jcarterwil

In 1920, Alfred Sloan invented the modern corporation to solve an information problem. Companies were too big and too complex for any one person to coordinate. His divisional management model routed knowledge from the edges to the center and back again. It worked for a century. Enterprise software is the digital version of Sloan's org chart. And the trillion-dollar selloff in software stocks last week is the market recognizing that this architecture has an expiration date. AI doesn't replace bad software with slightly less bad software. It dissolves the coordination layer that made the software monopoly possible. When an AI agent can bridge the gap between a customer signal and an engineering response directly, you don't need five layers of management or a monolithic ERP system in between. Jensen Huang says replacing software with AI is like reinventing the screwdriver. He's wrong. Nobody is reinventing the screwdriver. They're eliminating the guy who stands between you and the toolbox and charges rent. New post on what this means for GDP growth, whether copycat economies can close the gap, and the three things to watch as the Sloan model unwinds.

We've wasted 30 years arguing who pays for healthcare: Dems want universal coverage, GOP wants markets.

Both miss the point. The "healthcare" we're buying is junk. It's designed to manage chronic diseases we create with bad food. ACA subsidies? Just funding the epidemic.

Healthcare administrators grew 3,200% from 1975-2010. Physicians grew 150%. This isn't a funding problem. It's a signal problem. When bureaucrats allocate capital, we get more bureaucrats. When consumers allocate capital, we get solutions to their actual problems. Today's piece makes the case for expanded HSAs and consumer-directed spending as the only viable path to ending chronic disease. The argument draws on Hayek's distributed knowledge problem: no central planner can aggregate the preferences and needs of millions of individuals fast enough to match market discovery. Healthcare destroyed the price mechanism. We need to rebuild it. 100M+ pre-chronic Americans represent $50-60T in future healthcare spending. The current system ignores them until they're sick. Give them capital for prevention and watch how fast markets reorganize.

Consumer apps are giving shoppers instant nutrition scores and ingredient transparency. Yuka reports that 94% of users put back red‑rated items; Intermarché reformulated 900 products and removed 142 additives to improve scores.

Upstream, companies like Edacious are measuring nutrient density and making the data usable across the supply chain. The hypothesis: verified nutrition unlocks demand and sends a reformulation signal that rewards value‑added agriculture.

Questions for HN: What data standards, APIs, or open ontologies should this stack build on? Where do these tools break (gaming, model drift, labeling‑law conflicts)? What would you want retailers, payers, or EHRs to expose so that nutrition data can flow?

Disclosure: we’re investors in Edacious.

Most attempts to improve processed food stop at swapping ingredients: less sugar, fewer calories, lower salt. The evidence suggests that doesn’t solve the real problem.

A more useful way to approach reformulation is to focus on the metabolic systems most affected by ultra-processed foods. Think about protecting the liver by capping added sugar and fructose and reducing seed oils, feeding the gut by adding real fiber and removing emulsifiers that disrupt the microbiome, and supporting the brain by rebalancing fats and including essential nutrients. This way of thinking, sometimes called the metabolic matrix, has already been applied at scale in the Middle East, where a major food company reformulated hundreds of products.

The other missing piece is verification. Labels and nutrient panels don’t tell you whether a food reduces metabolic stress. Continuous glucose monitors do. A simple A/B test comparing the old and reformulated product shows immediately whether you flattened the glucose spike. That gives you real outcome data within days rather than waiting for epidemiology years later.

This frames reformulation as an engineering problem: change the inputs, define the constraints, then measure the outputs with real human data. It shifts the conversation from “does the label look better” to “does this food reduce glycemic pressure in practice.”

I’m curious whether others have tried using CGMs or other biometrics in product design. Could this become a standard tool for validating food and nutrition claims?

We recently published a FutureCast piece imagining Heartland Mart, 2036 — a discount retailer that evolves into the frontline of healthcare.

The scenario is fiction, but it’s based on real trends:

Continuous glucose monitoring & nutrient density scoring becoming cheap

Rural retail chains reaching more households than clinics

Chronic disease costs ($1.9T annually in the U.S.) creating an incentive for food/health convergence

Data + supply chain innovations aligning farmers, retailers, and insurers around prevention

In the story, Heartland Mart starts as a dollar store, then layers food scoring, metabolic coaching, and insurance alignment. Over a decade, this collapses healthcare costs by nearly half.

245 million acres of US public land could sequester more carbon than all of California's emissions while producing the world's highest quality beef. The tech exists. The economics work. #RegenerativeAg #systemsthinking

Wrote a long-form future cast modeling how the chronic disease epidemic could be solved, framed as a classic market disruption scenario (a la Christensen/Hayek) rather than a top-down policy shift.

The core thesis is that the incumbent healthcare system, optimized for profitable disease management, is being outcompeted by a new, decentralized system built on nutrient density and transparency.

Key disruptive elements explored:

New Tech Stack: How companies like Earth Optics (GPR soil mapping), Miraterra (soil DNA sequencing), and Edacious (nutrient verification) created the data layer for a new food system.

Vertical Disintegration: The commodity ag market splits into separate supply chains for Food, Feed, and Fuel, driven by consumer demand for traceability and quality.

N-of-1 Biohacking: A new generation rejects institutional health and uses CGMs and smart rings to drive market demand, forcing CPGs to adapt or die.

The "Upstream Cure": The economic model flips when regenerative ag makes nutrient-dense whole food cheaper and better-tasting than ultra-processed alternatives, collapsing the business model for sick care.

It's a thought experiment on how interlocking, complex systems can be transformed by market-based, technological solutions from the ground up. Curious to hear this community's take on the plausibility of this pathway and the tech involved.

This futurecast explores what happens when we flip the entire healthcare model from treating disease to optimizing human potential. Key technical innovations in the story:

Function Health's proteomic analysis creating personalized nutrition algorithms A WeChat-style platform ("LifeOS") that integrates health data, food purchases, insurance, and community Grocery stores with real-time biomarker integration for personalized shopping Distributed "Healthspitals" replacing centralized hospitals

The economic model is what makes it inevitable: insurers profit from keeping people healthy longer, employers see 8:1 ROI on healthspan investment, and the elimination of employer-sponsored health plans reduces administrative overhead by 40%. Based on real companies and current research, but projected forward to show system-level transformation. Curious to hear NackerNews's thoughts on the technical feasibility and potential barriers.

Interesting analysis of how existing retail infrastructure in "food deserts" might be the key to reversing chronic disease at scale. The counterintuitive insight: the same distribution networks that created the problem have the infrastructure advantages to solve it, but only now are market incentives aligning. Key points:

19,000+ strategically located stores Existing supply chain relationships Customer acquisition costs near zero Market timing around food-as-medicine trends

Worth reading for the systems thinking around how transformation actually happens vs. how we think it should happen.

A recent House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health debate saw RFK Jr. outline an ambitious vision for the future of American healthcare. Key points included: Wearables for All: A push to have every American using a wearable device within four years, empowering individuals to take control of their health data. AI in Healthcare: The significant role of AI, from enhancing diagnostics to streamlining administrative tasks, to transform the healthcare system. From Sickcare to Healthcare: A focus on shifting the current "sickcare" model to a proactive healthcare system emphasizing prevention and wellness. Dietary Reform: Plans to recalibrate dietary guidelines and ensure access to affordable, nutritious food across the country. This vision aims to tackle chronic disease, reduce healthcare costs, and fundamentally reshape how Americans manage their health. What are your thoughts on this approach?

Pears grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand, sold in the US: is an example of how convoluted and absurd our food supply chains have become. Shipping fruit thousands of miles for processing, driven by a system that prioritizes lowest cost per calorie over nutritional value. Time to disrupt this status quo by reframing food as a vector for health rather than just a commodity. Time to align agriculture and supply chains with health outcomes (like fresher, nutrient-dense food produced closer to consumers). Improving public health and creating new economic opportunities for farmers.

The healthcare system isn't broken; it's perfectly designed to profit from sickness. But a better system is quietly winning

he lineage from 1915 Ford Hospital to the ACA, exposing each policy/market inflection that shifted costs and warped incentives. Proposes a “System C” that makes premiums usable for staying healthy instead of financing endless treatment.

We dissect John Calhoun’s “Universe 25” experiment (limitless resources → societal collapse) and map it to modern nutrition economics. Post lays out data on UPF‑driven chronic disease and proposes market/policy fixes—nutrient‑density incentives, communal food culture, regenerative ag. Would love feedback from the HN crowd on the viability of these levers.

We got access to RFK Jr.’s draft plan to reshape HHS. It focuses more on food and makes drastic changes to many traditional programs. Take a look….

Despite spending more than $42B each year at NIH, chronic disease continues to grow. How do we now focus on research that ends Chronic Disease?

In 1999, top executives from Nestlé, Kraft, Coca-Cola, General Mills, and others privately acknowledged that processed foods were fueling an obesity epidemic. Despite alarming evidence linking their products directly to chronic disease, they chose short-term profits over long-term health solutions. Now, 26 years and $4 trillion in annual healthcare costs later, has the food industry missed its Kodak moment?

I often say our food system is a gateway drug for healthcare. Healthcare is also over-processed. ACA was frankly less about improving care and much more about how to pay for care. Now everyone in healthcare gets paid, and chronic disease continues to grow. Would you buy a new phone that took us back to 1G, instead of 6G?

Yesterday, HHS announced a bold four-part transformation aimed at modernizing the healthcare system. Key elements include:

A workforce reduction of roughly 10,000 full-time positions to save taxpayers $1.8B per year

A consolidation of 28 divisions into 15 for improved operational efficiency

An initiative to revamp the customer experience while keeping essential services intact

I dive into the details and implications of these changes on my Substack post.

Since WWII, U.S. agriculture has been more than just food production — it's been a cornerstone of American foreign policy. From "Food for Peace" to Cold War diplomacy, grain embargoes, and biotech diplomacy, this essay explores how the U.S. wielded food as strategic leverage.

It’s a fascinating and underappreciated piece of soft (and sometimes hard) power that continues to shape global relations — even in the age of climate change and agtech.

Would love to hear how others see the intersection of food, policy, and strategy.

Why Affordable Nutrition Requires Rethinking Our Food Supply Chain from Seed to Shelf

What I Learned this Week: To achieve venture returns, AgTech needs to give food the power to take market share from ultra-processed food and healthcare, and other things…..

We don't need more agtech investment, we need better agtech that takes market share from UPF and healthcare.

With $14B per year in marketing is it a surprise Ultra Processed Food dominates our diet?

Interesting EO to drive joint commission across Ag, Food and Health

May we seize this moment with the same spirit that has always guided our finest hours. Let us create a nation healthy in body, confident in purpose, and united in the pursuit of a brighter tomorrow—for ourselves, for our families, and for the generations yet to come.

Love or hate RFK, but we now realize healthcare cost comes from chronic disease. Could Novo, Hims and Costco join forces to fix food and health.

I used GPT o1 Pro to develop dietary guidelines based on my Function Health blood work. Interesting example of N-of-1 treatment plans possible with current AI tech and where it might be headed.

Aimpoint Research recently ran a AgriFood wargame to look at the future of food and health. Could rural America innovation unlock better healthcare?