Best of Twitter - Week of December 21, 2020
Seems like one pretty common life trajectory is that you eventually hit some speed bump (chronic illness in self or child, relative incapable of living unassisted, &c.) that requires you to take on an additional full-time job as a DIY guerilla bureaucrat.
^ thread
As a student, I would sometimes look at the careers of researchers in my field and be surprised at how they abandoned promising research lines and started working on something less interesting. Now I understand they often simply did the research they could get funded.
Because we don’t know how good the research is going to be, money is distributed based on how good the proposal is. Writing proposals is a very different skill from doing research. A key component is finding a topic that fits the tastes of the funder and is easy to write about.
^ thread
The evolution of lithium-ion battery pack prices:
2010: $1,191/kWh
2011: $924
2012: $726
2013: $668
2014: $592
2015: $384
2016: $295
2017: $221
2018: $181
2019: $157
2020: $137
(all real 2020$)
Annually from @BloombergNEF; analysis by @JamesTFrith about.bnef.com/blog/battery-p…
@wintonARK During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.
^ imo very important bit of history - even Musk sometimes decides to give up but is accidentally forced to keep on going… lots of cases like this
This is incredible. A guy took a fertilized chicken egg out of its shell, incubated it in a clear plastic cup, and filmed the whole thing.
It never occurred to me that this was possible.
Day 3: 🤯
youtu.be/uE0uKvUbcfw?t=…
This bit is also delicious and grist for the national accounting debate mills cc/ @JWMason1 @MJerven @ingridharvold @jacob_assa
^ might be my single favorite bit of economic history
