1800s: The Great Plains of North America support the largest herbivore migration in world history. 60 million bison. From Canada to Mexico. Moving in herds that took days to pass a single point.
Beneath their hooves: 3-7 feet of topsoil. The deepest, richest soil on Earth. Built over thousands of years by the exact process the bison represented.
Graze intensely. Move on. Trample plant matter into soil. Fertilize with dung. Let grass recover. Return next year. Repeat for millennia.
The grassland evolved with them. The soil was their creation.
1860s-1880s: The US government has a Native American problem. Plains tribes are mobile, militarily effective, and completely dependent on bison for food, clothing, tools, shelter.
Kill the bison, you kill the tribes' independence.
General Sherman states this explicitly: "Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."
Railroad companies offer bounties. "Buffalo hunters" kill thousands per day. The carcasses are left to rot. Sometimes just the tongue is taken. The rest wasted.
60 million bison in 1800. Less than 1,000 by 1889.
Native Americans forced onto reservations. The stated goal achieved.
But the land notices.
Without bison hooves breaking soil crust, rain runs off instead of penetrating. Without bison dung, soil microbes starve. Without intense grazing followed by rest, grasses can't regenerate properly.
The topsoil that took 10,000 years to build begins disappearing.
1930s: The Dust Bowl. Topsoil literally blows away. Farms destroyed. Millions displaced. Massive economic collapse. Ecological catastrophe.
"Experts" blame farmers for plowing marginal land. They ignore the obvious: The soil was fine for 10,000 years with 60 million bison. It lasted 40 years without them.
The bison weren't destroying the land by grazing. They were building the soil through the very process we eliminated.
Today: The Great Plains has 48 million cattle. That's 25% fewer large ruminants than existed naturally as bison.
Yet cattle are blamed for environmental destruction on land that was literally built by large ruminants doing exactly what cattle do now.
The American Serengeti had 60 million grazers and the deepest topsoil on Earth. We killed them, destroyed the soil within decades, and now blame their replacements for the damage.
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it "digital transformation."
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would "10x productivity."
That's not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.
I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a "pilot success."
Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured "AI enablement."
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We're "AI-enabled" now.
I don't know what that means.
But it's in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."
He asked what that meant.
I said "compliance."
He asked which compliance.
I said "all of them."
He looked skeptical.
I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."
He stopped asking questions.
Microsoft sent a case study team.
They wanted to feature us as a success story.
I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."
I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.
They didn't verify it.
They never do.
Now we're on Microsoft's website.
"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."
The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.
He got 3,000 likes.
He's never used Copilot.
None of the executives have.
We have an exemption.
"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."
I wrote that policy.
The licenses renew next month.
I'm requesting an expansion.
5,000 more seats.
We haven't used the first 4,000.
But this time we'll "drive adoption."
Adoption means mandatory training.
Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.
But completion will be tracked.
Completion is a metric.
Metrics go in dashboards.
Dashboards go in board presentations.
Board presentations get me promoted.
I'll be SVP by Q3.
I still don't know what Copilot does.
But I know what it's for.
It's for showing we're "investing in AI."
Investment means spending.
Spending means commitment.
Commitment means we're serious about the future.
The future is whatever I say it is.
As long as the graph goes up and to the right.
A thread of videos from today’s flight into Hurricane Melissa
In this first one we are entering from the southeast just after sunrise and the bright arc on the far northwest eye wall is the light just beginning to make it over the top from behind us.