I can't ease you into this one, so: Haliey Welch, colloquially known as the "Hawk Tuah girl," launched a bespoke cryptocurrency token called HAWK last Wednesday, the same day she told Fortune it was "not just a cash grab" and her manager cut off a question in the same interview about its legality (because, he said, "We don’t want to break securities laws"), and hours before the vast majority of HAWK tokens were sold off in what appears to be a textbook example of a pump-and-dump scheme. This reads, on first glance, as a story about some fundamentally ephemeral viral bullshit; it isn't not about viral bullshit, though I'd argue it's worth taking seriously as an extreme yet representative example of the new paradigm of online fame, social media, and a certain irradiated, newly relevant segment of culture.

Consider how Welch got into this position. This past summer, she answered a man-on-the-street question ("What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?") with an inspired onomatopoeic rendition of "[spitting] on that thing." The speed at which the interview saturated the social internet was only matched by thoroughness with which Welch capitalized on it. Within a month, she'd begun selling T-shirts, signed an agent and a manager, launched herself as a public figure in an interview with a Barstool Sports host named Brianna Chickenfry, and sang on stage with country star Zach Bryan. The following month, she threw out the first pitch at a Mets game.

Last month I drove the 2025 Rivian R1S to Las Vegas, and though I’ll have a more comprehensive review later, for now I want to just talk about EV fast-charging costs, because it can be ridiculous. In fact, based on my experiences with fast charging prices, and infrastructure issues here in California, I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy an EV unless they can charge at home or at work (or unless they’re willing to deal with some inconvenience/understand the costs). Anyway, let’s have a look at some gas-guzzlers I could have driven to Las Vegas that actually would have saved me money over an electric Rivian R1S.

I’ve got to start this article by saying I love electric cars, which is why I daily-drive one (with a range-extender). But sometimes I have to keep it real, and the reality is that, when my parking spots at home are taken up, and I can’t find a charger at work, life becomes markedly harder for my non-Tesla, and I’m forced to drive using the gasoline range extender. The lines at charging stations can be long, many of the stations never work, but beyond that: charging can be expensive.

I learned this yet again while driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to attend the SEMA show.

The vehicle’s range on its guess-o-meter read about 400 miles, and indeed, the 2025 Rivian R1S Dual Max (dual motor, max range) has an EPA-rated range of 410 miles. But even though Las Vegas was only about 300 miles away, I knew the 400 mile range estimate wasn’t really applicable given I planned to accomplish the journey almost entirely on the highway, where EVs are less efficient (the opposite of gasoline cars).

Have a look at the EPA label above, and you’ll see that the vehicle is rated at a combined 40 kWh/100 mi, or 2.5 miles per kWh. If we want to find the mi/kWh on the highway only, we use that highway MPGe figure, 77, and we divide it by 33.7kWh/gallon of gas, ultimately arriving at 2.28 (the city figure is 2.7).

The Rivian R1s Dual max’s battery has a size of 141.5 kWh, so if you multiply 141.5 kWh by 2.28 mi/kWh, you end up with a range of 323 miles. This is farther than the ~300 mile trip I had, but not by much, and the EPA’s highway efficiency figures are very frequently considered too optimistic, especially since I was driving at 80 MPH much of the way. So I suspected the R1S wouldn’t even get me to Las Vegas.

But I was wrong. The R1S got me 300 miles to Las Vegas without much drama. In fact, the most dramatic thing was the headlights, which danced around ahead of me to get me as much visibility as possible (seriously, they’re awesome headlights).

But the extremely luxurious and quick $100,000 SUV only narrowly got me to my destination (which is impressive on one hand, and not impressive on the other, as you’d expect it to get me there with that honkin’ battery), and I thought I’d need the car the following day, so I went to charge the Rivian at my hotel, Treasure Island. Here’s how that went:

 

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D’oh!

Treasure Island, a giant Casino, still doesn’t have working chargers, even in late 2024! I’d have known this had I used the PlugShare app and planned my trip out a bit better. So I drove to a nearby Casino, Caesar’s Palace, as I didn’t have enough range to get to any other chargers.

There, I was met by Autel chargers that (annoyingly) required an app. Getting this working took a while, because my old account was stuck for some reason, so I had to delete the app, re-download it, and start a new profile:

The price was fairly typical at a public charger on the West Coast: 38 cents per kWh (I think it’s 35 cents at my workplace in LA). The Rivian’s 141.5 kWh battery needed 154.33 kWh (~10% more than the battery capacity) to be topped all the way up due to charging losses (For reference, per Car and Driver “Tesla’s own data—buried deep in 49 pages of certification documents filed with the EPA—shows it took 87.868 kWh to add 77.702 kWh to the battery of the Long Range version. That’s a 13 percent overage.”).

The 154.33 kWh cost me about $59. At an average gas price of $3.73 per gallon last month, that 59 bucks would have bought about 15.8 gallons of fuel. To go 300 miles to Las Vegas on 15.8 gallons of fuel requires a vehicle capable of scoring only 19 MPG.

19 MPG. On the highway.

Sure, that’s at 80 MPH much of the time, but come on. You could get 19 MPG highway doing 80 MPH some of the way with lots of gas guzzlers out there. Just look at these big machines (which are all about 10-inches longer than the Rivian) here that would have cost less (or about the same) to get to Vegas than the Rivian:

Now, to be clear, the Rivian would wipe the floor with any of these significantly less-expensive machines in terms of acceleration and handling, though it’d probably be a less convenient tow vehicle, but we’re not comparing performance, really — that’s not what this is about. This article is really just a reminder that driving an EV can be pricey. You should save plenty in maintenance costs since an EV basically just requires tires and some fluids every now and again, there are lots of incentives out there, and more importantly, you can save money when you charge at home.

But if you can’t charge at home — say, if you’re on a road trip — you might be surprised to find that you’re actually paying more to travel than you did with your gas car. Sometimes it can be much more.

Take the EVgo station I filled up at once I arrived back in LA. The cost to charge? 66 cents per kWh! I didn’t even fill the vehicle up all the way (since I had charged a bit between Vegas and here), and I still paid $81.22!

Yes, over 80 bucks to fill up three-quarters of the battery!

To be fair, gas in my area averaged $4.87 last month, which ain’t cheap, but you’d still get over 16 gallons for $81. And even with a 19 MPG vehicle, you can do 3/4 of the Rivian’s range (about 300 miles) for 80 bucks.

Again, I’m a big EV fan, but the truth is, if you can’t charge at home, and you’re at the mercy of public charging stations, you can expect to actually pay more for your EV than you would if you drove a gasoline car, particularly if you drive a larger vehicle in mostly highway conditions. I know some folks find that surprising, so I figured I’d share.

I myself charge my small and efficient EV at home, and save a bundle over a gas car, especially since I do lots of city driving. I don’t see myself ever going back to gas for a commuter.

The post Charging The Electric Rivian R1S Was More Expensive Than Filling Up Some Notorious Gas Guzzlers appeared first on The Autopian.

After Donald Trump won this month’s election, one of the first things he did was to name two unelected male plutocrats, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to run a new Department of Government Efficiency. The yet-to-be-created entity’s acronym, DOGE, is something of a joke—a reference to a cryptocurrency named for an internet meme involving a Shiba Inu. But its appointed task of reorganizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing its spending heralds a new political arrangement in Washington: a broligarchy, in which tremendous power is flowing to tech and finance magnates, some of whom appear indifferent or even overtly hostile to democratic tradition.

The broligarchs’ ranks also include the PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel—Vice President–Elect J. D. Vance’s mentor, former employer, and primary financial backer—as well as venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, both of whom added millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. Musk, to be sure, is the archetype. The world’s richest man has reportedly been sitting in on the president-elect’s calls with at least three heads of foreign states: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Musk joined Trump in welcoming Argentine President Javier Milei at Mar-a-Lago and, according to The New York Times, met privately in New York with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a bid to “defuse tensions” between that country and the United States. Recently, after Musk publicly endorsed the financier Howard Lutnick for secretary of the Treasury, some in Trump’s camp were concerned that Musk was acting as a “co-president,” The Washington Post reported.

[Read: Musk’s Twitter is a blueprint for a MAGA government]

Musk doesn’t always get what he wants; Trump picked Lutnick to be secretary of commerce instead. Even so, the broligarchs’ ascendancy on both the foreign- and domestic-policy fronts has taken many observers by surprise—including me, even though I wrote last August about the broligarchs’ deepening political alignment with Trump. Though some of them have previously opposed Trump because of his immigration or tariff policies, the broligarchs share his politics of impunity: the idea that some men should be above the law. This defiant rejection of all constraint by and obligation to the societies that made them wealthy is common among the world’s ultrarich, a group whose practices and norms I have studied for nearly two decades. Trump has exemplified this ethos, up to the present moment: He is currently in violation of a law—which he signed into effect during his first term—requiring incoming presidents to agree to an ethics pledge.

Trump—who infamously said of sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it”—cites his celebrity as a basis for his elevation above the law. Many broligarchs also see themselves as exceptional beings, but arrived at that view through a different path: via science fiction, fantasy literature, and comic books. Ideas from these genres have long pervaded Silicon Valley culture; last year, Andreessen published a manifesto calling for “Becoming Technological Supermen,” defined by embarking on a “Hero’s Journey” and “conquering dragons.”

Superhero narratives also appear to inform many of Musk’s more eccentric political views, including his reported belief that the superintelligent have a duty to reproduce, and may help explain why in September he reposted a claim that “a Republic of high status males” would be superior to our current democracy. Last week, Musk likened Matt Gaetz, Trump’s then-nominee for attorney general, to Judge Dredd, a dystopian comic-book character authorized to conduct summary executions. Musk seems to have meant this as a compliment. He described Gaetz—who, until his resignation from the House, was under a congressional investigation in connection with an alleged sex-trafficking scheme—as “our Hammer of Justice.”

[Read: What Elon Musk really wants]

Whatever its source, the broligarchs’ sense of their innate superiority has led many of them to positions on taxation quite similar to Trump’s. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee bragged about avoiding tax payments for years—“That makes me smart,” he crowed from the debate stage. The broligarchs have quietly liberated themselves from one of the only certainties in life. As ProPublica reported in 2021, Musk paid zero federal income taxes in 2018 and a de facto tax rate of 3.3 percent from 2014 to 2018, during which his wealth grew $13.9 billion. Thiel used a government program intended to expand retirement savings by middle-class Americans to amass $5 billion in capital-gains income, completely tax-free. The Trump-friendly broligarchs’ political ascendancy turns the rallying cry of the Boston Tea Party on its head, achieving representation with minimal taxation.

In their hostility to taxation and regulation, the men who rule Wall Street and Silicon Valley resemble earlier generations of wealthy capitalists who enjoyed outsize influence on American politics. Even some tech barons who supported Kamala Harris clamored for the firing of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who favors vigorous antitrust enforcement. But the broligarchs are distinct from old-school American oligarchs in one key respect: Their political vision seeks to undermine the nation-state system globally. Musk, among others, has set his sights on the privatization and colonization of space with little or no government involvement. Thiel and Andreessen have invested heavily in creating alternatives to the nation-state here on Earth, including libertarian colonies with minimal taxation. One such colony is up and running in Honduras; Thiel has also invested in efforts to create artificial islands and other autonomous communities to serve as new outposts for private governance. “The nature of government is about to change at a very fundamental level,” Thiel said of these initiatives in 2008.

Cryptocurrency is the financial engine of the broligarchs’ political project. For centuries, states have been defined by two monopolies: first, on the legitimate use of coercive force (as by the military and the police); and second, on control of the money supply. Today’s broligarchs have long sought to weaken government control of global finance. Thiel notes in his 2014 book, Zero to One, that when he, Musk, and others started PayPal, it “had a suitably grand mission … We wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” If broligarchs succeed in making cryptocurrency a major competitor to or replacement for the dollar, the effects could be enormous. The American currency is also the world’s reserve currency—a global medium of exchange. This has contributed to U.S. economic dominance in the world for 80 years and gives Washington greater latitude to use financial and economic pressure as an alternative to military action.

[Read: What to expect from Elon Musk’s government makeover]

Undercutting the dollar could enrich broligarchs who hold considerable amounts of wealth in cryptocurrencies, but would also weaken the United States and likely destabilize the world economy. Yet Trump—despite his pledge to “Make America great again” and his previous claims that crypto was a “scam” against the dollar—now seems fully on board with the broligarchs’ agenda. Signaling this alignment during his campaign, Trump gave the keynote speech at a crypto conference last July; he later pledged to make crypto a centerpiece of American monetary policy via purchase of a strategic bitcoin reserve. The day after the election, one crypto advocate posted on X, “We have a #Bitcoin president.” The incoming administration is reportedly vetting candidates for the role of “crypto czar.”

If American economic and political dominance recedes, the country’s wealthiest men may be well positioned to fill and profit from the power vacuum that results. But is a weakened country, greater global instability, and rule by a wealthy few really what voters wanted when they chose Trump?

Musk spent millions of dollars to support Trump’s campaign and promoted it on X. He’s now doing everything he can to capitalize on Trump’s victory and maximize his own power—to the point of siccing his X followers on obscure individual government officials. Some evidence, including Axios’s recent focus-group study of swing voters, suggests that Americans may already feel queasy about the influence of the broligarchs. “I didn’t vote for him,” one participant said of Musk. “I don't know what his ultimate agenda would be for having that type of access.” Another voter added, “There’s nothing, in my opinion, in Elon Musk’s history that shows that he’s got the best interest of the country or its citizens in mind.” Even so, we can expect him and his fellow broligarchs to extend their influence as far as they can for as long as Trump lets them.

In the order I read them, more or less, noting that some very late 2023 titles start off the list.  Usually there is my review behind the link, though occasionally just an Amazon connection.  Here goes:

Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis.

Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium.

Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology.

David van Reybrouck, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World.

Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario.

Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity.

Kathleen Duval, Native Nation: A Millennium in North America.

Blake Butler, Molly.  Or is that one fiction?

Olivier Roy, The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms.

Nick Lloyd, The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War.

Carlos Scarpa, The Complete Buildings.

Bryan Caplan, Self-Help is Like a Vaccine.

Harriet Baker, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann.  What is it like to be an unusual woman writer, with unusual proclivities, and have to build up or rebuild your work life in the countryside?  There is now a whole book on this topic.  Does it really mean you have to write down a complete inventory of all household possessions? (apparently)  Beautifully written, very British, will frustrate those who seek generalization but recommended nonetheless.

Cormac Ó Gráda, Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars.

Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI.

Luke Stegemann, Madrid: A New Biography.

Alisa Lozhkina, The Art of Ukraine.

Padraig O’Malley, Perils and Prospects of a United Ireland.

Craig Brown, A Voyage Around the Queen.

Patchen Barss, The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius.

Truly an outstanding list for this year.  Although reading and “the book” are in decline, books are not.  If I had to pick out two to top the list, perhaps they would be:

Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario, and

Michael Cook, A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity.

Also having a claim is Anil Ananthaswamy, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, though for many readers the math will be too much.

I’ll give you all an update on what comes out between now and the end of the calendar year.

The post Best non-fiction of 2024 appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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People hate Jake Paul. He is the walking personification of a Reddit board: a cocky, belligerent white boy who loves to troll as much as he loves to use mental health issues as marketing. His transition from YouTube provocateur to "serious" "boxer" has been built on the calculated decision to fight washed-up black athletes. It’s smart; boxing has always thrived when catering to the public imagination around race war. The desire to see Paul get knocked out by one of the faded avatars of black masculinity he sets himself against explains much of the draw of his fights. His savvy protection of that appeal explains why he only fights people he can comfortably beat with his young legs and just-about-competent skills.

When it was first announced that Paul planned to fight a 58-year-old Mike Tyson, the initial response was one of widespread incredulousness. Over time, people seemed to convince themselves that somehow a geriatric Tyson could be the one to finally put Jake Paul “in his place,” whatever that might mean. It always made sense why Paul would want to fight an old Mike Tyson. But what exactly was in it for Tyson? Money, surely, but that can’t be the only reason. This is a man in his late 50s, who’d been mostly retired since the early 2000s. The people who got suckered into caring about this fight didn't want to see that reality, transposing instead an image of the Mike Tyson of yore, maybe older and slower in some vague way, but still in possession of the exhilarating, terrifying power and violence that made him a legend. On some level, maybe Tyson wanted to see that too.