Long-form thinking on systems, energy, and business. Archived from WattMind.
Thank you to everyone who has read and supported WattMind. An update on the publication - I plan to continue writing and publishing here, but I am pausing paid subscriptions. For those that are supporting - thank you - but, I do not feel like I’m pro…
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How many times a day do you ask yourself, “What the fuck is going on?” I do it about 47 times before lunch. It feels like vertigo. It feels like witnessing daily bouts of collective insanity while being handcuffed to the radiator. The onslaught cause…
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Following a 2023 school shooting in Nashville, Charlie Kirk argued that gun deaths are "unfortunate[ly] worth it" to preserve Second Amendment rights. He said, “It's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that…
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Congratulations on choosing authoritarianism! The old model (gulags, manifestos) is so 20th century. Today’s dictator needs only three tools: A smartphone No sense of shame America’s 8-second attention span Why does this guide work? Because we’ve tes…
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Listen to the podcast version of this article. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, a persistent pattern became harder to ignore: young men are increasingly aligning with the political right, and the Democratic Party seems lost on how to win them b…
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With the latest announcement about the Trump administration threatening to end the Energy Star program , along with the scaling back of energy efficiency programs across the country , it’s worth taking a moment to understand the value of these progra…
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The president is an asshole. Not exactly breaking news, I know. But for a large part of America, this is the appeal. He's their asshole, and he's here to stop America from getting ripped off and being destroyed by the lunatic libs. Okay, it's a viewp…
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The cost of doing nothing isn’t just maintaining the status quo. It’s the missed opportunity to build, grow, or evolve. Image by ChatGPT. Abundance is getting a lot of attention lately - and for a good reason. The excellent book by Ezra Klein and Der…
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Author’s note: Thank you for reading! If you find value in this and my other articles , please subscribe to support my work. WattMind is a reader-supported publication using a pay-what-you-want model . To receive new posts and support my work, consid…
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Something had to give. By 2028, American politics had collapsed into a parody of itself. Idiocracy seemed aspirational. Congress was locked in a perpetual filibuster loop, and the last two presidents had approval ratings lower than the odds of the Je…
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Something feels off. No doubt you feel it too. It's not a sudden feeling - it's been building for a long time. Unease, alienation, dread. Whatever you want to call it, it's infected everyone in the modern world. This is not about Trump, though his pr…
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(Dearest reader, I have not posted to WattMind in some time, due to the general busyness of life. And this post is not about energy. It is indeed about politics. If that’s not your cup of tea, I understand. There might be a few more of these since it…
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We’ve all encountered this guy, right? You're at a party. Or on your favorite social network. A self-proclaimed energy expert who has definitely “done their own research” declares, "The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow! Renewabl…
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Efficiency programs are an important tool for utilities. They allow investment into products that use less energy, rather than increasing energy supply through new generation or purchasing energy on the open market. Not only does this help to keep ra…
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As you know, it’s been a few months since the last post on WattMind. I want to thank everyone who has been reading and reached out with comments and suggestions. It is greatly appreciated! Subscribe now Going forward, I will be broadening the subject…
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AI is all the rage these days - and with good reason. ChatGPT put a UI on an LLM. This “simple” act opened the flood gates to millions of people, allowing human-to-computer conversations that put Siri and Alexa to shame. When it comes to clean energy…
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Subscribe now Why Does a Utility Care? You bought your smartphone because you wanted to. You might've done some research, compared options, then made a decision. Did you do this when you opened your utility account? No, because you didn't have a choi…
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University of Massachusetts Amherst engineers have made a groundbreaking discovery: almost any material can be made into a machine that takes in electricity from moist air non-stop. The trick is to make many tiny holes, smaller than 100 nanometers ac…
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Subscribe now I recently wrote about the massive growth in solar installations, the associated impacts on the grid, and the need for batteries to play a role in managing the duck curve. Just since then, there have been a few breakthroughs that are wo…
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Solar energy has a problem. Demand for energy is greatest in the morning and in the evening, when the sun is the least bright in the sky. In other words - supply and demand are out of balance. This is not a minor issue. Unless we keep burning methane…
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