Based on ~20 vendor conversations today I am convinced that the American and European precision motion industries are culturally incapable of cost control of any kind

https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1884267603436396910

The level of overengineering on things like ballscrew-driven linear actuators boggles the mind, people are out here selling $1200+ assemblies (without encoder) that do not do significantly better on repeatability than the fractional micron that I can hack together for $60

Almost all factory automation is >10x overpriced

If we solve that in America we can leapfrog PRC, if we don't then we stagnate and lose The most direct route to 10x cheaper automated factories is a vertically integrated automated factory for factories

I think of this as the minimum viable version of a Von Neumann constructor, which has been the objective of @genfabco from the very beginning

PLAN is making the contemporary equivalent of the WW2 D-Day Mulberry Harbors

This is not the kind of invasion prep that you can hide easily, and it makes me think that the decision to invade Taiwan has been made and now we’re just running down the clock

https://twitter.com/covertshores/status/1877725998549991560

Historically speaking the Chinese way of war isn’t particularly concerned with big expenditures of blood and treasure if territorial integrity is at stake

https://twitter.com/markthesnark2/status/1877783416441110626

USG already mass produces and deploys small modular nuclear reactors in the 200MW+ category, but only for warships for some very stupid reason

Let's scale existing production, slap them in Alaska-class tanker hulls, and then moor them off big coastal cities to serve grid demand This is a straightforward approach to significantly increasing American energy output that requires no new reactor certification, no new contractors, and no new infrastructure on land

It would also be a great excuse to get even better at making large numbers of naval reactors

America needs to start beating PRC on basic industrial stuff if we want to remain economically relevant in the 21st century

A good place to start would be electricity, because I think we can catch up pretty quickly there

Let's look at industrial grid pricing for Southern China In Shenzhen and its environs you can expect to pay ~$0.09/kWh for electrons to your facility, this is a high demand region with no locally available hydrocarbons

If you factor in stuff like local govt giving favored entities perks it probably nets out somewhat lower than that

US is firmly, unambiguously losing to China in every area of robotics, every area of transportation other than airliners, every area of energy generation and storage, and every area of infrastructure and construction

In 2025 we will lose our lead on AI, semiconductors, and more This is already baked in, it will happen, there’s nothing that we can do to regain the lead in any of these areas in the next year

Without whole-of-society mobilization to reindustrialize, their margin of overperformance will grow beyond our ability to surpass them in 2030

Restricting immigration or throwing fits about H1Bs will not fix any of the problems that have led to declining American quality of life

There is no silver bullet, we must radically restructure the government, the banks, the universities, and the myriad petty bureaucracies We live in a globalized imperial political economy that is rigged at almost every level to benefit parasitic rentiers

The root of this system is the clerical oligarchy that cycles between sinecures in the civil service, banks, NGOs, and universities, and it must be destroyed

It’s time to start thinking seriously about your personal bird flu precautions, it looks like a human outbreak may only be a matter of time and the political system is not in the right condition to organize an effective response

https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1872473233922134503

Tbc I'm not making any claims like the ones in Jan 2020

This isn't a human-adapted SARS-derived bioweapon leaking from a lab in China, it's a branch of the Influenza A virus bruteforcing human adaptation from American cattle herds to farm laborers

https://x.com/tlehmanifold/status/1872510141213614539

I beg you all to consider that viruses tend to be exponential when breaking out into novel populations

Bird flu has decimated America’s poultry farms and is now ripping thru America’s cattle herds

A bird to mammal jump is much harder than a mammal to mammal jump

https://twitter.com/420_gunna/status/1871648208985985200

Shut down all movement of cattle between farms to start, mandate respiratory PPE and biweekly testing for all workers who come into contact with livestock, close any operation that doesn’t immediately comply

Also set up fever clinics in tents outside hospitals to limit ER risk

https://twitter.com/chrislatorres/status/1871697360063254863

H5 influenza, covid, and RSV, and regular influenza A numbers from the main wastewater treatment plant in SF

Previous H5 reading was 6.5, jumped to 228.8

There are no major dairy processing facilities in SF and people don't flush pet waste, so this is likely coming from people


Link to the wastewater monitoring dataset, as you can probably see there's a clear trend despite some inconsistent sampling data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker/?chart…

Low hanging fruit for US domestic electronics production:

- server motherboards/other major components
- networking hardware
- commercial radio transceivers
- industrial controllers
- gaming consoles
- high end sensor packages

What else? More difficult to reshore:

- cameras/other commodity CMOS
- TVs/screens
- phones/laptops/desktops

Extremely difficult:

- batteries
- commodity components (esp passives)
- thermal management systems

For the Dems to have won this they would have to be an entirely different party

For example:
- Admit when their leader has declined into senility circa 2022
- Select a new leader via an open primary process, not a closed door conclave
- Make any attempt at all at persuasion They were incapable of doing these things because they are the party of the permanent administrative state, which is the only coalition that matters to them

All their messaging was targeted at the people they already represented

https://x.com/mattparlmer/status/1844829035890909573

The QTs on this post are very interesting and worth perusing if you want an idea of how dysfunctional American politics is and will likely remain for the next few decades

https://twitter.com/travishelwig/status/1847339192709222594

There are two types of QT above

Type 1: standard lib and leftie pile-on of the Helldump variety, per usual they're missing the point/proving his point

Type 2: righties dunking on him but also incorrectly inferring that he's making a racial point in addition battle-of-the-sexes

Possible
Meissner
Effect
Near
Room
Temperature
In
Copper
Substituted
Lead
Apatite

arxiv.org/abs/2401.00999
arxiv.org/abs/2401.00999 Well well well

There is no greater self-own than a VC that can’t justify investing in companies with physical footprint because they get scared of longer return timelines

This like so many issues with the technology industry’s overgrown finance support function boils down to pure skill issue If you as a professional financier can’t talk LPs into a 15-20yr return horizons (with god knows how many opportunities for cashout along the way given even modest success) you should find a different field to work in, maybe underwriting home loans or something more your speed

People who are saying "it's over" every time there's a lukewarm or conservative statement from a lab working on LK-99 have a bad model of academic research

A lot of the big university and state labs have an incentive to slowwalk this for a couple different reasons First, until the supercomputer sims from a few days ago essentially nobody on the physics theory side of things thought this was plausible

A lot of high ego researchers are in either denial or bargaining phase about their approach to this problem space over the last few decades

In the past I have given credit where it was due to Eliezer Yudkowsky for not explicitly advocating violent solutions to the problems with AI development that by his own admission only he and a few other (mostly nontechnical) people see on the horizon

He crossed that line today Since he has graduated from begging the question to openly stating that blowing things and people up is a reasonable thing to do I think we should dispense with the politeness that has been the norm around these discussions in the past

EY does not know what he’s talking about

Immense amount of cope out there rn esp in light of that letter

We are well over the event horizon, people are just gonna have to make peace with the fact that there will be many entities swimming in the pool with us that are many times smarter than the baseline human I say "entities" and not "transformers" because transformers are first and foremost a tool for augmenting humans

Low bandwidth text UI is just the beginning, we will be plugging human brains directly into these and other forms of machine intelligence very soon

One in eight cases of childhood asthma attributable to gas stoves used in the home

Exposure to gas stoves is dangerous, the stats for restaurant workers will be off the charts when they get around to measuring them

mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/1… You really should not need a bunch of studies to work thru the potential negative implications of openly burning a bunch of gas in the middle of your home several times a day but if you do, here are a bunch of studies

From time to time I’ll listen to NPR to get a read on what that particular media bubble is on about

Today the New Yorker Radio Hour did a “the year ahead in sports but”, and started with the Damar Hamlin heart attack

They neglected to mention the spike in similar incidents Instead of being journalistic and asking why it is we have had a significant spike in adverse cardiac events among some of the most physically conditioned people on the planet, they waxed poetic for several minutes about the inherent violence in football

This seems disingenuous

An eleven year sentence for Liz Holmes is wildly excessive She took money from powerful people to advance novel technology

When this didn't pan out as quickly as they demanded and she tried to pivot the company to compete directly with politically powerful testing services like LabCorp and Quest, they had her lynched in the press