Lugh

The Straits of Hormuz, through which 20% of global fossil fuels supply needs to flow, are closed; perhaps for months. It's not just gasoline prices that are about to sharply rise. LNG supplies are just as affected. In many places, notably Europe, this will sharply increase electricity prices. Renewables and EVs were booming before; now they'll have even more advantages. It's not just that they'll be cheaper; they'll also come to be seen as a hedge against global instability and conflict.

China, the major global producer of solar/batteries/EVs, will have even more incentive to abandon fossil fuels. The rest of the world will have even more incentive to buy from them.

There's still a contingent of people who think renewables/EVs are 'woke' or for 'do-gooders'; they're about to get a practical lesson in economics and cold hard cash, when they see other people paying a fraction of what they are to power their cars and homes.

Storing heat for months is more effective than you might think. There are systems across northern Europe where insulation is used to store excess heat from summer for winter use. This approach is theoretically simpler. It does away with the need for insulation. In this case, pyrimidone, a molecule related to DNA, changes molecular structure. Solar energy provides the energy to do it, and it's being undone, releases energy.

But there are still problems commercializing this for home use. In particular, the chemical reactions to change the pyrimidone depend on other chemicals, are multi-step, and relatively inefficient. Still, the promise is there. Combining this tech, heat pumps, and insulation means we should have future buildings that need little or no external energy for seasonal heating & cooling.

A fluid can store solar energy and then release it as heat months later - Sunlight can cause a molecule to change structure, and then release heat later

The 'Will AI Kill Hollywood Narrative?' had a moment back in 2024 when OpenAI released their SORA video generation model. For the first time, people saw an AI-generated video that was nearly equal to what they saw on TV and in the movies. OpenAI didn't capitalise on that, but a new video AI model called Seedance looks like it might be about to fulfil that promise.

The US TV & film industry is already struggling. It rapidly expanded during Covid, but has now shrunk to be much smaller than it was before Covid. This isn't down to AI. The hours spent watching TV & movies are shrinking, as more and more people spend their time watching online videos. These are mostly made for free by other users, or in a content-creator ecosystem separate from traditional TV/movies.

AI like Seedance looks set to turbo-charge the online content-creator ecosystem. Soon they'll have (almost) all the advantages Hollywood has, but won't have its costs. It's hard to imagine that the era of movie budgets in the hundreds of millions can last much longer.

Seedance in Action - Tom Cruise Vs. Brad Pitt

Study: Social Video Beats Traditional TV for Young Viewers

"New figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth………..and I identified a cooling in entry-level hiring within AI-exposed sectors, where recruitment for junior roles………But there is cause for further optimism…..."

Optimism? It's worth bearing in mind that, as AI companies suck up hundreds of billions in cash and get their electricity costs subsidized, for them to succeed, humans with jobs must fail. They'll argue that's zero-sum thinking, and AI will create more jobs than it destroys, but how many people really believe them?

The AI productivity take-off is finally visible New economic data suggests the US is transitioning to a phase of measurable gains from the technology

Now that AI can seamlessly imitate a person's voice and likeness, this means our digital likeness is virtually immortal. If AI has access to enough of your conversation and writing, it can probably do a good job of impersonating your personality, too.

The default in copyright law is that everyone owns their own likeness. It's why you often see faces blurred out on TV. It means the production company didn't get the person to sign a model release form. However, the law is much less clear about likeness ownership after death. It varies by country and state, and generally gives much fewer rights to the individual.

Is it time to strengthen those laws? The thought of being the property of Big Tech in perpetuity is dystopian and depressing, even if you won't be around to experience it.