Not Boring

Making the world more optimistic.
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[Not Boring @notboringco]

@packyM what a week for the optimists.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

By happy accident, I interviewed HT the day after he published this article, so I got the chance to ask him about it.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

RT @packyM: I had fun chopping it up with HT around his Q2 review and his (controversial) essay on the markups game.

We got into real ques…

[Not Boring @notboringco]

2016: Stocks Rise on Investor Demand for Telecom and Utility Dividends as G20 Finance Ministers Gather in Chengdu

In other news:

- The S&P 500 gained 9.86 points, or 0.5%, to a record 2,175.03 on Friday, July 22—the closing tape available on the morning of July 23.

- The Dow added 53.62 to 18,570.85. Nasdaq rose 26.26 to 5,100.16. All three recorded a fourth consecutive winning week.

- Southwestern Energy jumped 9.5% after reporting a smaller-than-expected loss and raising its production forecast. American Airlines gained 4% despite lower earnings.

- Sterling fell and global stocks softened as post-Brexit UK purchasing-manager data pointed toward a possible 0.4% third-quarter contraction.

- G20 finance ministers gathered in Chengdu.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

July 23rd in business history through the decades:

1976: Steve Jobs writes a $4.01 check to RadioShack for Apple 1 parts. Apple Computer Company was 4 months old.

In other news:

- A federal court issued its decision in Purex's antitrust suit seeking more than $500 million in treble damages from Procter & Gamble over its acquisition of Clorox.

- Congress passed a public-service jobs bill authorizing roughly 200,000 jobs, protecting another 90,000 state and local positions, and authorizing $700 million for wastewater projects. Funding still depended on later appropriations.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

2006: Stocks Jump as Bernanke Suggests Fed Hike Pause

In other news:

- The Dow finished the week at 10,868.38, up 129.03 points or 1.2%. The S&P 500 gained 0.3% to 1,240.29.

- Nasdaq fell 0.8% to 2,020.39, its lowest close in more than a year.

- Weak results from Intel and Dell cooled the rally; better reports from Apple, Motorola, and Google could not keep Nasdaq out of the red.

- Oil rebounded late in the week as conflict in the Middle East kept energy risk in the price.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

What a week for the optimists.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

Saronic has another very big week
Austin, too: Base comes home + TerraFirma raises
Walden unstealths + Memo Solves
FDA approves Merck LDL Cholesterol pill
Kimi + Thinky open-weight models stun

+ Extra Doses

What a week for the optimists.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

I've been hearing great things about Jordan Black and Senra for three years, and I was a little confused because wire harnessing does't seem sexy on the surface, but then you dig in and you realize that, for one thing, nothing turns on without them.

They're often the thing holding up production of everything from satellites to drones to F-35s, and that the problem is only going to get worse, because US aerospace and defense demand is booming while the skilled wire harness technicians are retiring.

OK, so automate it, right?

But you can't automate it, because wire harnesses are bespoke, low-volume, high-mix, 3D, bendy, and floppy, among other tricky attributes. There are parts of the process that you can plug better tools into, but making wire harnesses for A&D needs skilled humans.

So what Senra is doing instead is giving human workers superpowers - software, processes, machines, work instructions, the right parts at the right time.. everything they need to do the job well. It's training up a new skilled workforce.

Turns out, skilled assembly is one of the biggest blockers to American reindustrialization, and Senra is the best bet to unblock it.

Jordan Black, who ran wire harnessing among other things at SpaceX, is pulling together an all-star team, including many ex-SpaceX people who do not need to work anymore, to fix this really big problem, create jobs, and power the American manufacturing machine.

Jordan and I wrote an essay about it together.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

There's always more optimism in the Extras.

ft. @alephneuro

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

Aalo goes critical on July 4th
Josh Zoffer in FT on US Data Centers
American Turbine comes out of stealth
OXMAN grows coloring for new Vigils capes
1X gives Neo alien hands (hide ya girl, hide ya wife)

+ EXTRA DOSES

What a week for the optimists.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

"America should be the birthplace of superintelligence, the nuclear renaissance, the spacecraft that takes us to Mars, and the first people to populate the moon. This is the frontier country, wherever the frontier happens to be." - @ScottNolan

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

https://t.co/tH91EKvBdx

[Not Boring @notboringco]

200 weeks of optimism down.

Infinity to go.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

On the eve of America's 250th, our 200th Weekly Dose of Optimism. 🇺🇸

That's >1,000 incredible stories of human achievement, like these:

- Conception generates human eggs from stem cells
- Researchers create 1st fully synthetic cell
- Meta upgrades mind-reading model
- Too many nuclear updates to count
- Scott Nolan on America's Next 250

+ Science Breakthroughs, RocketLab, Etched.

What a week / 200 weeks / 250 years for the optimists.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

America's Next 250 are going to be even better.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

The next 250 years of the American project should be unimaginably abundant, if we can keep it.

Read Scott Nolan's vision for America's Next 250 in today's Not Boring.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

@packyM what a week for the optimists!

[Not Boring @notboringco]

@packyM What a week for the optimists.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

Markie Wagner is BACK, in not boring.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

In November 2022, @markiewagner wrote Choose Good Quests, then she went dark to work on her own.

Today, she's launching Poetic, a new class of software that's adaptive like AI, reliable like code.

This is her first public essay since CGQ, on why & how.

https://t.co/bhpxhiKjVY

[Not Boring @notboringco]

Here is your flying car.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?

Every time a transportation technology lets us go further, faster, we use that technology to expand the radius of our lives. This is Marchetti's Constant.

@tsungxu is building flying cars, because the time is right technologically and regulatorily, and because they can eliminate the speed-freedom trade-off that limits every transportation technology.

This week's co-written essay explains why now is finally the time for flying cars, and what we can expect our world to look like when we get them.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

my meme team gets stronger with every billion.

it's 44 strong now.

[Not Boring @notboringco]

Twitter is magical.

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

In The Electric Slide, I mentioned that I'd invested in a stealth motor company.

Today, Westmag is out of stealth, and I went deep on why America needs a motor and actuator company to build great products, and how Westmag plans to build the big one.

https://t.co/1XeKkUfQrm