The number of people that still pay attention to what Trump *says* is mind-boggling to me. His story changes every 4 hours. It's deliberate. He's running his messaging strategy like a reality show. It's designed to keep people off balance, uncertain, distracted and misinformed. It's designed to encourage you to "tune in" a few hours later. He's trying to maximize "viewership".

If you ignore the messaging, and pay attention to what's actually happening, you would know that the US is gearing up for a limited land war. This is nothing secret It's been covered on all the major news channels. But, it's second-run news that doesn't get the top billing, because it doesn't get as many likes and clicks as the will-he-won't-he reality show stuff you get from the Trump admin.

The smart people knew that Russia was gonna invade Ukraine, months before it happened. There was a ton of public info about it, but very few people paid attention because it's not intertaining stuff. Same thing is happening here. There's gonna be a limited land war in Iran, at the very least. It's gonna take a LONG time. And, when it happens, three quarters of the world are gonna make a surprised-pikachu-face.

That used to be the tradition for civilized western countries - you wait until well after death to memorialize someone.

There were damn good reasons for that but we've abandoned it. The time frame doesn't fit well with the internet economy, where everything is measured in milliseconds, clicks, likes and ad sales.

Actually the internet economy thrives when someone's reputation gets thrashed back and forth. First you put someone on a pedestal. Tons of internet content results in ad sales. 2 years later, you focus on their dirt, generate a bunch of negative internet content, and get them cancelled. This generates more ad sales. 1 year later after the hate has died down, you remind people of the positive they did, rinse and repeat, generating internet income with each cycle.

I’ve got plenty of gripes about Thiel, and the 2-billion dollar valuation is the standard I-estimate-my-company-as-being-worth-all-teh-mmmoonnaayyy.

But this idea seems solid and worth pursuing. It’s a real market, for real goods, that probably could benefit from some tech. There’s use case is extremely low on buzzwords. No AI. No blockchain. No crypto. Just a solid case for a hardware/software system that could probably improve actual physical productivity in an easily measurable way. The argument for using cloud infrastructure is pretty compelling.

The kicker is if costs can be low enough to justify, that’s a LOT of fairly advanced hardware to purchase, install, and deal with wear and tear in an aggressive outdoor physical environment, in order to get my cows to grow 20 percent better. Is it worth it? I have no clue, but that’s gonna be the main question to answer. Agriculture is a very-low-bullsh&t industry.

To the people who are griping about Thiel planning to use this on humans. Your worries are 5 years too late. We’re already shackled to devices that monitor and occasionally prod us in various directions. They’re about 7cm by 14cm by 1cm and we THINK that we’re the ones in control but who are we kidding?

Im all for psychedelic research. The evidence for possible therapeutic effects is super strong, and moral hysteria has prevented a lot of potential good from being realized. But were barely scratching the surface of the effects of individual psychedelics. Combo effects are gonna take decades to understand. This is either an April fools day hoax, or spectacularly irresponsible. Its published in scientific advances, a legit journal, so this looks like a bunch of high powered universities doing something spectacularly dumb. This will leak out of the lab, if it hasnt already. Itll wind up on the streets.

Ignoring all the mindless distracting blather from our admin, the strategic value to the US is the ability to sideline Iran at a moment when its particularly easy (and cheap) because they are vulnerable and weak. Better to deal with China and Iran separately. Like I said, Russia is already out of the equation since theyre vigorously sidelining themselves as a world power.

You sure you want this regime to win? Consider what happens if we pull out now and the current regime remains in power. What happens next year? What about the year after? You really think that everything is gonna return to the way it was before? And, was everything really that peachy keen before?

Try tuning out the constant blather of misinformation, distraction, and entertainment that's streaming from the current US administration. Yes, I know it's hard to do. The stuff is designed to hack into your brain and drain your IQ. Ignore that stuff and pay attention to what's actually happening. This thing is being executed by the military planners, not the elected hacks.

Sometime in the next 10 years, China is seriously considering throwing down with the US. They want to be top dog and we're not ready to give up the top spot yet. When they do, Russia and Iran will definitely be on their side. If they can.

We're making sure that they can't. This has nothing to do with Israel. You think that the world is suffering right now? Imagine having to deal with all the current sh&t, but simultaneously dealing with China invading Taiwan and Uncle Sam trying to prevent it. Missiles flying everywhere. Oil and gas shut down. Half the worlds shipping offline. TSMC chip manufacturing permanently and totally offline. God only knows what else. Better to deal with those two things in serial rather than in parallel.

Weirdly, I'm less worried about Russia. Those crazy Russians are voluntarily setting themselves back by at least 50 years. They burned a million men to take a postage stamp sized piece of Ukraine and their economy and demographics are utterly boned. Their nukes will prevent people from invading them, but that's about the limit of their utility.

Russia is sidelining itself. We're currently sidelining Iran. If Emperor Xi ever seriously considers invading Taiwan, he'll realize that he has zero powerful allies left. And, maybe he will think twice and decide that maybe a hot war isn't the way to go.

War is absolute hell, and innocents always get caught up in it. But, this one makes sense if you think about it. There's a very strong case that a smaller war now might prevent a catastrophically huge one in 5 years.

but not for the reasons that are popular here.

In America, it's my god-given constitutional right to be a booger-eating moron.

So, if Jim Bob the farmer wants to defeat three levels of safety interlocks so he can reach shoulder-deep into his corn thresher and try to fix something that has absolutely no qualifications to deal with, that's his business and nobody should be able to tell him otherwise. And, when the machine unexpectedly starts running, pulls Farmer Bob in and quickly converts him to a tidy pile of corncob sized Farmer-Bob-Nuggets, he has absolutely nobody to blame but himself. Especially not the tractor company.

If someone wants to pop the top off their $2800 Iphone 18 Max Pro Ultra and mess with the innards, that's all good. But when they inadvertently crack a dozen solder joints and turn their shiny piece of high technology into a glass paperweight, Apple is not at fault.

I am perfectly fine with complete right-to-repair, as long as the original manufacturer has zero liability.

Downmod in 3,2,1

Thought exactly nobody.

This is actually a case where free market principles might actually do some good.

Once Musk companies stuff count as publicly traded equities, the market will have a real say in what the valuation should actually be.

I think that it's starting at 5% of the ownership going public. That's artificially low to crank the price up, and I don't like that game. However, once Musk gets a taste of public money, I suspect that he will want more. I anticipate a larger fraction of it going public over time. He won't lose voting control, but even powerful corporate founders with complete voting control have to bow to market forced. Zuckerberg controls the voting for his Facebook empire (I refuse to call it meta) but he is definitely constrained against doing things that tank the stock price, for a variety of reasons.

The same will happen with Musk, and the world will be a better place

There is plenty of water. This is very true. We live on a water planet. But its not evenly distributed. I live in Ohio. Ohio is on top of a freshwater aquifer that replenishes itself so fast that the local population can use as much water as we want for literally anything, not bother with conservation, and we wont put even a tiny dent in the supply. Same goes for pretty much any place between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi delta. That doesnt LA, though.

because it's U.S. based and our government most definitely has various backdoors to get at anything that's generated using the package. I don't care much, but I totally understand that a lot of people don't like it. I consider myself to be a loyal US citizen, but sorry Uncle Sam, nothing you tell me will convince me that you're not snooping. I know too much history to be that naive.

And, if I was a European, I probably wouldn't like the idea of using MS office and every document I make winding up on a US government server. I get it.

But, dudes, you're trying to tell me the a RUSSIAN program is gonna be better? What planet do you live on?

to be a booger-eating moron. Uncle Sam will stand by with a grin on his face and watch me while I carefully shoot myself through one foot, and then drill the other one too for good measure. All while humming the national anthem.

The flip side is that I'm also free to become wildly successful, and society won't hammer me down like a nail.

But, the consequences of my actions land squarely in my own lap. Good, bad, or something in between. I own it. And I won't get much help if my stupidity blows up in my face.

If people want to bet their retirement money on crypto and opaque shady investments with valuations that amount to "whatever the cryptowallstreet bro says it is", so be it. I will stick with publicly-traded equities, real estate and bonds. There's a really old-timey rule in investing that's still pretty solid - "you should only invest in what you can understand."

"vaping" + "AI" +"blockchain".

There was a time when you could append those two words to literally anything, and private equity investors would shovel cash at you and not ask any questions while you lived on a caribbean island with 5 of your best poly friends.

Those times are gone. The dumb money has already been harvested. Any investors with cash to burn are now asking questions that include the words like "convincing business proposition" and "ROI".

I'm sure this company values itself at a hundred triillllyyeeeooonnn dollars. Investors probably don't.

Semantics much? Thats like saying I support free cheeseburgers for everyone, but I never advocated for making it hard to keep a burger joint open.

They might be around in name, but they’re like wispy tiny ghosts of what they used to be. Industrial research in the US is basically a rounding error. National labs, universities, and nonprofit research companies now dominate the activity. Companies are largely frozen out. They can use the results of the research, but the current model creates a “valley of death” between the knowledge generated in the research lab and the corporate world. “Corporate R&D” is pretty much “Corporate D” nowadays. There is no R. Not in the corporate world.