Saudi Arabia is importing solar panels so they can burn less of their oil for electricity and export more, and can use more of their natural gas for petrochemical feedstocks rather than fuel. Those are economic trades. Not environmental ones.

this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…

The private equity takeover of local veterinary clinics is one of the most predatory scams happening in America right now. Last month, our 3-year-old rescue dog threw up twice and seemed a little lethargic. Just acting off. We got nervous and rushed him to the local 24-hour emergency animal hospital. Before a vet had even stepped into the room, the receptionist slid an iPad across the desk: "Emergency exam intake fee is $385 non-refundable just for the doctor to evaluate him." Fine. You pay it because you love your dog. The vet walks in, checks his gums for twenty seconds, feels his stomach, and walks back out. Five minutes later, she returns with a printed estimate: Full blood panel: $650. Abdominal ultrasound: $900. Overnight hospitalization with IV: $1,400. Exploratory sedation: $800. Total estimated cost: $3,750. I asked the vet: "He ate a weird piece of grass earlier. Can we just start with an anti-nausea injection and monitor him for a couple of hours?" The vet looked me dead in the eyes with a straight face and said: "You can do that. But if he has a complete gastrointestinal blockage, he could go septic and pass away by sunrise." Pure emotional manipulation. They know your pet is family, so they hold your empathy hostage to hit corporate revenue quotas. We declined the package, paid the exam fee, and took him home. Fed him white rice and boiled chicken. Two hours later, he drank a bowl of water, took a long nap, and was running circles around the yard by 8:00 AM the next morning. Massive private corporations bought out almost every neighborhood mom-and-pop vet clinic, turned them into profit mills, and weaponized our love for animals into maximum billing. Has modern veterinary medicine become an emotional shakedown, or are people just ungrateful for specialized care?

J'ai vu une Tesla décoller. Et j'ai entendu beaucoup de bêtises. « Ça ne sert à rien. » « Gadget de milliardaire. » « Qui a besoin d'une voiture qui vole ? » Personne. Et c'est exactement pour ça que c'est important. En 1978, Brabham a aligné en Formule 1 une voiture équipée d'un ventilateur géant à l'arrière. Il aspirait l'air sous le châssis et plaquait la voiture au sol. Elle a gagné sa première course avec une avance insolente. Elle a été interdite immédiatement. Quarante-huit ans plus tard, on y revient. Un système de succion qui colle la voiture à la route et lui permet de passer sous la seconde au 0 à 100. Personne n'a « besoin » de faire le 0 à 100 en moins d'une seconde. Comme personne n'a besoin d'une Formule 1. Et pourtant : les freins carbone de votre berline, l'hybridation de votre moteur, l'aérodynamique de votre SUV, les palettes au volant — tout ça vient de voitures de course que personne n'utilisera jamais pour aller au travail. La Formule 1 ne sert à rien. Pourtant elle sert à tout. En 1973, quand la France a lancé Ariane, l'Europe sortait de onze échecs consécutifs du programme Europa. La presse parlait d'argent jeté dans l'espace. Vingt ans plus tard, Ariane détenait la moitié du marché mondial des lancements commerciaux, et chaque satellite de télévision, de météo ou de GPS que vous utilisez a bénéficié de cette obstination. Le progrès a toujours la même tête au début : un truc inutile, cher, ridicule, construit par des gens qu'on prend pour des fous. Ce que j'ai vu à Dallas, ce n'est pas une voiture volante. C'est un châssis, une gestion de l'énergie et une maîtrise des flux d'air que l'industrie automobile mettra dix ans à digérer. Les applications viendront : sécurité, freinage, stabilité, consommation. Elles finiront dans des voitures ordinaires conduites par des gens qui expliqueront, en 2036, que tout ça était évident. La question n'est jamais « à quoi ça sert ». La question est : qui ose encore construire des choses qui ne servent à rien ? Il y a cinquante ans, c'était nous. La fusée, le TGV, le Concorde, le Minitel. L'Europe construisait des choses absurdes et magnifiques. Aujourd'hui, on commente depuis le siège arrière car nous sommes hors course. Merci @elonmusk de nous faire rêver

This is awesome 😂 This sounds insane until you’ve been on enough date nights where you spend $250 to discuss the kids’ schedules in a different building. The backstory is pretty great! A married couple in San Diego wanted to get dressed up and go to a wedding. Problem was, they’d reached the age where nobody they knew was getting married anymore. So they built a website where you can buy tickets to strangers’ weddings. And the economics actually make sense. The couple getting married has already committed to a venue minimum. Someone cancels. Now there’s an empty chair and a dinner they’re paying for either way. Meanwhile, another couple would happily pay to eat, dance, have some cake and watch a best man make a series of increasingly questionable decisions with a microphone. The hosts approve the guests. Guests verify their IDs. Everybody agrees to the arrangement. Which is arguably more vetting than your cousin’s new boyfriend received. Apparently one bride said the paying strangers brought so much energy to the dance floor that she wished she’d invited more. Of course they did. Those people specifically bought tickets to be there. Half your actual guests are attending under a treaty negotiated between their mothers. I love businesses like this. Find something people already paid for but can’t fully use. Find someone else who wants it. Make the introduction. This guy just wanted to take his wife dancing and accidentally identified a liquidity problem in the wedding market. Cue Vince Vaughn!

People ask me why I'm so obsessed with ruminants. I've given it some thought, and my conclusion is that I'm not obsessed enough. A cow walks onto a wet hillside that grows nothing a human can eat, puts her head down, and comes back with steak, butter, cream and a pair of boots. She does it with a 150 litre fermentation tank she carries inside her, stocked with more bacteria than there have ever been people, which she feeds, waters and keeps at blood heat herself. Grass goes in. The bacteria take apart the one thing no animal can digest, and she lives on what they make. Then she digests the bacteria as well. Nothing is wasted. Even the fat comes out the far side rebuilt into something stable enough to fry in. Fuel: rain and sunlight. Emissions: next year's grass. She repairs herself, builds her own replacement every spring, and improves the ground she is standing on while she works. The finest engineers alive have spent billions trying to copy one chamber of her stomach in a steel shed, and so far they have made a paste. We have leaned on that machine for everything. The word capital comes from cattle, because a herd was the first bank. Domesday Book is written on sheep, and so was every deed in England for 500 years. Ruminants clothed our armies, lit our houses and carried our laws. Civilisation is a thing that happened to people who kept them. And they are such good company about it. A sheep remembers fifty faces for two years, which is forty-six more than I manage. A cow has a best friend, and her heart rate drops when that friend is beside her. A goat that cannot solve a problem will turn and look to you for help, as a dog does, and then ignore your advice. Let a herd out onto spring grass after a winter indoors and half a tonne of animal will skip. They ask for grass, rain, and to be left to get on with it. After ten thousand years of feeding, dressing and housing us, they will still walk over to the gate to see who you are. So no, I will not be calming down.