Biomedical engineer, permaculture farmer, Camus scholar, Maryland supremacy, husband, and father.
Frederick, MD
Joined December 2009
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Otto von Bismarck is one of the most impactful people to have shaped the modern world, yet few know anything about him.
I genuinely believe he is one of the most important figures for our age.
Why? Because of artificial intelligence.
Link below:
Our agricultural system is designed so that farmers stay indebted while multinational oligarchies make billions.
John Deere's stock has increased over 500% (total return) since March 2020.
Cattle and land are too cheap.
I hate to admit I’m out of touch but I haven’t bought a new tractor since 2012. When I saw this one with 1400 hours for $170,000, I thought they were asking way too much. Then I priced new ones. A new tractor like this is just shy of $400,000. I couldn’t believe it. I paid $174,000 for a new ivt 8225R in 2012. The bigger row crop tractors are now closer to $600k!
My back has gotten tired of running a 4850 for baling and I sure would like to upgrade because we’ve grown the Colorado operation to over 1500 acres of mostly irrigated land and it’s requiring a lot of time in the seat, but things just don’t add up, even with $400/ton hay and $3.50 feeders, and I really don’t expect either to stay this high for much longer.
I keep hearing that cattle and land are too high, but when you look at costs in agricultural inputs, they certainly are not.
If you’re in the camp that land and cattle prices are crazy, welcome to the club of being 15 years out of touch with reality.
California, like any place, has its share of problems, but it's extraordinary funny when people try to describe the fourth largest economy in the world and the dominant cultural and economic force of the last ~century as "very rotten," etc.
Then stop complaining and paint it yourself.
Just got quoted $2,400 to paint a 23 by 13 foot living room.
The 4 gallons of paint it takes to do the job costs about $110 at Home Depot, or around $160 if you want Sherwin Williams.
This is not a particularly skilled job.
You went to trade school, not medical school.
You own a brush and a roller.
Stop ripping people off, contractors.
We can't brute force compute all possible moves in Go, a static game with a simple 19 x 19 grid, yet somehow people think we're going to simulate a dynamic system of trillions of cells each containing trillions of molecules.
If you had an exponential amount of compute you could solve simulate biology exactly and wouldn't need to run any experiments.
Some of you will think "of course, but that's an unrealistic assumption" and others will think "no, you need experiments even with that much compute. That's just How It's Done".
You would of course need evaluations once you have a solution, but you don't in principle need experiments to find it: Experiments are a way to save compute, dating from a time when it was much more expensive.
And I think the presentation is exponential but real systems aren't irreducibly exponential. AlphaFold worked, after all.
The Cheesecake Factory that I, personally, have been to the most is in Santa Monica, CA.
"I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point; and men are unhappy and confused." - John Steinbeck, East Of Eden
It will be 2050 and people will still be complaining that Cash For Clunkers is distorting the used car market.
Barack Obama was horrible in a million different ways, but he doesn’t get anywhere near the hate he deserves for destroying the used car market for an entire generation.
15-year-old cars with 150,000 miles that should be selling for $3,000 are going for $15,000. It’s abominable. Pure destruction and thievery.
Hear me out: maybe we should tax the unimproved value of land instead of either income or net worth.
We have this lean-to in the creek field. In preparation for winter, I added a few inches of wood chips to the bottom.
Imagine how nutrient rich they will be after a few months of urine and manure from the steers.
The wood chips came from this giant hickory tree that the county cut down this summer.
The tech bros continue to underestimate the difficulty and timelines of translating biological understanding to proven and marketable clinical therapeutics.
I think Operation Warp Speed has warped (pun intended) people's perception of clinical development. Respiratory infections are acute; ASCVD, neurodegenerative disease, and cancer are not.
Plant-this-spring figs in the high tunnel, ~1.5yr old for scale.
Wondering if these fruits will be able to mature and ripen. The high tunnel is their only chance.
That's categorically different than what most people mean by wealth or how they behave with wealth.
Possession of money is a stock, while distribution of money is a flow.
And most of the wealthy care more about the stock than the flow. That's why they continually get richer.
If you want to save Social Security, you should buy a Claude Max subscription.
Imagine the AI economy stumbles in '29 or '30.
Social Security might be the "third rail," but what politician is going to hike taxes on working people during a recession?
