The argument is that the wooly mammoth actually helps counteract the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere:
"When the herds of northern megaherbivores were killed off by humans ten millennia ago, Zimov says, the largest biome on earth, called the “mammoth steppe,” converted from grassland to boreal forest and tundra. In these days of global warming, thawing tundra is releasing greenhouse gases, whereas grassland fixes carbon." [0]
There is a really great documentary about Stewart Brand, We Are as Gods, that also covers this project. [1]
I had the same question - it appears the We Are as Gods documentary is not out yet. According to IMDB, it will be released in March 2021 at the SXSW film festival (March 16-20).
One of the problems with offshore wind in the US is the depth of the ocean off the coasts of areas that actually have high wind. It's like God gave the middle finger to the US in this regard but it's something technology could potentially solve for. Much of the eastern US coastline has huge drop offs not far off the coast of windy areas. You need a max depth of ~50 meters for a good sized turbine to be installed. Florida is one of the most viable places but alas, not very windy.
I don't know much about the potential for California though. Has it not been invested in due to seismic risks? Or is it mainly a factor of coastal homeowners lobbying against it?
The US has a huge "wind belt" from the Texas panhandle north to Canada.[1] Big, flat open spaces where there are roads. Higher winds are available in the mountains, but installation and maintenance gets expensive. HVDC lines to Texas, the West Coast, and the Midwest will be needed to exploit that power.
California has four good on-land wind areas, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Time to look elsewhere.
There's an HVDC line that intends to colocate along railroad right of way to route from Iowa to Illinois [1] to get clean wind power to load centers. Lots of railroad right of way [2] to get renewable generation to load centers. Throw some fiber down while you’re at it, we can always use more fiber everywhere.
There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California, so one would think that it would be straightforward to add wind. However the laws are such that existing practice is privileged and allowed, and changes are easily challenged by only a tiny number of people. So we will see if CA is able to deploy anything new off the coast.
> There is a ton of offshore oil in Southern California
There was a lot of offshore drilling before 1969,
before blow-out protectors were required,
until one big spill at the cusp of the environmental
movement turned most of the California coast against
oil drilling, and anything like it offshore, even,
ironically, off-shore wind farms - for now.
I was one of those people who had endless lists of business ideas, but struggled with analysis paralysis. It was difficult to know whether an idea was good enough to invest resources in before starting.
Throughout 2020, I was wrapping up my MBA at NYU Stern and received a fellowship from NYU’s Innovation Labs to work on new startup ideas. This led me on an academic journey to study the frameworks that make startup ideas successful.
It’s like mental models for startups. Some of the frameworks are well known. Others were developed through my own primary research and include case studies you won’t find from searching the web. Favorite frameworks include:
The Export Framework: How to find proprietary tools used within the businesses that developed them in order to pursue a broader market.
The Luxury to Commodity Framework: How to make expensive things cheaper and more available.
The Second Order Effects Framework: How to identify an event and extrapolate new business opportunities that are several steps ahead of the present.
Each lesson includes a framework + case study + exercise to help you apply that framework to come up with relevant ideas yourself.
Case studies range from well known companies like Peloton to lesser known ones like Alto, AirGarage, and Jamf. Not every case is tech focused. One of my favorite case studies covers how Chobani went from unknown startup to the #2 yogurt maker in the world using one of the lesser known frameworks in the course.
To build this, I leveraged Arist’s (YC S20) platform to create an engaging course delivered via daily text messages or WhatsApp. It’s a really interesting approach to creating engaging learning curriculums.
Each day, you receive a text with a new framework + case study + exercise. Why text? Because the open rates are way better than email. This way you WILL learn and not give up. So if you are actually trying to learn and remember the material, this is an effective format to do so.
Learning about Stamets and reading his books opened up a whole new appreciation of nature for me. Starting with learning how to identify wild edible mushrooms, you then have to learn about different types of trees, seasonal patterns, weather, etc. It’s a great hobby that helps you learn about the interconnectedness of everything in nature while benefitting from delicious and healthy treats along the way. One of the most fun memories of this last year was stumbling across a patch of morels in the spring (one of the rarest and most delicious mushrooms that can only be found in the wild for a few weeks in early spring). I’ve even started making some of the extracts described in this article at home (tinctures of reishi, chaga, and lion’s mane) and enjoy sharing them with friends and family.
If you don't have it already his book "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms" is an indispensable guide for growing many species of mushrooms, including morels, at any scale. Coincidentally, it contains his observation of bees sucking on King Stropharia mycelium before the insight they might be doing it to self medicate.
Another argument for justifying the run up in price is that investors see the promise of TSLA being more than just a car company. The future of the Solar City division means that part of the company can be viewed almost as a utility co. There is a data play too. With an ever growing volume of Teslas on the road, all stocked up with the very latest in sensor technology, the company collects tons of valuable data not just for maps but also for Real time road conditions and traffic. At some point, they may find lucrative ways of monetizing that. Then we look at just the trends for their core product, the cars. The crazy thing that Tesla is doing is turning all other luxury cars into Cadillacs (ie products for old people). They are doing the same thing to Mercedes and BMW that the Apple Watch did to Rolex. If you want to signal that you are part of the new rich, you buy a car that shows off power + environmental friendliness. With the flight out of major cities in the US, Tesla is going to be a pretty popular choice for new car buyers that just landed in the suburbs.
Tesla is similar to Netflix/Amazon when everyone knew the future -- TV/shopping would eventually go online and now everyone knows cars will eventually be EVs
The legacy OEMs must allocate their capital to maintain current products/dividends/pensions and have a seat at the EV table in the future. Not as easy as it sounds, especially considering technology creates winner-takes-all situations and cap-ex to participate in battery production at scale appears to be in the 10s of billions.
> The future of the Solar City division means that part of the company can be viewed almost as a utility co.
That would surely lead to a lower valuation, if anything? Utility companies are not generally massively profitable, nor are they typically valued at hundreds of times P/E.
But isn't this the case with any religion? You could say the same thing about the Westboro Baptist Church to Christianity and Radical Islamist Extremism to Islam. Every religion I can think of has instances of groups co-opting the religion for evil means. All major world religions have multiple instances of this happening throughout history. One could say that you don't have a legitimate religion if there isn't a group of crazies trying to use the religion for evil means.
Any religion can be used as an excuse for right-wing extremism and hate, but I think Norse-related religions are particularly attractive to neonazis because of the specific attention the Nazis and the SS paid to their symbology, and to their (bullshit) notion of superior Aryan and Norse "races". The Nazis were obsessed with this. That their mythology was also mostly bullshit is less relevant; it doesn't matter whether it was "authentic" Norse religion, what matters is that the Nazis and later day neonazis thought it was.
There's also the even-lower-hanging fruit: Vikings were "badass" and "hardcore" and stereotypically too busy raping and pillaging to care about silly things like "women's rights" or "minority welfare" or "climate change". They also happened to be white, unlike the similarly-stereotyped Mongols and Huns further east.
Those two factors lend themselves to white supremacists wanting to model themselves on those stereotypes, never mind that reality was much more nuanced than those stereotypes (which developed specifically from the English complaining about their invaders rather than from any actual understanding of Scandinavian culture/society) or that hardly any of these white supremacists would make much of a Viking warrior (stereotypical or otherwise) anyway.
If only this worked in the other direction where Kohl's Cash could be used on Amazon... you've heard of Bitcoin Billionaires, but my mom is a Kohl's Cash Billionaire!
