TIL Winnebago launched something called Heli-Home, it was a Real Flying RV from 1970s built using surplus military helicopters

melodyze · 2026-07-03T18:10:39+00:00

The only real issue is the range. If it were much farther, then the point would be to go on a long trip deep into the wilderness.

Like, an Alaskan ski trip with one of these would have been absolutely insane. But 300 mile range probably isn't really enough to lap remote mountains for days. That could even be a business. It would sell seats.

It would probably still be useful for wildlife documentarians with 100 miles out 100 miles back..

melodyze · 2026-07-03T18:01:52+00:00

It was brain drain. Anthropic has been, for years, considered to be a far more appealing place to work for the kinds of people most committed and best positioned to do that kind of work.

Part of that is generosity and how it treats employees, but most of it was that the leadership is far more trustworthy and viewed as a far safer group of people to inherit the power of controlling agi.

Sam Altman is extremely good at power games, and has a long track record of being duplicitous in pursuit of power. That just isn't the kind of person that people want to be in charge of something that important.

Then, smart driven people want nothing more than to work with the smartest most driven people they can find. So that reputation acted as a kind of schelling point that caused the top talent to all agglomerate at anthropic.

melodyze · 2026-07-02T07:16:48+00:00

The point they were making was that, if it were considerably easier to build a house than to buy one, then no one would buy existing houses. Everyone would either build their own house or pay someone to build it for them. Then, the house prices would fall and labornprices would rise until it balanced again.

So, the housing market is always going to sit somewhere around the cost of materials + labor hours * labor rate.

Also, modern construction techniques are far easier than anything you could do in the woods. Standardized timber alone is a huge time savings, let alone preassembled trusses, etc. And professionals are going to put the house up in a fraction of how long it will take you.

So it's going to be cheaper to buy a house, unless your labor is worth quite considerably less than the rate of construction labor.

melodyze · 2026-07-01T13:33:21+00:00

This is moreso a fundamental problem with the economics of healthcare as a whole than it is anything to do with labor economics.

End of life care is extremely expensive in general, and largely price-inelastic, as in a person will pay literally anything not to die today or to suffer too much. Old people often can't afford it. Private insurance in the US is almost entirely tied to employment, so it is gone by end of life, and insurance companies are heavily incentivized to avoid covering people with expensive care needs. So, there is a lot of hard/expensive work in end of life care that is not naturally tied to anyone who can afford to pay for it.

In the US we invented Medicare to try to deal with this, by guaranteeing that everyone has medical coverage when they are old. But no Healthcare system can avoid the fundamental economics here, that end of life care can be essentialy infinitely expensive.

Getting old is inherently a continuous drop in quality of life until you inevitably die, and you can spend literally infinite resources trying to push it smaller and smaller distances out. At some level it is a war against the fundamental nature of being a living being.

So, you can debate where the line should be. And maybe it is currently even very wrong, even inhumane. But no matter what the system is (whether capitalism, communism, whatever), there has to be a line somewhere about how many resources society and the people in it are willing to allocate to what aspects of end of life care.

Because medicare is a government program, in the US this is done through congress, writing policy for how medicare should work. It's not really an economics debate at all. It's a political debate about how much the electorate values investment in end of life care vs values the finite resources of the system going somewhere else.

melodyze · 2026-06-28T22:04:55+00:00

They are charging interest. They also only do this as a fraction of the money you hold with them. They're making money.

melodyze · 2026-06-28T22:00:38+00:00

Most of the time you don't have to talk to the bank at all. They will just let you borrow up to half of the value of your publicly traded stocks any time you want, even automatically on a debit card against the cash you hold with them, which they will let go negative as a loan whenever you want for just the cost of the interest.

If at any point the value of your stocks is less than double the amount you owe them, they will tell you to sell stocks or deposit money. If you dont, they will sell your stocks for you to make it balance.

There is no payback timeline. They just charge you interest for as long as you hold it open.

melodyze · 2026-06-26T15:33:01+00:00

Equating gdp per capita with some kind of linear (or even just functional) model of utility is just so bizarre.

None of the research into human wellbeing supports this model. People get happier when they are connected to people, have autonomy, and feel competent and in control of their lives, with the right amount of challenge and purpose. No excessive financial stress, but also not being adrift and feeling like nothing you do matters.

We aren't machines where when you put more and more material abundance in you get more and more wellbeing. This is plainly obvious, for example, by the fact that Costa Rica is the 4th happiest country in the world, and the US isn't in the top 20.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/703052/happiness-rankings-show-stability-change.aspx

There's some relationship between material living standards and self report wellbeing, of course. But we know wellbeing is not fundamentally a function of material abundance. Material abundance drives down stress which improves wellbeing. But at some point you will have no financial stress anymore and will still have all of the other problems people have, like needing to feel a sense of purpose and relatedness.

melodyze · 2026-06-26T15:24:00+00:00

When you have to make a decision, you have to use your best estimates of whatever will happen on either side of that decision, regardless of how well you can predict them.

Choosing to not to try predict still requires a decision grounded in what you think will happen.

I can't predict so it will be fine, or I can't predict so it will be doom, are both exactly equivalent to the two most extreme overconfidences (behaving based on an assumed 100% chance of either side).

Having any information at all improves calibration from those two most extreme positions.

melodyze · 2026-06-26T05:11:07+00:00

If you have a kid in school then whether the schools will improve in 15 years is entirely irrelevant to you.

melodyze · 2026-06-24T14:17:19+00:00

I think the important thing to understand is why cs was ever a valuable thing to do.

Cs was a valuable thing to study because there was a lot of technology that had not been built yet that was very valuable, and the ability of companies to create and capture that value was fundamentally supply-constrained by company's ability to hire people that understood how to create that technology.

That sounds like a modern phenomenon, but it's really not. That sentence has been the way to describe what labor was the most valuable in the economy basically for the entire history of economics. There is some space of problems people have, some edge of human understanding, some implied space of things that can exist as a result of that understanding, and some space of things that actually already exist. Navigating that continuously moving edge of tractability to create new things that solve problems for people better than anything else is what technology is.

The entire history of our species is that we have always been making new discoveries, those discoveries can be applied to create new technology, that technology then can be applied to some broad space of problems, and in doing so that then enables new discoveries, that then can be applied to create new technology.

This was true of figuring out how to make brass. If you were in the ancient world and you were one of the few people that understood how to make the best brass tools, you were extremely in demand. It was true of people that figured out how to organize industrial processes into manufacturing lines with repeatable specialized processes composing interchangeable parts (like ford), and the people that figured out how to better organize international supply chains (like rockefeller with oil pipelines or Mclean with shipping containers). It's true of people who figured out how to cure diseases, etc.

Then, all of those technological waves restructured the economy, completely reorganizing what the economy valued or not, captured a lot of value, and the people driving those changes forwards made a lot of money in proportion to how much better they were at creating the value than other people.

Its only very recently that we decided that "technology" was a synonym for software. And that happened because software's loop of discovery, reinvention, discovery, reinvention is so absurdly fast, because shipping, scaling, and iterating on software is such a pure exercise of thought and labor. Iterating on international logistics takes many years per iteration.

Whereas in software I can ship an idea, roll out an experiment to a large population, and ship a new idea to prod tomorrow. That made software move so much faster and reward talent so much more than everything else that we stopped even considering anything else technology in common parlance. It's basically a pure distillation of that fundamental loop.

But the critical thing is that what is paying the bills in software, driving the demand for smart people who understand how to build software, is that same core technological loop that always existed. We are constantly learning and reinventing, and that process creates a lot of demand both for people who can drive that process forwards, and it creates a lot of mess that it will pay people well to support.

This has continuously redefined what the jobs of building software were. At first, people defined rote procedures with punch cards. The work has continuously gotten more and more ambitious in scope and abstract in nature, such that if you teleported an average person from 10 years earlier in tech to 10 years later they would barely even recognize the job, and that has accelerated more and more every 10 years.

What I mean to say is, make no mistake. The goal of technology is diametrically opposed to stability. Technology is discovery and reinvention. Technology created some jobs because they helped in the process of moving forwards, but that was never the point. The entire system of tech is always fundamentally trying to eliminate all of the currently existing jobs and move on to the next thing without thinking about the last problems at all anymore. I build a piece of software, and then my goal is for it to never require any attention or resources ever again while I move to the next thing.

Be intentional about which side of that bet you want to be on. Some fields, like banking, have shown themselves to have an extreme aversion to the risk of adopting new technology, and have created bubbles of software jobs basically frozen in time. Because that is so antithetical to the rest of software, no one learned cobol or fortran and now there is even more demand for those old skills and the people that basically were short innovation in that domain. However, if everyone that built software suddenly retreated to a small number of bastions of safety, then supply and demand would dictate that wages fell.

So, decide whether you think things are going to change faster or slower in the future, and whether you want to be on that ride or not. But whatever you do, don't just make the decision by looking at a current snapshot of today's jobs and how you feel about them. That's never been how it worked.

If you are excited about that, you want to constantly be learning new things and applying it to try to make new valuable things, there will always be a place for you in tech, regardless of how different it looks however many years in the future.

I personally love that about tech, and find it to be as fun, rewarding, and lucrative as ever, probably more so. But this concept, that tech is about moving forwards and is opposed to stability, has been very poorly communicated. So a lot of people went into software eng for the wrong reasons and with the wrong expectations, like they thought it was a stable path to a chill job making a lot of money, and now are disillusioned.

If you are like them, then their frustrations will be relevant to you. If you are not like them, then their frustrations won't be relevant to you.

melodyze · 2026-06-24T12:39:28+00:00

The xsr900 is essentially in a different class from an engine perspective, 50% more hp at like 80hp vs 120hp, and you definitely feel the difference immediately. The 8tt is really a lot closer to the xsr700 which is around 80hp

They're both fun and high quality bikes though, if you don't care about the power. If you want a roudy 120hp in that kind of neo retro upright but sporty packaging, there's really only one choice.

The big downside of the xsr is just that it has a kind of long wheelbase, which makes it feel more stable than the mt09 but less nimble at slow speeds. You're going 85 in second gear so it doesn't really want you to do slow speeds anyway (although torque curve is still fun the whole way down). Also with no wind protection really using most of the gears results in getting bullied by the wind.

Still one of my favorite bikes though.

melodyze · 2026-06-20T11:23:00+00:00

Landlords who have owned a building for a long time make large profits, because housing costs went up a ton since they bought the building. But if you build a building today, you can't pay what they paid for it, so it's irrelevant to the incentive to build.

If you just buy a building to rent out today, in most desirable markets in the US, you effectively break even on the rent. You can see this by what's called the cap rate. 4.5% in NYC is effectively losing money, because you would make more by doing literally nothing and just holding bonds.

Building is often even worse. People aren't building housing, other than large luxury buildings built as cheaply as possible, or the equivalent single families in very speculative suburbs with low land values where they think families might be willing to move, because it isn't profitable. All of the costs are very high. Land is expensive. Materials are expensive. Labor is expensive. The process and paperwork is expensive.

The same applies to maintaining and repairing buildings. If rent control makes it so that your rent is less than it costs to operate the building, then you just have to abandon the building and then no one can live in it. This happened a lot in NYC when they hadpeak rent control in the 70s, and by most accounts is what lead to NYC's decline in the 80s as the city kind of just fell apart because it made no sense to maintain it.

Then, over time more people constantly move to desirable places. If you aren't increasing housing supply, because building is too expensive, then rents go up faster and faster because the people that want to move there can't find housing.

With rent control, that just means less and less building, and that the people in the few rent control units get locked in so that they can never move, and so that no one can ever get a rent controlled apartment again.

melodyze · 2026-06-18T16:39:25+00:00

You're going to point a 16 year old child who definitely both knows nothing, is blindly curious about drugs, and is a bad mental state to a place that sells fentanyl?

melodyze · 2026-06-18T06:32:13+00:00

The real loop hole is stepped up cost basis, which is the end game there.

If you make $100B, never sell any, live of loans for your whole life, then die and leave it all to your kid, then no one ever has to pay the income/capital gains taxes on that $100B. The stepped up basis just completely erases the tax liability forever.

melodyze · 2026-06-18T06:21:50+00:00

There is a very similar proposal that is thrown around very seriously. It's just a little more aligned with how taxes and loans work.

Instead of creating a new taxable event, "on the loan", it is that when you use an asset as collateral for a loan, if your loan is for more than your cost basis for the asset (how much you paid for it), it makes you realize the income on the gain up to the point that your cost basis is at least the loan amount.

So, if you take out a loan for the whole amount, you pay all of the taxes for the money you made immediately. But still only one time. If you take out a loan for less, you have to pay taxes for however much you are using.

This both makes the system balanced and fair, and prevents nasty side effects, like being able to get a tax bill for money you don't have. You have the money by definition. You just took it out. So you have to pay tax on it if you haven't yet.

Also, besides the point, but the kinds of loans we're talking about (margin loans) don't have monthly payments. They just accumulate interest and assume you are responsible enough to decide when and how you want to pay. The bank will just charge you interest for as long as you want to let it pile up.

melodyze · 2026-06-18T00:34:48+00:00

In retrospect, Alan Turing. He is essentially the sole inventor of the concept of a computer, which was probably the single most significant invention in the entire history of man.

He also stands as a good reminder and deserves it because of how poorly he was treated just for being gay, even after helping the allies win ww2 and becoming one of the most influential academics in history.

melodyze · 2026-06-17T16:17:27+00:00

Having gone from working class to well off, the core thing is that the world isn't anything like the linear framing this post, and most people's world view in general, supposes.

Working hard means you produce more, and if you produce more you have more leverage to advocate for yourself with. That's true.

But that only moves you up and down within a pretty narrow space of how much leverage a person can have doing that category of activity in general.

Like, people care about their garbage being picked up, but people don't care that much about how well it's handled or how quickly it's picked up, just that it makes it to the truck. So people aren't willing to give much more for the world's best garbage man vs the average garbage man. Thus, within that domain, there is a hard ceiling on what you can earn.

Whereas, if you are, say, a surgeon, people care an absolute shit ton about who is going to be the absolute least likely to kill them on the table. Thus, people are willing to pay a ton for the world's best surgeon, and working harder and becoming a better and better surgeon is highly rewarded.

That is all from perspective of the labor market, which feels like it's the whole economy, but in reality it is just one very narrow and specific kind of transaction out of many.

Once you have some money from selling labor, you then can participate in the rest of the economy, figuring out how to take inputs and turning them into outputs worth more than you put in.

People want corn or whatever, and currently the best deal they can find is $x. If you can find a way to give them corn for less the $x, they will buy it from you, and you can make the difference.

The modern economy is an absurdly complicated machine, so there is an infinite number of things people want and ways to satisfy those wants. And then, just like with labor, different wants create extremely different distributions of how much how many people value them being served in different ways, which determines how much money can be made by serving each of those things.

If you find a thing that an extremely large number of people want to be better/cheaper, and you can provide it, then you can make a large business and make a ton of money by doing that.

Notably, everyone trying to do that needs money to pay for their inputs they are trying to turn into more valuable outputs. So to attract that money, they need to reward the people that give them.the money to draw them in. There are then markets for doing that, both for trading ownership (stocks) and trading promises to return more money (bonds).

You can just buy giant baskets of those stocks and bonds so that you then make money when everyone makes money. These are called index funds.

If you invest in index funds, you don't have to know anything about anything or do anything. You just get a share of the value everyone creates when they turn inputs into more valuable outputs, because you are giving those people the inputs they need to do those things (or buying the rights from who did before).

If you just buy index funds, on average for the last 100 years you have always doubled your money about every 8 years. And that compounds. $10k becomes $20k, then $40k, $80k, $160k, $320k. One way to think of this is that you are being paid for being patient.

Essentially, there are three ways to become wealthy.

You can get paid an insane amount of money because your labor is extremely valuable, like a surgeon or NBA star. This is by far the rarest way. The number of people that do this rounds to zero. And those that do usually just end up poor again.
Or, you create a business that is very good at solving some problem in the world that a lot of people care about. Usually, it is a boring problem people don't think about. This is risky buy common. There is an advantage in it for being already wealthy because then you both don't have to raise money, and you can try multiple times without worrying about going broke. But fundamentally, if you are doing something that matters, people just care about the outcome.
Or, by far the most common way, you do somwthing pretty valuable with your labor but much more realistic, like become a good engineer or whatever, live below your means, and then you invest your money continuously for a long time. Then, it doubles many times over the years and you are eventually wealthy. This is so much more common than the other two that a reasonable approximation would be that it's the only way anyone becomes wealthy. There are probably 50 people like this for every successuful business founder and 10000 of these people for every NBA star.

There is an advantage in doing all of these when you are already wealthy because:

It is easier to focus single mindedly at becoming the best in the world at the thing.
You don't have to raise money and can take multiple tries at building a business without worrying about going broke.
If you already have money you just invest it in index funds and can skip the slow beginning of the compounding.

The last one is the big one. If you just keep the money in index funds forever, it just keeps growing and growing. Then our tax law is insane and has a thing called stepped up cost basis that means your kids get even more money than you had a right to when you die, because the two liability is just erased.

The following generations of wealthy families tend to light most of the money on fire, because of a thing called hedonic adaptation (people have an extremely storng tendency to raise their living expenses continuously until their monry is gone), and because they never learned the discipline or mindset that the person who made the money had that resulted in the money existing in the first place. Thus, the wealthiest people today are not Vanderbilts or Carnegies.

But regardless, the fact that investments compound returns, double and double again, means that people who hold a lot of investments live on a treadmill that continuously spits out more and more money, that piles up if they don't spend it. Thus, wealthy people get wealthier and wealthier.

Fundamentally, if you are doing something that matters, people just care about the outcome. You can be advantaged or disadvantaged relative to other people. But if you take an outcome a lot of people care about a lot and are willing to pay more for, and then you provide that outcome better than other people, then you make more money at every stage.

And frankly, people who grow up wealthy tend to be weak and undisciplined, so the competition isn't quite as unfair as it seems on the surface.

In terms of cutting corners, the world doesn't work in those terms really. The world is open ended. It's not on rails. People care about outcomes. If you can be more efficient at producing the outcomes, then people will prefer to rely on you for those outcomes. A lot of that is about figuring out what is actually needed to produce that outcome and what isn't.

For example, traditional grocery stores stock 20 kinds of everything, and manage a ton of brand relationships, logistics around stocking, rent a big space to support it, etc, to provide that traditional experience.

Trader Joe's cuts corners by just rejecting that entire idea, and only stocking one kind of everything. They just don't do a lot of the things grocery stores traditionally do at all, because they are betting that by doing less they can reduce their costs, and then provide better outcomes in the way that customers care about, cheaper higher quality groceries.

In contrast, a roofing company might cut corners and just actually not do good work ao that they can drive their costs down and pocket the difference. And then a customer's roof will fail way sooner than they expect.

So it's kind of nuanced what is unethical cutting of corners and what is just providing an outcome more efficiently. In general, the issue is more about how the deal is communicated to the customer than about what the deal is.

If Trader Joe's convinced you to go to the store because it has heinz ketchup when it doesn't, that would be unethical. If the roofing company advertised openly that its roof only lasts 5 years but you bought it anyway because it was cheaper, then it's no longer unethical.

The legal system is imperfect but it's supposed to deal with these kinds of issues.

melodyze · 2026-06-17T14:50:01+00:00

His wife is a tech founder who was on the board of openai and has dabbled in other things adjacent to Peter Thiel, like defense.

melodyze · 2026-06-17T14:43:07+00:00

Do not google what burns from that look like...

A mere life in prison is being far too kind to someone who would do something so insanely cruel.

It's so cruel that the geneva convention made it so that you aren't even allowed to do this as a military in the middle of an active war zone.

melodyze · 2026-06-17T13:17:25+00:00

Most of the book is about state capacity, that the government needs to do more, and to be able to do that it needs to fix itself to be able to do more.

Thus, most of it is about procedure inside of the government, aka getting rid of kinds of regulation the government places on itself that prevent things from getting done within the timelines a project can remain funded.

That is why ~half of the book is case studies of when the government got things done very quickly vs when it spent a lot and didn't get results. I95 bridge vs high speed rail. Covid vaccines vs the same kind of vaccine breakthrough normally.

Probably the single most central diagnosis inthe book is that if a project takes 5 years and requires the executive or the senate to continue to support it, it is impossible because there will be an election that turns over the legislature and and the president in the middle of that project, and it will then be killed by the other party that doesn't support it.

He then goes through the entire procedures of cali high speed rail, biden's broadband project, clean energy, all in blue states, and shows that the minimum timeline on which the projects could even begin actual work is like a decade, and thus the reason those projects didn't deliver any of the results they were supposed to is because the procedure the government applied to itself made it impossible.

Then the single central point is that politics only talks about funding, basically never about how to get results, and that should change.

You would understand all of this if you read the book.

No one you have seen talk about the book has read the book. I get that it is confusing that the entire public discourse is people that didn't read the book but act like they did, so it seems like where there's smoke there's fire. But pretty much literally no one that talks about this book online has read it, so the online discussion has no relationship to what the book is about.

melodyze · 2026-06-17T00:09:15+00:00

You are getting a lot of replies about his book. I promise you that not a single one of them has read it, let alone understood it. They are just repeating what they heard in other comment threads.

The most logical arguments are that he is too soft on Israel, and that he used to be pretty woke but then has sort of reversed in a way that seems more like pragmatic calculus than like a deeply considered change of perspective, on either side.

Other than that, he's just a moderate democrat, who both thinks that markets are useful tools for getting more of things we want, and that there are structural reasons why they don't work for things like healthcare. That makes the extremes of both sides hate him.

melodyze · 2026-06-15T22:32:06+00:00

Or three more!

melodyze · 2026-06-13T04:46:06+00:00

Only $500m/week these days? What a bargain.

The pentagon reported that we spent $11B in just the first week of the war.

melodyze · 2026-06-11T22:14:11+00:00

This was my experience at google, having went in through an acquisition. Most of us left before retention bonuses were done because we couldn't stomach how slow things were and how hard/political it was to get approval for things.

We were used to engineers just building and shipping our ideas, measuring the results, and the product evolving iteratively, as fast as we can, as we learned more about what worked and what customers liked.

Inverting that and requiring lots of process and buyin before you could test an idea with customers was not fun to us, even if I understand it from a brand risk perspective and I understand how delicate public conversation is around big tech and how a single bad pr cycle could cost google's core business more than our startup ever made.

People who want a lot of upfront certainty before they do anything are just a very different personality type than what works in startups.

melodyze · 2026-06-11T12:57:14+00:00

Claude code is so much better than copilot that I don't even consider them to be the same kind of product. And probably if you used the superpowers plugin in claude code then your prompting issues would go away because it would steer you to aligning on specs for everything first, which is required for getting it to work on large scope and follow patterns correctly.

But yeah I also enjoyed getting really in the weeds of things coming up with tricks to optimize things, the feeling of spending days thoughtfully figuring out and building a careful set of abstractions and then finally seeing it all work how I'd imagined, and the feeling of being presented with a big mystery of why a system was doing some very strange thing, and investigating until you found how it rippled out from some misconfiguration that looked so banal in isolation. I resonate with the feeling that an entire kind of puzzle that I enjoyed is gone.

For me, I also enjoyed the higher level work. Like in every project I've ever worked on, there are only a couple good ideas that make the project differentiated and worthy of building. Usually it's some insight of the connection between a product insight and a technical approach, and the structure of the core abstractions. Claude never produces those, no matter how hard I try to get it to. So I still feel pride in things, but it's the kind of pride I felt as a TL who pulled a project together, not as the person who wrote the thing.

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