pontifier

I had to drive about 45 miles on a donut tire between Provo and SLC, and decided to put on my flashers and drive about 10 miles per hour to reduce the wear on it.

It was a lovely drive, and I saw so many things along the road that I had just sped by before.

While driving I had the strange thought: "Only the very rich, and the very poor, can afford to travel slowly."

Oh yeah, forgot to mention... It was just a search loopnet.com for buildings over 65,000 sqft sorted by price. You can do a map search, then "remove boundary" and zoom out to see everything nation-wide that matches your search.

I'm totally open to collaborations. One of the properties I bought at the tax auction is 27 acres with a bunch of tall trees on it. I was thinking about inviting people who weave space webs to come down and build something amazing.

Just before I closed on the warehouse, I reached out to the Megabots people to see if they wanted to move Megabots here, but didn't get a reply. The overhead cranes and large open interior spaces give opportunities not available anywhere else.

I literally had living spaces for artist and entrepreneurs on my original proposal, and I was hoping that it would become a destination makerspace where big names could come and access the amazing workshop I was planning to set up.

I was also planning to build a permanent robot combat arena here too, kind of like what they built in Norwalk.

My full proposal is here: https://www.murfie.com/dist/serendipic.pdf

It's very interesting to see how the things I've put out there are interpreted.

It feels like looking at myself in a fun-house mirror. There are probably huge pieces of these events that I'm not communicating well, or at all.

Thank you for your comment. I'll try to be better at communicating the meanings I intend.

How can I run a serious business if I can't use the warehouse I bought?

Why can't I use it? Because the city won't let me.

I'm not the only one. This guy, Garland Trice, had his building demolished by the city because he failed to repair it. Why did he fail to repair it? Because the city would not give him permits.

It's SO RIDICULOUS here!

They've closed down the movie theater because they wanted to bring in their own theater. They drove a crypto mining facility away. They ran a tire recycler out of town...

If I hired 50 people, what would they do with no place to work?

If anyone is interested in this, I'm open too the idea. I tried to have a videographer at the auction where I bought all the property, but they didn't show up.

My biggest fear/hope about that is that my life could suddenly become boring once the cameras started rolling. I'm not sure which one would be worse.

Lawsuit has already been filed.

About $8k per year. Most were bought for just back taxes, so I basically paid 5 years taxes on them. A couple of them were bid up, so the taxes are less than 1/5 what I paid.

I'm happy to verify anything. It's easy to type my last name "Fenley" into the county website at:

https://www.actdatascout.com/RealProperty/Arkansas/Jefferson

And see the property I bought and what I paid for it.

You can find out more about my fusion reactor at http://www.DDproFusion.com

My YouTube has tons of videos of my experiences here. http://YouTube.com/pontifier

I even started recording all my interactions with city zoning at https://murfie.com/dist/list.html

You can accuse me of being a lot of things... Oblivious, overoptimistic, naive... maybe even incompetent or delusional. But I am not a liar.

I can back up everything with evidence.

The city will not issue the permits to do the work. FULL STOP.

I literally already have a city water connection and it's costing me a hundred bucks a month just to sit there unused because I can't get the permits to fix the plumbing... So what would you do in that situation?

It was just a search on loopnet.com. You can do a map search and "remove the boundary" then zoom out.

Yeah, that's me.

I bought the warehouse before I really had the money to do it. I was scraping by on ramen for a while.

Buying the others was honestly WAY, WAY, WAY cheaper than you'd expect. I almost didn't feel like I had a choice it was so cheap. Spent about $130k at a tax auction to get them all.

It almost feels like land is the only thing they can't steal around here.

My method sure hasn't worked very well... or has it? I was looking for cheap warehouse space to start a business in, and did a nation-wide search for the largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US.

I found one that seemed too good to be true. a 220,000 sqft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k.The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.

It was in a little town called Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

I offered about 3/4 what they were asking, and they accepted the offer.

Fast forward 2 1/2 years, and I've had nothing but problems. Break in after break in. Can't work through the red tape with the city so my warehouse sits empty. It feels like they are actively working against myself and other entrepreneurs I talk to. At least 2 others who bought buildings and tried to open businesses left after getting nowhere.

Maybe I'm daft, but I ended up buying about 75 more properties here... all surprisingly cheap.

The town is killing me though. I haven't seen my kids very much lately - I don't think it's safe enough for them. I'm probably going to be moving back to Utah in the next couple of months because it's just too much out here.

This seems to be using a kind of "reactionless drive" I.E. Movement without apparent exterior force. This kind of drive can't produce a net velocity, but can create repeated small translations.

To imagine how one would work in a space ship, imagine a very long ship that acts like a particle accelerator. Take an atom from the front end, accelerate backward to near the speed of light so that it's mass increases say 1000 times. While that atom is flying backward, your ship that pushed on it moves in the opposite direction. Catch it again in the rear, and the ship must return to zero speed because of conservation of momentum, however the ship is now in a slightly different spot.

Move that atom back to the front of the ship, but slowly so it's mass stays low. Your ship moves backward, but not quite as far as it moved before. Do this again and again to translate the ship. The net velocity of the ship will always be zero though.

Sounds like someone was... sick of their shit.

Boom... Your consciousness is deleted as the DALL-E 4 output for "Evolved monkey person at a computer, wasting time" is delivered to the dinosaur that paid for it.

The article teases by opening with a casual mention of "high speed running boots" but I'm having a devil of a time finding any info about that.

I've thought about this a bit myself. About 15 years ago my unpowered prototype allowed me to speed walk about as fast as I could sprint. Only problem was my ankles kept hitting each other... Very painful.

Sounds like a very inventive and interesting guy rather than a one trick pony. Good luck!

I kind of got stuck here. I bought some real estate really cheap hoping to use it to resurrect a business but everything has gone bad since I came here. There's not really a great option to move to because the space I need is so expensive.

If I can make it work in the space I have, things will be ok. If I can't, then I don't know what will happen.

It's no bit. I've been robbed again and again and again. I freaking hate Pine Bluff Arkansas.

The chain I did it on allowed me to set a levy that would go to my account every time the token was moved. I hate that stupid coin.

No. I've never had a good experience with an insurance company.

Like I did the last 10 times I was robbed? Doesn't seem to help.

I went down a rabbit hole. I remembered seeing guns like that, but they all seem to have spinning barrels. Look up centrifugal guns.

I was sure I'd seen a space launch method but it took me a while to find. It's called the slingatron and has a tube that wobbles like a hula hoop.

I'm working on a fusion reactor too, but progress is slow. Thieves stole my turbomolecular vacuum pumps. I'm sitting here with a gun waiting for more thieves. It's only a matter of time til they try it again.

I feel like I have the shittiest luck.

It's even funnier when you can create a token with any name you want and send it out...

And it's hilarious when they have to pay you to get rid of it.

I was reading a book about time travel a few years ago that had randomly caught my attention. In the story they traveled to the exact date and time that I was reading the book. It was quite surreal.

Gotta make it simple and robust enough that someone who isn't an idiot can reach in and change it when it stops working.

In the sci-fi future such as star trek, you often see systems being reprogrammed by swapping crystals around or something like that. I used to think it was really stupid, but as I deal with trying to build complicated systems I find myself wishing I could build something like that to set up systems and have them just work.

Interestingly, 90's industrial automation sort of feels like it was trying to build systems like that. The control cabinets are filled with simple, discrete, computational blocks that control valves and actuators based on sensor inputs.

Getting back to the sci-fi, I realized that the crystal swapping could just be the high level interface to all the complex code below. They really wouldn't need to do anything except light up when they are detected correctly, but still control complex code hiding below the surface... Maybe written on demand by AI that reads the crystals as prompts.

I don't know where this is all heading, but maybe someday swapping databases will be as complicated as changing a lightbulb.

It was probably cheaper to spend $600 to just buy the office treadmill right then, than have 2 employees and the CEO debating the merits of the thing for much more than 5 minutes. Far from being a trap, it seemed like a super cheap way to show that the CEO both cared about the employees and was responsive to exploring opportunities the employees identified.

Feels like a misplaced anecdote. Otherwise it's interesting article about opportunity cost, even if it has a bit of a clickbaity oversimplification feel to it.