How does the 'a lot less' compare to the risk-free rate? If the service providers are charging less than the return from holding Treasuries for a day it's much more understandable why the service would be used at scale ...

Why is there *thirteen trillion dollars* of demand for being able to pay what in the article is a 3800% APR for something a day before you get the money in? Is it normally 1bp rather than 1% premium?

That's a stock picture of 黑城, 2400 kilometres from Tongling! Can we see the bridge itself?

On the one hand, the smallholder /could/ record on the blockchain the price he was actually paid. On the other hand, the landlord's goons /could/ break the smallholder's fingers. We know how this works out in prosperous countries with strong rule of law: www.leighday.co.uk/news/cases-a...

Have we actually observed the craters? It looked as if all that we had was coincident observations of flashes, indicating the flashes were real events - has LRO had time to have a look yet?

Given that there have been cases of ‘people producing submarine parts for the US Navy using cheap Chinese tungsten rather than the Canadian tungsten they claimed to be using’, and that’s about as closely monitored a manufacturing network as exists.

It is hard to see how anything short of revolution stops a landlord from buying the rice from the small farmer in cash at the price the landlord wants to pay and then labelling up the rice for Oxfam according to the label Oxfam wants to see … this is not a problem solvable with cryptography!

Battery packs at least don’t need scaffolding; the scaffolding cost has been more than the module FOB Shanghai for home installations in England for quite a while!

Apparently ’hundreds of meetings on how we can mitigate the risk to birds’, rather than ‘one meeting in which it was pointed out that this was a cliff across a bird migration route and a non-starter for that reason alone’

Sadly that is ‘battery packs at the docks in Shanghai’ rather than ‘working battery modules connected correctly to your house electrics in Massachusetts by a licensed electrician’, and hundreds of billions fewer yuan have been put into reducing that large part of the pricing.

So 'all' that is necessary is to get the price differential between LFP cells FOB Shanghai and installed batteries in Switzerland down to a factor six. Of course it is demonstrably much harder to make Swiss electricians cheaper than it was to make production in Fuding cheaper.

Can you draw the curve of ‘how much an x kWh battery would need to cost for seven year payback’?

I have my data, but my load is much larger than my generation so the battery is basically decorative so long as I do computational mathematics.

How often do crazy dreams of tyrants do that? I’ll give you Brighton Pavilion, from a point of view I’ll give you the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, but around Nuremberg is still full of concrete stuff literally not worth the explosive to blow it away.

Is it fair to say ‘also they gave the company its death blow’ because realising the entire stake at a 60% haircut is going to spook every other lender?

I start to wonder whether there is any merit at all to news organisations allowing comments under their posts to social media

I mean, aluminium smelters are carefully optimised efficient ways to make something for which there is enormous demand. An electric Aga is a mockery of a thing that was almost a reasonable design before we invented central heating.

Are there good guided tours of selections of the best bridges available if I am a tourist in Guizhou? Or should I just hire a car and drive around?

My daughter was the only Rumi in the village; she sang to three people, all of whom were delighted!