Phil Boonstra

I build luxury homes in Boulder & Denver.

[John Blatchford @JohnJBlatchford]

I’m rooting for companies like this, but they are solving the wrong problem.

Construction of a suburban single-family home is already very efficient.

70% or more of the total project timeline is utilities, permits, zoning, community pushback, site preparation, financing, etc. All the stuff before construction really starts.

Once a motivated crew is on-site with materials, a house can go up in weeks.

Hard to imagine a localized factory can do much better, and it has its own complications. I hope I’m wrong!

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

@JaredDHardin Nice job!

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

The long road is not punishment, its a gift. and if you cant see that yet, its because you are still the same whiny creature who prayed for God to teleport you out of egypt. God said no, i am going to make you walk. and you cry about it like its some injustice. it is not. the desert is not your enemy, you are your enemy. you want to arrive at canaan as the same person who ate the bread of slavery. you want to be free and also not change. pick one. that is not how this works. God is not going to drag your bitter half formed soul into a promised land, it would spoil the milk and spoil the honey, and you would wreck it within a year because you are not ready. so he walks you until the readiness is not something you aspire to, it is something you are forged into. the sand in your teeth is teaching you. the thirst is teaching you. the rations are building someone who can receive a promise without choking on it. stop asking od to rescue you from the only process that will actually save you. blessed are those who walk it without cursing the sand, for every grain grinds a slave into a son

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

I built an internal CRM tool for my GC company. Nothing special but suits my needs almost perfectly. The cool project I’m working on is a septic estimator. Pulls GIS data, existing septic permits, existing septic tank and leach locations from as-built drawings, soils types for USGS or nearby test pits, limiting layers, well permit overlay and setbacks from the state, etc. Then trained it on Colorado regulations and engineered plans to produce a materials list with pricing and labor hours to give the client an immediate quote. Overall just took a few days to build.

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

@bendellwerry Put me in coach

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

Everything around me is rotting, so i build. that is it, that is the whole reason. God built six days and rested one. he could have stopped at function, he could have given us eyes that only see useful things, but he made color. he made sunsets. he made the shape of a woman's back. he made the sound of rain hitting a dirt road at night. beauty was not an afterthought, it was the first thought, everything else came after. i build because the world is falling apart, and a man who does not build is just watching a fire. i lay bricks straight, i put flowers where nobody will see them, i sand wood until the grain is smooth enough to hold without a glove. these are prayers. and the man who says beauty does not matter has never built anything, he has only consumed, and consumption leaves you hollow. everyone i know who only takes has the same eyes, empty, always hungry, looking for the next thing to swallow. hold a hammer instead. hold wood. hold stone. make something that does not need you to survive, and then walk away from it, and feel what that is. that is the closest i have ever got to being alive, and i am not giving it back.

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

@pinpulleddrmf Sent you a DM

[Department of State @StateDept]

WATCH: Secretary Rubio Delivers Remarks to the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany. https://t.co/MSnxmlRf2w

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/bHkcSotj3b

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

@MysteryGrove I already know that your takes are probably the most reasonable. Maybe a TLDR version with some names named would help for us to follow along.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

Will is the rarest skill on earth right now. you can mass produce intelligence you can buy beauty you can fake status but you cannot download will from anywhere it has to be grown in suffering and nobody wants to suffer so nobody has any. one man with will is worth ten thousand without it. the future belongs to whoever can still force themselves to do things they do not want to do

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

https://t.co/NuAo6S10Yn

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

@elonmusk My friend’s nephew was killed by an illegal immigrant driving a truck.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

They close the path to fatherhood because a man who loves his child the way God loves him cannot be controlled. he has tasted the divine and knows the difference between their laws and His law. The father holds his newborn and suddenly understands sacrifice, suddenly understands unconditional love. This knowledge is dangerous. A man who knows God through fatherhood does not need their institutions, their permissions. So they poison it. They tell him fatherhood is slavery. They tell him his children are burdens. They build a world where becoming a father is considered failure instead of ascension. The path remains but they have hidden the gate

[Sólionath @Anarseldain]

This is simply not true. Many Americans are jumping at the opportunity to do hard jobs – they just want a decent wage. Ford’s CEO is also lying: you can just go online, and find that almost all of the jobs offer between $16 and $30 per hour.

Many employers (like Ford) are used to paying low wages to immigrant scabs, and now they are balking at the idea of having to pay a livable wage to Americans. This is especially true of low-skill, crappy jobs – the kind that employers say Americans “don’t want to do.”

Americans did those jobs for decades. But wages have not kept up with inflation, and now employers want Americans to do these “undesirable” jobs for the same wages that might have been decent 20 or 30 years ago! It’s not that Americans “don’t want to do these jobs,” which is a lie spread by large corporations. It’s that Americans “don’t want to accept the low wage we’re offering their immigrant counterparts.”

Another huge issue: American workers don’t have any bargaining power at these jobs. Many of these jobs were union jobs in the past – and it was immigration that ended that. Dishwashing was often a union job, as late as 1959; and it was immigration that killed the unions.

Fruit-picking and other agricultural jobs were done by Americans; and they could have been union jobs too. But the U.S. government, in cooperation with agricultural lobbyists, devised the Bracero Program: supposedly designed to address worker shortages during WW2, it continued for almost 20 years after the end of the war, and was used almost exclusively to depress farmhand wages, and break up worker strikes which tried to create a union for the industry.

The Bracero Program ended on December 31st, 1964. The Hart-Celler Act was passed in 1965.

Americans can, have, and will do those jobs. But companies are going to have to pay them more. That’s how supply and demand works. But large corporations would rather put their thumb on the supply scale, and sell America’s citizens out, if it means a little bit higher of a profit margin. America is not an economic zone, and the GDP is not the only thing that matters. If all of America’s workers are replaced with the cheapest foreign work that money can buy, then America’s GDP will skyrocket – but the GDP won’t matter anymore, because there won’t really be an “America.”

[Labrador Skeptic @SaysSimulation]

This is a follow up to yesterday's thread, and yes, unfortunately this could become life changing for us all.

China has been setting this up for 10+ years, and they may be going for the throat now. The US let them gain a near monopoly in critical rare earths,
1/

[Charlie Kirk @charliekirk11]

Tell someone about Jesus this weekend.

[Phil Boonstra @philboonstra]

Some days you close 20% of your yearly work and the next day you are wondering how you are going to get more leads.

[Free Northerner @FreeNortherner]

Everybody talks past each other because the actual problem is status and talking about status instead of material wealth is gauche, classist, and vaguely racist.

Younger gen is suffering from low status, which they talk about as poverty, because they can't put it in words.