Comments
By turtlegrids 2025-02-2416:35 By iugtmkbdfil834 2025-02-2418:567 reply I am not a fan of Larry so take the next sentences as an odd way to confirm bias and maybe this is why I am responding to it now..
Anyway, in order to change something ( implicitly for the better.. one hopes ), one should be able to know the current approach. Based on the articicle itself ("It has also stumbled from farming inexperience."), that is not the case.
Isn't this rehashing the disrupt-vs-reform issue? I guess I am concerned that people are surprised every time someone like Ellison does it.
Personally, I think it's laziness - too lazy to plan it out better, to learn what you are dealing with, to find outcomes that benefit someone other than yourself.
But there is something to be said for disruption, and understanding it won't be perfect immediately but can be improved beyond the current situation.
It's sort of like overthrowing a dictatorship and replacing it with democracy - the first few years are tough, but the future goes far beyond any dictatorship (it's called, in some places, a J curve).
But that doesn't excuse the laziness in any way, or that often these people do it for only their own benefit.
[edited]
Is it laziness, or is it hubris? In a world where some people are told what they do is so good they essentially have infinite wealth, it's hard to convince them that any specific decision they make is an error.
By mmooss 2025-02-255:46 Hubris is laziness. They know better but are too lazy to put in the hard work to do better. It's much easier just to help yourself and screw everyone else. It's hard for anyone else to stop them.
A lesson I had to learn when I was first in charge: when deciding a course of action, ask myself, 'would I accept that from a subordinate?' If you report to no one, it's hard to hold yourself to the same or, if you are doing it right, higher standards. That is the corruption of power.
If you really want to see a person's character, give them power.
By renewedrebecca 2025-02-2422:00 and no error will really cost them that much, anyway.
For me, “disrupt” is forever tainted by all the startups whose only real innovation was aggressively breaking the law until they were too big to police.
Just breaking the law is not disrupting. Disrupting requires broad support from the public, which is aware that laws are being broken and are fine with it - meaning the particular laws in place are ripe for questioning at the very least.
Uber isn’t what it is because they broke the law, but because the vast public approve of their actions.
We used to see innovative disruption that would grow the pie. Generating large and broad benefits, and capturing a fairly small fraction for the company.
My sense is this is in decline
By red-iron-pine 2025-02-2620:41 it's been dead for a few years now. At this point it's just standard monopoly behavior -- weasel in, take over, dominate and extra maximum value until real competition happens or the government/regulations come into play.
Uber broke the law and used VC money to subsidize their fares. It's not complicated. They bought the support.
I remember taxis before Uber/Lyft. They had a whole series of problems.
Predicability - You wouldn't know how much the fare would be when getting into a taxi. In addition, driving indirect routes to charge more and claiming the ride cost more than the normal fare were common scams. Uber/Lyft tells you the price before you order the ride.
Ease of payment - taxis had card machines pre Uber but the machines were frequently "broken" unless the rider spent time arguing that they had no other way to pay. Then, in a miraculous turn of events, the machine recovered.
Accountability - If a taxi driver stole from you, you had essentially no chance of finding them again, especially as a tourist. Uber/Lyft stores this information and surfaces aggregate reviews.
By freejazz 2025-02-2521:57 > I remember taxis before Uber/Lyft
Yeah? So do I. I really wish we still had them everywhere, but thanks to Uber, you can pretty much only get a cab in Manhattan.
I take a cab over an Uber any time its practicable, it's almost always cheaper. For the same price as an Uber, my cab driver gets a really nice tip.
By jack_pp 2025-02-2515:46 Sometimes, or oftentimes, the law is used against the citizens. Ride sharing is a real improvement in a lot of european countries.
I suggest watching this with subtitles, while it is a comedic skit taken to the extreme you can see how taxi drivers were viewed before ride sharing apps disrupted the taxi industry.
Uber broke the law that protects traditional taxi drivers from having competition under the guise of passenger safety (taxi drivers have the same driver's license as any other driver, no additional safety certs). The public was way too happy to use Uber and that's why it's now forbidden where I live (a country in central EU).
By freejazz 2025-02-2521:55 The public was happy to use Uber because they cost significantly less than cabs did, because of the VC money.
Any time a billionaire demonstrates interest in the disruption of a critical industry, I get nervous. Humans are just too damn susceptible to the “product is subsidized until the disruption is firmly entrenched” play, especially when the feedback loop to uncover deficiencies in the new approach is measured in years and decades.
By rurban 2025-03-0212:40 The industry is already in agtech 2.0 for plants and animals. There's no need for billionaires. We already do fully automated control, robotics, sensoric and harvesting. Farmers are rich enough to do it by themselves, and it scales easily.
Just vertical farming is a bit too expensive still, but with animals it's already vertical.
By hmmm-i-wonder 2025-02-2512:40 I think a baseline for both disrupt and reform is an understanding of the problem space and existing solutions first, maybe more-so for successful disruption.
By passwordoops 2025-02-2511:331 reply No one with a half billion lying around is lazy in anything they do. Hubris, arrogance, or disrespectful are better descriptives here
By andy_ppp 2025-02-2511:51 You know billionaires personality traits are probably normally distributed in most aspects, except they have a (much) higher tolerance for risk. So do homeless people.
By alabastervlog 2025-02-2420:261 reply > Isn't this rehashing the disrupt-vs-reform issue? I guess I am concerned that people are surprised every time someone like Ellison does it.
... how often does that happen? Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service.
Musk (in business and government), Zuckerberg, Trump, much of the cryptocurrency industry, ... it's everywhere.
By hmmm-i-wonder 2025-02-2512:452 reply That's a great list of examples that fall well under "Usually it's just illegal cabs or e-waste littering as a service."
Is there examples of the alternative?
By mmooss 2025-02-2517:12 I don't understand how you define the categories. I took "Usually ..." as referring to more trivial matters and the issues I raised are not at all trivial.
In no particular order:
* 3d Printing
* Cloud Computing
* The iPhone
* Google
* Google Translate
* Google Maps
* CRISPR
* Netflix
* SpaceX
* Electric Vehicles
* OpenAI
* Drones
You may not include Uber in that list, but I would. I vividly remember taxis before Uber.
By alabastervlog 2025-02-2518:531 reply How many of those were outsiders walking in and spotting the solutions none of the so-called experts could, or whatever? It's a short list, to the point that I'd call the entire notion effectively a myth, not much better than chance and probably more often having to do with huge amounts of money being thrown at it, not outsider status or brilliant computer nerds or tech business jerks being magically good at other fields.
Off the top of my head, I would count Google, Google Translate, Google Maps, Netflix, OpenAI, Uber, PayPal, Amazon, and SpaceX in the category of outsiders creating a massively influential product.
You are free to pick apart the companies and their origins to decide if they are enough of an outsider for you.
By hmmm-i-wonder 2025-02-2613:55 Uber specifically needs to be removed from that list. The business model is 'drain investor money to undercut existing business and then abuse contractors and employment laws to attempt to make a profit after'. There isn't much innovation anymore, most cab companies have similar apps and experiences now.
By hmmm-i-wonder 2025-02-2613:53 This is a list of general technology. Musk, Zuck and Trump specifically (the post I was replying to) have had little impact on much of this list.
3d printing, iphone, google, crispr, netflix have little to nothing to do with them.
Honestly why is CRISPR in this list, that is from scientists and labs not tech billionaires and busniess.
Cloud computing has been impacted a lot by Zuck and invented/reinvented by Bezos yes (not that Bezos was in the list I replied to).
Google Maps and Translate were both bought and innovation happened outside the space we're talking about.
Spacex and Electric Vehicles. Musk got onboard after the fact and used money and influence to push the existing path forward. The telling part is once that path is done things derail quickly when Musk is the one coming up with ideas (cybertruck, booring company etc..)
By ajmurmann 2025-02-2516:06 I think that if you know the current state of the art you have a higher chance of making an incremental improvement. I don't know if it changes your odds of coming up with a revolutionary improvement. We just recently had the story of the student who developed a faster hash lookup because they didn't know it would be impossible.
If this was my money I'd rather take the higher odds for any improvement and have deep understanding of the state of the art at the table. But it's not, so I'm delighted Larry is spending his money on something that truly could help everyone with their most basic needs rather than spending it on more sailing boats, hobby rockets or similar.
There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution.
This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.
By skippyboxedhero 2025-02-2419:423 reply Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble. The point is that there is a competition for the best solution in terms of money.
The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work.
The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something.
The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
By jordanb 2025-02-2512:29 > Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble
This seems like more a characteristic of "winner take all (or most)" capitalism rather than a characteristic of innovation.
A new technology potentially creates a new market opportunity and you have everyone bum-rush it as quickly as possible with as much money as possible in the hopes of being the new monopolist.
At any rate, this Ellison play wasn't about an innovation. It was about muscling into a mature market he didn't understand (an "eating-the-world play" to use SV lingo).
By niemandhier 2025-02-257:191 reply Lots of money surly helps, just pointing out that we as a species can also advance in other situations.
Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble.
In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox).
There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.
By skippyboxedhero 2025-02-2822:07 No, there aren't. There are no examples of this. The exact reason humanity didn't develop economically for tens of thousands of years was because of the very ideas that you have, almost every human has.
Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.
By FrustratedMonky 2025-02-2511:111 reply Real question: what is "SV"? I missed the anachronym ref.
By illinx 2025-02-2511:25 Silicon Valley
By shermantanktop 2025-02-2419:131 reply "<insert semi-fact taken out of context regarding something you don't know about>
We are fixing this."
By poslathian 2025-02-2419:172 reply By neilv 2025-02-255:52 > The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted.
I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.)
Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy.
(I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
By canucker2016 2025-02-2512:16 I vaguely recall the NeXT marketing materials touting their first machine was 3M. Sounds like this is where the seed for NeXT was first planted.
But wikipedia lists Paul Berg as the inspiration.Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for." Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!" "Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too." "A what?" "A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation."from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT:
Some of the people listed in the "Whats a Megaflop" post went over to NeXT with Jobs.Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education.
The weirdest part to me, especially with that kind of money, is the lack of bringing in external expertise. There are a lot of ag experts that are up to date on the latest greenhouse, climate, and plant science. Many colleges in the US started as agriculture schools and still have strong agriculture programs. With Ellison's money it is baffling why they didn't bring in a team of these experts to point out the basics like "use ag tech from similar climates", "test ag tech in smaller facilities first", and "gather local farming knowledge". Why in the world would someone put a medical doctor in charge of an ag tech venture?
Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
By forgetfreeman 2025-02-2516:09 One major irony here is if the stated goal is improving agriculture and you've got half a bil to play with the most obvious move would be spin up an equipment manufacturer to compete with John Deere. Pressuring them to halt their ongoing war against their own customers would have a measurable impact on rural suicide rates.
I think the likes of Uber & Starlink might have to disagree.
Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect
Uber is an iffy case.
Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.
There will always be a way to explain the events that enabled the disruption and that doesn't take away from the achievement.
Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet.
It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
I wasn't discounting the achievement. Just pointing out the achievement was the result of domain-experts, not random people with a lot of capital and a can-do spirit.
By setr 2025-02-268:22 You need a lot of capital in order to acquire the domain experts. The main question, once you have the capital, is whether you can correctly identify an expert, and set them up to be functional/productive
By bobbygoodlatte 2025-02-2419:345 reply Hasn't this worked out in a few cases? Maybe Uber as a better solution than taxis as an example?
Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry.
And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
By skippyboxedhero 2025-02-2419:551 reply There has been massive innovation in the area in the last forty years or so. This isn't leapfrogging but attempting to scale up what is known to already work.
Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment.
And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding).
Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
By mschuster91 2025-02-259:111 reply > Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries
The Dutch built their agriculture industry on the back of the environment - they have massive problems keeping nitrogen runoff under control enough to pass EU-wide legal limits, and the question on how to transform the ag economy has crashed two governments by now. Continuing as-is is blatant cheating against other EU countries that do keep their nitrogen emissions under control, but any kind of reform will threaten people with very deep pockets.
By skippyboxedhero 2025-02-2822:04 No, they didn't. They had an industry before there were EU-wide limits. The stuff about nitrogen emissions ignores the fact that no other country outside the EU has done what they did.
This cultish "EU is the world" mentality is tiresome.
Uber was a better consumer experience, but I don't know that it's really a "better solution" than taxis.
It was unprofitable until literally this quarter, and the majority of that profit was, I believe, earned from food delivery services.
And the other thing, Uber became super popular because it was subsidized by VC money and fares were cheap.
Now that it's established... it isn't generally cheaper than taxis, it just has a slightly better app, though in many places that's not true anymore.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you know how the taxi groups lobbied against public transportation, for example to airports? AWESOME, now there aren't just a bunch of local SMBs doing that, now there is an international mega corp doing that too.
Yeah, uBer was better and cheaper. Because it was subsidized from every angle. Cheap fares for riders, higher pay to drivers. Now it's either worse or about the same as Taxi's used to be. There's definitely some benefits to Uber especially when travelling. For local rides though, for me, at least, it's no longer better than taxis used to be, but the problem is now all the taxis are gone. It used to be that calling a taxi was unreliable, but they were generally available just by going outside and standing around for a few minutes.
By oblio 2025-02-2511:35 Ah, I forgot to mention something. The enshittification has begun. Uber needs ever growing profits every year. Those will come from... lower pay for its drivers. Higher fares. Other various microagressions (ads in cars, ads everywhere).
By simonsarris 2025-02-2420:401 reply In a sense the invention of farming itself was a bunch of neolithic hackers fooling around with nature, which they knew almost nothing about, until they got it right.
I don't agree that Uber was a better solution than taxis.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
By robertlagrant 2025-02-2511:223 reply Feels like you didn't book a taxi before Uber. Going up to them (no apps back then) and maybe they were or weren't legit, they were expensive, and they would sometimes tell you a price and then charge your differently at the end of the journey, getting annoyed if you challenged it, and you had to pay cash, and you couldn't easily speak to your driver or see where they were on the route to you...so much worse.
By forgetfreeman 2025-02-2516:06 The last time I caught an Uber dude intentionally ignored my directions and missed a turn, then just kept cooking off into the countryside with me in the back seat. At 20 over the posted speed limit. At 3am. I spent an unbelievably tense 5 minutes seriously wondering if I was being abducted. I got home but seriously what the fuck.
By freejazz 2025-02-2515:13 I'm a New Yorker. We used Uber because it was cheaper. Now I can't get cabs anywhere besides Manhattan.
I literally described my experience of booking a taxi before Uber. Many of the local services also had apps that showed the location of the car and a fixed price before Uber was available here.
By robertlagrant 2025-02-2612:35 Booking a courtesy car is different to most instances of getting a taxi, though. Getting a taxi is far more often things like "going to the line of taxis outside the club and negotiating prices with them" or "I landed in a foreign country on a business trip or family visit and I need a taxi to my hotel, and I don't have a local credit card". Before Uber, these things were far, far worse on average than they are now.
By chris_wot 2025-02-2516:12 It worked out for Uber because the taxi industry was, in most parts of the world, a monopoly, inefficient and often riddled with corruption and criminal acts.
You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.
Yes it has. I mean, it hasn't worked out in every case, but between Tesla (Ford/GM/Chrysler), SpaceX (Boeing/Lockheed Martin), TikTok (Youtube), Moderna (Pfizer/Merck/GSK/Sanofi), Uber (Taxi industry/Medallion system/Dispatch companies), Stripe (PayPal/Visa/Mastercard), AirBnB (Hilton/Marriot/Expedia/Booking.com), and OpenAI (Google DeepMind/IBM Watson/Academia), I think there's enough of a case to be made that being young and ignorant of the existing incumbent entities has worked out in a couple of cases.
SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things.
Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
Disruption doesn't come from "experts".
Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.
By etchalon 2025-02-256:46 Computer science experts literally built both of those things.
By skeeter2020 2025-02-254:202 reply what exactly did FB and twitter "disrupt"?
By datavirtue 2025-02-2512:28 They are making the world a better place.
By njarboe 2025-02-255:02 Teenagers?
By GeekyBear 2025-02-2516:40 One of the beloved early figures in modern agriculture had no money and no formal education, yet his work developing improved plant varieties earned him international fame.
> In his early twenties (1871), the Irish potato famine was fresh in memory, and new blight resistant American varieties were needed. Burbank developed an improved and blight resistant variety of the Russet potato, known as the Burbank or Idaho potato, still used widely today.
During the course of his work, over 800 unique and improved fruits, vegetables, spineless cactus, flowers and other plants were developed for commercial and home use.
By grumple 2025-02-2512:17 There’s also a ton of money being spent on ag tech. My parent company spends billions per year on ag tech. We have drones tracking cows in fields, sensors tracking animals, mixing food, feeding them, monitoring them… tons of other stuff (I’m not on that side of things). This is one of the subsidiaries: https://www.microtechnologies.com/
By Apofis 2025-02-2620:11 It's remarkable because there are a ton of vertical farming setups in and around large cities in unremarkable warehouses that got this right, but they're having issues with small greenhouses and $500mm.
By Brian_K_White 2025-02-2515:471 reply There is an argument for the blank restart, intentionally ignoring all knowledge gained up to now, to possibly get past a local maximum.
Just as a general concept, no idea how it could apply to this case.
I also am no fan of the way these douchebag ignoramuses go about things and this is no attempt to excuse them or lionize them. Ellison is not a net positive for humanity.
By chuckadams 2025-02-2519:371 reply There’s something to be said for fresh perspectives, sure. There’s also something to be said for hiring farmers to teach you how to run a greenhouse. You need to know the rules before you break them.
By Brian_K_White 2025-02-263:43 Well no, that is not how you surpass a local maximum. You randomize. Random, not informed.
One of the early proponents and perhaps a driver, was Dickson Despommier, who just passed.
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1195/
Part of the problem was excess automation. Another problem was taxes in some cities who wanted the industrial taxes of the abandoned buildings of yore to be asserted.
It had promise and some success, as they could exclude pests have 24/7 optimal LED light. Many focussed on fast salad crops = fast cycle and the high volumetric cost of freight to northern cities in winter. For those interested, youtube has a list of failed startups and some promotional ones https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vertical+farmin....
By AtlasBarfed 2025-02-2419:27 What he wants is automated food production in his creepy autonomous Hawaii sub-nation, which fits with all the other Atlas Shrugged "hidden valley" dreams of the SV ultrarich.
He probably did it this way to make it tax deductible or depreciable to setup his farming operations.
He doesn't care squat about the world in general.
