I’m learning about the “era of the nations” thinking from Hungary’s Balázs Orbán, via an episode of a podcast called the Winston Marshall show. YouTube just randomly suggested it to me.
I just rebuild a speed queen dryer that broke with spare parts from Amazon, which revealed a remarkably simplistic engineering. Very surprised by how simplistic the mechanism was. It’s incredible how over engineered most laundry systems have become.
Also spent some time digging into the integrations between Tesla FSD and rideshare services today. It’s remarkable how much progress has happened.
Be careful what you believe from Balázs Orbán, as a Hungarian I can say he is mostly concerned to come up with a ideology to explain whatever Viktor Orbán is doing and not building a consistent model of world politics that drives actions.
Indeed. I think that’s an astute assessment. I listen to a massive variety of perspectives, and as a NATO member I think what they have to say is worth hearing at least. Thanks for your comment — appreciate it.
This is a case study in the failure of product market fit.
There is tons of room for a low cost, high quality small electric or hybrid pickup in today’s market.
Ford Maverick sales have been exceptionally strong, setting records in 2025 with 155,051 units sold in the US of A, up almost a fifth from last year.
Tesla needs to make a product that people want, and continuing to try to sell one they don’t want just won’t work. Why not pivot and build the truck people are asking for? Otherwise, this program will fail.
They should’ve released the electric tuck for the segment that wanted the maverick. Even better would e been an electric lei truck, but I don’t know if you’d be able to stack enough batteries on one of their tiny li’l frames
They will when supplies eventually dwindle. We were saved from peak oil only by the invention/cheapening of fracking followed by the advent of horizontal drilling and unlocking of oil in shales. It's unlikely any such windfall will occur again, and even if it does that merely kicks the can down the road.
All petroleum was created from ancient forests before the evolution of microorganisms that could decompose fiber, so the plant material was simply buried and gradually became petroleum. Above ground, evolution produced organisms which could break down fiber. My point being, that not only is petroleum very useful, it is exceptionally rare on a geological timeline (at least on this planet ). It's like a cosmic trust fund, and like most trust fund recipents, we utterly squandered it. We took all this free energy, burned it to power ai slop, and poisoned ourselves in the process. We should have been using that oil to push humans out of the gravity well to Titan where petroleum is abundant. But no, we wanted big cars, cheap electricity and single use utensils.
Edit: I was mistaken, confusing coal and petroleum. While petroleum comes from microscopic ocean life, coal forms from the remains of terrestrial plants.
My point is that the chemical complexity (manufacturing uses) can be reproduced, and the energy storage density also can be. So really the gift of hydrocarbons under the ground is more that readily available energy is under our feet to help propel us towards higher levels sources of energy. IMO it’s a stepping stone and that’s effectively how humanity is using it.
I feel like you’re citing the primary source material for the vast majority of us. Like, “let me find the thing that original taught me how to think about radiation pools. Ah yes, this xkcd. Yep, here’s the manual.”
Imagine if Google, which presents itself as a supporter of open source, had clear support policies so that when it ended support for a product, the open source community could take over. Think about how much e-waste that could prevent and how quickly it could make Google the default recommendation.
At this point I’ve thrown out so much Google hardware that was end of life but still operating I’ve become just the opposite — I constantly suggest people don’t use their hardware.
That’s the top seller. So… you end up with more electric than gas — because you don’t sell it.
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