Nick Pinkston 🏭 🏗️ 🏙️ 🌐 ⏭
@NickPinkston
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Founder/CEO @ Volition. W. PA Rust Belt to SF. Build Manufacturing/Engineering Tools. Econ/Finance/History Nerd. YIMBY / Pro-Democracy++ / Left-Accelerationist.
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2008
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@mattparlmer
This isn't a thing in archaeology anymore, just pop culture.
Some cool findings have come from in fishing nets and dredged up earth actually.
There's also some cool mammoth bone structures.
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This guide to picking STEM majors is too good.
Especially true about chemistry and feelings on safety haha
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My biotech PhD/researcher friend told me last night they're scared to share this about Covid vaccination, so I'll do it at my peril haha (& I'm triple vaxxed, etc.).
They were saying that we're approaching the point where further 4+ vaccines may be more harmful than more Covid.
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This is how many ships Bethlehem Steel built during WWII.
Amazing how fast we can go when we put our minds to it.
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People have told me to read "Sapiens" forever, and just stumbled across his lecture, and there's just fundamental flaws in the central premise and supporting facts all over this thing.
Were these books like the 2010's Malcolm Gladwell series?
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Apparently the Salton Sea in SoCal has enough lithium to support US EV needs for the foreseeable future.
I used to be surprised when these deposits are suddenly "discovered" after a shortage, but it's actually a normal part of the commodities market.
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@ArmandDoma
Yea, she's really bringing so much energy.
Dems are finding an oasis in the desert right now...
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Breakthrough if true: solid state "thermophotovoltaic" cells as efficient as a steam engine?!?
40% efficient at what to me seems like very high temperatures: 1.9K to 2.4K Celsius.
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I love everytime I see this come up again - haha.
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
1/ Sorry I'm late guys :D - I'll comment here as a factory owner, buyer of many machine tools, and industrial history buff. First, it's true that today only a few countries make all the machine tools today, so let's look at that history. Thanks for indulging me :-)
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Apparently the increasing vaccination rate + omicron surge causing broader natural immunity may make the impact of side-effects from further vaccinations worse than further Covid infections, which will become endemic like the flu.
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Funny there are people who recognize the hypocrisy of saying:
"I support more housing, just not in my backyard."
But they don't see the same in saying:
"I support criminal justice reform, just not having a reform DA / police accountability in my city."
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Again - I'm definitely not a PhD bio researcher, and hope I'm conveying their message accurately, but FYI I thought it was interesting from someone known in the field who I respect. Don't take my word for it, do your own research, etc.
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Excited
@govolition
is coming out of stealth mode as the cover story on Industrial Distribution magazine!
We're signing up suppliers like crazy right now (over 9M components and more, industry leading), and preparing to go live to customers after that.
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Can we ban police unions yet?
Literally one of the worst / corrupt forces in our society today...
JUST IN: The top executive for San Jose’s police union allegedly smuggled synthetic opioids over an eight-year period to orchestrate a national drug ring that disguised packages of pills as wedding gifts, makeup and chocolate.
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I saw some rumor about FRB having FDIC takeover, then when you search for BoA, etc you find similar BS accounts pulling the same thing.
There's something pretty widespread and fishy going on, and it smells like one of those crypto/stonks Discords running their biggest scam.
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When Lego builds a new factory, I imagine they put down a big plastic board with a ton of studs on top, and then they snap the rest together.
Either way - pretty cool to see Lego Made in the USA.
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@Twittomatter
@mattparlmer
Yes, those are two separate things. That mammoth bone hut was found on land in Siberia or thereabouts.
But there are neolithic finds from fishing nets, like those from now submerged "Doggerland", where today is the North Sea, once was an occupied landmass in the Stone Age.
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There are few better examples than Boeing to show the rotting of American manufacturing due to the shortsighted cultures of corporate America and the US gov't.
NEWS: It appears the crippled Boeing Starliner, which has marooned two astronauts up in space for almost two months, may have completely failed.
It's now highly likely the stranded astronauts will end up leaving the International Space Station on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
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@Trace_Cohen
@asanwal
And like the subway, it's hard more because of human reasons than engineering ones.
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🧵 As an Accelerationist, I've been watching e/acc gain traction interest.
With
@pmarca
post, it's time to address this philosophy's shortcomings.
Namely, that it is not broad or ambitious enough to truly fulfill the role we as tech leaders have to the future and society.
THE TECHNO-OPTIMIST MANIFESTO part 1
“You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
— Walker Percy
“Our species is 300,000 years old. For the
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Very excited to be featured in
@TechCrunch
on our recent fundraise led by
@newarkv
and
@QuietCapital
!
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It's crazy that Starlink satellites now number almost double the total of all other satellites combined. 🛰️📈
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
@usairforce
@MIT
@Haas_Automation
@fanuc
@Siemens
@Dassault3DS
17/ My theory on this is that the outsourcing craze starting in the 1970's paired with the short-sighted application of Coase's Theory of the Firm by the burgeoning MBA class led to American businesses shedding these "unprofitable" activities.
#MBAsRuinEverything
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Whenever you hear the news say there's X amount of a given material, most of the time they're talking about "proven reserves", where proven really means "proven to be profitable to extract", not the total amount of the substance in Earth's crust.
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I like
@ewarren
and her mission a lot, but her focus on the jobs cut by private equity seems misplaced. Someone has to cut unproductive jobs. The issue is that the safety net and education system aren't helping those people get new higher productive jobs. What am I missing?
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Glad to see the degrowth of the degrowth movement accelerate
This is, and I cannot overemphasize this, unhinged
This is like listening to a college freshman talk about Stalin or Nicolae Ceausescu as ideals to aspire to. It’s just thoughtless chatter from the uninformed and dramatically, best case, naive or, perhaps more realistically, dim
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I've been
@sfchronicle
-pilled. It's actually great to subscribe to a real newspaper that covers SF/Bay Area.
I switched from the NYT-->Chronicle a while back, and the more I explore the paper, the better I understand what's going on in our community.
Highly recommend!
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@ArmandDoma
@CathyReisenwitz
had a book that showed church attendance was anti-correlated with Trump voting, for the reason that church creates community and isolated/alienated people are Trump's core audience.
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I just got a tour of
@Formlogic
's factory and software in Pittsburgh, and I know of no one more advanced in their CNC machining tech, data, etc. on earth.
Very exciting! Things I wished we could do at Plethora, they have in operation.
I wish I could share more, but NDAs...
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Someone made a 3D motion graphic of a watch movement that you can rotate and explode, along with explanations of how it works by mechanism - very cool.
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Hardware is still hard.
I blame the lack of innovation in hardware tools vs. software tools for the former languishing.
Some of this is "reality is messy", but a lot of it is zero tools innovation in 20 years to make it easier to do hardware.
We should probably ask why VC hasn't managed to reduce hardware start ups to a repeatable playbook the same way we have with software.
There is the obvious reason - software lives inside computers, which run a different set of physical laws in which perfect copies are nearly
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Just found
@rrhoover
's great post on "The Rise of No Code" - I'm a huge fan of this trend in the Future of Tools.
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The manufacturing startup world always feels ignored by the VC world, and it's funny to see more evidence as
@PitchBook
's research vertical list doesn't even have anything like manufacturing, hardware, etc.
I guess everything physical you can't eat is just "Supply Chain" ?!?
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@loobah_l
Even worse, some of them send the decks to their competitor companies... I've been sent these before, and it's gross.
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13/ Silicon Valley was built by an alliance of:
- Gov't funding (DoD, NSF, NIH, DoE)
- Big labs (Bell Labs, PARC, NASA, Stanford, MIT, etc.
- Daring entrepreneurs
- Cowboy investors
That was and is the magic formula. We can't forget that.
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Really excited by what
@InfinitForm
is building:
Gen AI for CAD optimization and DFM.
Plethora built one of the best DFM tools, but we had to program a ton of specific algos, whereas AI seems promising to handle the plethora :-) of edge cases.
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New cocktail idea:
It's like a White Russian, but you light it on fire.
I call it the T-72 :-)
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
@usairforce
@MIT
@Haas_Automation
@fanuc
@Siemens
@Dassault3DS
@MazzucatoM
21/ I really hope we don't fuck that one up too. I believe strongly in industrial policy and public-private partnerships that have shown (see above) to be the way this seemingly always happens. Thanks for reading! :D
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Honestly very happy that Chinese consumers are preferring domestic luxury goods.
Getting France/Italy/Germany off their addiction to Chinese luxury spending is probably better for the geopolitics of all global liberal democracies.
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@ArmandDoma
Sorry you have to deal with this dude.
The more I've had contact with the overt racists (more common nowadays 😢), the more I think they've actually got a pretty severe mental health problem they're probably unconscious of sublimating into this kind of extreme trolling.
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Chile nationializes their lithium industry (with the largest deposits on earth), after having previously done this with copper.
Crazy they have both the most copper and lithium. It's like they're the "Electric Nation" or something.
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Would anyone come to a manufacturing / industrial startups Clubhouse room I host?
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@aphysicist
The struggle is real...
Give me the confidence of a fresh VC associate with no operating/investing experience giving seasoned founders feedback haha.
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@JoshuaSteinman
His parents directly pledged all of their personal assets against it. You don't actually have to post $250M in collateral - just agree to take $250M in debt if he skips bail.
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So essentially, when you hear we're "running out of X", remember they probably mean proven reserves, which have price graphs like this, where price increases lead to more capacity --> supply increases + sometimes lead to new methods that decrease prices.
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
5/ The Americans then started getting in on it when Lowell stole the British tech for textile production after he visited a factory and memorized everything (baller):
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I'm excited to announce that my company
@govolition
is now in private beta and onboarding customers!
We're looking for MechE's to try it out and give us feedback, so let me know if you want an invite!
It's for anyone who designs/builds physical objects. RTs very appreciated!
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🧵 This is a very exciting chart for YIMBYs - record numbers of new apartments are coming online!
This growth directly coincides with the birth/growth of the YIMBY movement (graph below).
My totally-not-an-economist take below (tho help wanted)
HT
@krystalball
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Crazy to see the
#NeverForget
tag while being inside an even darker national tragedy. Total US Deaths:
9/11: 2,977
#COVID19
: 196,328
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What's the positive opposite of a "social safety net"?
I've been calling it "Social Springboards" - as in systems that aren't just for catching you during the bad times, but accelerating your life/career.
There's a big open space on the left for optimistic plans for this.
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Reserves proven is driven by commodity prices + improvements to the extraction tech.
There's also a phenomena known as "supercycles" w/ commodities where pricing rises to the level where big Cap Ex is worth it, leading to prices falling once it's online.
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Georgist AF
This is hilarious: a rogue assessor in Alberqueue is turning up the valuations on vacant land to force the property owners to do something useful with it.
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I love that The Big Bang might get disproven by the James Webb observations (super early to say)! Re: "red shift" is actually diffraction.
I was more hoping for Dark Matter / Energy to get disproven as a modern "epicycle", but we have yet to see that🤞
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"The Resurgence of 'Shop Class' in American High Schools" from
@MMSOnline
Anyone have any data on this? We definitely need to support more of this if we want a strong manufacturing sector / workforce.
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
@usairforce
@MIT
@Haas_Automation
@fanuc
@Siemens
@Dassault3DS
18/ When the US stopped investing in machine tool R&D and outsourced manufacturing, it left to door open to Japan, etc. to pick up the slack and develop their own industry using a lot of gov't money given to big industry. You need govt help to make this happen. cc:
@MazzucatoM
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Just learned about the "Labor Leverage Ratio" from NPR's
@theindicator
podcast.
LLR = Job Quits / (Firings + Layoffs)
The higher the ratio, the more labor power. The chart below shows just how unusual the labor market is right now.
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@benlandautaylor
I think psychedelics should be treated as sacraments and not party drugs or even taken super regularly. It's like consulting an oracle or something.
Then again I'm not a super drug guy - unless caffeine counts, then I'm an addict haha.
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@RandallAMorris
@rrhoover
Fully agree, there are 178K therapists in the USA, a country of a 332M. That's about 1 for every 1865 people.
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REINDUSTRIALIZE is sold out, and so popular that people are coming just to crash outside.
If you're doing the latter, let me know where you scamps are congregating 😃♥️🏭🗽📈
what we've been able to pull off in ~2 months speaks to the power of this movement. REINDUSTRIALIZE is going to be an absolute banger. thank you to everyone for your support. full agenda and details will be up on soon!
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
4/ This was all very trade-secret type of stuff, the guys who invented it were really secretive and were the l33t hackers of their day. The inventor of that lathe, Jesse Ramsden, was the Woz of his day, inventing a lot of the whole field:
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These "Factory of the Future" articles from consultants always miss all of the disruptive mfg. tech being built now.
They think in IoT terms "computers will replace paper", but not "computers will change factories themselves".
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US Navy (
@donsbir
) opens SBIR for:
"AI and Autonomy for Improved Ops and Modernization of Navy Shipyards" to increase production capacity (re: Taiwan prep)
Manufacturing Tech Community: Activate!
- Materials Handling
- 3D Scanning
- Non-Dest. Inspection
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Why do we pronounce "etc." fully as "et cetera", but people don't say "et alia" for "et al." ? (or just "and others"?)
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My new company
@govolition
is in stealth mode, and we're looking for MechE's / hardware engineers to join our initial beta / give us feedback. It's applicable to everyone who designs/builds physical objects.
To sign up: email me, DM, or @ me here! RTs very appreciated :-)
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Just brainstorming the major events that affected the US manufacturing workforce over the last ~80 years.
What did I miss? Any other thoughts?
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This makes sense, but it somehow never occurred to me that this was obviously going to happen.
More like the "Belt and Rust" initiative -amiright?
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"Foomscrolling" is great neologism and trend if it's really true - ie everyone excited for techno-optimist stories on social.
"Foom" comes from the singularity world where an AGI accelerating its abilities makes a "Foom" sound like a jet blowing by you.
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Very cool in-depth map of the entire global semiconductor industry / technology throughout the entire design --> ship process.
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
@usairforce
@MIT
11/ Interestingly, it was partly WW2's immense capital equipment investment that modernized American manufacturing infrastructure that led to a jump in post war productivity. (can't find the citation now)
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
6/ We then went on to invent the American System of Manufacturing to (try and fail to) make guns for the Army with interchangeable parts - starting the American theme of the military having to do everything in manufacturing R&D.
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
3/ They started by making a lathe to make precision screws by hand-making a low precision control screw to cut a better control screw - bootstrapping precision:
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Any startups working on improving the forging process?
Open die (below) looks cooler, but closed die probably makes cooler parts (MacBook bodies, etc.).
I'm an equal opportunity forging enthusiast.
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@eduw4rdo
@AlecStapp
That's already been true, our businesses and universities already have plenty and even more are compromat into aiding the CCP intelligence forces.
The migrants are probably almost exclusively looking for the American Dream like everyone else.
I like the US propaganda victory.
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@SamoBurja
@MarkLutter
@tylercowen
@usairforce
@MIT
@Haas_Automation
@fanuc
@Siemens
@Dassault3DS
@MazzucatoM
20/ Interestingly, you can still see one kind of machine tool maker thriving in the US: semi-conductor equipment makers:
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DARPA simulation: You can't win the drug war.
In Ch 16 of "The Imagineers of War", they created a detailed sim of the drug war to figure out how to win it, but nothing they tried solved it.
They saw this as a problem with the simulation, but I think they got the right answer.
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Really cool flowchart of world emissions from source to use by compound.
http://t.co/7f7pJDT7Hr
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This is soooo wild!
Well done
@ryangrim
- thanks for going deep on this - so insidious.
Do me a solid and share this story:
A left-wing govt took power in Honduras and is now immediately squaring off against US-backed crypto libertarian bros, suing the country in order to keep the bizarre pseudo-sovereignty that the former govt — which was installed after a U.S.
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Who's got this on their dystopia bingo card?
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Wow, so we're now at 184K global
#coronavirus
deaths which is roughly the estimated death toll of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.
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