A cross-section of my thoughts on this day.

Sugar

What if the only way to run a country is with slavery? This question has haunted me now for about a decade. I’m going to talk about it by giving spoilers about an unnamed show. In that show the very shape of the country is made to be in the shape of a pentagram so that the entire country can be sacrificed to create an incredibly powerful item that gives the bearer power over life, death and the states of matter.

I call it “the ultimate cheese”. To make a kilogram of cheese, you need ten times as much milk. To make ten kilograms of milk, you need the cow to eat about a thousand kilograms of grass. The ultimate cheese is made up of the souls of millions of people, each who have eaten thousands of kilograms of cheese. This richness at the top of the trophic levels is not for the ordinary liver. The ultimate cheese costs a lot to acquire and requires a certain inhumanity to even exercise, but this is what we all do in a way every day.

This conversation came up during our talk about the sugar trade. Sugar is an incredible caloric boon for humanity. Clearly we lived slothful and unimaginative lives when we only ate complex carbs and fiber. Sugar brightens up life.

It was also an extraordinarily brutal industry. There weren’t many ways to make profit from paying your sugarcane harvesters well. Instead, the plantation owners did what any capitalist given sway would do: they found a captive class of worker who had no negotiating power and they extracted all they could. Every calorie spent by the slaves was returned tenfold to the customers, but who remembers those people now?

After the Haitian revolution, the plantation owners fled to New Orleans. The Haitians remaining on the island inherited a bum deal - they didn’t just have to buy back their freedom from their enslavers in order to trade on the global market and be recognized as a nation - they also had to find a way to work a land depredated by decades of extractive sugar planting. They returned essentially to a form of forced labor - now under the sights of the revolutionary state. The ecosystem was too wiped to allow for anything better. Or maybe the new rulers were unimaginative.

Whatever they were - the Haitians were cutoff from the trade networks that would have allowed their nation to survive. They could not trade with America on equal terms. A small island nation lost its connection to an enormous land full of resources and had to make do.

We’ve assimilated the nutrients of the fallen…

The Western battery industry has had at least two public failures recently: Moxion and Northvolt. Moxion was a much smaller company than Northvolt. They were chasing the generator market - looking to replace diesel generators with mobile battery packs. They have a really slick website which breaks down the pack construction with some nice 3D renderings. Respect. From the rumors, they seem to have failed due to a combination of product and customer communication failures. You can buy some of their units at a fire sale price of $150,000. A lot of our office furniture is actually second-hand Moxion stuff.

Northvolt recently declared bankruptcy for its North American division. It was, at some point, worth more than $10 billion. Northvolt had a lot of expectations placed on it - it was supposed to be the savior of the European EV industry, finally ending the Chinese and Korean hold on the most crucial element of an EV - the battery. It was also supposed to be a Swedish success story. A hardware Spotify - could you imagine?

Peak is learning from both of these companies. We have leadership, engineers and some small assets from these other companies. But there’s something deeper here, I think. A lesson about what it means to fail in a business as hard as hardware: there is no slow death. You fail catastrophically and your company simply shuts down. The money stops flowing and you are dissolved. The lessons you learned, the extremely detailed model of your failure - that might or might not be absorbed by another company.

Cuba

Cuba’s national grid has been suffering a lot recently. There’s even the possibility of a total grid shutdown and a cold-start or black start for the entire grid. I don’t know much about whether such things have happened before, but it seems to me like an enormous engineering and operations challenge.

Cuba’s largest potential trading partner is an increasingly strained Russia because of the US embargo placed on this small island. This is almost certainly a part of the failures of the grid. It all rhymes a bit with what happened to Haiti.

Short Story

“That’s not a weapon. It’s pure nihilism.” General Umar pushed his finger into the desk as if pushing a button. He didn’t approve of the Noodle, but some part of him wanted to push a button anyway, just to see what it would do.

“Si-“

General Umar cut off the contractor before he could turn on and deliver the full sales pitch.

“It’s a disgusting idea, the point of war isn’t just to-“ the general cut himself off. He gave the imaginary button some much needed relief and turned away from the contractor.

“Sir, this is not unlike a field of anti personnel mines. Or a tactical nuclear weapon. In many cases it’s much cleaner. There’s no radiation or leakage.”

“I just don’t believe you Roy. You’re telling me I can make a shield that lasts forever, that no weapon or human can penetrate and I don’t need to power it. It just doesn’t add up. Where does the power come from? Where does the force come from?”

Roy didn’t move in his seat. He looked straight at general Umar. “I can show you”.

“My calendar is booked out for next week, but I can’t say I very much want to go out of my way to see this weapon that makes a piece of land completely fucking useless.”

“We don’t have to go anywhere”

Roy pulled an unremarkable box out of his messenger bag. There was a keyboard embedded in the front of it and a screen that could hold less than 3 lines of text. After a few taps, a series of laser lights emerged from the side of the box and focused in on a corner of the room.

“What the hell? Roy, that little thing is a weapon? You brought it into my-“

As the generals temper began to flare, a burst of low humming interrupted. A few seconds of hum, silence, hum, silence. A final screech.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” The general was clearly peeved.

Where was I going with this?

I wanted to write about intentional environmental destruction. How our baselines shift over time to forget that there was in fact a space here that we could inhabit. Pablo talks about it a bit at the end of this post, which is mostly about the extinction of the dodo.

The weapon in the story allows you to subtract a space from our universe. You can see the last state of that cube of space you destroyed, but that’s a human illusion. Animals don’t recognize it, instruments don’t see it. That space is gone as if it never existed - there is no detectable radiation, nothing, it is just somehow living in human memory. In the story, eventually it is revealed that human memory retains and transmits the original state of the universe and the weapon does something more powerful than originally intended. It cleaves human knowledge of reality from physical reality itself, not by manipulating knowledge the way humans in power have done for ages but by destroying the fabric of space.

After a few centuries of the use of this weapon, the Earth becomes a maze of “no-go” zones. Places that humans can see but if they try to reach into, end up traversing thousands of miles to another destination entirely.

Can you imagine if that was reality? A slow carving away of the space of humanity until all that is left is an invisible labyrinth before us. But it looks like an open and beautiful paradise.

Connection and Communication

I’ve been ruminating on the difference between connection and communication. I’ve met some excellent communicators recently - in fact, I have around me a diverse collection of excellent comunicators. But my connection to them is complicated - I share little in terms of life experience with them. Perhaps the one throughline is that all these people felt a profound isolation at some point in life. Perhaps as a result they all developed a love for the essentially human things. The bare necessities of being human. Perhaps they developed powerful communication skills because so little of their experience is shared by the world. They were all on their little islands. The only way they learned how to tell the rest of the world what it’s like on their little island was to shout.