10: On a broke billionaire,Tesla battery breakthrough,the use of a life, and more..

Sep 27, 2020

Oh hi, just another typical day. What’s up with where I live. Turns out, Lebanon is literally going to hell, thank you very much.

Living in Lebanon. I’m getting overwhelmed by all the negative energy enveloping me. It’s like being stuck in a maelstrom of doom and gloom, and it is my mission to try with all the might i could muster to see past all of it and focus on finding a way out. Sure, I can’t guarantee success, but, there is no way I could lose hope too, for when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Besides, I don’t see how anxiety, learned helplessness, or playing the role of victim could help in any way, shape, or form. There is only one way out: Forward.

Past Mohamad, my friend, we’re the future versions of you. we’re already out of this rut you’re bemoaning. We don’t wanto remember the past. We’ve long since turned over a new leaf, so spare us the doom and gloom talk, show us some interesting notes. What good ideas have you come across last week?

Okay okay, Jeez. Here goes:

What I’ve been reading:

I have finished a book about how the stoics deal with adversity and crisis. I was inspired by examples of great people who turned their obstacles into successes. I felt gratitude for living in this day and age. The obstacles in my way would make me an object of ridicule for those men.
Why should you read out loud: This article argues that reading out loud enhances recall, memory, and emotional bonds(empathy). Listening to someone read aloud also improves memory in many ways.
33 Things I Stole From People Smarter Than Me: My favorites:
- On why you should revisit great works or places. “ No man steps into the river twice.” The second time around, both man and river are different than they were before”. Ties well into Nassim Taleb’s Never read a book you would not re-read.
- “Go to what will teach you the most, not what will pay you the most.”
- “Competition is for losers.” On why you should pick something only you can do. Pairs well with an advice I once heard on the Tim Ferris show when Tim asked his guest what one should do in his life. to which the answer was, Ball bearing. The guest has come up with something few people are doing to drive home the point of doing something that no one is thinking of doing, or to pick a problem no one is solving and solve it.
- “Amateurs focus on results, Professionals enjoy the process.” They have a system in place, and the enjoy the grind of it all. Results are by products of a good system of habits.
- Seinfeld’s “Quality time vs garbage time” or alive time vs dead time” sit around and wait for things to happen( dead time); make every second count( alive time).
- “If you haven’t read widely, you are functionally illiterate.”
- “Don’t be discouraged at the outset. It takes time to build up from nothing.”
On the use of a life: on why academic institutions and solving millenium problems are not the best way to spend your years. When you’re at the mercy of granting institutions whose funding is limited and in whose laboratory you can not pursue novel ideas, it is better you decline the offer and choose entrepreneurship, which is the only path to stay out of the trap of academia and be free to do your own research and work on long term goals that will bring the most value to the world. The author wrote this post in answer to someone asking him isn’t there something better to do with your life than what you’re doing.
Science Fiction's Untapped Potential: Experts(Economists,engineers, and scientists alike) should use science fiction to predict nuanced, consistent worlds that serve as predictive models for the future.
The End of the Beginning: Apple, Amazon, and google are like the GM, Ford,and IBM of the 20th century. They were the beginning of the technological revolution of the century. The implications of cloud computing and mobile will be huge and a new tech rev has just begun.
How a designer used AI and Photoshop to bring ancient Roman emperors back to life: Using The software Art breeder, and generative adversarial network GAN, A designer used machine learning to turn old portraits of roman emperors into photo realistic renderings.
The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke: Chuck Feeny, previously a billionaire, is now completely broke. Chuck is known as the James bond of Philanthropy. He's given away 8 billion dollars of his money to causes that are high risk,high impact. He led a frugal life and never lavished on himself. His philosophy which inspired Warren Buffets and Bill gates is that giving while living is better than giving while you're dead. If you can give your money and see its impact in the world while you're living, why wait until you're dead. If you have more money than you could ever spend in your lifetime why don’t you donate or invest all that excess money in high risk high impact ventures where every penny can change lives..

What I’ve been watching:

Mobility in the cities of the future: In the future, the design of cities will focus on people instead of automobiles. We live in a world designed for automobiles that occupy most of the space we have. In a future of autonomous electric vehicles, not only will our driving change, but also our whole lifestyle. The fleet of autonomous cars will communicate with the the city's infrastructure to make life more comfortable for people. A lot of spaces that are taken by cars for parking spots and roads will be foregone and turned into parks and other spaces that humans can use. The brilliant designer of Minority report and fight club create his designs according to data combining where things are headed and by addressing current problems like congestion,say. In the movie Minority report, there are vertical roads. That is one way to think about mobility. He's now working with Ford to design future cities for people instead of cars.
2020 Annual Shareholder Meeting and Battery Day: This year’s annual meeting was so 2020; an audience of Tesla cars honking at Elon every time he announced something exciting; Tesla seems to be upping its game on a constant basis. Here are the main highlights from a 3h stream:
- It is important we have economies of scale( china gigafactory, and giga berlin) to increase capital and growth.
- Tesla’s growth was 50% in 2019 , and 40% 2020( others's growth have declined)
- The world is greening. All the data shows a speeding transfer toward sustainability.
- At Tesla, safety is n#1. Tesla is arguably is the safest car you can buy. Probability of accidents/injuries is 2.1% per a million miles. Engage autopilot and it is mere 0.3%…and getting safer.
- A full self driving beta software will be released in one month, rewritten from scratch with incredible new abilities.
- Making a prototype( what any start-up can do) is trivial to manufacturing. Making the machine that makes the machine(production) is extremely difficult.
- The success metric for Tesla is measured by answering the question, by how many years did we accelerate the transfer to sustainable energy
- Building a large amount of cells is not a matter of how much money we need, but rather the amount of efforts we’re willing to put in. Organizing a group of people in a way that achieves a specific goal is crucial.
- There are 3 parts of a sustainable future: Energy generation, energy storage, and electric vehicles
- What is a battery? In simple terms, a battery is composed of a positive,a negative, one anode, and one cathode. You charge the battery and lithium, in cathode moves to anode, the batter discharges when lithium moves from anode to cathode.
- A breakthrough in Battery Cell design. Tesla made significant improvement in cell manufacturing. Tesla’s new battery will have 5x more energy, 6x more power, and 16% more range. Other new manufacturing techniques includes: Dry electrode coating process, high speed continuous motion cell assembly line( 7x faster). Tesla Silicon for anode now costs $1.20/kWh which enables 20% more range. Tesla in-house cathode reduces capex by 66% & process cost by 76%. Zero waste water and cheaper lithium production, localization of cathode production( materials travel 80% less now), single-piece casting for front & rear body, cell-to-pack technology makes car even safer + more stable w/ increased energy density. Overall, Tesla will achieve 54% range Increase, 56% $/kWh reduction, and 69% Factory cost reduction.
- Long term plan: scaling battery production to 100 GWh/year by 2022 and 3 TWh/year by 2030. Increase purchase of batteries, and build ~20M cars/year to replace at least 1% of total vehicle fleet on Earth - $25k affordable car in 3 years. Companies has to adapt to a sustainable future or they won’t exist in the future.
- On top pf all that, Tesla introduced the plaid model S. What a car!
A secret from everyone but the film industry: Strontium-19 fallout from the trinity project(1945) was only detected by Kodak, a company that made a deal with the government to be warned before the tests took place. Fallout of these tests post-1945( till 1963..) have traveled by air all across the country and cows consumed them which then reached children through milk. This milk caused mutations in their genes( detected by inspecting their baby tooth) and a lot of bone cancer. To this day, two half lives later, strontium-19 still exists in every human in the US albeit in amounts that raises no health concern.
The Largest Star in the Universe – Size Comparison: Humbling, to say the least.
Porsche Taycan Turbo: MArquez points out the differences between a Tesla and Porsche.
Siskel & Ebert Advise Young Movie Critics: Art is subjective so use I instead of the third person when critiquing art. Start a review by what you’d wrte as a headline.

Films:

Escape room: Similar to Cube in that a group of people find themselves trapped in a place where they have to solve riddles to get out alive. I really enjoyed it.
Redline: This movie is my idea of a perfect film. Hand animated, seven years production, with no CGI whatsoever, Redline is absolutely the best racing movie ever made. The music, the characters, the visuals, everything i ask for in a movie. It seems like they wanted to reach the limit of what is possible with this movie. I think the first movie that will be better than this will be in a VR or something. Looking forward to rewatching it in a year or so.
The platform: There is like a 5 star-hotel where chefs are preparing the best of food. Starting at floor 0, the food is set to ride a platform and descends 350 floors, stopping for only 2 minutes at each floor where two persons will be waiting to gobble up as much as they can in their allotted time. by the time the food reaches the 50th floor, nothing will be left, leaving the rest at the lower levels hungry. In this system, people get to experience life on different floors. One would think that those who were on the lower floors would sympathize with the unfortunate when they get lucky but alas, they don’t. In every system like this, a man rebels and tries to upsets the balance. in our story, It’s Goreng who joins hands with another man, rides the platform to the lowest levels to bring the less fortunate food, and see what life is like at the bottom. They see horrible scenes of cannibalism, and a girl hiding at the lowest level. Is this girl the child of that woman who’d been riding the platform for awhile now looking for her daughter? The girl then becomes the message sent to people at the top. The finale wasn’t really satisfying like that of Snowpiercer but as a whole, a thought provoking movie. Is it about greed and the need to ration out our resources so that every member of the society get a slice of the pie? could be or maybe it is about how it doesn’t matter if the system is horizontal(Snowpiercer) or vertical, you can achieve your social stratification necessary to stay at the top.
The room: I’ve heard a lot of people saying that there is an original idea in this movie, and I couldn’t wait to watch it. The original idea, turns out, is only partly original. A couple move into a new house, they discover a room in the house where all their material wishes could be granted with one caveat. You can’t take anything outside the house or it turns to ashes. The mother wishes for a child, which complicate things for the couple. For him to live outside the house, the parents must die, according to a previous house resident, now prisoner. I thought it was a be careful what you wish for story doused with a bit of horror. Didn’t live to my expectations but still worth the watch.