RRR30: Welcoming 2025, Easy Home Remedies, Key Ukrainian Territory, Free Learning, Never Trump, Nuclear Fusion, Relitigating NAFTA, Philly Photos

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Jan 29, 2025

Happy New Year, RRR family! 🎆🎇🎉💃

I hope the most recent holiday season brought lots of positive energy into your life.

No matter how challenging the past has been, life constantly offers us a renewed chance to improve ourselves and uplift our loved ones.

As we flip our calendars to 2025, what are you most looking forward to?

I know... New Year's resolutions have a reputation for fizzling out.

Yet, I think we should be kinder when people commit to getting in better shape, building stronger relationships, or exploring what brings them happiness, even if the results are inconsistent or short-term.

The beauty of these efforts lies in their beginnings. Each attempt marks the early stages of building habits that can genuinely enhance quality of life. We should celebrate those taking steps towards self-improvement (👏) and reflect on how we can align our own actions more closely with the desires of our soul.

For 2025, I’m challenging myself to:

Continue improving my flexibility
Eat fewer processed foods and cook more homemade meals
Spend more quality time with people
Publish the 55th edition of RRR
Reduce my daily phone usage to under 1.5 hours
Consistently chest press 180 pounds for 10 reps
Allow myself time to be bored (and relish the moment)

If I had to simplify all these goals into one guiding principle, it would be: "Get 5% better at everything you’re already doing."

Small, steady progress compounds into extraordinary results over a lifetime.

Wishing you all an incredible 2025 🥂.

In Recent Times…

In an effort to be a better steward of my dwelling space, and to be slightly less wasteful, I’ve been using some easy and beneficial home remedies:

After cooking something that is strong smelling, or after I’ve cleaned the apartment, I’ve been putting on these simmer pots.

There are several beautiful things about them, but one of the best externalities is that you automatically become less wasteful.

If I have extra spices laying around, or if I have fruit scraps (cores, pits, and peels), I automatically start thinking about how I can leverage them to make the apartment smell great.

A simple one to get started is a lemon pot. Just throw the rinds and flesh of lemons you’ve used into the pot and let the steam do the rest 🍋.

Some other simple things I’ve been doing to optimize my time at home:

Soaking some lemon slices in water, and using that water to clean the sink at night. It leaves the sink smelling great.
Making homemade tea with turmeric and ginger root
When I run the oven to cook anything, I also use it as an opportunity to further season my cast iron skillet
I installed some hooks on the wall to hang hats, my backpack, an umbrella, or other things I repeatedly need to grab when I leave the apartment

What easy wins am I not taking advantage of?

Content Corner 📖🎙📺

The Latest in Ukraine and Crucial Elements Heading Into (Possible) Peace Talks 🟡🔵

If you're interested in gaining some perspective on the evolving strategic considerations in the Ukraine war, this video dives into the latest.

While I can't fully verify all the facts presented, much of the content aligns with reports from other credible sources, such as this article further breaking down the importance of the Pokrovsk Coke Plant .

Zooming out — I never thought we would see three years of this war.

While it is true that drones have been an important tool for the Ukrainians, I would have imagined that in the mid-2020s, wars would feature a plethora of modern capabilities, ultimately leading to swifter conclusions to avoid massive casualties.

More simply, I thought that technological and monetary supremacy would make fighting less-effective than diplomacy and negotiation.

It’s tough to believe we have been watching this slow-moving war unfold for as long as it has.

It’s also hard to escape the fact that there are entities which have something to gain the longer this conflict continues — with human lives as the fuel to keep the fire burning.

Khan Academy

I remember hearing about Khan academy some time ago.

I can’t put my finger on exactly how I became aware of it, but it stuck with me because recently I was asked if I knew of anywhere someone could take a free course on programming basics.

I immediately told them to look into Khan Academy, that I hadn’t personally used it but that I was pretty sure they had great content for free. Good marketing, I suppose 🤷‍♂️.

If I was going to start recommending Khan Academy, I probably ought look into it myself — there’s no way I couldn’t get some value out of a free, high-quality learning platform.

Just a few weeks in, and I am pretty impressed with the platform.

The courses do a remarkably good job of transforming complex topics into understandable and logical flows, where ideas and concepts naturally build off of one another.

I kind of wish all my high-school teachers were this good.

Whether you want to brush up on world history, mathematics, physics, or practically anything else, I can now recommend Khan Academy with more confidence than I did a few weeks ago.

P.S. — my first course was AP U.S. Government.

“I Will Never Vote For Donald Trump. Here’s Why.” by Ben Shapiro — 2016

In every election cycle, the establishment insists that we unify behind a candidate who does not reflect conservatism because elections are always a choice between the two worst options. They blackmail conservatives into supporting candidates who undermine the message and morality of our mission. Now Trump does the same. The establishment created the Donald Trump phenomenon with their “best of two bad options” logic, and now Trump is using that logic to destroy conservatism openly. The establishment doesn’t object to Trumpism. They only object to Trump. Strip the drunken boor antics from Trump, and you’ve got John McCain who will lie transparently to pander to the populist wing.
We don’t have to be complicit. As Ben Domenech is fond of citing, Alexander Hamilton once wrote, “If we must have an enemy at the head of government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.” Let us not be our own enemies.
Now is the time to say no.

I came across this listening to Ben shapiro debate Sam Harris on the “Honestly” podcast with Bari Weiss.

Nuclear Fusion Power Plant To Be Constructed in Virginia ⚡💡

This will mark the first time fusion power will be made available in the world at grid scale. We’ll plug 400 megawatts of steady fusion power into the state’s electrical grid starting in the early 2030s. We expect ARC will create hundreds of jobs to build and operate the power plant. We’re pleased by the reception we’ve had so far, and we’re looking forward to more engagement with our neighbors and the surrounding community.

You can count me as “reasonably skeptical” as far as the early 2030s grid-ready fusion power goes, but there is no doubt that there is tons of nuclear energy momentum out there right now (for both fission and fusion).

Here is some context as to where we’re at with fusion as well as it’s unique challenges and benefits:

For starters, fusion is when atoms are joined together vs. the already operational nuclear fission power plants which split atoms to create energy
Ignition is one of several key technical challenges — it takes an absurd amount of energy to heat the fuel enough to start fusion reactions, though a major breakthrough took place in 2022 when net energy gain (more energy output than input) was achieved for the first time in nuclear fusion. Plasma containment is another challenge.
Fusion reactions have close to “limitless” fuel. Deuterium found in seawater (which is already extracted commercially) is abundant and not needed in large quantities to power fusion.
Minimal and less hazardous waste products with much shorter half-lives. Fusion works with light atoms like hydrogen vs. the uranium used in fission reactions.

Ultimately, humanity is headed towards an era of clean energy abundance. Technological advancement has been prolific in my lifetime and it is not showing any signs of slowing down.

As I mentioned in Junto Club, “I suspect we will look back twenty years from now, and the present day will seem like the stone ages.”

For more in-depth coverage on the state of global energy, Liberty and Mark Nelson recently released a couple of highly informative pods.

Was NAFTA effective at increasing US trade with its bloc partners?

Trade talk is quite in vogue at the moment — it’s a consistent part of the rhetoric from newly inaugurated U.S. administration.

Specifically, there’s been a lot of discussion and fiery exchanges surrounding North American trade agreements, tariffs, and even… territorial disputes?

In any event, it was timely that the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a blog highlighting the way in which North American trade between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada has played out over the course of various trade deals.

NAFTA was implemented in 1994:

Aside from trade volume (and the interesting long-term trend of U.S. Mexico trade compared to the U.S. and Canada), it’s interesting to consider some of the pros and cons of this trade deal, especially given the time it occurred.

U.S. critics would likely point to the fact that U.S. manufacturers were incentivized to take on cheaper labor outside the U.S., but I think that generally lacks the context of globalization trends. The U.S. was always going to offshore production and labor.

In this sense, the disruption NAFTA may have caused was likely outweighed by the fact it:

Made U.S. companies more globally competitive
Put downward pressure on inflation, especially with year round access to a larger agricultural base

In any event, NAFTA was ultimately replaced by Donald Trump in 2020 with the creation of the USMCA. That agreement, unlike NAFTA, needs to be reviewed every six years.

We may be seeing new trade deals on the continent more frequently than we have in the past.