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More from @tomaspueyo

Tomas Pueyo

@tomaspueyo

Oct 15

Now that Starship can land, it's ready to go to Mars in 2026

Why then?
How will it go?
Why don't we need a Moon station for pit stops?
When will humans go?
🧵

1. Why 2026?
As the Sun travels through space, its planets follow it

The Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun
Mars is farther away, and takes nearly two years
This means the 2 planets get close by every ~26 months

Read 15 tweets

Tomas Pueyo

@tomaspueyo

Oct 13

Starship is going to change humanity well beyond going to Mars: It will transform the Earth too because the cost of sending stuff to space is about to drop by 10x

A tip of this future comes from the Silk Road [1/6]

Why was it called Silk Road? Because silk is expensive & light

Transportation costs depend on distance and weight: The longer the distance and the heavier the goods, the more expensive transportation

So over long distances, only light & valuable goods could be sold—like silk

Cheaper transportation techniques like ships and railroads allowed many more goods to be traded over much longer distances

It started with tobacco, sugar, china, cotton... Eventually, things like corn & wheat

Trade exploded and the world got rich [3/6]

Read 8 tweets

Tomas Pueyo

@tomaspueyo

Oct 3

Lebanon could be rich, but it's chaotic. Why?
Geography, which is reflected on its flag
You can understand it with just these maps:
🧵

Here's the population density in the Middle East

Lebanon is in the small region of the Levant, surrounded by 4 traditional superpowers:
1. Asia Minor—now Turkey
2. Mesopotamia—now mostly Iraq
3. Persia—now Iran
4. Egypt
5. And also has sea access for Mediterranean superpowers

1. Because 🇱🇧Lebanon is in the middle of these superpowers, they vie for its control
2. Because🇱🇧is smaller, it can't fully assert its independence

➡️occupied by Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Achaemenids, Greeks, Romans, Umayyads, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, French...

Read 19 tweets

Tomas Pueyo

@tomaspueyo

Oct 1

Every American is poorer because of longshoremen's position

The worst is not the $1½-5 Billion per day the strike would cost the US economy

The worst is not their outsized salaries

It's not even the known ties they have with organized crime, or their extraction of rents for work they never did

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1840904466310316459

The worst part is that they increase transportation costs, which destroys the wealth of every American, making us way poorer

As this tweet explains, longshoremen get hefty fees every time they touch a container. As a result, shipping avoids "touches"

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1840904466310316459

Read 14 tweets

Tomas Pueyo

@tomaspueyo

Sep 30

Conflict between 🇲🇽Mexico and 🇪🇸Spain, because 🇪🇸 hasn't apologized for its invasion of 🇲🇽 500 years ago

Here's what happened, and why this is ignorant and hypocritical:

1. When the 🇪🇸 arrived to Central America, the Aztecs were in the middle of a brutal conquest (green below)

Ppl don't realize how recent this had been before the arrival of the 🇪🇸
• Tenochtitlan was formed less than 200y earlier
• The 1st king of the Mexica was crowned just 150y earlier
• The Aztec Triple Alliance formed less than 100y earlier

This was not the 1st wave of conquests & massacres in the region. They'd been at it for thousands of years

And the Aztecs were not particularly kind. Tenochtitlan displayed walls of skulls from its enemies

Their rise includes killing & skinning the daughter of an allied king!

Read 22 tweets

Tomas Pueyo

@tomaspueyo

Sep 24

Massive floods across the Western world. What pattern do you see?

1. Massive floods in Vienna, carrying cars and everything else on its path.
The Danube is mostly embanked, no floodplains

2. Budapest is underwater
The city is also built on the Danube's floodplain. In fact, most of the Danube has embankments, and the floodplains and dams upstream are not enough to absorb all the water

3. Flood disaster in Głuchołazy, Poland, worst one in 100 years. Why? Because the river is fully embanked, has no floodplains anymore, and goes through the middle of the city