NOURiSH Workshop

garage based tinkerer. photographer, adventurer & storyteller. life saver. mountain climber. Validator in the Commonwealth of ALGOLand...

[NOURiSH Workshop @gowandrlost]

Found my 'Forever Home'. This film is a story in 3 parts. Tragedy, perseverance and then... Well, watch and tell me what you think part3 is...

https://t.co/LmEcVPQ9KV

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️This is a quiet blueprint for civilizational enclosure.

It’s about the final erasure of local compute autonomy.

In ancient feudalism, you lived on land you didn’t own, paid rent to a lord, and needed permission to harvest, trade, or build.

In the coming cloud-state, you’ll think on infrastructure you don’t control, process memory through rented cores, and run identity on external stacks.

Your mind becomes an app.
Your agency becomes an API call.

Every click, keystroke, frame rendered, or action executed is metered, mediated, revocable.

This is the death of local sovereignty dressed in latency reduction.

The gaming PC was the last symbolic frontier of raw, local computation.
Owning one meant power, modification, independence.

Killing it is symbolic decapitation of the individual compute node.

This reads like a Rothschild moment of the cloud era:

Control the hardware, and you control the factory.

Control the compute, and you control the future.

Bezos is not wrong.

He is simply first to say it out loud.

[NOURiSH Workshop @gowandrlost]

The Story of Llao and Skell... https://t.co/XSf2NmY5qq

[🇺🇸 B 🇺🇸 @bekahj]

I’m worn out hearing people moan, “Our grandparents could buy a house on one paycheck, but now we can’t even afford rent on two!”

Yeah, maybe because Grandma wasn’t dropping half her income on $14 iced lattes and avocado toast shaped like art projects. Back then, if they wanted coffee, they boiled it at home in a dented pot. It tasted like burnt rubber and regret — but it woke you up and cleaned your pipes.

And Grandma wasn’t “out to brunch.” You think she had time for mimosas and hashtags? She was making something called whatever’s left in the fridge and feeding six people with it.

Don’t even start with Uber Eats. You think Grandpa was out here paying $38 to have a burger delivered three blocks away? Please. He grilled mystery meat on a rusted barbecue, and everyone called it dinner.

Now people cry about being broke while sitting in a house full of gadgets. Two SUVs in the driveway, six streaming services, three air fryers, and matching tattoos that cost more than their light bill. You think Grandpa had a tattoo? He did. It said “Korea, 1951,” and it came with trauma, not Instagram likes.

And the kids—Lord help us. “We can’t make ends meet, but Brayden needs the new iPhone!” No, he doesn’t. You’re handing an $1100 device to a child who still eats crayons and forgets to flush.

When we were kids, there was one phone. It hung on the wall like a family relic. The cord stretched just far enough for you to whisper secrets before someone yelled, “Get off, I need to make a call!” And guess what? We lived.

The TV? One. In the living room. With three channels and a dial that clicked like a safe. And if Dad wanted to watch bowling, you were a fan of bowling, end of story.

Now there’s a flat screen in every room, the baby’s got an iPad, the dog’s got a camera, and everyone’s wondering why they can’t afford rent.
Because you’re living like rock stars on retail salaries, that’s why.

Grandpa wasn’t leasing Teslas or buying $12 smoothies called “Green Zen Awakening.” He drove a truck that coughed smoke, rattled like a storm, and smelled like oil and hard work.

They lived within their means. Whatever Grandpa brought home on Friday — that’s what they had. They weren’t keeping up with the Joneses; they were keeping the lights on.

So yeah, Grandpa bought a house on one salary. But he also didn’t have a gym membership, three delivery apps, and emotional support crystals on his nightstand. His only support system was Grandma, who told him to quit whining and mow the yard.

Nowadays, everyone’s broke, anxious, and “manifesting abundance” while ordering tacos on DoorDash for the fourth time this week.

It’s not the economy — it’s the lifestyle.

Wake up, turn off your subscriptions, make your own coffee, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll smell the truth.

Credit to original author, unknown

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

4 years of therapy in 1 minute

[NOURiSH Workshop @gowandrlost]

This feels like the most important article I've read in a terribly long time- Pure signal...

https://t.co/JlLfeXXy7v

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Actually, housing is still an awesome investment.

Let me explain.

That chart is missing leverage + tax benefits.

Let’s walk through the math step by step.

You want to buy a $1M home. You put 20% down. That’s $200K out of your pocket. The bank lends you the other $800K.

The home appreciates 4% in year one. That’s $40K in appreciation. But you only invested $200K of your own money. So your return on equity is 20%, not 4%.

Now take that same $200K and put it in the S&P 500. At 9% annual returns, you make $18K.

Same capital. The house generated $40K. The stocks generated $18K. The house wins by more than 2x.

This is leverage working in your favor. You control a $1M asset with $200K. The appreciation happens on the full $1M, but your denominator is only $200K.

Now layer in the tax advantages.

You’re paying 6% interest on $800K. That’s roughly $48K in mortgage interest during year one. If you’re in the 37% federal bracket, you can deduct that interest. That puts $17,760 back in your pocket. Your effective borrowing cost drops from 6% to about 3.8%.

Property taxes are also deductible up to the $10K SALT cap. In many states that’s another few thousand in tax savings.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

When you sell stocks at a profit, you pay 15% to 23.8% in long-term capital gains tax. No exceptions.

When you sell your primary residence, the IRS gives you an exclusion. If you’re married and lived there two years, you can exclude $500K in gains from taxes. Completely tax-free. If you’re single, it’s $250K.

No equivalent exists for equities. None.

Let’s run a 10-year scenario.

You buy that $1M home with $200K down. It appreciates 4% annually. After 10 years, the home is worth $1.48M. Your gain is $480K. You sell, take the exclusion, and pay zero federal tax on the gain.

Your friend puts $200K in the S&P. It compounds at 9%. After 10 years, they have $473K. They sell and owe $54K in long-term capital gains tax at 20%. They keep $419K.

You kept $480K tax-free. They kept $419K after tax. And you had a place to live the entire time.

But wait. There’s more optionality in real estate that stocks don’t offer.

If you convert your home to a rental before selling, you can use a 1031 exchange. This lets you roll your gains into another investment property and defer taxes indefinitely. Your $480K in gains moves into a bigger property. No tax event. You can keep doing this your entire life. Some people die with millions in deferred gains that pass to heirs at a stepped-up basis.

Try doing that with Apple stock.

You can also depreciate rental property on a 27.5-year schedule. This creates paper losses that offset real cash flow. You collect rent, but the IRS lets you report a loss.

Stocks offer no depreciation shield.

Now consider forced appreciation. You buy a dated home, renovate the kitchen and bathrooms for $50K, and add $150K in value. You created $100K in equity through sweat and decisions. Stocks don’t let you do that. You can’t renovate your way to a higher share price.

The chart shows S&P 500 at 7000 vs median home prices around 2000, indexed from 1970.

What it doesn’t show is that almost nobody buys a home with 100% cash. The comparison treats real estate as an unleveraged asset class. It ignores that a 4% return on a 5x leveraged asset generates 20% returns on equity. It ignores tax deductions that reduce your borrowing cost. It ignores the primary residence exclusion. It ignores 1031 exchanges. It ignores depreciation. It ignores forced appreciation.

The tweet asks why people take 6% mortgages when renting is cheaper and they could earn 9% in stocks.

Because $200K in a home generates more after-tax wealth than $200K in equities over a 10-year hold in most appreciating markets.

Housing can be an amazing investment (if you get the right land in the right market at the right price).

[Scott Stevenson @scottastevenson]

Much of life is filled with stupid maintenance tasks like eating, cleaning, exercising, clearing your inbox, brushing your teeth, sleep hygiene.

Paradoxically, your ability to actually do anything meaningful and creative relies on your ability to power through this stuff ultra-efficiently so that you actually have time for creativity.

You can fill your entire day with maintenance tasks and never get to the "creating new value" part.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

"Nobody understood why Dad kept the storage unit.

Cost him $89 a month. We told him to cancel it, sell the stuff, save the money. He's 68, retired on a fixed income. Can barely afford his medication. But every month, without fail, $89 to Store-All on Industrial Drive.
"What's even in there?" I asked last Christmas.
"Things people need," he said. Wouldn't explain further.

I followed him there in March. Couldn't help myself. Worried he was hoarding, losing his mind, wasting money we didn't have.
Watched him unlock unit 247. It was full. Furniture. Appliances. Clothes on racks. Kitchen supplies. Bedding. Toys. All organized, labeled, clean.

A woman with three kids met him there. He walked her through like a store. "Take whatever you need. No rush. No charge."
She left with a microwave, dishes, winter coats for the kids, blankets. Crying. Thanking him over and over.
"Dad, what is this?"

He sighed. "When your mom and I divorced in '92, I moved into an empty apartment. Slept on the floor for three months. Ate off paper plates. It broke something in me, that emptiness. Made a promise then. If I ever could, I'd help people starting over."
"But $89 a month"
"I don't need much. But they need everything. People leaving abuse. People getting out of shelters. Refugees. Anyone starting from zero."

He'd been doing it for eleven years. Filled that unit with donated furniture, thrift store finds, things neighbors gave him. Gave it all away to people rebuilding their lives. Over 200 families.
"Why didn't you tell us?"
"Because you'd try to stop me. Say I can't afford it. But I can't afford not to. You don't forget what empty feels like."

I posted about it on Facebook. Just a photo of Dad in his storage unit, brief explanation. Asked if anyone had furniture to donate.

It exploded. 4,000 shares in two days. Donations poured in. Furniture stores contributed. People rented additional units. Five units now. Volunteers helping.

"Dad's Second Start" it's called. Sixteen storage facilities across the state doing the same thing. Furnishing empty apartments for people escaping, recovering, beginning again.

Dad still pays for his original unit though. Won't let anyone else cover it.
"It's my promise," he says. "Some things you pay for yourself."

Last week, a woman showed up with her daughter. "Your dad furnished my apartment in 2015 when I left my abusive husband. I'm a social worker now. I send people to him. Brought dishes to donate."

Dad cried. Doesn't cry often.
Because he remembers sleeping on an empty floor. And he made sure hundreds of others never had to."
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Let this story reach more hearts....
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Ai image is for demonstration purpose only.
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By Mary Nelson

[The Driven Man @Thedrivenman]

Shoutout to everyone who's been here 🙌

[Max @minordissent]

The hard truth for women and weak men:

As a human you have two lifestyle options: cherished property or disposable tool.

Women are naturally the former and men are naturally the latter.

Being cherished property has the upside that you are valued just for existing but the downside that you are not free to choose anything but your owner.

Being a disposable tool has the upside that you are free to choose most things but the downside that you are only valued in proportion to the utility you provide.

In the 20th century, most women got sick of being property so tried to become cherished tools. Unfortunately, because all tools are disposable and most women are not particularly good at being tools, all this made them is disposable property.

Similarly, in the 21st century, some men have gotten sick of being tools. But because their disposability is innate, all they are now is the disposable property of mega corps who provide them dopamine slop in exchange for money.

Both, in their rejection of the group designation assigned to them at birth, are now more enslaved, miserable, and disposable than they’ve ever been.

Unfortunately for women, because their value is innate and slowly declines over time, those who have spent decades trying to become cherished tools (or simply believed they can be cherished without providing anything in return) have very little opportunity to turn things around.

Fortunately for men, starting out as disposable and useless is the expected state. So even if you’re 20 years late, you can still turn things around.

Personally, i don’t see any positive vision forward beyond men accepting their burden of being disposable tools with the latent potential to become invaluable tools by cultivating themselves, and then becoming that invaluable tool they can now find a nice woman willing to become their cherished property and starting a beautiful family with her.

[NOURiSH Workshop @gowandrlost]

@AlgoFoundation Damn. And here I thought selling all my ALGO at a loss 3 days ago to buy a house was a bad decision...

End of an era

[NOURiSH Workshop @gowandrlost]

Food rules everything around me,
CREAM get the honey!
Waddle all around y'all

Today's contribution to the hive of civilization... :/

[Keira Connolly @keira_con]

Wise words

“My name’s Frank. I’m 64, a retired electrician.
Forty-two years I spent running wires through houses, fixing breakers, making sure people had light in their kitchens and heat in their winters. Never once did anyone ask me where I went to college. Mostly, they just wanted to know if I could get the power back on before their ice cream melted.

Last May, I was at my granddaughter Emily’s school career day. You know the drill — doctors, lawyers, a software guy in a slick suit talking about “scaling startups.” I was the only one there with a tool belt and work boots.

When it was my turn, I told the kids, “I don’t have a degree. I’ve never sat in a lecture hall. But I’ve wired schools, hospitals, and your principal’s house. And when the hospital generator failed during a snowstorm in ’98, I was the one in the basement with a flashlight, keeping the lights on for newborn babies upstairs.”

The kids leaned forward. They had questions — real ones. “How do you fix stuff in the dark?” “Do you make a lot of money?” “Do you ever get zapped?” (Yes, once, and it’ll curl your hair.)

When the bell rang, one boy hung back. Small kid, freckles, hoodie too big for him. He mumbled, “My uncle’s a plumber. People laugh at him ’cause he didn’t finish high school. But… he’s the only one in the family who can fix anything.”

I looked that boy in the eye and said, “Kid, your uncle’s a hero. When your toilet overflows at midnight, Harvard ain’t sending anyone. A plumber is.”

Here’s the thing nobody told me when I was young — the world doesn’t run without tradespeople. You can have all the engineers you want, but if nobody builds the house, wires the power, or lays the pipes, those blueprints just sit in a drawer.

We’ve made it sound like trades are what you do if you can’t go to college, instead of a path you choose because you like working with your hands, solving problems, and seeing your work stand solid for decades.

Four years after high school, some kids walk away with diplomas. Others walk away with zero debt, a union card, and a skill they can take anywhere in the world. And guess what? When your furnace dies in January, it’s not the diploma that saves you.

A few weeks ago, that same freckled kid’s mom stopped me at the grocery store. She said, “You probably don’t remember, but you told my son trades are important. He’s shadowing his uncle this summer. First time I’ve seen him excited about anything in years.”

That’s the part we forget — for some kids, knowing their path is respected changes everything. It’s not about “just” fixing wires or pipes. It’s about pride. Purpose. The kind that sticks with you long after the job’s done.

So next time you meet a teenager, don’t just ask, “Where are you going to college?” Ask, “What’s your plan?” And if they say, “I’m learning to weld,” or “I’m starting an apprenticeship,” smile big and say, “That’s fantastic. We’re going to need you.”

Because we will. More than ever. And when the lights go out, you’ll be glad they showed up.”

[EndGame Macro @onechancefreedm]

Why I Think Michael Burry Is Shutting Down Scion Now

Let’s put a few things together…Burry’s liquidation letter, his depreciation thread on the hyperscalers, and his “me then, me now” Big Short meme and he’s basically spelling out one story.

He thinks we’re in an earnings inflated, AI driven bubble that a value investor can’t sit inside without eventually getting crushed.

In the letter he says it plainly “My estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.” That’s not a I’m tired of running money line. That’s a man saying, I can’t reconcile what I see in the numbers with the prices the market is willing to pay. When someone like Burry reaches that point, the logical move isn’t to keep collecting fees and hope it mean reverts. It’s to get out of the structure that forces you to play the game at all.

Then you look at his post on depreciation. He’s saying the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom that includes META, GOOG, ORCL, MSFT, AMZN of juicing earnings by quietly stretching the useful life of servers and GPU rigs that are really on a 2–3 year technology cycle. Extend the life in the accounting model, and you cut today’s depreciation expense. Cut depreciation, and EPS looks 20–30% higher than it would under a stricter assumption. He’s saying that the market is paying premium multiples on numbers that are, in his view, structurally overstated.

Put that together with the “me then, me now… it worked out, it will work out” post, and he’s clearly casting himself as the same guy who sat in front of a wall of subprime prospectuses in 2005. Back then, he saw engineered AAA paper built on bad collateral. Now he sees trillion dollar market caps built on AI capex and accounting choices he thinks will blow up 2026–2028 as the depreciation math reverses.

SO WHY SHUT DOWN SCION NOW? MY HIGHEST PROBABILITY READ IS THIS

He expects a major repricing in the very stocks that dominate the indices and he doesn’t want to live through the last, craziest stretch of the bubble with other people’s money tied to his name.

If he’s right about the under depreciation, then over the next few years earnings growth for the hyperscalers should slow sharply or even go negative just as the AI narrative cools and the cycle matures. When that happens, multiples compress, passive flows that are overweight those names work in reverse, and the broad market takes a hit because the “Magnificent Few” are the market. From his perspective, that looks less like a normal correction and more like the equity version of the housing unwind: a long stretch of fake comfort, then a sharp break when the math can’t be hidden anymore.

Closing the fund accomplishes a few things at once. It lets him step aside before that break, so he’s not fighting client redemptions or daily benchmarking while he’s trying to hold deeply contrarian positions. It frees him to short or sit in cash on his own terms, without regulators and LPs looking over his shoulder. And it sends a signal: if valuations are this disconnected from what he thinks the true earnings power is, the most honest thing he can do as a fiduciary is hand back the money and say, I don’t want you in this.

So, in my view, he’s not walking away because he’s done with markets. He’s stepping off the stage because he thinks the show has turned into something he’s seen before: a late cycle mania, powered by flattering models and aggressive accounting, that ends with a long, grinding reset in stock prices especially at the top of the index. @michaeljburry

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

I'm a simple man. If I see a field trial of genetically-engineered trees, I read it.

A recent preprint reports the largest field trial to-date of American Chestnut trees engineered to resist a blight. And the results look promising.

For context: The U.S. was once filled with American Chestnut trees. There were billions of them, each with a natural lifespan of 500+ years.

In the late 1800s, however, an import of Asian
chestnut trees unintentionally introduced a hitchhiking fungus into U.S. nurseries. That fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, was first identified on an American chestnut tree growing in New York in 1904 by a forester at the Bronx Zoo, named Hermann Merkel.

The fungus spread through the U.S. in the early 20th century (its spores can float on the wind for several miles). By the 1950s, this fungus had infected basically every American Chestnuts growing in the U.S., killing at least 4 billion trees. (There are still some mature, intact trees in the U.S., but they are really rare. Maine has most of them, it seems, including one American Chestnut tree in Lovell that is 115 feet tall.)

When the fungus latches onto a tree (in a small wound), the fungus grows and colonizes the inner bark. It chokes the tree, forms cankers, and prevents it from growing outwards, thus cutting off phloem transport to tissues above the wound site. The fungus eats the tree using a chemical called oxalic acid.

In the mid-2010s, researchers at SUNY made a transgenic American Chestnut tree that can fend off the fungus. These researchers took a gene from wheat, called oxalate oxidase (or OxO), and spliced it into an American chestnut sapling. This gene expresses an enzyme that breaks oxalate into hydrogen peroxide and carbon dioxide, thus neutralizing it. And, importantly, the gene is driven by a promoter that expresses this protein in basically every tissue of the tree.

The OxO gene does not make the trees immune; it merely helps them tolerate the fungus. Trees can still get cankers and spread the fungus.

But anyway, onto this paper.

This is a two-year field trial of transgenic saplings vs. wildtype siblings. It is the largest such trial to date; prior papers used like 3 trees. Whereas in this study, 261 trees were inoculated with the fungus in three replicates. Transgenic trees (carrying the OxO gene) “consistently outperformed their [wildtype] siblings” and also Chinese chestnut trees. Every year, these researchers inoculated the trees and then, 90 days later, measured the lengths of cankers (or fungal growth) around the trees. The trees were planted in an orchard in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

The key result is that transgenic trees fared better than their wildtype siblings on basically every metric. They had smaller cankers, and also released fewer fungal spores from those cankers. Growth was normal, despite one year of fairly significant drought conditions.

This is a really promising sign for the American Chestnut, perhaps saved by genetic engineering.

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

When I was 18, I asked one of the greatest coaches in history for the "key" to success in the field.

He didn't give me a secret workout or a grand philosophy.

Sitting in his living room, he told me: "Read as much as you can. Never stop reading."

This advice is more important today than it has ever been.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

BlackRock started buying American public utility companies

They buy them with debt, when the purchase goes through the debt goes to the power company, not to BlackRock

This means entire states power bills will instantly rise to pay off the debt. It’s a racket and it’s started

“What if I told you that your electricity bill isn't just paying for the power you use? It might also be paying off Wall Street's debt.”

“Here's how private capital works. Firms like asset management giant BlackRock don't usually buy companies with their own money. Instead, they raise giant funds from pension systems, governments, and wealthy investors. When they go shopping, whether it's for a factory, a toll road, even your power company, they use part equity from those investors and part debt borrowed from banks and bond markets.

Here's the catch: that debt doesn't sit on BlackRock's books. It sits on the company they just bought, and it's the company, not the asset manager, that has to pay it back. Now, when the company is a utility, like water, gas, or electricity, it's not just any business. Utilities are monopolies. You can't just shop around for a new power company. So, where does the money to pay back that debt come from? It comes from you, the ratepayers. In leveraged acquisitions of utilities, the bills you pay every month are the revenue stream that services Wall Street's loans.

Let's take a real case. Last month, state regulators approved a $6.2 billion buyout of ALLETE, the parent company of Minnesota Power, the state's main power utility. The buyers, Global Infrastructure Partners, which is owned by BlackRock, together with Canada's Pension Fund. A public utility that hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans rely on is shifting into the hands of private capital. Critics, like one administrative law judge who advised the acquisition be stopped because it's not in the public interest, warn that buyers are paying a big premium over the utility's actual worth here, potentially hundreds of millions above market value.

And when investors pay more, they expect to earn more back. Where's that money gonna come from? Well, the fear is from higher rates or cuts to services, bigger bills for you while your utilities get worse, while BlackRock collects steady fees for managing the investment”

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

We tend to think greatness comes from grinding: 10,000 hours, endless reps, pushing kids to practice.

But the real story is more interesting.

The best aren’t just pushed from the outside. They’re pulled from within. Psychologists call this the rage to master.

Greatness doesn’t start with the grind. It starts with curiosity.

[NOURiSH Workshop @gowandrlost]

Hey @natphotolab I just finished & published a YouTube film where I made a gorgeous, illuminated walnut frame starring a triptych of metal prints from you!

Check it out!!

https://t.co/1NS7fKVEJc