Hey guys, Non here, coffee in hand. Want to hear some interesting stories?
Donald Trump just claimed that Canada is looking for the benefits of being a US state because trade talks have officially collapsed. This matters because it signals a shift from traditional trade friction to a much more aggressive, structural questioning of our northern neighbor's sovereignty. We're going to look at how this move plays out for your wallet. I also have a look at tech infrastructure moving underground, a test of coconut oil as jet fuel, a four hundred million dollar TikTok settlement, and the life of Mary de Rachewiltz.
A company called EarthGrid recently completed a test in a California quarry to see if they could bore through three metres of solid white granite. To do it, they used three plasma torches inside a spinning head to create a stream of super-heated plasma reaching 27,000 degrees Celsius. That is significantly hotter than the surface of the Sun. The machine essentially creates a violent vortex inside the tunnel to suck away debris, which the founder, Troy Helming, says can sometimes look like lava.
The goal is to make it cheaper and faster to put critical infrastructure—things like power cables, data centers, and fiber optics—deep underground. Here is how the math works for the people building this. For a long time, putting a substation or a data center underground was considered a luxury because of the sheer cost of moving earth. But the incentive has shifted.
Engineering firms are reporting a surge in demand for "undergrounding" because the war in Ukraine proved that above-ground facilities are incredibly vulnerable to drone attacks. If a power grid can be taken out by a relatively cheap drone, the cost of defense moves from "optional" to "mandatory." Someone will say that we should just build better fences or use more sophisticated anti-drone tech instead of spending billions to bury our entire civilization. That is a fair point. It is much easier to build a wall than it is to move a city's nervous system into the crust of the earth.
But there is a nuance here that the headlines often miss. The story isn't just about hiding from drones; it is about the physics of cooling and stability. Look at Trentino DataMine. They are using naturally cool caverns 100 metres underground to house servers.
They are using 90 million cubic metres of dolomite rock as a shield against physical intrusion, electromagnetic interference, and seismic events. Because the rock provides natural cooling, it is less energy-intensive to keep the servers running. They are trading the high cost of excavation for a permanent reduction in the electricity bill. To put it simply, we are moving from a world where we tried to shield things from the environment to a world where we are using the environment as the shield itself.
Whether it is burying submarine cables three metres deep to stop them from snapping or boring tunnels for underground freight to take trucks off the road, the move is about finding the cheapest way to achieve "brutal materiality." The gap here is that while we worry about the cost of the machines, the real cost is the vulnerability of staying on the surface.
We just looked at how physical infrastructure is being moved underground to hide it from sight, but the next story involves a different kind of fortification. Instead of burying cables to protect them from physical harm, the United States and Canada are currently engaged in a high-stakes game of economic maneuvering to see who can build the highest walls around their respective markets. The two countries have officially entered a trade war. According to the BBC, negotiations between the United States and Canada collapsed late Friday night after both sides accused the other of making last-minute changes to a deal that seemed likely earlier in the week.
In response, President Donald Trump announced new 50% tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded on Saturday by announcing that Canada will match those tariffs dollar-for-dollar starting on September 8th. To understand why this is happening, you have to look at the specific goods being targeted. These aren't just random items; they are the building blocks of a deeply integrated North American economy.
The US tariffs cover about 20 billion dollars worth of Canadian imports. That is only about 5% of the total trade between the two countries. This small slice includes things like wine, dairy, cement, clothing, and even hockey equipment. When a government puts a 50% tax on a specific category like dairy or steel, they aren't just trying to balance a budget.
They are trying to change the math of where it is cheaper to build a house or run a farm. If it becomes significantly more expensive to bring Canadian cement into the US, the goal is to force developers to use American sources. The incentive is protectionism: using the state's power to tilt the playing field toward domestic manufacturers. But here is the friction point.
Because the economies are so intertwined, these moves create a feedback loop. When the US taxes Canadian steel, it makes it more expensive for American factories to produce their own goods. This is why Prime Minister Carney is calling the move a miscalculation. He argues that the US is trying to extract the benefits of a shared continent without accepting the shared costs of a shared market.
Someone will say that these tariffs are a necessary tool to bring manufacturing jobs back to American soil. They will argue that if you don't protect your own workers from cheaper imports, the domestic industry will simply evaporate. It’s a defensible position based on the idea that a country that cannot produce its own essentials is no longer truly sovereign. However, there is a different way to see the numbers.
If you look at the 5% figure—the small portion of trade being hit—it suggests this isn't about a total economic divorce. It's about leverage. By hitting specific, high-visibility items like dairy and electronics, the US is looking for a "win" they can point to at home. The more important question is what happens when the retaliation hits.
When Canada matches those tariffs dollar-for-dollar on its own goods, the cost of living for the average person in both countries begins to rise. To put it simply, a tariff is a tax paid by the person who buys the item, not the person who sold it. If a Canadian dairy farmer is hit with a 50% tax, the price of milk in a grocery store in Ohio goes up. When the Canadian government retaliates, the price of appliances in Toronto goes up.
We are seeing a move where both sides are trying to prove they can take a hit without breaking. But the people who actually have to pay the bill are the ones standing in the checkout line. The gap here is between the rhetoric of national strength and the reality of consumer cost. While the leaders talk about "attacks" and "miscalculations," the actual outcome is a more expensive grocery bill and a more complicated supply chain for the person trying to buy a new refrigerator. The US and Canada are currently at a standstill with no clear path to a resolution.
The US and Canada are currently at a standstill with no clear path to a resolution on trade. But while we look for ways to move goods across borders, engineers are looking for ways to move planes through the atmosphere. It is a shift from the friction of geopolitics to the friction of chemistry. A new study from Osaka Metropolitan University suggests that we might be able to power jet engines using coconut oil. The researchers tested biofuels made from the oil found in discarded coconut seeds and leftover flesh—parts of the crop that are usually thrown away.
They used what they call a co-solvent method, mixing acetone with alcohol and the oil. This allows the liquids to blend and react at much lower temperatures than the intense heat and pressure usually required to refine aviation fuel. To put it simply, they found a way to make a high-purity biofuel that doesn't drain as much energy during the manufacturing process. Most sustainable aviation fuels, or SAF, are energy-hungry to produce, which can eat into their environmental benefits before the plane even leaves the gate.
By using waste material and lower temperatures, they are trying to make the math work. Someone will say that this is just another biodiesel. They have a point. The study showed that at 80,000 rotations per minute, a 50% methanol-based blend consumed about 16.8% more fuel than pure kerosene to produce the same amount of thrust.
Because the biofuel has less energy per kilogram, the engine has to work harder to get the same result. There is also the technical hurdle of aromatics—the specific chemicals in kerosene that make wing tank seals swell correctly. Without them, the fuel could leak. The more important question is whether we can move from "biodiesel-ish" blends to fuels that are chemically identical to kerosene.
If we can use waste cellulose from US waste streams to create a drop-in replacement, we could potentially displace all current US jet fuel consumption. We would need an extra source of hydrogen to do it, but the goal is a fuel that isn't burdened with extra oxygen. The gap here is between a fuel that works in a lab and a fuel that works in a wing tank. We have the chemistry to burn it, but we still have to master the plumbing.
We just looked at the plumbing of aviation fuel, but now we have to look at the plumbing of the internet—specifically how it handles the data of children. TikTok has agreed to pay four hundred million dollars to the United States to settle a lawsuit over its handling of kids' privacy. The deal is a response to a 2024 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice, which accused TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, of collecting data on millions of users under the age of 13. To understand why this is such a massive settlement, you have to look at the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
This is a federal law from the year 2000 designed to stop companies from gathering information on children without a parent's okay. The government’s argument is that TikTok essentially didn't check who was using the app, even though the Justice Department estimated there were over 170 million teenagers on the platform. In other words, the company was profiting from a user base it claimed it wasn't targeting. Someone will say that a four hundred million dollar fine is just a cost of doing business for a company of this scale.
They might argue that if the profit from those millions of users exceeds the fine, the behavior doesn't actually change. That is a fair point, but the math here is different than a standard fine. TikTok is paying three hundred million dollars immediately, with another hundred million coming once the government clears a specific legal hurdle with the Federal Trade Commission. To put that in perspective, Google’s YouTube paid 170 million dollars for similar violations in 2019, and Epic Games paid 275 million in 2022.
TikTok’s settlement is significantly larger. It also forces a structural change: the predecessor to ByteDance, Musical.ly, has to pay a 5.7 million dollar fine and strictly ensure it gets parental consent. The more important question is what survives. While the government is still looking at Meta for potentially hundreds of billions in penalties, TikTok is moving into a new ownership structure where ByteDance only holds a 19 percent stake.
The fine is the price of staying in the room.
I want to put a few different stories from today next to each other to see if they reveal a larger pattern. The Economist reports on whether Scott Bessent is the specific type of Federal Reserve chair Donald Trump wanted to manage bond yields. Al Jazeera and The Economist are tracking the escalating costs of Trump's trade tariffs and his new "crushing" sanctions against Iran. Finally, the BBC reports on Trump waving the green flag for an IndyCar race through the streets of Washington as part of the country's 250th birthday celebrations.
To put it simply, these stories represent a massive pivot toward a high-friction style of governance. We see a move toward aggressive, unilateral economic pressure—tariffs and sanctions—paired with a desire to control the underlying financial mechanics that make that pressure possible. The common thread is the use of the state to force a specific economic outcome, whether that is punishing a foreign rival or trying to manually lower the interest rates that dictate your mortgage or your grocery bill. I am not claiming that these are all part of one secret master plan or that they will all succeed in the same way.
It is entirely possible that the IndyCar race is just a ceremonial gesture and the interest rate goals are mathematically out of reach. We don't have enough data yet to say if the sanctions on Iran will actually change behavior or if they will just increase the price of oil for everyone. But what survives all of these is the shift in how power is being exercised. It is less about consensus and more about the direct application of weight.
For you, the thing to watch is the "friction tax." When a government uses tariffs and sanctions as its primary tools, the cost of that friction eventually stops being a headline and starts being a line item on your electricity bill.
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TikTok just paid four hundred million dollars to the United States to settle a massive child privacy case. That is the price of staying in the room. But we are moving away from the mechanics of corporate fines to a very different kind of persistence. According to The Economist, Mary de Rachewiltz died on July 24th at the age of 101.
That is the only information I have. The rest is behind a paywall, and I won't pretend to know it. But there is a specific idea in that single sentence that matters. It says she devoted her life to defending Ezra Pound.
To spend a century on a single cause is a staggering expenditure of time. Most people choose a career, a family, or a hobby. To choose a defense—especially of a figure as complicated and controversial as Pound—is a choice to inhabit a specific, difficult space. It tells us something about what happens when a person decides that a single belief is worth more than their own convenience.
It is a refusal to let a narrative end just because it is difficult to sustain. We live in a world that asks us to move on, to be efficient, and to pivot when things get messy. Devoting a life to a defense is the opposite of efficiency. It is a long, slow commitment to a single point of view.
I do not know what she said or what she did, but I know what she stayed for. It is the quiet, stubborn reality of the long haul. Thanks for listening.