I grew up in Detroit where the city Chestnut trees were everywhere. I remember as a young boy when they all got this disease and quickly died. Our entire family was sad one summer when the big Chestnut tree in our front yard was cut down. Has anyone under sixty ever tasted roasted chestnuts?
Northern Michigan was full of Chestnut trees and supported a large lumber industry. Now they were replaced by a spindly scrub pine that has little value. For that reason there are few jobs with those counties being lightly populated. I think if they could plant these news trees that in fifty or so years the state's lumber industry could return. But I do not know if the state's politicians would be bold enough to make that long an investment.
Had the pleasure of meeting Vint Cerf when he spoke at Michigan State a decade ago. He gave a terrific speech highlighting the history of the Internet and modestly detailing his part in it.
I got my amateur radio license in the sixties. There was an old timer on 80 meters who was the leader of a chat group that met daily. Any ham could join the conversation with one exception. He had a phrase: "no kids, lids or space cadets." Just like Gen Z these days he did not like Boomers ;<). That phrase to this day brings a smile to amateur radio operators of a certain vintage.
Caught my attention for a different reason and that's the name - REO Motors. I live in the Lansing area and until entering college there were two companies building vehicles here, GM (Oldsmobile) and REO.
Ransom Eli Olds created the Oldsmobile. Olds created the assembly line for manufacturing his cars. Everyone believes it was Henry Ford who created the assembly line but Ford (and mainly his chief engineer C. Harold Wills) who perfected the assembly line as we know it today. Olds got into a tangle with his investors and left. The company was sold to General Motors.
So Olds created a new company which was named after his initials. R.E.O. originally made both cars and trucks but after WW2 they dropped cars and specialized in heavy duty trucks. One famous model was the REO Speedwagon made even more famous by the rock band.
The new REO Motors is based in Texas and is going to build gasoline powered Japanese style KEO trucks. I am much more interested in an entrepreneur in Detroit who also started a company, Mutiny Motors, who is building his own Japanese KEO trucks except his will be EV's. He bought an old Lincoln plant, he is bootstrapping and will be selling the trucks as kits that you assemble.
Actually in the latest J.D. Power initial quality ratings they took a big step up in quality. I think it was the first time in 15-20 years that they were on the list of recommended major brands.
I am a lifelong resident of Michigan and sadly the state keeps doubling down on what isn't working. Politicians like to think they're smart enough to pick winners and they're horrible at it.
When Governor Jennifer Granholm was governor a guy approached the state needed investment for a factory in Flint. It would create thousands of jobs. They were delighted because that is something that never happens in Flint. They not only gave him the money but he posed him holding a $9.1 million dollar check with the governor. The picture of the two of them together was in all state media. You know when something sounds too good to be true you might want to do a little checking? When people in Flint saw the picture they informed the state that this guy was a well known conman who had just got out of jail and was living in a trailer. Luckily they were able to recover the money.
Another Gov. Granholm story was the time an old line Boston VC firm approached the state for investment. So the state pulled funds out of the employees retirement plan to invest in the next round. The idea was that this would give the state more venture investment. But again no one did any due diligence whatsoever. This firm was not obligated to open an office in the state but only come a couple of times a year looking for investments. They were under no obligation to make any investments in the state and in fact did not. Due diligence would have revealed that the firm offered a very low return on their last several funds. So in the end the employees retirement funds grew more slowly and the state got no venture investments. That venture firm wasn't able to raise another fund and closed.
Back in the nineties Ford ran a lot of ads about how quality was job one. But in the last twenty years their quality declined by a large amount at the same time other brands were getting better. I say that as a lifelong fan of Ford, quality was why I left the brand two years ago.
I started out as journalist so I always appreciated great writing when I reinvented myself as a tech entrepreneur. There were three writers beginning in the nineties who were my tech troika: Kevin Kelly, George Gilder and Om Malik. Sadly now the only one still writing regularly is Kevin Kelly.
This is unenforceable and imho ridiculous. Canadians are now going to be able to buy Chinese vehicles under a agreement just signed between those two countries. So we are going to arrest them when they try to cross the border in Detroit to catch a baseball game?
Mu sister and I gave my late parents sizeable library to the East Lansing public library, a place the entire family adored. They gave us a document that detailed that most of the books would be sold and the money would be used to support the library. We were OK with that and knew in advance that would happen. They have two large sales a year and receive more money than if they just sold them to a broker and the books stay in the community.
This doesn't happen everywhere. I have an old friend who like me is a fan of Michigan history. Every time he bought a book on his rural county or its towns he'd give a copy to his local library. Twenty years in he found out they were just selling them to brokers for ten to twenty percent of the cover price. Now he gives the list price of the book to the library with the understanding they use it for books of history.
Before becoming a ham I was an avid shortwave listener, both of radio and TV. You could learn so many things about the different countries by listening to their shortwave stations. Even get a little Communist propaganda from Radio Moscow ;<). Guess you can blame shortwaves demise on the Internet. Canada's CHU has been transmitting for 103 years.
Here's the other part - USV did not hire two analysts in an experiment to see if the new agents could replace them. They found out they could not and are once again looking for two analysts. That doesn't mean the experiment failed, the agents were useful but couldn't do it all.
I run an Adobe user group for over 25 years and I have been banned twice on Reddit for merely posting notices of livestreams and YouTube links of finished videos. Never failed to get less than 10-15 upvotes yet I still got banned.
That is Reddit's problem, not yours. However it does help to spend some time in the forum, answer a few questions and get known before posting about a product. It is also not a problem when answering a question to have a link to your product in the signature.
1. Always have price on the top menu bar. don't make me scroll to the bottom of the page to see what it costs
2. Need on Chrome at least some padding between the headline and the green box
3. Why are all the videos cockeyed? Its possible it is a styling thing but you are better off having them level
I love the idea, just not certain that people giving testimonials will submit video ones. If they do a video testimonial could be a much stronger one because you could see emotion in a video which would make it far more powerful.
Pretty certain Dang won't ban you on here for listing the URL of your company. Not that you can't go over the line in self promotion but I specifically asked you to post it.