Rainmaker just produced ~19M gallons of water in Alaska via next-gen cloud seeding over 3 hours of operations. We are the first company to provably produce precipitation in Alaska. As promised, we’ve linked our white paper and relevant data. In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall. Immediately, this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months. We turned around this analysis and white paper just a couple days after operating. There are many data sources I want to deepen our understanding of the atmosphere and increase our provable production; we’re building the instruments to collect that data in subsequent operations. But at Rainmaker, we won’t tout LOIs, simulations, or lab tests. What matters is physically measuring that you’ve affected the atmosphere; proving that we’ve produced water. We prefer sharing only the tech that has proven to make more water for farms, industries, and ecosystems in need. Expect a regular cadence of these from us as we build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. Feedback is welcome in the interim. Rainmaker Century. rainmaker.com/blog/alaska-va…

A woman was a Starbucks barista for 5 years, then spent 3 years at Starbucks corporate on the operations and product team. She left in 2024. She still goes to Starbucks every single day. She told me: "I stand in line and watch people spend $7 on a drink I make for $3.50 using the same ingredients. I watch them tap their credit card at the register and earn half the Stars they should be earning. I watch them order a Venti because they think bigger means more coffee it doesn't. I watch them use their birthday reward on a $3 drip coffee when it covers a $12 Venti with every add-on in the system. I watch them walk past the free refill they're entitled to because they don't know the policy exists." "Starbucks is a $110 billion company. It makes its money on one simple principle: most customers don't understand the menu, the app, or the rewards system well enough to make the choices that save them money. The menu is designed to steer you toward the highest-margin drink. The app is designed to feel convenient while hiding the moves that lower your bill. And the rewards system is designed to feel rewarding while ensuring you spend more than you save unless you know how to flip it." "I spend $3.50–$4.50 per visit. The person behind me spends $7 for the same caffeine. Same store. Same barista. Same espresso machine. The difference is I know how the system works." Here are the 10 things she does that most Starbucks customers have never tried: 🧵

🚨Governor Josh Stein has signed legislation eliminating minimum parking requirements for most uses across nearly all of North Carolina. “An Act To Restrict Local Governments From Regulating Certain Aspects of Off-Street Parking Spaces,” passed the Senate 44–1 & House 111–2.

Latin America is the new frontier for Old Colony Mennonites. They are spread across 200 colonies with 200,000 people in a combined area almost equal to that of the Netherlands and twice that of Israel. Link to article below.

It is time for the United States Postal Service to ban junk mail. Unsolicited spam calls are already prohibited by the FCC. Emails are heavily regulated by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Junk mail is the majority of mail, 100 million trees per year. Enough!

The joy of owning beautiful things, a good knife, a proper linen towel, a jar of excellent honey, one soul encapsulating perfume, over many mediocre things. Doing this slowly across every domain.

Thank you Germany 🇩🇪and Britain 🇬🇧 for sacrificing your economies to save the planet. China appreciates you exporting your manufacturing to provide jobs for their citizens.

A kid drew himself sleeping in bed between mom and dad and labeled it 'safe.' In Japan, this exact sleeping arrangement has a name. They call it 'the river.' Mother is one bank. Father is the other. The child between them is the water. Roughly 70% of Japanese mothers sleep this way with their kids, sometimes through the teenage years. The Western model of putting a kid alone in their own bedroom is barely 200 years old. For most of human history, in most cultures still alive today, kids slept beside their parents. James McKenna runs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at Notre Dame. He spent decades watching what happens when parents and kids share a bed. The bodies sync up. Heart rates align with the parent's, breathing falls into the same rhythm, and by morning even sleep stages have started matching. The parent's body, in McKenna's words, acts as a kind of biological jumper cable for the child's. In 2013, researchers in the Netherlands tracked 193 babies through the first year of life. They measured cortisol, the brain's main stress hormone. Babies who had spent more weeks co-sleeping in the first six months produced less cortisol under stress at 12 months. Sleeping near a parent had rewired the kid's stress system to be calmer under pressure. Inside the kid's brain at night, the amygdala, the fear alarm, gets more sensitive as the body gets tired. Darkness makes it worse. A 2021 paper in PLoS One from Australian researchers showed that light directly suppresses amygdala activity. Lights off, alarm louder. The whole brain is wired to read 'alone in a dark room' as a threat. Now add a parent's body to that bed. The kid's nervous system reads warm body, breathing nearby, familiar smell. The threat alarm dials down. Two parents on either side dial it down twice. The drawing is the kid's brain calculating maximum safety: I am surrounded by the people who keep me alive, and nothing can reach me without going through them first. The arrangement in this drawing is what most of human history called 'sleeping.' Sleeping the kid alone in another room is a 200-year-old Western invention that we forgot was an invention. Every kid who has ever padded into your room at 3am and crawled into the middle of the bed is just trying to redraw the picture.

Like I’ve always said, Spanish colonial homes are the most people-centered homes ever built. Plants flourish and coexist in harmony with people. The courtyard designs and verandas hold conversations and family celebrations. Colombia, Mexico, and Peru built entire cities this way. Thick lime walls kept the heat out without a single electricity bill. The building understood where it was. I don’t believe we chose square boxes over these timeless beauties. The earth needs more of these

I was in a sauna where this man and his friend were discussing what sort of adventure they wanted to go on for his 30th birthday. Something "extreme, unexpected, never before seen" were the approximate requirements. Cambodian river hunting, Afghani mountain climbing, Patagonian glacier trekking was floated. Yacht rentals with billionaire friends were mentioned. Bharatpur, Ulaanbaatar, Nairobi. Ice, volcano, jungle. The entire world traversed in a single conversation. And I pondered, the ridiculousness of a man constructing adventure, rather than suffering it as it arrives. True adventure is not purchased on your phone, it is inflicted. It is illness, it is heartbreak, it is grief. The man scheduling an adventure is fleeing the one waiting for him at home. Attendre et espérer.