Last week, Raleigh got 3-4 inches of rain with hailstorms an inch deep in a few hours. Weirdly, no cars or buildings got damaged and the plants bounced back even healthier. The apple trees are having their best year ever thanks to pruning tips from Martin’s Fruit Trees for Every Garden. For anyone who hasn’t tried pruning trees, to get those beautiful big sweet apples organically without spraying pesticides, you need to prune in the winter (February is common in NC) followed up by handplucking the extra blossoms off or pips in early spring to leave 1-2 baby apples per bunch. Wow, it makes a huge difference and isn’t time consuming even on large trees like we have. Figure 30 min to 1 hr tree? 10-10 recommend.
Which brings me to a more practical question, wandering around cities like Durham or Cary with their award winning herb gardens and beautiful flowers, will we see a return of color gardens or plants used in dying as flower borders for vegetable gardens and rich neighborhoods with this AI and robot push our elites seem so obsessed with this year for custom accessories for new space companions for tourism? Natural dyes are environmentally friendly and have a long history of use by the very rich to over dye or recycle costumes in court season after season. Can you imagine a scifi show with Tesla robots where the robots keep seriously complaining about their tailor not getting the wool garment right? Comedy gold there. Texas or Florida are likely the two big boosts for manufacturing reshoring if it actually happens. Sometimes also called companion planting, many traditional flowering herbs in older European gardens often included dyes as pest protection. Basil gets rid of mosquitos, etc. Don’t have a good sense of which plants to use or how they would go together, but seeing reenactment groups in Europe show off for tourists sun dying wool garments and thread, you can’t help but see the museum implications for expanded education projects, classes, and teaching seminars. Especially, wild US indigo vs. domestic.
It’s hard to predict the future. And definitely not God. Scifi writers like Asimov were all into fashion designers on star planets like Aurora designing robot costumes and working with AI programs is what made ME think of this line of profit grifting. Just like any argument about tariffs affecting domestic pricing is fake, most stuff made here uses 3-8% raw materials from overseas (often fancy packaging), so odds are good it will be AI and robotics that drive the money or bitcoin for the future of reshoring manufacturing domestically. If you were placing bets, money on either Austin, TX or Miami, FL becoming a new fashion hub for robot costume skins similar to the NYC car shows that drove Mercedes Fashion Week for decades if the whole AI trend isn’t a complete grift. Given haven’t seen any robots out and about in real life, the stuff coming out of China could be a total scam. Odds favor Texas heavily since they have both the US cotton exchange and oil for building a space travel tourism trade if AI is legit. Florida however does have the costume industry and a long history of filmwork. Similar to computers and cell phones where money was made in the apps and cool phone cases in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
Of course, looking at history, especially nobility making mechanical automatons to play musical instruments or entertain people, the modern rich will decide to get over the top robot companions for leisure activities to load programs. And then give their rich friends cushy jobs training robots in copyright licensed gimmicks. “Hey John, I just downloaded a new skin for my tennis instructor.” or “Yes, Hillary is working for a company doing training for this new Cotillion app. She’s getting a Bitcoin upgrade this quarter.” Rich nepo kids and proud parents keeping the grift going. Reality tv is cheap to produce, but $35,000 robots interacting with humans….it will be the World Fair all over again. But hey, could be wrong. Just a random thought this week. What are you thinking about? Have a great week all.