Crawdad

Cars, Brewing, Music and Building a New Life in France

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

Today I led a school parade through a French village on my mower. This is living.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@WeldBoy13 Really nice job. Love the design

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@MichaelXBT Sir with respect, some of your doubters are also some of your long-time followers

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@DanNeidle Looks to me like if you can avoid working, driving and owning a property or a business - in other words, sit at home and play computer games - you're avoiding 90% of taxes.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@MBrundleF1 Man, used to love track days on this circuit. One of my favorites.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@theleo27 @MichaelXBT I keep expecting him to, but no. Either he's not paying this intern enough or he at least owns the mood change.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@sierraaaliyahh The guy who rolled back fuel efficiency standards

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

And yet solar is ridiculously cheap now. The fact that the US has so much empty land, is so short of power and at the same time the administration is so opposed to renewables, is absolutely baffling to me.

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

A utopia in which we stand around arguing about who is going to fix the robots when compensation is no motivation and there's no point being educated in how to do it.
We just sit ankle deep in the garbage from the abundance that isn't worth the robot's time to collect.

[BitcoinSapiens ⚡️ @BitcoinSapiens]

Elon Musk said saving for retirement becomes pointless in 10 to 20 years. Not speculation. Math.

Musk: “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like ten or 20 years. It won’t matter.”

We passed the event horizon. Retirement savings assumes scarcity persists. It won’t. AI and robotics collapse labor costs to zero. Living costs follow. You’re not saving for security. You’re saving for a world that stops existing.

Musk: “If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@BrittanyFerries Bold to assert "there is no chance that BF will run out of fuel", but reassuring for sure. We love the BF experience and will it will continue to be our preferred mode of transport between France and the UK.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@AshCrypto Good luck filing the taxes from that LOL

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@RoadandTrack Good. That's a million less reasons for me to wonder how they let their design go to shit

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@Acyn OK can we just skip to the bit where we put this woman in charge please

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@RethinkingJames @C_Kavanagh In hindsight, a little suprising that he took half the gold position off the table since he states explicitly in the interview that he doesn't need the money and that it's fundamentally a conviction trade.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@RethinkingJames @C_Kavanagh Frankly I think this is one of his best interviews. If you filter out the catchphrases, he has a lot of good advice in here. But it's the only time I've heard him say he had a $2m gold position that he sold half of and a small stock portfolio and up to that point, that was it.

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@C_Kavanagh ... he actually did in his position as a trader. That the best traders put on a position and then wait for the results to roll in. Remarkably honest. I'll find it for you if you haven't heard it

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@C_Kavanagh ... what was particularly interesting though was that he admitted that the last few years for him have basically been about one trade - buying and holding gold - and that he sold half of it before it really took off most recently. He was very honest about how little trading ...

[Crawdad @bensthinks]

@C_Kavanagh Yea that's exactly what I'd expect from Rory. Seems like a decent chap.