Founder building at the edge of logistics & markets. Rapidual • Rogue Wave Alpha • Undersea Energy Where energy concentrates, alpha follows.
Newport Beach, California, USA
Joined January 2009
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Something I keep thinking about: how we actually use drone technology to fight wildfires.
Coordinated drones delivering precise streams of water or foam onto fire lines while homes stay protected and crews oversee from safer positions.
Drones already change the fight.
Thermal sensors map perimeters and hunt hotspots through smoke and darkness. Real-time imagery improves decisions in steep terrain. Aerial ignition makes prescribed burns safer. AI cameras and sensor networks detect starts earlier than many human reports.
The next layer is direct suppression.
Emerging systems use autonomous or semi-autonomous aircraft that, once given a rough location, find the heat, adjust for wind, and deliver foam or water at high pressure. Small teams can put hundreds of pounds of suppressant on a target in one sortie. Units can be prepositioned, moved by truck, or staged close to the line. One operator can supervise multiple aircraft. Fast turnaround keeps them cycling.
This is highest-leverage on initial attack and structure protection. Most homes are lost when small starts escape the first minutes or when embers ignite new fires ahead of the main front. Drones fill the gap between detection and the arrival of larger assets. They work at night, in smoke, and over terrain that is slow or dangerous for ground crews.
They reduce risk to pilots. They do not replace helicopters, tankers, or hand crews. They multiply their effect on fires that are still small enough to stop.
Limits remain. Payload and endurance constrain how much any single aircraft can carry. Rules for multi-aircraft operations and beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight are still catching up. Unauthorized private drones continue to force official aircraft to divert. Weather, wind, and airspace coordination with manned resources must be solved in practice.
None of these are fundamental barriers. Battery density, autonomy, and detection networks are improving quickly. The images illustrate what consistent use looks like once the pieces lock together: faster initial attack, continuous coverage on the edges, and safer conditions for the people who still do the hardest work on the ground.
The technology exists. The concept is clear. The remaining work is scaling it where it reduces acres burned and structures lost.
#NorteFire
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already
A possible DoorDash-Instacart deal is all about keeping up with Walmart and Amazon, analysts say trib.al/WxnHGLt
So why do VC's continue to dump money into these AI companies that are already too far behind and will never catch up?
Pretty much.
As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.
That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.
Very problematic
Hedge funds are DUMPING AI stocks, while retail investors pour billions into leveraged semiconductor ETFs:
Hedge funds sold global AI stocks for 5 straight sessions through October 14th.
TAP IMAGE TO SEE FULL INSIGHT👇
globalmarketsinvestor.beehii…
This
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
Grok Bot lets us founders spend our days in the physical world while agents run the digital one.
This shift collapses operating costs. Businesses once dismissed for thin margins or the need for full teams now clear the hurdle.
Logistics, specialty services, light manufacturing, field work. When the headcount is software, the math works again.
Solo founders return. The real constraint was the coordination tax, not the idea. One operator plus Grok Bot can run what previously required a staff.
The edge goes to those who own the physical world and let the agent handle the rest.
@SpaceXSI @bot @grok @xai @elonmusk
He get it 🇫🇷
J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.
Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.
Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.
La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.
Bring a solo founder just became practical and realistic again.
Until recently the constraint was headcount. You needed people for research, coding, operations, and customer work even if you had the idea and the capital.
Grok Bot collapses most of that requirement.
One person with clear direction can now run continuous analysis, build features, manage workflows, and iterate on product at a pace that previously demanded a team.
The residual skill is judgment and prioritization. Everything else is leveraged.
This is why the number of high-output solo operators will rise. The traditional startup org chart is no longer the default path. The people who treat agents as force multipliers rather than assistants will pull away.
@grok @bot @elonmusk
The bull market is hiding in plain sight.
A handful of AI infrastructure stocks have held the S&P near highs since late July while most of the index has been in a quiet bear market. That is not broad strength. That is concentration.
A broad advance in the other 493 names.
The major indexes will understate it because of their Mag7 weighting. The companies that actually use AI to cut costs and expand margins will outperform. The ones still funding the buildout with debt and equity issuance will not.
This is how these cycles play out. The infrastructure gets built and commoditized. The users of the technology capture the economics. Rotation into healthcare, utilities, staples, homebuilders, and select energy and logistics names is already underway.
That is where the opportunity sits.
Hedge fund manager sees a bull market hiding in plain sight
Read more: thestreet.com/investing/hedg…
ALT Hedge fund manager sees a bull market hiding in plain sight
Half true.
Speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 m/s. That’s the SI definition.
The Great Pyramid is not at 29.9792458°N. The apex is ~29.97917°N, 31.13417°E. The meme’s line runs about 8 m north of the peak. It does clip the building — and so do ~20,000 other 7-decimal latitudes across a 230 m base.
That’s only latitude, not coordinates. The same parallel also runs through Texas.
Metres: 1791. Exact c: 1983. Decimal GPS: modern. The pyramid: ~2560 BCE. Egyptians used cubits. In cubits, c “matches” a field in western Russia.
Fun coincidence. Not a cosmic code.
via @grok
🚀 $BTC
They went from 0 to $50m overnight
College football’s most carefully guarded secret is the amount of money flowing to the players on each roster.
So we reached out to 70 sources across the sport.
Estimated budgets for all 68 teams: nyti.ms/4xwoPqe
