Veteran, Land Developer, Amateur Farmer, Baseball, Dipping my toe into social media
United States
Joined July 2023
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This news from the Pentagon is more of a “Back to the Future” discussion than some signal of impending trouble. Prior to the mid-90s, virtually all installations were self-sufficient in producing their own utilities. Then, two things happened to change the environment.
First came the end of the Cold War and the “peace dividend” led to a dramatic reduction in active duty military members, BRAC closed many bases, and reduced defense budgets led the military to cut costs and look for the most cost-effective means of operation. All functions that could be classified as commercial activities, performed by businesses in the private sector, were out-sourced via contract rather than performed by in-house, government staff which proved to be over 25% more expensive than contractors. As a result, installations greatly expanded contracting for outside services while, concurrently, reducing their in-house capability.
Then in the FY98 NDAA, Congress codified the legal authority (10 USC 2688) allowing DoD to sell or convey utility systems to private operators. This law was well-timed because the on-base plants and distribution systems were badly obsolete with extensive deferred maintenance. This law enabled DoD to divest of what was considered to be a non-core (i.e. not directly tied to warfighting) function and they could use third party funding to upgrade systems. While each service took a different approach, DoD used this authority to privatize utility systems and close obsolete plants, relying, instead, on commodity purchases from local utilities.
At the time, these were rational decisions based on the condition of the government systems and the cost to repair them. But, as a result, the installations were left vulnerable to outside forces for which there was absolutely no ability, of the military, to control them. This move is a return to the pre-90s military and the recognition that bases are vulnerable to new threats that really didn't exist or weren’t considered 30 years ago. Achieving this goal, though, will be extremely expensive and will be very disruptive to the way DoD has managed installations.
NoTiedLand retweeted
My new research: “Stagflation and Investment Management” with Panashe Bera and @KristinaHooper focuses on stagflation and overheating and the implications for investors. Free download: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… Here is a short: youtube.com/shorts/WAkf_a8s3… @DukeFuqua
NoTiedLand retweeted
Imagine sitting on top of a mountain, thinking you are safe, and a massive grizzly casually runs up it.
I can't believe how athletic these bears are. If you are on the menu, nothing will stop it.
A couple years ago there was a hiker in Waterton Park that tried to out climb a grizzly who just kept climbing up to him. He had to get rescued off.
NoTiedLand retweeted
I always had great admiration for Jerry Koosman. Outpitched Mike Cuellar in game 2 of the 69 series. Not easy to do.. 2-1 victory. 220 wins, 140 complete games, 33 shutout , 20 wins twice. Great career and such a class person.. RIP
NoTiedLand retweeted
ACA exempt short term medical care. You can buy 3 year policies at about 40% of Obamacare.
If your wife is SUPER organized you can do Christian Health sharing, but it’s really tedious.
NoTiedLand retweeted
The Merchant Banking Playbook created some of the greatest fortunes in history.
Jay Gould shows how small investments in distressed infrastructure can grow into an industrial empire.
NoTiedLand retweeted
Orwell's great observation in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was that to shrink a person's vocabulary is to shrink his capacity to think.
An impoverished version of English removes the mental tools needed to formulate and communicate complex (and dissenting) ideas. Such is the deep, complex relationship between language and thought.
We don't read "difficult books" to say that we've read difficult books. We read them because they expand the boundaries of what we are capable of thinking and feeling — we ascend to their level. Vocabulary helps us to recognize truths otherwise beyond our grasp.
This revelation is worse than you may think. This must be reversed.
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
NoTiedLand retweeted
In my years as an Army officer, I learned one thing for certain: when young people struggle to meet a standard, you don't lower the standard.
Soldiers rise to what is expected of them. So do our sons and daughters. Ask little and you get little. Ask much and they will meet it.
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
NoTiedLand retweeted
"Why does nobody run for the school board?"
"Why are the Rotary clubs empty?"
"Why does every town meeting feel like it's run by the same motley assortment of terrible people?"
Because the men who ought be doing so--the successful local men of prominence, typically businessmen and lawyers--came to the conclusion in the mid-20th century that participation in and leadership of civic life was someone else's job.
This is the desire of the so-called conservative to simply "work" rather than do all the other things that keep entropy at bay and ensure things function. Their doing so left open the field to the worst among us: spiteful malcontents
It wasn't always like this.
The planters of the Virginia gentry served as vestryman, justice, militia officer and burgess, usually before he turned thirty and usually for no pay, other than perhaps having some travel expenses covered as a burgess.
It was expected of him, and he expected it of himself: as a man whose success made him privileged, he was duty-bound to be the one to show up and lead
That habit can come back. It ought come back. It starts with showing up to the boring meeting, and being the sort of man to whom others listen. The sort of man whose reputation for success and competence, and cultivated but not overdone and always aesthetically pleasing look makes others want to follow him
This is what the great men we look back to did, and is indeed what their whole soceity was geared toward producing: great men who were great leaders at every level of civic life, from the humblest station at the bottom to the greatest at the top
Re-engaging in that way will be critical if we are to retake our country.
Read more about what we can learn from the Virginia gentry here: theamericantribune.news/p/ho…
How The Gap And The Gain Transformed An Athlete’s Mindset
travismewhirter.substack.com…
NoTiedLand retweeted
🎯
I pay every invoice the day it comes in—not net 30, not on Friday, but that day. And anybody who tells me that’s bad cash management has never had the best guy in town pick up on the first ring.
Here’s what nobody tells you about paying slowly: You think you’re being smart by floating your money, but what you’re actually doing is training the best people in your life to answer somebody else’s call.
Every plumber, every lawyer, and every good contractor has a short list of clients they’ll drop everything for. The people on that list are the ones who never made them chase a check.
So when it’s Sunday, something happens to your pipes, and you need the one guy who’s actually good, you’re either on that list or you’re leaving a voicemail.
I’d rather lose 30 days of float than lose that phone call. Pay fast, man. It’s the cheapest loyalty you’ll ever buy.
— Nick Ayala
NoTiedLand retweeted
My favorite sports business story involves two brothers turning $1 million into $800 million as basketball team owners without ever owning an NBA team.
It's a masterclass in leverage, long-term thinking, and the power of equity and ownership.
Here's the crazy story 👇
NoTiedLand retweeted
This is absolutely insane.
Homeowners in Magnolia Cove, a neighborhood in Sherrills Ford, North Carolina, are watching their HOA fees spiral completely out of control.
Earlier this year, residents were paying $350 a month. In June, those fees jumped to $1,250. Now, just four months later, the HOA has voted to DOUBLE them again to $2,500 A MONTH.
And believe it or not, it could have been even worse. The HOA had initially proposed raising the fees to an unbelievable $7,500 a month. That’s $90,000 a year!
The final approved amount of $2,500 still means homeowners are expected to pay $30,000 a year in HOA fees alone, compared to just $4,200 annually earlier this year.
Some residents are now worried about liens, foreclosure, and bankruptcy because they simply cannot afford these increases.
Imagine working your entire life to buy a home, only to have an HOA increase your fees by more than 600% in a matter of months and potentially force you out of your own house.
How the hell is this even allowed to happen?
NoTiedLand retweeted
⚡️The United States is slowly selling its future policy freedom to finance the present.
Debt is usually discussed as a number. That misses the real object being accumulated.
Every additional trillion is a claim on future taxation, future growth, future monetary policy, future political choices, and future generations of output. The government receives purchasing power now and gives away degrees of freedom later.
At small scale, debt expands optionality.
At this scale, debt begins consuming it.
That is the phase change.
The state becomes progressively less able to tolerate outcomes that would otherwise be economically cleansing. High real rates become fiscally corrosive. Deflation becomes poisonous because nominal revenues fall against fixed liabilities. Deep recessions become harder to permit. Asset-price collapses threaten collateral, tax receipts, pensions and financial stability simultaneously.
So policy starts bending around the balance sheet.
That creates a hidden asymmetry:
The United States increasingly needs nominal expansion simply to preserve room to maneuver.
More GDP. More productivity. More asset value. More tax receipts. More monetary velocity. More technological output.
The machine must keep getting larger because the claims written against the future keep getting larger too.
That is why AI suddenly belongs inside the debt conversation.
If AI produces a genuine productivity discontinuity, it expands the economic substrate underneath the debt fast enough to restore breathing room.
If it does not, the adjustment migrates elsewhere.
Currency.
Real purchasing power.
Interest-rate suppression.
Financial repression.
Future taxation.
Some combination of those absorbs what real growth could not.
And that leads to the deepest implication:
The debt problem is ultimately a sovereignty problem.
A sovereign is supposed to control its choices.
But once enough future income has already been promised, the range of available choices narrows.
Eventually the government still appears sovereign legally while becoming increasingly governed economically by the need to preserve the system carrying its liabilities.
That is the inversion.
The debt no longer sits on the balance sheet.
The balance sheet starts writing policy.
NoTiedLand retweeted
my wife and i maxed out our full $5 million SBA 7a allowance to buy the business i had built up under my mom’s name over 6 years of me running it. here are the biggest lessons i learned through the process:
1/ $5mil of debt on a 10 year term 10 year ammo is AGGRESSIVE. Everyone thinks it’s good relative to other private credit options out there, but it still is a significant amount (almost $64k monthly rn)
2/ all banks are not created equal. we got term sheets with feee, collateral requirements etc all different from each one. you NEED to shop around, esp if you’re just relying on a third party broker or if you’re not going to a SBA direct lender
3/ underwriting was no joke. they want all of the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. all of that annoying administrative stuff like secretary of state etc needs to be in order and in line. it added almost 2 months to our loan closing timeline
4/ seasoned funds requirement is no joke. i almost lost the deal because of it, and it only comes up way later in the process near closing. if you’re planning on scrapping cash together from different places to pay for this, make sure that cash is sitting in the bank minimum 3-6 months
5/ lenders won’t approve you if your resumes isn’t up to par. all 3 of the lenders said they wouldn’t even consider this deal if i didn’t already somewhat own the business the last 6 years.
6/ they take a macro approach to analyzing the market. every single one of them asked about key reimbursement drivers / risks like medicare and medicaid cuts etc or payor concentration
7/ the independent appraisal process took 3-4 weeks beginning to end. great and easy process but still cost $5k and added time to closing
8/ they’ll ask for all of your regularly updated financials during diligence. make sure you have a process to hand that off quickly so it’s all good
9/ every line item on the balance sheet and bank statements will be scrutinized. be prepared.
10/ this loan is NOT closing as quickly as the bank or broker is telling you it will. add at least another 60-90 days to that timeline and make sure your seller’s are aware of this. i’ve seen more deals lost bc of the timeline issue than not.
final / if you need any first hand exp or support (not expecting anything in return) hit me up!
NoTiedLand retweeted
⚡️The chart is basically showing the first stage of a regime change:
The bubble can die before the economy dies.
That is extremely relevant to AI.
If today’s AI leadership eventually gets repriced, the first move does not have to be “everything crashes.” It can look like money fleeing the handful of companies carrying extreme expectations and rotating into areas where expectations are low, valuations are sane, and earnings are less dependent on the AI capex loop.
That would produce a bizarre tape where the headline indexes fall while large parts of the market actually improve.
But the table contains the more important clue: equal weight eventually got hit in 2002 too.
That is the second phase.
At first, the market discovers the valuation error.
Later, the economy absorbs the consequences.
Once technology spending collapses, layoffs spread, investment slows, credit tightens and demand weakens, the initial rotation stops being enough. Then the damage moves from price into cash flow, and the rest of the market gets dragged into it.
So the sequence matters more than the analogy itself.
The current AI cycle could eventually resolve in the same two-step architecture:
First, the market stops paying unlimited multiples for intelligence infrastructure. Capital rotates outward.
Then, if the AI investment boom has become large enough that its slowdown hits employment, capex, power demand, construction, semiconductors and credit, the rotation becomes an economic contraction.
That is the part most people miss when they use “dot-com bubble” as shorthand for “tech stocks crash.”
A concentration unwind can initially make the market healthier. A capex unwind can later make the economy weaker.
Those are two completely different phases.
And if the AI complex breaks, knowing which phase you are in will matter far more than simply knowing that the bubble cracked.
NoTiedLand retweeted
⚡️The real unit being discussed is not money.
It is uncommitted future time.
Every fixed obligation reaches forward and pre-spends part of your future before you arrive there. Mortgage, car note, lifestyle, dependents, subscriptions, debt service, social expectations. Enough of those stacked together and your future stops being open territory.
It becomes collateral.
That is why burn rate is fundamentally about sovereignty.
A person with low obligations can absorb uncertainty without immediately surrendering decision quality. They can wait. They can walk. They can refuse. They can take asymmetric risks. They can endure a bad year without selling themselves cheaply.
A person with high obligations can look wealthy while living under permanent compulsion.
The trap is subtle because modern culture rewards visible consumption while hiding the liability structure underneath it. Bigger house, better car, nicer everything. The outside looks like progress while the inside becomes less free.
And this matters far more in the world now forming.
Career continuity is weakening. Expertise is depreciating faster. AI is compressing labor demand. Income paths are becoming less predictable. In that environment, high personal burn behaves like leverage on an asset whose cash flows are becoming more volatile.
That is dangerous.
The strongest position is therefore not maximal consumption.
It is maximum optionality per unit of income.
Because optionality lets you survive long enough to catch the right move.
And the deepest form of wealth is probably this:
How much of your future still belongs to you?
That is what low burn protects.
NoTiedLand retweeted
Costco really does sell the same stuff at much lower prices than anywhere else. How?
Having finally launched Masa chips at Costco, I have some insight into this question. There are three reasons:
1. They take less margin than any other retailer. It varies by store and category, but most retail stores markup products 30-50%. Costco very famously takes only 14%. So right there, you're paying a lot less money to the *retailer* for the same exact product. This is the biggest reason
2. Emphasis on larger items/multipacks. Everyone knows that a bigger item has a lower unit cost. That's what they optimize for, so they buy larger items from their suppliers. Masa bags are more than 2x as big at Costco than anywhere else, for this reason.
3. Sourcing in bulk. Costco moves so much stuff (8% of American groceries, ignoring other categories), they can buy a ton from their suppliers at one time, which results in cheaper per unit freight, better economies of scale, etc. We've never shipped entirely full truckloads of finished product to one retailer before, until Costco.
And all this without buying lower quality items than any other competitive store.
While a health oriented customer might not be interested in everything they have for sale (just like at any other store), there is now one more reason to get a membership there.
