Robert Nelsen

California Celebrates Installation Of Single L.A. Trash Can That Cost $400 Billion And Took 18 Years To Build buff.ly/Hcz1aHw

1. I can’t believe I agree with Glenn Beck. 3. I am embarrassed to live in Seattle. 3. All the commenters telling me to leave are going to get their wish.

Sauna data interesting. Need a study that actually measures BDNF etc and clinical outcomes to really prove. But I am doing it. Low risk. The evidence for cold afterwards is weak

$clpt aspen more information “All the patients are improving, and they're all improving in a way that's clinically significant,” Aspen CEO Damien McDevitt, Ph.D., told Fierce Biotech. For example, treatment increased the amount of patients’ daily “good on” time—defined as when they feel their symptoms are best under control—by more than two hours. “Anything over an hour, an hour and a half, is clinically significant,” McDevitt explained. Videos of one patient, recorded before treatment and at the one-year mark, were particularly striking to the Aspen team. Before receiving sasineprocel, the patient struggled to stand from a chair, open a door and walk down the hallway, with a low voice and a muted facial expression, McDevitt said. One year after the treatment, he is “like a different person,” rising from the chair and walking straight out the door with a smooth gait. “It's night and day,” McDevitt said, with the video making many at the company emotional. “There were a lot of tears.” “It feels like they're going to want us to do the sham surgery,” the CEO said, though he hopes it may be possible to use a natural history control arm instead. The surgical procedure itself is minimally invasive and relatively simple for neurosurgeons to perform, he added. fiercebiotech.com/biotech/aspens…

Aspen Neuroscience Announces Positive 12‑Month Data from its ASPIRO Clinical Trial in a Late‑Breaking Oral Presentation at the AD/PD™ 2026 International Conference on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

This is the first big product from Xaira — and also my first work since joining 8 months ago. Few people realize why Xaira is uniquely positioned here: First, $1B backing helps :) But more important is the concentration of talent — world-class co-founders, an exceptional board, and a team that deeply understands both biology and AI. We’re building data + models together, at scale, for causal biology. That’s what X-Cell represents.

This is how sunscreen appears when applied in front of a UV camera.

BREAKING🚨: ALL FIVE types of nucleic acid bases, the building blocks of LIFE 'DNA and RNA', have been found in samples collected from asteroid Ryugu

Even China is confused by Cuba’s adherence to socialism

Don't be IBM and fumble an 18yr head start on AI IBM was the most valuable company on Earth. Invented the hard drive. The PC. The floppy disk. The ATM. DRAM. SQL. The barcode. Most US patents 29 years straight. 405,000 employees. 70% mainframe market share. Today: $231 billion. 67th in the world. Anthropic. Founded 2021. Four years old. $380 billion. Every piece of the bag was fumbled... Invented the PC. Sold to Lenovo: $1.75 billion. Invented the hard drive. Sold to Hitachi: $2 billion. Server business. Sold to Lenovo. Basically nothing. Now the chips. This is pure comedy. IBM was the largest semiconductor manufacturer on Earth. Fabs in New York. Fabs in Vermont. 16,000 patents. They PAID GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion cash to take it. Gave away the factories. Gave away the patents. $4.7 billion write-down. IBM had American fabs. They paid to close them. And the same Democrats who scream about chips going overseas are the ones whose policies made it too expensive to build here. We wouldn't have TSMC/Taiwan issues today. Decisions have consequences. TSMC: $700 billion. Nvidia: $5 trillion. IBM paid to exit chips right before chips became the most valuable industry on Earth. Incredible timing. Deep Blue beats Kasparov. Live television. First machine to outthink a human world champion. IBM owned AI. Not as a buzzword. As a fact. On camera. In front of the whole planet. OpenAI did not exist for another 18 years. Anthropic for another 24. Nvidia was making cards so teenagers could play Halo. Google was two grad students sharing a dorm room. IBM had an 18-year head start on the entire AI industry. What did they do with it. They dismantled Deep Blue. Put it in a museum. Same mentality as every socialist (cough dems) who wants to regulate AI before it ships. Celebrate the breakthrough. Kill the follow-through. Watson wins Jeopardy. Destroys the two greatest players alive on national TV. Most famous AI brand on the planet. IBM spends billions on Watson Health. AI that cures cancer. Their engineers flagged it unsafe. Instead of fixing it they sold it for scraps. Then killed the brand entirely. Loser mentality. IBM Research. Decades of NLP work. The compute. The talent. The CEO looks at LLMs and says "no thanks." Two years later ChatGPT launches. 100 million users in two months. The entire economy reorganizes around the exact technology IBM looked at and said nah. That is like having Google's algorithm in 1997 and deciding to build a phonebook. The suits and the consultants took over. Same thing that kills every city, every agency, every institution that picks socialism over competition. $201 billion in buybacks over 25 years. More on buybacks than CAPEX. They could have funded every AI lab on Earth with that money. Instead they bought their own stock while the stock went down. Revenue down 22 straight quarters. Nobody fired. Name another job where you lose $95 billion in market cap and get a raise. Actually don't. That job only exists at IBM and in Congress. Buffett bought $12 billion in IBM. The greatest investor alive. Held six years. Dumped it on CNBC. "I was wrong." Put the money in Apple. Best investment in Berkshire history. They had the patents. The labs. The engineers. The brand. An 18-year head start on AI. Replaced the builders with bureaucrats. Chose buybacks over R&D. Chose administration over competition. Lost everything. Now look at who wants to run the same playbook on the AI economy. Bernie wants data center moratoriums. Tax the builders before they finish building. Ro Khanna represents $18 trillion in Silicon Valley market cap. Apple. Nvidia. Google. His district built AI. He just held a Stanford town hall with Bernie called "Who Controls AI: The Oligarchs or The People." Wants to tax unrealized gains. Pause data centers. Put unions on AI boards. Redistribute wealth that hasn't been created yet. His own district is trying to primary him. Not because he's too progressive. Because he's trying to kneecap the industry that made his district the most valuable zip code on Earth. That is IBM energy. Tax the engineers. Slow the builders. Add a committee. Wonder why nothing works. Gavin ran California from a $97 billion surplus into a $68 billion deficit. Lost 789 companies. Tesla. SpaceX. Oracle. Chevron. 200,000 people leaving per year. And he thinks he should have a say in how AI gets built nationally. The guy who can't keep In-N-Out Burger in California wants to regulate the most important technology since electricity. These aren't hypotheticals. This is the IBM playbook in real time. Replace engineers with regulators. Replace competition with committees. Replace building with administrating. And act shocked when the talent leaves and the lead disappears. IBM went from first to 67th. 1.43% a year for 28 years. A savings account beat that. Don't let them do it to America. Name a bigger fumble. I'll wait.

Today we’re announcing X-Cell — Xaira’s first step toward a virtual cell. 🧬 A foundation model that predicts how gene expression changes under causal perturbations — across cell types, conditions, and even unseen biology. This is not trained on observational atlases. It is trained on interventions. 🧵👇

FDA commissioner Makary at a CMS conference today in Baltimore calls for “big and different” IRB reforms to catch China's speedy trial starts - pre-IND phase can run 380 days in the US, he said, while China is pushing for 60 days. endpoints.news/makary-pushes-…

Can Progressives govern? It really is becoming increasingly clear that no, they cannot. They are beholden to public sector unions (SEIU, AFT, NEA, etc), and see budgets primarily as redistribution and retribution mechanisms, not as the necessary source of funds for effective state services. What if the "Affordability Crisis" is just... modern American Progressivism? stevemurch.com/say-it-with-me…

@BiotechShark1 Licensing in most professions exists to exclude entry. Since AI soon will be better than doctors and for sure lawyers, the guilds will try to pass laws to restrict it to just them, versus to provide better care to a broader number. Money in the guise of safety. They are unions.

@rtnarch This shouldn’t be controversial - laymen can’t practice medicine, law etc without a license. Why should software be any different from a public policy perspective?

Perfect summary of how licensing guilds resist change to preserve money.

there's a cat who has also published 3 physics paper

NYC spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025. And $81,705 is a floor. It excludes supportive housing (~$500M/yr), mental health response teams, and NYPD encampment costs. The city projects ~$97K per person in FY2026.

the new Big Arch is more McDonald’s than ever before

For some reason, the @wapo editorial board decided to cover Bay Area county finances and absolutely nailed it: runaway spending despite a stagnant population.

In just 7 days, Tesla is going to start building Terafab, that’s their own chip factory from the ground up. They’re done waiting on TSMC and Samsung (who are honestly maxed out) and plan to crank out advanced silicon for autonomous cars, Optimus robots, and AI supercomputers. The goal is brutal: 1 million wafer starts per month by 2030 (matching TSMC's current output) at 2nm nodes, with a $20–25B price tag they can easily cover from their $44B cash pile. Source: @MilkRoadAI

Bill Maher drops a reality bomb on Zohram Mamdani voters with a brutal history lesson on socialism. “We’ve run this experiment many times, and the results are always obvious,” Maher said. He looked straight into the camera and delivered a blunt warning about Mamdani. “Democrats must recognize that Zohran Mamdani is the future of the party. Unfortunately, it’s the Republican Party.” “Here’s capitalist South Korea at night from space,” Maher presented, showing a country lit up and thriving. “Here’s socialist North Korea,” he followed, with the map pitch dark. “Yeah. In 1990, Venezuela was wealthier than Poland. But then Poland, finally free of Soviet style economics, went all in on capitalism and now their economy is as big as Japan and people there have high wages, low inflation, cars, vacations, homes.” “Meanwhile, Venezuela traded capitalism for Hugo Chavez’s socialism for the 21st century, which turned out to be like socialism in the last century or any century, a f*cking mess.” “It turned one of Latin America’s richest countries into one of its poorest. Low wages, high inflation, shortages, outages, 8 million people fleeing. If you think New York can somehow reinvent this wheel, you’re in for a rude awokening.”