Chris Vale retweeted
150 years ago we were hunting whales to keep the lights on.
For hundreds of thousands of years, generations lived and died in essentially the same world. Then, in the span of a few lifetimes, we conquered flight, split the atom, walked on the moon, built machines from silicon, and now stand on the precipice of manufacturing intelligence greater than our own.
It's entirely possible that all of recorded human civilization is merely this peculiar little interlude between biological evolution and something altogether different. That we may actually live to witness the singularity.
How can one be anything but utterly awestruck by the absurdity of it all?
We were burning whales, for God's sake. – at Marina del Rey, CA
Chris Vale retweeted
Cropped and color tweaked SpaceX Starship launch pic, sized for MacBook Pro wallpaper.
“The AI era rewards depth more than any period I've seen, because the tools make the shallow parts of most jobs free.”
Interesting!
Chris Vale retweeted
Seven Things This 63 Year Old Surgeon Would Tell My 40-Year-Old Self
I am 63 now, and I spend my days as an orthopedic surgeon watching how people's earlier choices show up in their bodies decades later. I see it in my college friends, high school buddies, and patients that I have known for 20+ years. If I could sit across from myself at 40, here is what I would want that man to understand. None of what follows is complicated, and all of it compounds over the decades… either against you… or in your favor. You are largely in control.
Chris Vale retweeted
The culmination of years-long work is now here.
Please join us tomorrow in South Downtown as we open it up for visitors to enjoy during the World Cup and Atlantans to enjoy for decades to come.
Chris Vale retweeted
When you read the specs of the Bugatti EB110, you realize just how batshit crazy this car was for its time. A quad turbocharged V12, 5 valves per cylinder, 12 individual throttle bodies, all paired to a 6 speed manual transmission.
And unlike the Bugattis that came after it, the EB110 actually has real racing pedigree. The EB110 competed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the 24 Hours of Daytona, and in various GT endurance racing series throughout the 1990s
Chris Vale retweeted
After many conversations over past year with friends, business associates & policymakers about the future of AI job disruption, I’ve tried to get my thoughts in order. With the caveat that I have no specific AI expertise, here they are. Comments and corrections encouraged.🧵
1/n
Chris Vale retweeted
Space launch was a clear case where there was a large difference in efficiency between what was possible and what was done in practice before SpaceX. A large part of that was due to everything being locked in to what (just barely) already worked, with huge risk aversion. WIth national prestige or a half billion dollar geosync satellite on the line, speculative engineering ideas that might result in a public debacle were not welcome.
When failure is not an option, success can stay very expensive. You need to experiment to improve, and that fundamentally means being comfortable with failure. If you know it is going to work, it isn’t an experiment.
I have long believed that nuclear power today is in precisely the same state as space launch two decades ago, but the even more pressing question now is if semiconductor fabrication might also be.
On the one hand, Moore’s Law has been a sequence of heroic miracles of technology at the wafer fabrication level, grinding out hundreds of compounding small improvements.
On the other hand, fabs are “too big to fail”, and there are elements of extreme conservatism at play. Intel’s “Copy exactly!” fab development exemplifies that mindset – instead of every new building being an opportunity to explore and optimize processes, it was deemed more valuable to just replicate.
While each individual machine may be straining against physical limits of technology, it is possible that the systems orchestrating them all together could be far from optimal.
The explore / exploit axis is fundamental to all decision making, but human risk avoidance probably biases away from optimal exploration.
Chris Vale retweeted
For in-state residents, tuition at @GeorgiaTech is the biggest screaming bargain in the higher education universe. (It’s amazing how few people nationally realize it’s a public university.)
Honestly, for high school students: if you DON’T live in Georgia, it makes sense for your parents to move there in your junior year.
“CA can’t actually build things”
Sad. No way a Golden Gate Bridge gets built today
In 2001, the SFO airport released a study concluding that new runways needed to be built in the bay to separate traffic & reduce the need for visual approaches. The new runways would be far enough apart that parallel approaches could be made even in bad weather.
To offset any environmental effects, they would preserve vast stretches of wetlands. The proposal was supported by politicians & airline executives, among others.
Environmentalists killed the plan.
25 years later, the FAA effectively kneecapped the airport by restricting parallel approaches.
Will SFO now build the new runways? I doubt it. CA can’t actually build things. High-speed rail boondoggle, the 2014 bond that was supposed to build 10 new reservoirs (9 are now cancelled, the last has not begun construction & may never), wildlife bridge, a capital renovation where politicians refuse to reveal the costs & un-auditable homeless spending.
Even if a proposal was made today & put before voters, would I support it as a resident? No. Not because SFO doesn’t need it – it does – but because the project would take the trajectory of every other California project & just become a black hole for money to mysteriously vanish into with nothing to show for it while politicians refuse to audit it.
The state can’t afford it anyway. We have a looming fiscal crisis unfolding slowly, but it will accelerate soon.
So, I’m sad. SFO is kneecapped, the region’s existing infrastructure can’t absorb the overflow & I don’t believe it can build. There is a future here, but its a future of decline.
My airline career here isn’t over, but the trajectory has changed. I doubt I’ll be displaced from the left seat, but the days of growth are over.
Chris Vale retweeted
One little known fact about the Google WiFi routers was that we put a TPM module in every one to cryptographically verify every line of code it depends on. Same with Chromebooks.
The FCC today updated its list of products that can't be sold in the U.S. to include *all* consumer routers made in foreign countries. It's a big but potentially disruptive move to limit supply-chain security risks to U.S. networks. docs.fcc.gov/public/attachme…
Chris Vale retweeted
Effectively all growth in corn production over the last 20 years is for ethanol.
~20 million acres of conservation land, grassland, and soybean rotation was turned into corn monoculture that effectively strip mines the topsoil.
Meanwhile it’s the most fertilizer dependent crop with only a 40% uptake rate. So ~1.7 million tons of nitrogen runoff flows into the Mississippi basin annually while also polluting their own water supplies. This runoff ends up expanding the Gulf deadzone, which is also where 40% of domestic seafood comes from.
It’s hard to find a worse way to create fuel, with a wicked level of waste and downstream consequences.
Chris Vale retweeted
🧵 1/11 Imagine a world where it rained...for two million years straight. Not a drizzle, but biblical downpours that reshaped the planet, wiped out half the species, and set the stage for dinosaurs to rule. This isn't sci-fi, it's the Carnian Pluvial Event (CPE), Earth's wildest weather tantrum that took place 232 million years ago. Grab your rain gear because we are diving in!
Chris Vale retweeted
For those legislators who are working on healthcare legislation right now , here are some suggestions :
1. For intercompany medical charges, require them to be priced at Medicare rates. Ends gaming of MLRs
2. Require all insurance plans to apply any cash purchase against your deductible. Let plan holders shop.
3. Require all pharmacy purchases by a plan holder to be charged at net price after rebates. Right now YOU pay full retail price for branded meds in your deductible phase. You can think your insurance company PBM for lying to you when they say they negotiate better prices. They obviously suck at their jobs if the best they can do is get you retail price !
4. Require wholesale pharmacy pricing to be at net. This may seem like price controls. It’s not. The wholesaler buys at retail, gets a prompt pay/data discount of 5 pct from the manufacturer , then has the pharmacy buy from them at retail price minus a small discount. Which reimburses the wholesaler.
Wholesalers complain then don’t make money on brands. Indie pharmacies get crushed on brands. Manufactures don’t make more money this way either. Why ? Because they write HUGE rebate checks to the PBM!
Require pricing to be at net, and you improve cash flow and reduce reimbursement risk for indie pharmacies. Patients can naturally pay lower cash prices for brands because pharmacies will pay much less. The only loser in this ? The PBMs every one else gains
5. Create a moratorium on all acquisitions by ins carriers
6. If a medical provider of any kind, hospital , clinic , whatever , acquires another provider , they must retain the pricing ( pre any price increases meant to game this rule ) , for a period of 5 or 10 yrs allowing only for cpi increases
7. Investigate the acquisitions of providers by pharmacy wholesalers.
8. Allow doctors to own hospitals
9. Standardize contracts by insurance carriers by provider type. Every one contract with every hospital should have the same fill on the blanks with minimal variance. This will cut administration costs dramatically
I can go on for days. This is a start
Chris Vale retweeted
Just returned from my first trip to China, mostly looking at the energy and robotics industries. Fascinating. Random observations, both business and general, below...
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Chris Vale retweeted
governments need to start gamifying paying taxes
give me a battlepass
awards and unlocks once you paid $ xyz in taxes
notifications what has been paid (you just paid a teachers salary)
the IRS should at least send a plaque
make paying taxes fun
Chris Vale retweeted
I fly my own aircraft, cover all my own expenses, and donate my salary to Space Camp. To the limits of the law, I will never have taxpayers incur a dollar of expense for me to serve as Administrator at NASA. This includes donating the use of my aircraft for workforce incentive flights and inspiration.