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.
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.
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.
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…
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
His neighbors and lifelong friends turned on him for one vote. He died less than a year later, still shunned, and his final words were a message aimed straight at the people who abandoned him. Meet John Morton, the man whose single vote may have made American independence possible.
Morton wasn't born to any of this. He came into the world in Pennsylvania around 1724, and his own father died before he was even born. He had almost no formal schooling. His stepfather taught him surveying, and from that humble start he taught himself enough to become a surveyor, a farmer, and eventually a respected judge and lawmaker. A self-made country man, not a powdered aristocrat.
Now here's the moment that put him in history. Summer of 1776. Independence comes down to a vote, and it needs the colonies to line up behind it. Pennsylvania, one of the biggest and most important colonies, was deadlocked. Its delegation was split right down the middle. Benjamin Franklin was for independence, others were dead against it, and the whole delegation hung in the balance.
John Morton was the swing. He was uncommitted, and everyone knew his vote would decide which way Pennsylvania fell. And he chose independence. His vote tipped Pennsylvania into the yes column at the exact moment the cause needed it most. Without Morton, one of the most crucial colonies might have said no.
He paid an immediate, personal price. Many of his old friends and neighbors, loyal to Britain, were furious. They censured him, turned their backs on him, treated him like a traitor for the vote he'd cast. The man had helped birth a nation and got iced out by his own community for it.
Then, cruelly fast, he got sick. Less than nine months after that signing, John Morton was dying, likely of tuberculosis. He became the very first signer of the Declaration of Independence to die.
And on his deathbed, thinking of the friends who had abandoned him, he dictated one of the most quietly powerful lines any Founder ever spoke. He said to tell them that they would "live to see the hour when they shall acknowledge it to have been the most glorious service I ever rendered to my country."
He was right. He just didn't live to see it.
A self-taught farmer whose one vote helped push a nation into being, who lost his friends for it, died first of all of them, and went to his grave certain that history would prove him right.
John Morton. The swing vote who never got to see he was correct.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Check out the two completed structural masonry buildings for our Townsend development (and Apollo Workspace).
Started on the 3rd one last week.
It’s just going to get cooler as this comes together.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
With AI Overviews in Google Analytics, diving deep into your data only takes a click.
Speed is your competitive edge, and moving from insight to understanding quickly is key. AI Overviews cards surface the most important insights since your last visit, so you don’t miss a thing. From traffic shifts to seasonal trends, and setup updates, AI Overview cards expand to provide more analysis in one click without a prompt required.
Check the top of your home page for more: goo.gle/4wh63Tp
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
January 2, 1949. “Blizzard of ‘49” hits Great Plains. 72 hours. 76 dead, 100,000 cattle frozen. Trains buried. Chadron, NE rule: “No travel. Roads gone.” 16-year-old ranch kid Don “Sled” Miller tied 6 sleds to 4 horses. Rope, no runners. Loaded 23 kids from 7 ranches cut off 40 miles out. No heat, no food. Rode 22 hours in -35°F. Fed kids snow + jerky. One horse died. All 23 kids lived. Army saw it, copied “Operation Haylift” next day—dropped hay from C-47s. Saved 2 million cattle. Don got Bronze Star. Became sheriff. Died 2016. His sled rope is at Museum of the Fur Trade. He said: “Snow stopped trains. It didn’t stop me.”
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Across 10,000 ads we shipped this month, these are the 6 hook types that consistently work on Meta right now:
- Pattern interrupt → A visual that doesn't fit the feed. These can be: crayon drawing + font, hospital photo, reddit screenshot. The feed is trained on polish, so unpolished gets noticed first.
- Direct address → “If you're [specific situation], read this.” Speaks to one person. Qualifies in 2 seconds.
- Diagnostic question → “Did your skincare routine stop working after 30?” The brain can't help but answer. Works when it diagnoses, not when it sells.
- Confession → “I bought 4 mattresses before this one.” Founder-tone, unproduced. Works because it admits something a brand wouldn't normally say.
- Offer-led → A specific number in the first frame: “Save 70% on fees.” “73% of members drink less in 2 weeks.” Data stops the scroll before any other stuff does. The more specific, the more credible.
- Contrarian claim → A statement that contradicts what the reader already believes. “Going to bed earlier might be hurting your sleep.” The brain can't scroll past something that challenges a held belief.
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
Today we released the June 2026 spam update. We'll update our ranking release history page when the rollout is complete: status.search.google.com/inc…
Eric Gutenberg retweeted
America faces more than a chronic disease epidemic that threatens our physical health. We also face a spiritual malaise that undermines our mental health.
Our children are increasingly isolated, fragmented, and anxious, spending more than 8.5 hours a day on screens.
This summer, put down the phone and reconnect with nature, family, and community. It's time to Take Back Your Health. Eat Real Food. Get Active. Together, we will Make America Healthy Again.