Digital marketing for Blue Collar businesses
North Carolina, USA
Joined November 2023
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Eric Gutenberg retweeted
America is building so fast, we’re out of capacity. It’s a CAPEX hurricane. And it’s just beginning.
Four things before we get started:
1) Lock up your steel now
2) Secure your engineering team
3) Project manage your long lead equipment
4) Make a friend in trucking, ASAP
You’ve heard President Trump say the industrial investment is measured in the trillions. At the same, I’ve seen accounts on this app claim industrial spending is decreasing because they are reading some market for Fed report. Not true.
On The ReForge Podcast, you’ve heard me and Colin say all year that manufacturing and heavy industry are exploding. Several billion $ in new announcements come out every week.
But instead of headlines or Fed reports, let me teach you a Floridian trick. If you want to know if you’re in a hurricane, go stand outside. If you’re in a hurricane, you can feel the air pressure in your bones, you can smell it (yes they have a smell), you will get wet was water droplets pelt your face, and you’ll feel the wind - fast and turbulent. Then you can look at the trees. You won’t see any birds or insects. And if part of some guys roof blows by you, run inside and take shelter. YOU ARE IN A HURRICANE. And you didn’t need to read an article or study data to know that you are.
Now, we try to bring folks along and share data and stories. But Colin and I grew up in manufacturing. I’ve done it exclusively for 21 years. 11 years of design-build construction and 10 years of industrial robotics. I’ve filed 100+ state and local permits. I’m licensed as an engineer and general contractor. I manage complex supply chains and take prime contracts. My company offers performance guarantees, liquidated damages, bonding, and about 15 insurances. All that to say, I’m in the industry, I am from the industry. I am the Florida man of manufacturing CAPEX.
I’m standing outside and I can feel it in my bones, on my skin, and the turbulence is starting to break all normal systems.
We are in an industrial CAPEX hurricane. A face melting, mind bending, industrial CAPEX hurricane.
And it’s not going to stop anytime soon. It’s a big and wide CAT 5, and news reporters will soon demand a new category for CAT 6. That’s how big this storm is.
So what to do? Take shelter. It’s too late to board up the windows. It’s too big to make sand bags. It’s too late to buy a pallet of water from Costco. @GovRonDeSantis has ordered the DOT to close the bridges. The storm is here, and it’s already made landfall.
How do you take shelter? Easy, the 4 things I mentioned above. Okay, there’s probably a few more, but those are the big ones.
1) Steel is out of stock and all major structural orders are coming straight from the mill. This means you need a mill order.
2) Engineering teams are stretched thin already. You better lock down your team, ASAP. People that make calls looking for an engineering company in June of 2027 will either go without or get a C or D level firm.
3) Order your long lead equipment like your life depends on it. The same engineering and material availability constraints exist in the vendor’s supply chain too. This takes rigorous project management.
4) Make direct relationships in industrial freight. You need your imports to clear customs and you need your loads to get delivered on time. Not gonna be easy.
Later, we can talk more about the trades and factory software. But those don’t even come into play if you can’t secure a project team with a predictable CAPEX budget and a schedule you can hit. Now, layer in tariffs and shortages… see how hard this is?
With that dire warning, are we having fun yet? I certainly am, 21 years of preparing for the big one, and the day has come. I have more than enough food and water on hand for me and my neighbors… and I’ve already waxed the surfboard. No way I’m missing the waves 🏄♂️
Stay safe in the storm!
-your neighborhood engineer
CC: @thereforgepod @ThaaatColin @ChangRobotics
This is not normal what is happening in Louisiana right now. $300+ Billion in the project pipeline....
$100B – SpaceX Starbase LA (Planned)
$50B – Meta Hyperion AI Data Center (Under Construction)
$18B – Venture Global Plaquemines LNG Expansion (Planned)
$18B – Amazon Multi-Site AI Data Centers (Under Construction)
$18B – Argent LNG (Planned)
$18B – Woodside LNG (Under Construction)
$15B – Venture Global CP2 LNG (Under Construction)
$13B – Entergy Energy Buildout for Meta (Planned)
$10B – Commonwealth LNG (Under Construction)
$10B – Hut 8 AI Data Center (Under Construction)
$10B – Cameron LNG Expansion (Planned)
$8B – Ascencion Carbon Ammonia (Planned)
$6B – Hyundai Steel Mill (Under Construction)
$4B – Applied Digital AI Data Center (Under Construction)
$4B – CF Industries Ammonia Plant (Under Construction)
$4B – Lake Charles Methanol II (Planned)
$3B – Shintech Petrochemical Expansion (Planned)
$3B – DG Fuels Synthetic Chemicals (Planned)
$3B – Louisiana International Terminal (Planned)
Eric Gutenberg 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…
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Websites are files on a computer. When you view a website, you are asking the computer to send you the files, then your browser shows them to you.
70% of the websites you see use PHP to make them interactive. So you can send things to the website too and it can respond. E.g. filling in a comment box and hitting 'post' adds the comment as a row to a spreadsheet.
PHP has a flaw in its code that allows anyone to gain control of the computer that has the website on it.
The organisation that provides PHP announced the vulnerability before a patch was available, meaning we're in a window where everyone knows about it (including baddies) but the good guys don't have an official solution.
Some are just turning off their websites and waiting for the solution. Others are trying to fix it themselves. General chaos and lots of stressed techies across literally the entire planet because this affects the entire internet.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
I am looking for a special projects engineer.
You will design stuff that is on our never-ending “we should redesign this some day” list.
Things like designing a lifting mechanism for a 1000lb blast door.
Or coming up with a better heat resistant material for a battery testing enclosure.
Or designing an acoustic test.
Or or or…all sorts of weird shit associated with the business of protecting people in the space and aerospace industries from things that go boom.
This will be remote. I don’t care where you work. Hours are flexible. Not full time. Or Full time.
You must be a US Citizen. You must be efficient and highly proficient in SolidWorks CAD. You must be smart. You must be dedicated to winning 🇺🇸
Note: @totalshield_llc has a strict no-asshole policy.
DM me if you are interested.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Remember falling asleep on the couch during family holiday gatherings?
You could hear the adults talking and laughing in the background, dishes being put away, and the TV playing softly.
You didn't have a care in the world. You just knew everyone was there, and you were safe.
It's funny how much you miss those ordinary nights, especially the people who made them feel like home.
Anyone know why @vivachicken seems to consistently have terrible sanitation scores? Are they just trying to keep up with @Bojangles ?
Bingo
Here’s the part builders should be paying attention to:
There are now 1.62 million existing homes for sale in the U.S.
And new-home inventory is sitting at 9.6 months of supply.
The market isn’t saying “stop building.”
It’s saying stop building average.
Buyers have more options, rates are still high, and weak product is getting exposed faster.
The next cycle won’t reward whoever builds the most.
It will reward whoever builds the right product, at the right price, in the right location.
And builders who ignore that may end up sitting on inventory they can’t move without cutting margins.
Absolute legend
Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside.
Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed.
Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged.
After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people.
So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway.
8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out.
He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here."
9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming.
He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life.
Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.
2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde.
He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up.
The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
⚡️The public received temporary cash.
Asset owners received a permanent repricing of the world around them.
That is the part people feel even when they cannot articulate it.
The system flooded the economy with money and credit while simultaneously crushing interest rates. Financial assets exploded. Housing exploded. Equities exploded. Businesses refinanced cheaply. Owners of scarce assets watched their nominal wealth rise enormously.
Then the price level caught up.
Food.
Rent.
Cars.
Insurance.
Homes.
Services.
Everything repriced against the expanded monetary base and the fiscal surge, while supply chains were constrained at exactly the wrong moment.
The $1,400 disappeared.
The higher price level stayed.
That is the scar.
And there is a deeper asymmetry underneath it.
A wealthy household watching a $2 million portfolio become $3 million can absorb a 15% rise in living costs.
A worker with $4,000 in savings gets a few thousand dollars of stimulus, spends it, then spends the next decade purchasing necessities at a permanently higher nominal price level.
Same monetary event.
Completely different balance-sheet outcome.
That is why the pandemic response became such an accelerant of wealth inequality even though substantial money genuinely went to ordinary people.
Inflation taxes the person who owns currency. Asset inflation enriches the person who owns claims on scarcity.
The system did both at once.
And that is the structural truth underneath a million political memes about “money printing.”
People were told they were being rescued.
For many households, they were.
But the rescue was financed through a mechanism that also changed the denominator underneath almost every price in their lives.
The check arrived once.
The dilution kept compounding.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Food for thought...
A crow lived in the forest and was absolutely satisfied in life.
But one day he saw a swan. "This swan is so white," he thought, "and I am so black.This swan must be the happiest bird in the world."He expressed his thoughts to the swan. "Actually," the swan replied, "I was feeling that I was the happiest bird around until I saw a parrot, which has two colors. I now think the parrot is the happiest bird in creation."The crow then approached the parrot. The parrot explained, "I lived a very happy life—until I saw a peacock. I have only two colors, but the peacock has multiple colors."
The crow then visited a peacock in the zoo and saw that hundreds of people had gathered to see him. After the people had left, the crow approached the peacock. "Dear peacock," the crow said, "you are so beautiful. Every day thousands of people come to see you. When people see me, they immediately shoo me away. I think you are the happiest bird on the planet."The peacock replied, "I always thought that I was the most beautiful and happy bird on the planet. But because of my beauty, I am entrapped in this zoo.
I have examined the zoo very carefully, and I have realized that the crow is the only bird not kept in a cage. So for past few days I have been thinking that if I were a crow, I could happily roam everywhere.
"That's our problem too. We make unnecessary comparison with others and become sad. We don't value what God has given us. This all leads to the vicious cycle of unhappiness.
Live the life valuing the things God has given us. Learn the secret of being happy and discard the comparison which leads only to unhappiness. And remember you are beautiful in your own way and There is GREATNESS within you.
Best AI customer service I've ever seen. Does anyone know what they are using? that1painter.com
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Very honored to have built the bronze statue of George Washington for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington, D.C.
America is incredible.
Excited for the @America250 Grand Prix but wish it was a @NASCAR road race instead
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Today we released the August 2026 spam update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: status.search.google.com/inc…
