What's wild about it is their fancy automated systems never worked, and they were at $50 lb for a price point, which is insane.
The article also interviewed another guy with a much lower tech setup that was doing a lot better, with about a third of the footprint, but sounded like he understood both the process as well as the market a lot better.
The whole business sounds a bit like some of the high tech pump and dump schemes, where it looks great on paper, gets lot of investors but doesn't actually work, so the only ones that make money are the ones that get it to IPO and sell off their stock options at a hugely inflated rate before it falls apart.
I went to grade school with a brother/sister duo who's dad did
precisely that...
He would start companies, some of which were exactly along those same lines.
Revolutionary. Exclusively Pattented. The Next Generation of <Insert Important Sounding Industry Here>. The Solution to This Big Problem. Etc
He would nurture that baby from idea, to registered business, thru all kinds of 'market studies' and 'scientific studies & dialogue', then all the way thru the IPO process...
And he would MAKE ABSOLUTELY BANK doing this. Filthy f**king rich.
(New Lamborghini's, the little cell phone ear attachment bluetooth thing BEFORE they were popular, etc etc. Dressed kinda like of a Hindu party guy was also a Mexican cartel leader, and attending a formal business meeting...if that makes any sense?)
And never, for one moment, did I ever get the impression that he wasn't a total flippin' slimeball that could be trusted to even water flowers.
Those shares never seemed to be worth very much, and those big changes to the way the world was supposed to work never really materialized.
(Similar to that scam during the 2003 Iraq War, re buying Iraqi dinars & their monetary system reset)
And as we grew up, I got the impression he might have a lot of enemies & the police might have at least been 'aware' of him if he wasn't a full sized raging contact on their radar already
...
Random Story...
I remember having a conversation with him once at a dinner party. I think it was like an Easter dinner or a Thanksgiving dinner, and there were a bunch of families all having dinner together...and I'm pretty sure it was at his house.
I think I was like 10yo or 12yo.
Anyway he tried to explain to me that in 10 to 20 years time, we would be able to pay for things by sending money through the air...
It would be pretty rudimentary at first. But that as time went on the technology would evolve, and the market would then create companies that would 'add to it' and 'make it accessible to anyone who wanted to use it'
And we would have these devices that we could talk to anybody else in the world on, in real time, and even talk face to face with them in real time just using these devices.
We would be able to send them a message that they could read and reply to, if you didn't need to actually 'talk' talk...
And using these same devices we would pay for things, buy things, and could send money to other people. It would have a camera for people to take pictures on.
And then said something like "and all of the memory of all of these pictures, and everything, would just be stored like in the air..." and I remember him shrugging as he said it, like so casually and like it was no big deal
When we had this conversation, e-mail hadn't even been invented yet. I thought he had kinda lost it.
My 10yo self thought it sounded like some buuullllllsssshhhhiiiitttt. It sounded like a cool fantasy bro, but should you be this drunk if you're the host of this dinner??
The idea of a PC in every home hadn't even crossed my lexicon yet. Even in the newest classrooms being built, we had 1 PC per every 2 classrooms
So now, as an adult in 2026, I genuinely want to know so badly
how in the f-ing world he predicted so damn accurately the evolution of everyday communication/commerce technology!???
Like HOW??
I'm 43yo now. This conversation happened when I was around 10 years old. I couldn't have been older than 13 at the oldest.
In hindsight it actually just blows my mind.
Especially considering I think he died fairly young. (I remember running into the kids I went to school with at a funeral for our classmate about 20 years ago, and when I asked them how their mom and dad were doing they had said he had recently passed away)
Which makes his predictions even more mind blowing to me.
(Daily random story is now finished. Sorry folks, I didn't see it coming either.)
simply put: everyone pays 20% (as a for instance) of their household gross salary. There are no deductions and no credits except for the number of family members . Lets assume you need 20,000 after taxes as a single person to get by reasonably well; no excessive toys but you are able the rent, a vacation, a car, that type of thing. Therefore you would need an income of 24,000 before your tax level would kick in. If you earned 28,000 then you would pay $5600. Now you get married and have two children. To get by comfortably that would require an income of say $40000. So that would be the base at which you start paying 20%. A person earning $200,000 with a family of 4 would pay 20% of 160,000. Its fair, its simple and the rich actually don't mind it much. Ireland has had that system for years and for a while there tax rate was such that families like The Weston's moved there because it was advantageous compared to what they were paying in Canada.
That actually makes so much more sense...
I'm sure there must be a downside to that type of system, but on the surface it seems pretty fair & logical
