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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’m an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I’m writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.

    Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it’s make or break in others.



  • Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.










  • The most difficult part is creating the charter and selecting the appropriate category; after that it’s a small filing fee (most states) and - as long as you stay under $50k income - a trivial tax reporting burden. I’ll be filing two returns - one for MD and one for VA - for two non-profits I’m on the board of this weekend. I’ll be done before breakfast. They both have federal EINs and both are small enough we use Excel for ledger (since QuickBooks has gone to online-only annual extortion as their business model). Without paid employees or stockholders (just a board of directors), edit: and have no substantial physical property, and without donations coming from prohibited individuals or sanctioned stated, there is diminishingly little paperwork. If it’s just a virtual organization with leased remote assets like web services, the bar is pretty low. Maryland has no annual fee; Virginia has a small one ($75, I believe) to maintain the corporation.