Nawab

Your fridge runs 24 hours a day. Solar panels only work while the sun’s out. That mismatch is the entire reason this plant exists, and the fix is just hot salt. The Dunhuang plant in China’s Gobi Desert uses 12,000 mirrors aimed at a single tower about as tall as an 80-story building. All that focused sunlight heats a mix of salts (the same stuff in fertilizer) to 565°C, hot enough to glow red. That liquid salt gets pumped into giant insulated tanks. The tanks are so well insulated they only lose about 1°C per day. When the city needs electricity at 2am, the hot salt boils water into steam, the steam spins a turbine, and you get power. Same basic process as a coal plant. Just no coal. Here’s what makes this different from regular solar: the storage lasts 11 hours. Sun goes down, plant keeps running all night. The big batteries that cities plug into their power grids right now? Those typically hold about 4 hours of electricity. Building batteries that last 11 hours is possible, but the cost balloons fast. A German energy storage study found that storing energy in hot salt costs roughly 33x less than storing it in the lithium-ion batteries we use today. China has built 27 of these plants so far, enough to power roughly a million homes. They doubled that number in 2025 alone. Another 3,000 megawatts (enough for about 2 million more homes) are under construction right now, with 4,000 more in the planning stage. Beijing wants 15,000 megawatts by 2030. The US tried this same technology once. Ivanpah, out in the Mojave Desert. Cost $2.2 billion. But they skipped the storage part entirely, so it could only make power while the sun was shining. It needed natural gas every morning just to start up. It’s now slated to shut down in 2026, thirteen years early, because regular solar panels got so cheap they made the whole project obsolete. China took the same idea, added the one part America left out, and is now building dozens of them. One more thing worth knowing. The salt is made from basic industrial chemicals. No lithium mining. No cobalt. No rare earth metals. And it lasts 30 years of daily use before the tanks need work.

OF owner, Leonid Radvinsky, has died at age 43

For anyone not acquainted with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf - the man said to be negotiating with the Trump Administration on behalf of the Islamic Republic - here he is piloting a plane through an Israeli blockade to visit Beirut during the height of Israel's war on Lebanon in 2024.

I think about this often

Girls education this & girls education that. Grow up man. The universe existed for millions of years without modern schools & so did civilizations

Vietnam is rising. One of my friends just put $100m in a plant there. They built it in 6 months. Like China does. Smart, hard working people. Vietnam will be a mini-China circa 2015. Won’t lead on tech like China but will become a massive exporter powerhouse. Will be interesting in local SE Asia politics as Vietnam becomes a regional superpower.

JD vance might be present at the meeting in Islamabad, according to the senior Israeli official

Anglican priestess is partnering with a sex-shop to give away hundreds of free vibrators, and then donating any profits from her affiliation to Planned Parenthood.

Britain - if you lose your Jews you are fucked It is the sign of a dying society Jews have punched above their weight and contributed in untold ways to every society they’ve been a part of If they no longer feel safe - then something is deeply wrong with your country - and you will lose some of the best people who could help fix it Jews were expelled from England in 1290 It eventually led to economic decay Jews were invited back in 1656 and their dynamic and industrious nature helped Britain bloom I can’t see Jews returning any time soon if you lose them again and prefer to share your country with disloyal Islamists that hate you

Ditch X. Lose 15 kg—thanks largely to Move to Muscat’s peptide suggestion. Fifteen years of sciatica? Gone. Back to 100 pushups a day. Energy through the roof. No more food noise. Finish the three books waiting on you. Step away from the noise and actually live. Hard not to be tempted to follow that path. Clock is ticking when you hit 40. Either do something useful with your time or expose yourself to slop and be depressed.