Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers.
…
After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology.
They had come with questions of their own.They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
rich people are fucking terrifying
The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.
1. How do you suppose the 1960 conservatives would react to the idea of a President who has close ties to the leader of Russia? What would they say about the fact that so many of his followers are literal Nazis?
2. If AOC appeared to be a lunatic to 1960 Americans, it would be because the principle thing she advocates for–the 70% marginal tax rate–was policy at that time. So she’d be running around going “Marginal tax rates should be 70%!” and everyone would go “…yes? They are? Shouldn’t you, a sitting member of Congress, know that?”
The marginal tax rate in 1962 was 87% percent.
That’s how the 1960s had the money to build highways and go to the fucking moon.
Now that it’s legal to grow hemp in the United States, a man who’s spent the last decade developing hemp “hardwood” is building a $6 million factory to manufacture the product en masse.
His patented product called “HempWood” is made out of compressed hemp pulp fibers, held together with a soy-based glue.
While that may sound like some newfangled version of particle board, it’s not.
It looks and feels like oak, but is actually 20 percent harder than the famous hardwood tree.
It also grows 100 times as fast. While it takes an oak tree at least 6 decades to mature, it takes hemp 6 months
Thats good news for oak trees, as they are among the most endangered trees in the planet because of the high demand for solid oak furniture.
The owner of the new start up company Fibonacci, Greg Wilson, was a pioneer in the bamboo flooring industry before hemp became legal.
The company uses technology popularized by China’s strand-woven bamboo industry, in addition to technology developed at Wilson’s other company SmartOak, which creates engineered wood products using logs that would otherwise be converted to wood chips.
HempWood will be used to make blocks, boards, flooring, cutting boards and skateboards, all at prices far cheaper than oak, the company said.
The company will be headquartered in Kentucky, where more than 40,000 acres of hemp are already being cultivated.
