dragon retweeted
The moral case for capitalism is that your life belongs to you. Your work, your savings and your plans don’t become somebody else’s property because they have a moving speech about how they’d use them.
dragon retweeted
I recently spent some time with former colleagues from academia. All of them brilliant, peak human capital. Almost all of them fundamentally unable to plug into the economy, inoculated against productivity by a youth spent experimenting in laboratories instead of building wealth for society. Dealing with real people in the real world.
90% of them have left academia in the last 10-15 years, and 90% of those are functionally unemployed. Grad school does a lousy job of training scientists to be professors (since most of them don't get the good postdoc or tenure track position) and an even worse job of preparing people for real life.
We complain that our societal infrastructure is collapsing, our state capacity is low, our incumbent industries are faltering. Where are the next generation of leaders that can push us forward?
A huge fraction of them were conveyor-belted into academia by schooling systems that have no mechanism to channel ambition and 99+%ile competence, and our universities are mostly hedge funds with glorified psych wards/academic departments on the side, running an insane pyramid scheme that exists only to prove, over and over again, the Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
We literally poured trillions of dollars into state-funded research and effectively neutered our elite civilian technical leadership development programs.
I recently asked a few academic friends if they were finding AI useful in accelerating their programs of research. You know, to solve the Big Problem their entire field exists to solve?
Some were. But most were complaining about how it created pedagogical issues, explaining how their department decided to ban the use of AI, or how it took 18 months to approve an enterprise account, or how they tried Gemini 2 on a puzzle a year ago and it wasn't very helpful, or repeating nonsense about datacenters and water consumption, or supposed IP theft by model companies, as though that has any bearing on their ability to, eg, accelerate a cure for cancer.
Elon sometimes calls AI a supersonic tsunami - a huge wave you don't see coming. I see it coming. But even the people who you'd think have been waiting for this their entire careers are steadfastly looking in the other direction.
dragon retweeted
What’s happening in Paris and Milan is no surprise to anyone who has spent time around young people in Europe during the 2010s:
Virtually all of them were working on their 4th masters degree in social welfare, were unmarried, attended communist dinners every night, and regularly participated in riots.
Now the economy is suddenly transforming and they have nothing to show for it.
dragon retweeted
The largest number to be successfully factored so far on a quantum computer is 21, a four bit number. That’s been the record for decades. To be useful for breaking cryptographic systems, quantum computers would need to be able to factor numbers with 1000 times the bits. Even if quantum computers can be built, it is not clear that they have any financially remunerative application. So it appears that you are as good a venture capitalist as you are an economist.
dragon retweeted
The level of retardation happening in Canada rn almost surpasses belief. Let me try and explain:
Canada has race-based sentencing guidelines. Native criminals are supposed to get shorter sentences than white criminals because the courts are required to consider racism, colonialism, etc.
But at the same time, people who kill or assault native women are supposed to get longer sentences than people who kill or assault white women. Because, again, racism, colonialism, etc,
The problem?
It’s mostly native men killing and assaulting native women.
And liberal judges have been caught in the legislative middle, wobbling stupidly on this comically high tightrope from which a fall to either side is a snake-filled pit of inevitable racism accusations.
If they start cracking down on the killers and abusers of native women, the native male prison population will explode (racist).
If they don’t, they are making it effectively legal for native women to be killed and abused (also racist).
It’s like shitlib zugzwang.
And no one in this entire country seems to have an IQ high enough to figure out how to deal with this.
Supreme Court split over sentencing when the offender and the victim are both Indigenous nationalpost.com/news/suprem…
dragon retweeted
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Important context needed: Trump previously promised 2 dividends and never followed through.
In early 2025, Trump publicly backed a roughly $5,000 “DOGE dividend”
In November 2025, he promised a $2,000 “tariff dividend”
newsweek.com/every-dividend…
dragon retweeted
As I posted before, I've cancelled almost all of the SaaS subscriptions for my business
The only thing I still pay for as a business:
- AI inference
- Hetzner server hosting
- Cloudflare storage
- Backblaze backups
- Taxes
Now I started cancelling personal subscriptions too and just vibecoding my own versions or using Claude to take an open source project that does the same and then customize it for myself
All I still pay for personally is:
- Claude Code
- YouTube (content)
- Spotify (content)
- Starlink (internet)
- Phone eSIM
- Personal cloud storage
- Electricity and water (utility)
- Taxes
So if we summarize it for both, I only still pay for:
- AI inference
- Content
- Cloud storage & hosting
- Connectivity
- Electricity & water
- Taxes
So to summarize all my money now goes to:
- Content
- Data centers
- Power plants + water
- Governments
I think we'll be facing a tidal wave of cancellations once people find out how much money they can save
It's just how the economy works
the fundamental basic economics misunderstanding that ppl have esp on here is that they think normal ppl need to use models to build their own software to be disrupted. they obviously don't & they obviously won’t.
but even if just 1% of the population can build software, that's enough to flood the entire supply side with millions of new products collapsing the cost to near zero.
you absolutely don't need universal adoption to destroy scarcity. you just need enough producers to overwhelm demand. you can feel this now already. i never pay for software because i just ask claude to point to something like a chrome extension or a mac app & it’s just there. at some point your agents will also auto update & maintain your software automatically too.
dragon retweeted
@DHH is 🎯. Recycling plastic is a scam on all of us by the industry. The fastest way to wake everyone up from this hallucination is to ban plastic recycling. For first timers to this topic, start here:
npr.org/2020/03/31/822597631…
washingtonpost.com/climate-s…
Most domestic recycling efforts are empirically retarded, counterproductive, and require you don't value your time. Their real function is to fill the God-shaped hole, sized for penance, prayer, and sacrifice, in people's souls. wsj.com/opinion/most-recycli…
dragon retweeted
Only a tiny fraction of the world’s mosquito species prey on humans. All of these are invasive across essentially their entire range, having tagged along with humans as we moved around the world. Multiple careful studies say that eliminating these species would have little or no impact on the environment. However, it would save at least a million human lives a year, and get rid of a constant source of discomfort that prevents people from safely spending as much time outside as they would prefer. Malaria is only one of dozens of diseases, many potentially fatal, spread by mosquitoes. Gene drives can safely and relatively inexpensively eliminate these parasitic insects; we can create male mosquitoes that can only have male offspring and which then crash the population. It’s well past time that we did it.
dragon retweeted
RE: "Bigger picture, 60% of society once worked in agriculture. Now it’s less than 2%. If society managed to get through that transition, I actually think working with AI will be easier."
No one ever talks about *HOW* we managed through that. (Hint: 1914-45 & then the Cold War)
dragon retweeted
🚨 @LynAldenContact ON WHY NOTHING STOPS THE DEBT SPIRAL:
"Congress going to say, 'The 10-year is over 5%, maybe we should trim defense spending or reform Social Security and Medicare?' It's not gonna happen. There's no political will to do that. Less than 1% chance. Negligible."
On how it plays out instead:
"If the Treasury market ever breaks, instead of Congress doing anything, the Fed steps in. They kind of have to because financial stability and moderate long-term yields are part of their mandate. Congress isn't doing it because the people don't really want it. They want a balanced budget in theory. But do you want to cut this, this, and this, or raise your taxes? 'Well, no.'"
On the historical endpoint:
"The end game for highly indebted governments, nearly 100% of the time, ends with financial repression, trying to inflate that debt away, and impairing cash and bondholders. Whether it's the central bank doing it, whether it's the Treasury doing it, whether they take turns, these are the types of things you see when you start getting over 100% debt to GDP and no realistic austerity anywhere near the horizon."
Was getting tired of various TradingView issues and ads, so I vibe coded my own - so much better, faster, and custom!
dragon retweeted
If Warsh is going to demonstrate a willingness to raise rates into an oil supply shock, do not be surprised when Iran makes oil-related infrastructure go *boom* in the lead-up to every Fed meeting from here on out.
dragon retweeted
Contrast the present hysteria with Los Alamos.
The Manhattan Project scientists thought the first nuclear explosion could ignite the atmosphere and end humanity.
They did the math. They determined it wouldn’t. And they proceeded.
Because they weren’t fighting a thought experiment. They were fighting the Nazis.
Effective Altruism inverts this. Multiply a sufficiently horrifying hypothetical future by enough hypothetical future humans and suddenly speculation acquires the moral authority of fact.
That’s not empiricism. It’s secular eschatology.
Take risks seriously. Do the work. Engineer against them.
But don’t confuse the ability to imagine the apocalypse with the authority to rule the present.