Monday Night Links

• The solarists are undaunted: you can use solar power to “mine” carbon from the air and convert it into fossil fuels, then use the fossil fuels on the plane. Since you took the carbon out of the air in the first place, it’s still carbon neutral! If these trends continue, solar power could reach $10/megawatt-hour in the next few years, and maybe even $1/megawatt hour a few years after that. This would make it 10-100x cheaper than coal, and end almost all of our energy-related problems. The United States could produce all its power by covering 2% of its land with solar panels - for comparison, we use 20% of our land for agriculture, so this would look like Nevada specializing in farming electricity somewhat less intensely than Iowa specializes in farming corn. [Astral Codex Ten]
  
• Indeed, solar PV is the first mass produced product where energy is an output rather than an input. We have literally invented a way to produce more and more energy at ever lower prices, which are currently falling at 15-20% per year. Earlier this week, we saw modules changing hands for the record low price of $0.07/W! Solar modules are commodities, inert slabs of glass that you put on the ground and which spit out wealth. If we can maintain similar cost curves on racking and installation systems, we’re within striking distance of $0.10/W for a large scale array. [Casey Handmer]
• The prospect of a sustained reversion in investment yields likely extends beyond the horizon of bargain-hunters’ binoculars. We may look back at historical returns and wonder why investors ever got to have it so good. We will look back and think how inefficient it once was. Can you believe people earned 8-10% in stocks and thought it should last? We may look at equity returns for the past century the way people now look at home prices. Remember when a house only cost 3x annual income? That was cute. [Party at the Moontower]
  
• Trump is likely to win in a landslide. It looks like coup Thermidor has gone through, and they are just waiting to hold an actually free and fair election to make it official and legal. Which does not mean that free and fair elections are back in style, but they will be held when convenient, and today is convenient for team Thermidor. [Jim]
• What is the point of a biography anyway? The annals of the mighty are part of history, with the tiny, scruffy details and grubby crumpled linen of the subject’s life overshadowed by battles and massacres and mountains of skulls or by great political or cultural triumphs. If such works are any good, they show us the tiny, lonely figures peeping out from behind the enormous monuments they left behind. But the annals of the not-so-mighty are a problem. What did they actually do? We know that Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway are important writers. But are they important people? Must we dwell on every corner of their existence, every unmade bed, every drink in every bar, every betrayal? Some lives are works of art in themselves, so intensely and brilliantly lived that they shine out as examples of how to live, or (equally likely) how not to. But for most of us, plodding tediously through our days, eating, falling ill, failing, leaving the housework undone, mistreating others, running out of money, breaking promises, working for terrible employers, there is no theme and we are neither warnings nor beacons of achievement. [The Lamp]
• I knew it would end this way. When Altria announced in the summer of 2020 that it was dumping Nat Sherman—the “pandemic created new challenges that were unfortunately too big to overcome,” a spokesman said—I systematically cleaned out the stock of every tobacco store in Northern Virginia. The guys behind the counters frowned at me; they knew what I was doing. But I couldn’t help myself. I had this idea that by stacking away these cigarettes I could steal back some time that would otherwise be lost. I was saving the past from the future. [The Lamp]