u/pywang

My parents are in Houston for 4th of July; they spent a whole day just touring oil complexes (I think it was a guided tour), and I thought it’d be cool if anyone owned just a few small ones unlike a giant corporation to just give some history/story as a private owner, show some equipment or usage up close, even a brief background of themselves and how they got into it.

For background, my dad studied rock mechanics, and almost went to work for Exxon two decades ago when he first immigrated to the US from China. My parents do completely different engineering now, but I called em last night and it sounded like they really enjoyed their oil tour lol.

edit; parents worked on hydroelectric dams, solar photovoltaics, cars, etc.

I saw some videos online of old people owning 1 or 2 wells and actually pouring some oil out while telling their American backstory. My pop loves the U.S. and its history, so it’d be cool if anyone in the area could show him a well up close and let him touch it (maybe not operate it 😅😅)

Edit; I think they went to Ocean Star Museum in Galveston yesterday.

Edit 2: Today they went to Bay Town (?) Exxon’s facility!

Michigan politicians will never learn that subsidies will not create jobs. An attractive landscape for ecosystem-driven urban development will create businesses.

Since I was asked what eco-system driven development is, here's my definition/my own theory (I have no academic background):

There are two parts to growing a city or state that spiral together: business and community growth. In the case of Michigan as a whole, it doesn't have either. Why grow a city? Personally, I believe if you remain stagnant as a state or city, especially business-wise, someone someday will catch up to dominate and jobs will be lost a la microeconomics. So let's assume Michigan or a big Michigan town wants to grow their town to boost their economies and to prevent stagnation and lack competitiveness.

Growing cities have two components that come down to people: people want good wages and an attractive town that suits their wants. The easier one to explain is a town that's attractive socially: young people want public transit, they want dense neighborhoods to meet friends, walkability, events, community (whether by religion, by partying, very ambiguous), etc. New parents want good schools and safety.

The other component is business growth. Having more businesses in general not only generates more tax revenue through payroll and corporate tax but also attracts more people; taxes are good if spent correctly: more revenue can be put towards more public development so long as there's ROI on it. Additionally, workers need money, and people want to base themselves in a place with employment opportunity, decent career growth potential, and good wage compared to cost of living.

Businesses thrive based on two things: their industry's ecosystem in a given geography and the local talent density. Businesses need a network of other businesses that'll supply them whatever they need. Without that local network, transportation costs and consulting can become difficult. An example of this being a problem is prototype development: in most of America, prototyping new products requires fast iteration, even if it means the local shop isn't the best quality -- because time means money. Finally, when a business launches, they need other local businesses to help them scale up with machinery and expertise -- for example of a mechanic/engineer -- if something goes bust. A great example of this is ShenZhen: you can walk down the street to get any part you need within an hour at a cheap price. Michigan is actually fairly similar, but there are only three automakers. Another example is restaurants: if you're in a suburb, it's hard finding replacement ingredients if your main supplier is Sodexo. If you were in NYC, you can ask tons of different restaurants and local suppliers for spare ingredients.

The other much more significant component to thriving businesses is talent. There are plenty of examples of this, but businesses typically congregate around talent dense pools, e.g. (I'm going to name more geographically agnostic industries since, e.g., oil is dominant in Texas for just its sheer amount) NYC for finance and consulting, SF for software engineering, Boston for healthcare/pharma, San Diego and Virginia for military industrial complex, etc. They don't inherently have much extremely strategic advantage over other places, they simply started with a minor advantage and grew them over time. For example, Michigan and Connecticut also have large military industrial complex presence, yet it's much smaller compared to San Diego.

Talent only wants to go to attractive towns that also have attractive wages.

Businesses want the best talent so that the business can grow faster (just assume it's in their interest to grow fast and large to make more money). And they want a local ecosystem of other businesses that 1) can support their business and/or 2) also have good talent to poach from or rely on for assistance.

An ecosystem, or in this case Michigan/Detroit/Ann Arbor/Grand Rapids, needs to do two things at the same time paradoxically, build attractive towns that don't have the money to do so and attract businesses that don't see local talent and don't foresee better talent moving to Michigan.

Ecosystem-driven development is the compounding growth of trying to build attractive towns, attract businesses, and most importantly attract people.

There's a pallet of 25 good computers being sold for $50 a piece in Maryland that usually sells on eBay for $100-120 ish. I only need 10-15 of the 25, and was wondering if anyone here is in NYC, has a car, and has an interest in sharing buying these up.

They're sold pretty often, but I just need em kinda soon.

Do they just have massive video animation teams? I’ll post a link in comments. But the whole text type writer animation, Claude mascot animating… Honestly there’s lots of animations. I wonder if they’re just super easy to make or something.

Mostly wondering because I’ve been hearing about more screencasting tools, but haven’t been able to find a bunch

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/haydenbleasel\_today-were-rolling-out-a-redesigned-navigation-ugcPost-7468722003684872193-aMen/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=member\_ios&rcm=ACoAACVSRsYBOK3B0Adk0P94w8UHJP6uSMavYRo

https://youtu.be/bluAmTHoEow?si=Bzhc6pzDvbpIaG86

Do they just have massive video animation teams?

This is a post about jury nullification. Also if you’re an OG CGP Gray viewer, the video title “Watching this could disqualify you from jury duty” (https://youtu.be/uqH\_Y1TupoQ?si=\_jEeyhnJ\_a9bzyBd) is probably not going to work anymore as “65% of people were willing to take the law into their own hands as opposed to following the judge’s instructions, up from 52%.
In the criminal justice system, jurors are entitled to acquit defendants by deliberately rejecting evidence or refusing to apply the law, often by substituting their own sense of fairness—a concept known as jury nullification.” Just as an example from the article, the judge explicitly told the jury not to sentence, yet the jury disobeyed and triggered a mistrial.

Though jurors who reveal this intent are dismissed or never selected in the first place, pre-determined voting is increasingly the reality of America’s jury. Because political affiliation is becoming the deciding factor in many trials instead of deliberation, I fear not just that time is wasted from mistrial but the judicial system with juries has completely malfunctioned and will have dire consequences, including precedence as younger generations are a lot more inclined to nullify, if the political climate doesn’t calm down.

Though this last comment of mine feels tangential, I can’t help but find that this situation reflects America’s politics extremely well too: the inability, post-COVID, for understanding of other political opinions produces America’s political divide, so much so that elections aren’t won by swing voters or independents but by supercharging your party voter base to turn out for elections via fear mongering.