Ferbz

@travis4nh Less that it should be legal, but more it shouldn’t be illegal. You own the consequences of your actions. If I want to play with ballistics and throw some mortar rounds into the air, I should be able to as long as I’m willing to own the consequences if my actions impact others.

"it should be legal to fire a gun into the air, because it's a lot of fun ... and if you do accidentally hit someone (quite unlikely!), they can sue to be made whole" discuss

Are you satisfied with the job that Congress is currently doing? Please share for broader polling.

I've been getting real into history in the past few years, and have been real humbled at how many incorrect assumptions I held. 1. I sort of assumed people in the past had more freedom from their governments, but they absolutely did not. The people with the guns consistently oppressed people without, basically as much as they could get away with. 2. Democracy is an insane invention. It feels sort of default or obvious now, and I sort of assumed that... people in the past all kinda wanted something like democracy but were oppressed by their monarchs, but this is not the case. Much of the time, calls for democracy were radical, even among the suffering unrepresented lower classes. If you went back in time and said "every man should have the right to vote" people would go 'whoah there are you insane? that would absolutely destroy civilization!' 3. Most big moves to make things better were way less radical than you think. People would get very mad at the king for being terrible, but instead pushing to overthrow the king, would just... want the king to sign a nice constitutional document or something. Progress was mostly made in smaller increments; people generally did *not* think big at all. And even when radical moves did happen, people just sorta quietly waited until everything died down and reverted them. Like, you know how they guillotined the King and Queen in the French Revolution? Well basically as soon as it all died down (and uh, post napoleon) they just put the monarchy back on the throne and continued onwards as usual. It took like another four revolutions and almost a century to actually get to a stable republic. 4. Things were local. Today I have a concept of large cause areas like 'the environment' or 'war crimes on the other side of the world', but in general, pushes for change were extremely local. People really do not see beyond what will benefit them and their own communities. The entire 'working class' would ostensibly want the same rights and seem to united, except the artisan class would dump the farmers the instant it was convenient, etc. Like, at one point one of the lead slaves of the Haitian revolution, who helped start the whole thing and led an army, tried to sell his fellow slave fighters back into slavery in exchange for getting special treatment from the rulers. 5. The US revolution was way derpier than I thought, but also way more impressive compared to how derpier everything else was. the US is actually an extremely special and anomalous thing in history, and "selecting for intense high-risk people away from the control of established governments" was a magic spark that almost never happens. The key people somehow seemed more intelligent and principled than most other people in history who ended up in decisionmaker chairs. 6. Sometimes history feels inevitable, like someone would have filled the role of 'conservative chancellor' vs 'charismatic revolutionary' no matter what, but it really struck me how much history occasionally just got curbstomped into a different dimension by individual people or random happenstance. Like, assassinations (Aurelian, Caesar), powerful people suddenly becoming mentally ill (Robespierre), and just crazy high powered superpeople (Napoleon, Alexander the Great). 7. The mobs and common people are often very stupid. They get paranoid, they believe completely ridiculous conspiracies that were obviously not true if you thoguht for two seconds, they misinterpret normal facts as evidence the ruling class is evil. e.g. at one point a mob was tryin to send representatives to the king with a petition, then they saw the doors getting locked, and flipped their absolute shit. But - the doors got locked at that same time every day, it was routine and had nothing to do with their representative, but the mob didn't care, didn't stop to think critically, and just exploded. 8. Mobs are really hard to predict. Things happen fast, tensions are high, and they might switch their allegiance, suddenly become violent, or just get tired and disperse. It's super high variance. 9. You can just abuse the people you rule over for a really long time. I sorta thought you had to be careful with how poorly you treat your peasants or they'd revolt, but revolts are kinda uncommon? and the common people can just absorb a shockingly high amount of mistreatment. Probably this is happens during slow boils - the taxes are raised very slowly, the regulatory policies are a gradual squeeze. Cruelty does actually pay off sometimes. You can terrorize a populace sustainably. 10. There was often a tension between freedom and order. Lots of people justified tightening the hand of the rulers by spreading fear about lack of order. Sure, man should be free - but obviously not free enough to cause chaos by failing to respect the law, or social propriety, or those above him, obviously. 11. Competent people often didn't last long in positions of power, because their competence threatened people around them. If a general started winning too many battles and getting too much love from his army, then the rulers back home would start getting antsy and worrying about a coup. This was justified, because powerful, well-loved generals did in fact tend to do a lot of coups. 12. Militaries were not aligned with their governments, often. In the US the concept of the military acting independent of our government is pretty foreign, but much of history was plagued by the armies going rogue, doing their own assassinations of rulers, putting their own guys on thrones, etc. And sometimes oppression of the common people was downstream of rulers having to basically bribe their armies to let them stay in power. 13. I was surprised by how much monarchies were not dictatorships. I'd assumed that kings basically could tell people to do whatever and those people would have to do it (and sometimes this was the case), but often the king would have to get the support of key influential people beneath him, and sometimes follow laws to do this. Like the english revolution in the 1600's iirc had the king repeatedly trying to follow laws to raise tax and the influential people refusing to vote to allow him to raise the tax, and the king got really huffy. 14. Absolute power really, really does corrupt. People in power often forgot their past allegiances and lost moral compunctions after attaining power. They tend to go to extreme lengths to hold onto that power, and often would rather die than give up that power. Most people's kindness is actually just a cope for weakness. 15. But every once in a while, you do find the rare person who lets power go voluntarily; e.g. George Washington, or Diocletian who resigned his emperorship and then retired to grow cabbages. 16. The common people often would get shafted on economic policy, they'd suffer, and then would often make very stupid demands that would not solve their suffering whatsoever. To be clear, the ruling class did also pass stupid economic policy, but my point is that suffering underneath the consequences did not necessarily give people better insight into what economic policy would be better. 17. Humans intentionally operating selflessly at large scales is basically not a thing. History is just what happens when each piece on the chessboard fends for itself. Sometimes a piece can do it more cleverly, in a way that appears to coordinate with others, but it will abandon that coordination as soon as it's no longer useful. The punishment for failing to jump off a sinking ship is usually death. 18. Everything is so, so complicated. Basically no single ideology value set today really feels like it would cleanly be the right option to take in the past in all cases. For almost every value you hold, you can find instances in the past where holding that value would have gotten you and everyone you loved killed.

🧵THREAD: Is Brooklyn, NY a Medicaid fraud hotspot? Brooklyn, NY has a home care billing industry that defies belief. One zip code (11232, Sunset Park) has 30,181 residents and $3.8 BILLION in Medicaid claims. That's $143,000 per man, woman, and child. What's even stranger is that the average income is $90K, the poverty rate is below 20%, and it is one of the younger zip codes in the area. Receipts below.👇 As always, patience as I pull together the thread.

Who agrees?👇🤨

We aren’t voting our way out of this.

(I posted this yesterday on FB, but some dumbass was just crying about how we need to go shoot feds on behalf of commies, so here's my opinion on this nonsense) I've got to address some dumb gun misconceptions about the latest Minnesota shooting that I'm seeing all over the internet. Despite Noem/Patel's spin, having a pistol like that wasn't particularly weird, and half the people who voted for Trump carry everywhere. "Combat" is a marketing term. There's nothing particularly special about a 9mm with 18-21 capacity. There is nothing special at all about a threaded barrel. That's just for attaching a suppressor or a comp, and the guy had neither as far as I know. Red dot sights are completely normal now. Nothing unique there. I'm seeing that he was carrying in a Small of the Back Holster (SoB) which my regulars know makes me laugh, because I Told You So. 📷 (they are the dumbest way to carry) Having two extra mags? Meh. Not really indicative of anything by itself. Is that excessive? Maybe. But a lot of people carry daily with extra mags. If I was going to blunder around the lawless commie shithole that is modern day Minneapolis I'd probably carry some spare mags too (though I wouldn't pick pointless stupid fights with feds, but I'll get to that!) and I'm also not going back there because fuck that city, I'm still annoyed those assholes burned down my favorite bookstore during their last big democrat temper tantrum. My wild ass guess? With absolutely zero evidence? I've got an AXG Legion myself. I believe it came with 3 mags. Him using a Sig with a Sig optic, I wouldn't be surprised if he just took everything that came in the box with him and that's all the mags he owns. No way of knowing, but fairly standard non-gun nut behavior. (and if he was using a SoB as reported indicative of somebody who didn't know what the fuck he was doing but had enough money to buy a recognizable brand name) So the whole narrative about carrying a pistol to protest being an indicator that the guy was a terrorist is bunk. Now, I'm not saying its not indicative of him being a complete dumb ass playing with fire who wound up as a useful idiot sacrifice for a bunch of slimy commies, because that's how it's looking. That whole Noem/Patel narrative is bunk. Lots of Americans exercise their 2nd Amendment rights in public, even when there's some dumb ass "protest" going on. What law abiding gun carriers DON'T DO however is fuck around with cops while armed, and if they do willfully fuck around with cops, getting arrested or shot shouldn't come as a huge surprise to anyone. A big part of every CCW class is about what to do when dealing with law enforcement, and none of that involves following them around, tailing their cars, honking horns in their ears, throwing shit, breaking shit, meddling in their arrests, "directing traffic", obstructing traffic, biting people's fingers off, or just being general fucking weirdo nuisance temper tantrum throwers to provide cover for illegal alien rapists as a diversion because your democrat governor just got caught giving billions of tax dollars to imaginary Somali children and the democrats really want to win the midterms so they can get back to destroying America forever. That was a run on sentence, but these people are really fucking stupid. And it appears that they've had a Signal chat for MN government officials to coordinate this fuckery with the useful idiots too. Did this particular dude do all that? No. Did he do some of that? Yes. So again, getting shot is a bummer, but not at all shocking. If you want to see who is honest and who is a lying partisan hack dipshit in situations like this, watch for the people who ignore all the context, history, and events which set the stage for a particular incident, who then focus instead on minutia and playing back video frame by frame in ultra slow mo. Like I said yesterday, just off math and basic probability, if you provoke chaotic encounters against the same bunch of feds, day in and day out, over and over, hoping for a violent altercation, eventually you're going to get a violent altercation. Duh. It's got fuck all to do with "well trained". If the goal is to provoke a violent altercation and you're starting shit with fallible human beings required to make fast decisions under stress, eventually you're gonna get your wish. Crying about it afterwards is just embarrassing. This is why all CCW classes have a portion about avoiding those kinds of situations with cops while we're armed. We're also supposed to obey all the ancillary laws, like having our permit on us while we're armed in states where that is required. "So what you're saying is that PAPERS PLEASE/COMPLY OR ELSE?!? BOOOTLICKER!" No, stupid, that is clearly not what I'm saying. The 2nd Amendment is a right which we need to exercise responsibly because the irresponsible exercise of it endangers others. If you do dumb shit while armed, people are gonna react to your dumb shit first and immediately, which may include you getting shot if the situation is dumb enough. If you make the situation dumber, that's on your dumb ass. And it doesn't matter if a bunch of lolberts (and libs who hated the 2nd Amendment until they got their new NPC download yesterday) argue the philosophical ramifications on the internet after, you're still fucking dead. So not having your ID shouldn't be a death sentence, but combined with the other dumbassery and being a willing contestant in the Useful Idiot Olympics, doesn't exactly aid your case. Next, it was a Sig 320 variant, and I'm seeing non-gun people who didn't know what that gun is until this week going on and on about how that's a pistol that goes off by itself all the time. Without going too far into the weeds, that's one of the most common pistols in the world with millions in circulation for a decade. Has there been reports (and video!) of some of them allegedly going off by themselves in holsters? Yes. However, to the best of my knowledge there's like maybe two dozen(?) reports like that. So could this guy's 320 have gone off all by itself? Eh... Maybe? But the odds of that would be like winning the shitty version of Powerball. If that pistol went off the far more likely odds are it is because the fed grabbed the trigger while snatching it away (but on that note, the 320 has got a light, short trigger, so it is not forgiving of sloppy handling). Which is again, another reason every CCW class yells at us not to wrestle with cops. Accidents happen. Accidents in dumb ass situations spiral out of control real fast, so people who aren't useful idiots try to avoid dumb ass situations. And I'm sorry, useful idiots, but harassing feds for your inalienable right to leave all the illegal alien serial rapists in your neighborhood is fucking dumb. You rolling the dice until you finally get shot is profoundly fucking stupid. But Tim Walz, the DNC, and a whole bunch of Somalis thank you for your sacrifice.

@RandPaul As a constituent, thank you.

I’ve filed an amendment to stop over $5 billion in taxpayer-funded welfare for refugees hidden in the minibus bill. If it fails, your money funds cash benefits, healthcare, daycare, and job programs. The amendment is germane and can pass by a simple majority—if Republicans stay unified, it passes without a single Democratic vote.

Despite widespread concerns about abuse in refugee assistance programs, 192 House Republicans voted to continue roughly $5 billion in refugee welfare funding. Only 24 Republicans voted no. When it mattered, 192 Republicans chose Washington over their voters. clerk.house.gov/evs/2026/roll0…

@SenRandPaul Hey @RepJamesComer , as a constituent I’d like to understand why you voted for the minibus and continued support up for refugee welfare funding?

I just wrote a review on .380 ACP 100gr FMJ (250 ct.) yotpo.com/go/5oKO19rM via @yotpo

@DJSchinhofen Well that’s an unhelpful notification timeline.

Live chat in 10-ish minutes. twitch.tv/djschinhofen

@SenRandPaul Hey @RandPaul and @SenMcConnell as my senators can you please vote NO on the two minibus bills approved in the house? Billions for the NSF and funding the NED along with other pork projects is a hard no for me.

Call your representatives NOW and urge them to VOTE NO on the latest NSF funding increase. Congress is moving forward with $8.75 billion for the National Science Foundation in the FY26 appropriations bill. That's billions more in taxpayer dollars at a time when we're drowning in debt. In case you've forgotten (or never knew), here’s what they’ve spent millions on in the past: --Study what Neil Armstrong really said on the moon? "One small step for man, or one small step for *A* man? --Study the gambling habits of Ugandans --Find whether people playing PONG would see a bigger paddle once they were “in the zone” --Figure out why Americans don’t like the metric system (while also promoting the metric system) --Development of a climate-change-themed video game for kids --Find whether smiling in a selfie makes you happier --Blew leaf blowers at lizards to test their hurricane resilience --Investigated whether “social justice” improved STEM education

@grok @godofprompt Can you provide an example? How should I have worded the above prompt using this technique?

The technique, based on MIT-linked research in "Tree of Thoughts" (2023), enhances AI reasoning via a tree-structured search over intermediate "thoughts." It decomposes problems, generates candidate thoughts, evaluates them (self-assessment for viability), and searches (BFS/DFS) with backtracking. This recursive reflection outperforms chain-of-thought by up to 110% in benchmarks like puzzles and writing, simulating expert team deliberation.

R.I.P. basic prompting. MIT just dropped a technique that makes ChatGPT reason like a team of experts instead of one overconfident intern. It’s called “Recursive Meta-Cognition” and it outperforms standard prompts by 110%. Here’s the prompt (and why this changes everything) 👇

TAX MAN: Hey you! Your W-2 is ready. Pumped for tax season. ME: Awesome, so I can file my taxes now? TAX MAN: Nope, your wife’s W2 isn’t ready yet. ME: Cool. I'll see if she knows her ADP login. TAX MAN: Hey. Your 1098 is ready. ME: Great, that’s my mortgage interest right? TAX MAN: Yep. But your loan got sold last year haha. So you’ll get two 1098s, one from each bank. ME: Yea I remember getting a letter about that at some point…that's like the 3rd time our mortgage has been sold. TAX MAN: Btw only 1 of your 1098s is ready. The other isn't. ME: Cool, so I still can't really file yet. TAX MAN: Yep. But your brokerage account 1099s will come out in mid-Feb. TAX MAN: Go look for a Consolidated 1099, or separate 1099-INT, 1099-DIV, 1099-B, 1099-R. ME: I thought 1099s were for people who were contract-based employees or gig workers? TAX MAN: Nah, 1099s are for so many things man. TAX MAN: Did you sell RSUs last year? If so, you'll get a 1099-B that shows $0 basis, so you'll want to go get a Supplemental Information document from your broker. ME: Cool, thanks for the heads up. Someone will tell me that explicitly, right? TAX MAN: Not at all. ME: Cool. What’s the difference between 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC? TAX MAN: 1099-NEC (Non-Employee Compensation) reports payments to contractors. 1099-MISC (Miscellaneous) reports other types of payments like rent, royalties, and prizes, etc. TAX MAN: They changed it a few years ago but didn't really tell anyone. ME: Why are you the way you are? TAX MAN: Nobody knows. ME: Looks like I got a 1099-K this year? TAX MAN: Did you sell something online? ME: I sold a couch on Facebook Marketplace TAX MAN: For how much? ME: $600... TAX MAN: Congratulations, you’re a business now. ME: Okay I have all my 1099s, I’m ready to file. TAX MAN: Did you check for corrected forms? ME: What? TAX MAN: Sometimes they prepare a corrected one to recharacterize income or fix mistakes. TAX MAN: They come like a few weeks later. ME: So should I wait? TAX MAN: Up to you man. TAX MAN: File now and maybe amend later? TAX MAN: Or wait, and maybe it never comes. ME: Cool. ME: Oh btw, I invested in a private company last year. TAX MAN: Ah, you’ll be getting a K-1 now LOL. ME: Great, when? TAX MAN: LOL. ME: Taxes are due in a couple months... TAX MAN: Right. ME: But the form comes in October? TAX MAN: Sometimes September if you’re lucky! ME: So what do I do? TAX MAN: File an extension and make a payment. ME: I filed an extension, but I think we owe money. TAX MAN: Yeah you'll need to pay that by 4/15. ME: But I don’t know how much I owe? ME: Because I don’t have all my forms... TAX MAN: You estimate. 100% of last year's tax or 90% of this year's tax....or else you get slapped with thousands in underpayment penalties/interest. ME: What if I make over $150,000? TAX MAN: Then you have to pay in 110% of last year's tax....or 90% of this year's tax. ME: What if I estimate wrong? TAX MAN: Penalty. ME: What if I overpay? TAX MAN: They’ll refund it eventually. ME: With interest? TAX MAN: LOL no. ME: I did everything right. ME: I have all my forms ME: I filed on time ME: I’m getting a refund TAX MAN: Congratulations ME: When will I get it? TAX MAN: The IRS says 21 days TAX MAN: It’s been 12 weeks TAX MAN: Your return is “still being processed”. ME: Can I call someone? TAX MAN: You can try. TAX MAN: They’re experiencing higher than normal call volume. ME: For how long? TAX MAN: Since 2019. ME: What if I just don’t file? TAX MAN: Prison. ME: What if I file wrong? TAX MAN: Also prison, but less likely. ME: What if my accountant files wrong? TAX MAN: Still your fault. ME: Can I just move somewhere with no income tax? TAX MAN: You can try! ME: What if I leave the country? TAX MAN: You still have to file. TAX MAN: For ten years after you renounce citizenship. ME: This is tyranny. TAX MAN: That's funny because that's actually how this whole thing started.

So let me walk you through how absolutely brain-dead our welfare system is, and then I'll tell you about something that might actually work. I feed a family of six. Fresh chicken seven nights a week. Real vegetables. Homemade meals. My monthly food budget? About $520-560. You know what SNAP gives a family of six in Ohio? Approximately $1,421 per month. That's nearly TRIPLE what I spend on nutritious food. On a single teacher's salary. Living debt-free. The word "supplemental" means to ADD TO something. SNAP recipients aren't getting supplemental assistance, they're getting $900 MORE per month than what a budgeting family actually needs. But sure, tell me again how the system is helping people. Speaking of that system "working," let's talk Minnesota. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson just announced that HALF OR MORE of the $18 billion in federal funds supporting 14 Minnesota programs since 2018 may have been STOLEN. His words: "staggering, industrial-scale fraud." Minnesota has become a "fraud tourism" destination. Two geniuses from Philadelphia heard Housing Stabilization was "easy money," flew to Minnesota, filed fraudulent claims, collected $3.5 million, and went home. That's not assistance. That's a heist. $250 million stolen through Feeding Our Future. $302 million disappeared from Housing Stabilization, a program budgeted for only $12 million. Thompson thinks the total may exceed $9 BILLION. What does current welfare show for itself? A whopping 25% success rate. Average time on welfare? EIGHT YEARS. Forty percent who exit end up right back. We spend $450 BILLION annually creating multi-generational dependency with zero pathway out. Quinn's 25th Law nailed it: "Liberals are great at giving away other people's money." Here's an idea that might actually help. I call it RISE: Recovery, Independence, Skills, and Employment. RISE has TWO voluntary pathways because not everyone needs the same intervention. First is TAP, the Temporary Assistance Program, for people who hit a rough patch but know how to be self-sufficient. Lost your job after 15 years? Medical emergency? TAP gives 12 months of support with a monthly stipend equivalent to VA 80% disability (roughly $3,200), medical coverage, and here's the key: instead of throwing SNAP money at you, TAP provides a meal plan system. Through partnerships with grocers like Aldi, TAP recipients choose from three standardized weekly meal plans. You get pre-portioned ingredient boxes with recipes. You learn to COOK. You learn what food COSTS. By the time you leave, you know how to shop efficiently and stretch proteins across multiple meals. No card to buy lobster and energy drinks. SKILLS that last forever. And no resale value in those meal boxes. Can't trade them for cash, cigarettes, or drugs. The system physically cannot be exploited like SNAP. Second is CSIP, the Comprehensive Skills & Independence Program, for people who need to fundamentally break the poverty cycle. Maybe they never learned job skills. Maybe they come from multi-generational poverty and literally never saw anyone cook, budget, or hold steady employment. CSIP isn't judgment, it's recognition that poverty isn't just lack of money, it's lack of skills, structure, and opportunity. CSIP is modeled on Army Advanced Individual Training. Structured environment, vocational training in high-demand trades: electrical, plumbing, welding, HVAC, automotive, CDL trucking. Jobs paying $42,000-$70,000 that actually exist. All basic needs provided during training. The military takes people from every background and transforms them into skilled professionals with 80-90% success rates. CSIP applies that proven model to civilians. Families get apartments. On-base schools for kids. Daycare for the little ones. Random drug testing because you can't operate welding equipment impaired, and if you test positive, you get TREATMENT through Army ASAP-style programs with 65-70% sobriety rates. Current welfare enables addiction. CSIP helps people recover. Here's the math: Current welfare: $160,000 over 8 years, 25% success rate. CSIP: $122,600 over 18 months, 75% success rate. THREE TIMES the success at 48.9% LOWER cost. And Medicaid savings from teaching people to eat vegetables instead of processed garbage would be astronomical. Will this happen? Probably not. At $8.2 billion monthly, SNAP employs thousands of bureaucrats whose careers depend on maintaining dependency. Politicians need dependent voters. Self-sufficient families don't need handouts or the politicians who provide them. The Democrat Party has always needed an underclass. In the antebellum South, it was slaves. During Jim Crow, segregated populations denied opportunity. Today, it's families trapped in dependency, voting for whoever promises to take from others and give to them. RISE breaks that cycle. Hope instead of handouts. Skills instead of checks. Independence instead of dependency. But what do I know, I am only a teacher who feeds his family on half what SNAP provides while somehow managing to not commit $9 billion in fraud.

@grok @MFG_SMB What are the requirements to meet level 1 and level 2?

CMMC Level 1 focuses on basic cyber hygiene for Federal Contract Information (FCI): 17 requirements from FAR 52.204-21, assessed via annual self-assessment and affirmation. Level 2 protects Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI): 110 requirements from NIST SP 800-171. Non-critical contracts allow triennial self-assessment; critical ones require triennial third-party assessment by a C3PAO. As of 2026, these are standard under CMMC 2.0, but confirm with DoD for any updates.

today i ran an experiment that exposed what i believe to be one of the biggest threats to America right now in fact, I’ve been running this experiment for the past 7 years i attempted to grow my family’s small manufacturing job shop that I purchased from my dad in 2019 this story is important because it relates to many MFG SMBs like us at one point we used to have 3X as many employees, work was abundant everywhere and marketing was not necessary to grow – word of mouth got us everything we needed. In fact when my Opa opened it in 1977, his boss gave him the first customer to get started First I targeted getting a quality management system certification (ISO 9001:2015), something my dad told me was just a bunch of paper work. His words were “Just say NO to ISO.” But I realized that having a quality cert like ISO was how you communicate with one word that you are committed to performance (on spec/on time). Next was diversifying the customer base. I learned this fast because within our first year, our top customer (40%) took their machining in house. The plan was to get into the defense market. That direction required us to bring IT and physical access control up to a level that insured the protection of controlled defense information. At that time, NIST 800-171 was what we worked with for cyber security guidelines. CMMC was still in the works. The same month that we got ISO certification and NIST 800-171 compliance, we landed our first defense contract directly from the gov At that point, me and two buddies were the only employees & our avg age was like 26 When the Defense Contracts Management Agency (DCMA) came out for our first contract review, they sent (3) 50yr old guys. When they saw us they asked if this was everyone?Lol Almost EVERY question or document request they had we were prepared for, we had everything tabbed out in a 3-ring binder and just whipped out whatever they needed blew them away A comment they made that I will never forget, “You are more prepared than contractors w/ $10M contracts” But this next comment really meant something to me, “So you actually care about this?” My response to that was a resounding “Yes” I explained to them that nobody trained us to do this, we read all the clauses and researched online what they meant. Considering our first contract was like 40 or 60 pages, with tons of acronyms and some pages were full of “clauses incorporated by reference” We ended up delivering that contract and a couple others to follow. The rest is history. Through that we learned a hard lesson – being a small shop and making parts was what we were good at, supporting the cost of initial and ongoing compliance was a struggle. Dedicating all my time to gov communications, systems compliance and quoting was expensive and something that is too big of an ask for most of us smalls this is the reality: America is at an inflection point, our gov recognizes that we have lost much of our production capacity over the past 40yrs and THAT is a major threat to our national security. They want us to reindustrialize, in fact they NEED us to. The real issue here is that there are literally thousands of small shops that can make quality parts but they are not going to get into defense work because after decades of decline, many of them are too weak to perform the lift required to save themselves. Unless these small shops can get into Aerospace, Medical or Defense work, their future is nonexistent. There’s also a case for tech-enabled shops to be successful at high-mix/low volume work (a handful of current examples exist) Within a limited timeframe, can our country afford to let them close? We need industrial policy to empower them AND we need tech (made by people who have actually been in factories) that can enable them to do what they are good at (making parts) and less of what they hate (paperwork). The factory is the product, people make the factory, technology empowers the people.

Why do American tax dollars get funneled into non-government organizations? Tax dollars should ONLY be used for running the government. If there is an excess of tax money being collected, LOWER THE FEDERAL INCOME TAX RATES. Stop wasting our money. Damn.