John Garry

In much of the Midwest, the grain elevator functioned as a coordinating system, not a landmark. Its operation set daily labor cycles. When the leg started, hauling began. When the pit backed up, everything downstream slowed. Truck lines, rail access, meal breaks, school pickups, even store hours adjusted to whether grain was moving or sitting. Rail timing was not abstract. Elevators were built where sidings allowed loading, and trains responded to volume. Active elevators meant trains slowed, stopped, or waited. Once throughput dropped, rail behavior changed permanently. That shift alone altered how towns related to the outside world. The elevator also operated as a financial intermediary. Grain wasn’t always sold immediately. It was stored, advanced against, or held until prices improved. Credit decisions were made locally, based on harvest history, land knowledge, and reputation. This created a feedback loop between agriculture, cash flow, and daily stability. Weather knowledge concentrated there. Moisture levels, spoilage risk, and bin temperature were tracked continuously. People understood coming storms, heat waves, and storage failures through physical indicators, not forecasts. The elevator acted as an early-warning system tied directly to survival. When an elevator closed, the impact was not just job loss. The town lost synchronization. Labor became asynchronous. Rail service decoupled. Businesses shifted from predictable hours to defensive ones. Time stopped being shared. Most of these structures still stand because they were built to last. Their persistence isn’t symbolic. It’s infrastructural. They mark where coordination once existed and where it was removed. The grain elevator mattered because it aligned people, capital, transport, and time into one system. When it disappeared, those systems didn’t vanish. They fractured.

the older i get the more pilled i am on the innateness of human agency if effort were the limiting factor to making things, you'd think claude code would trigger mass entrepreneurship but no the people who always shipped continue to ship the people who never did, still don't

It is more important than ever to project your will onto the world and forge it to have the traits and values you want it to have.

To the point about emerging markets here, Blackrock had an interesting note where they pointed out that EMs are now perhaps more fiscally disciplined than developed markets

I called it last year. Ping pong still hasn’t reached its peak but I’m already thinking about what’s next… Strong intuition that foot posture, GOATA training, gait analysis is up next. As for sports I need to see how the ping pong arc plays out

Charlie Munger literally revealed the timeless principles for compounding wealth over decades:

“Position sizing was 70 to 80% of the game. The reason that struck me is because, first of all, purportedly George Soros made money on fewer than 30% of his trades.” What Stanley Druckenmiller taught Michael Mauboussin on investing