In particular, Russia will likely have to meet these conditions for the revocation of sanctions:

1. Pay repatriations to Ukraine. Russia will be paying for everything that Putin blows up in Ukraine and for everyone he murders.

2. Surrendering Russians accused of war crimes to the International Criminal Court. That killing or surrendering Putin becomes explicitly necessary to get out from under sanctions places a huge price on his head within Russia.

From the summary:

While the cow-free milk "will likely still trigger allergic responses" for individuals allergic to dairy....

Those of us allergic to real milk because we have alpha-gal allergy should not have allergic reactions to the new animal-free milk.

China has a tremendous advantage in South America because paying bribes is a prerequisite for doing business there and U.S. corporations are legally prohibited from paying foreign bribes.

from this report from Harvard and MIT:

from wikipedia, here:

That effect has been common knowledge among experts for a long time, I heard the United States Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs in the 1980's remark then that it placed U.S. businesses at a significant disadvantage when operating in third-world countries.

I believe the correct moral calculus here is 1) the government should have no more power to confiscate the DNA of a rape victim than of any other citizen and 2) The government should have no power to confiscate the DNA of a citizen not suspected of a crime, because that is an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

So ya, conclusion is, they should not be doing that.

When it collapsed in 1982 DeLorean was not the first automotive startup to fail against The Big Three. Tucker had failed about 32 years earlier, around 1950. Circumstances were similar at both DeLorean and Tucker: Both were startup companies with innovative designs challenging the large manufactures and both collapsed as a result of unsuccessful lawsuits brought by the U.S. federal government. Both Tucker and DeLorean prevailed in court, but the legal fees, loss of reputation and diminished investor trust destroyed them. Particularly in the case of Tucker, it was alleged that the legal attacks were conducted by the government at the behest of larger auto companies. Especially suspicious, the federal War Assets Administration (established after the war) prohibited Tucker from obtaining steel.

A DeLorean reboot today will not confront that. Large auto companies have become total slackers when it comes to using their wealth and influence to illegitimately suppress competition. Tesla blew right past those behemoths, which did no even notice until they were about a decade behind on R&D. Boutique manufactures such as Icon are thriving, I think the waiting list is like two years and their prices are astronomical. In fact, Ford recruited Icon founder Jonathan Ward to consult on the new Bronco design (and it shows), which says something about who has the influence in automotive design these days; It's the startups. Franz von Holzhausen, rockstar automotive designer, abandoned big auto for Tesla when it was relatively tiny.

None of this is to say that the new DeLorean corp will not screw it up, rather, the point is only that the major force which acted against its predecessor, the anti-competitive and malevolent collusion between big government and bug business, is sufficiently diminished in that sector to permit success. Though new DeLorean has other advantages as well, there has been a revolution in the affordability of design, prototyping and low-volume remanufacturing, as a result of ubiquitous advanced CAD/CAM tools and robust JIT material supply chains.

One impetus behind the revival of nuclear is that Europe recently commissioned studies examining how much wind and solar they will need to fully replace existing energy sources and satisfy future needs. The answer was that they will need to mow down every living tree in Europe to cover the entire landscape with wind turbines and solar panels.

So Germany and France are running in opposite directions with that finding.

Germany is enthusiastically pursuing the "we need to destroy the environment to save it approach," having commenced destruction of about 5,000 acres of pristine 1,000 year-old forest to put up wind turbines.

Wind and solar have terrible space efficiency and those are hard limits established by the density of the energy in the environment. It is a definite impossibility to engineer your way around that. Then, also, the intermittency problem of those requires spending several times the GDP of your nation on batteries.

France is going 180 degrees the other direction by choosing the smallest possible energy footprint. The power density of nuclear is a zillion times higher than wind and solar.

Fission works now and has feasible potential for orders-of-magnitude improvements in price per kWh. Unlike with wind and solar, there is a lot of room to engineer big improvements. Advanced small modular reactors mean not every reactor is a one-off design built on-site, but instead comes off a factory production line, greatly reducing design, manufacturing, licensing and construction costs. Passively safe designs rule out the possibility of meltdowns. Experimental seawater harvesting if fissionable materials continues to improve, with the possibility of a virtually endless supply of fuel. Even just modernizing conventional reactor design has reduced the number of parts to about 1/4 of a 1970s design. Wave reactor research continues to advance, improving the recyclability of fuel. Estimates are that with wave reactors and sea water harvesting we have enough fissionable materials on earth for about a billion years at current energy consumption levels, which might be enough time to get fusion reactors to breakeven.

Yes it does, because that waste exists into the future and fusion potentially changes the economic viability of wave reactors which that waste would fuel; If fusion reactors undercut and supplant wave reactors, that could make burying the waste a better choice.

Suppose in the future electricity generated from natural gas has price x. Suppose that also electricity generated by wave reactors has price x/2. So we should keep the fissionable waste instead of burying it, right? Because we will want it to fuel wave reactors? But what if also electricity generated from fusion is price x/100? or x/y? The bigger y, the better the choice to bury that waste instead of using it to fuel wave reactors.

So, what you said, but the opposite.

Agree. This sounds more like government contractors finding a big new trough to feed at than it does a rational scheme for waste disposal. The planning horizon is 100,000 years, so you'd think they could continue to store that spent fuel on-site for a few decodes until we know if wave reactors will work.

Make up some number like about 20 years from now. By then, so much of the uncertainty about whether to bury that forever or fission it will be resolved. Wave reactors will or will not prove viable by then. Fusion will or won't work and will be less or more economical than wave reactors. Ok, maybe not 20 years, maybe 30. The overall point is, burying that stuff is not now known to be the correct decision, however uncertainty reduces on a decade timescale and the act of burying it commits you to a geological timescale.

That is like, I will travel the world continuously three years, but I will plan the entire trip in the next 8 hours.

Sweden should plan now to plan better later.

Snopes rates that as False.

You are wrong.

Neil Young did not try to prove Joe Rogan's statements to be false. He tried to shut him up.