Lawrence D. LaPlue

@NMSU, Economist (enviro, energy, trade, development). Benefits 🔼cost ⏩sustainable dev.

UT Knox '16 (Phd econ)
Bryan College '08 (BA history, political comm)

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@MAHA_Action Not WIC eligible in many (most?) states is perhaps what he's referring to?

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@Kody__Rogers Basis for Intuition that "Their $1B ATM sell program is ALMOST FINISHED. It began on February 26th, 2026. We're three months in." ? My understanding was it is long dated, and not clear they've raised anywhere near that, yet? But, more likely I'm missing something.

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@074Dux @AAlacarbonara Bookmarking for review in 6mo and 36mo.

I think this list of recommendations is wrong, but predictions are hard (fun), esp. About the future 😁

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

Seems like supply chain pipeline is meaningful too... Seems Really hard/time consuming to spin up a whole new, technically demanding supply chain. Doosan as a partner seems to be investing in support of this (others too, not all eggs in the nuscale basket), but with a meaningful 2030ish volume SMR target. Seems like that's a meaningful bottleneck. Something a customer signing a major purchase agreement would want to have good clarity on.

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@webdevMason @blhack Placed the order like 10pm, February 14, or whatever the last night $8k fsd was still offered 😅

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@webdevMason @blhack Same config (5 kids, 3 are 6 and under). Delivered 2wks ago.
Been testing seat config with all seats full. Definitely a pinch, but workable.
Our sienna more comfortable for the whole crew (while still maintaining meaningful cargo capacity)... But, yeah, I kinda love it :)

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@jeffreytucker My feed right now.

Wild.

[Michael Antonelli @BullandBaird]

Imagine the math required to make this guess and aim 4 people at a point in space

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@jakefenner_ Looks like they both did it 😁 (but, Mary, not God)

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@NewestPapa @webdevMason Can you say more? This is a plausible padlocks scenario in my life (all kids currently under 12)

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this is art

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@074Dux @DTrades98 Did you add? 😏

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@074Dux @DTrades98 Not wrong... That *would* definitely be a nice place to add 😁

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@Kody__Rogers @NuScale_Power If only lines on screens caused the predicted future 😊. Hodl 🤞

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

250 years ago today Adam Smith gave the world a fantastic insight.

That order, cooperation and prosperity are not ordered from above by priests or chiefs but emerge from the social interactions of ordinary people.

It’s the most revolutionary and benign idea ever proposed.

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

Who knows. Sellers have to find buyers, and isn't Fluor still trying to unload, like, 20m or more shares, over course of next few months. I'm not really a trader and don't pay much attention to daily volume, but my instinct is that will continue to drag until summer. I think my current average cost basis is around $11-14. If it drops back that low before July I'll go into the couch cushions 😜

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@KULOLO808 @DirtyTesLa Somehow need to factor subscription cost inflating. Analysis changes if they gap up to $200 in the coming months

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

@wholemars Happily one of the ~140m people giving them my money last month.

[Lawrence D. LaPlue @LLaPlue]

Anyone concerned about token traffic going to China (meaningful version of this question: anyone MORE concerned with minimax processing vs Claude? Or other frontier?)... Sometimes cheaper/free isn't really free. Really interested in how people who know more/have thought more on it think about this kind of question. Probably it exists somewhere in this platform but I haven't been able to find/distill it yet.