Rob Murdock

Insane stat of the day: California almonds use roughly 3–5.5 million acre-feet of water per year, depending on methodology. That's ~4-7x more water than all data centers in North America used combined in 2025.

Banning institutional investors from buying single-family homes is a commonsense policy to drive down home prices. Every single Republican in Congress should be supporting it. We can't allow RINOs and Dems in the Swamp to block my fathers America First agenda on housing!!!!

"Dad books" — which this article, and some publishing insiders, use to describe "serious nonfiction" books across biography, current affairs and business and economics — are reportedly in a free fall, with sales declining every year for the last few years “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” said Jonathan Karp, the former chief executive of Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon Six imprint. “When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts,” said Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Group at HarperCollins Publishers.

There’s a tension between two views that are often held together: that public enterprises should benefit the public and that public enterprises are jobs programs for public employees.

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.