@prescott

I help people find facts faster. Dept of War R&E Director of Industry Engagement. Scalable® Business Advisor. ₿itcoin. Marine. Ideas mine ≠ DoW.

Washington, DC
Joined April 2008
Prescott Paulin retweeted
America’s corporate governance system is broken, and it’s killing public companies. Look no further than Cracker Barrel: Decades of brutal mismanagement have seen one incompetent CEO after another walk away with a massive paycheck while customers and actual shareholders take a beating. Why does this keep happening? Because proxy advisory firms like ISS are corrupt. They blindly rubber-stamp failing boards year after year, protecting the corporate elite while burning shareholder value to the ground. The root of the rot is index funds. There's no question that indexing one's money is a smart financial move for most people. But just because you passively index your investments doesn't mean your corporate votes should be handed over to the managers of your fund so they can play politics. Right now, passive funds hold massive, unchecked voting blocks while having zero skin in the game themselves. It is time for a simple rewrite of the rules: We need to index the votes of index fund investors. Passive index funds should be forced to automatically split their votes to proportionately mirror those of retail and active institutional shareholders — the people actually doing the research, risking their capital, and fighting for performance in the companies they hold shares in. No more rubber-stamping. A change like this will immediately strip corrupt gatekeepers like ISS of their toxic influence. True accountability happens when lazy, overpaid boards actually answer to the stakeholders they represent, rather than screwing them over. Actual, logic-driven governance when your money is passive happens when your vote passively follows the voting decisions of the actual market. We need to stop letting passive capital protect active incompetence. By stripping index funds of their arbitrary voting power and empowering engaged investors, we will finally torch corporate cronyism and usher American capital markets into a golden age of capitalism.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
In July, @CENTCOM forces struck an Iranian submarine and ship maintenance facility using three Corsair unmanned surface vessels—the first combat employment of sea drones in American military history. This is the new COMMERCIAL FIRST Department of War in action, where new entrant companies like @Saronic can rapidly deliver and scale lethal technology for the Joint Force. We will ensure our warfighters NEVER enter a fair fight. 🇺🇸
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
Attempting to eat as fast as my girlfriend
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
BREAKING: ADHD researchers confirm that having "one single appointment" at 3:00 PM successfully destroys the entire day leading up to it. 1/6
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
FLIPPER ONE SENDS DATA 150 KM OVER RADIO WITHOUT INTERNET, TECHNOLOGY COULD BE USED TO SEND BITCOIN TRANSACTIONS Flipper says its upcoming LoRa module can send messages through a network of radio repeaters without relying on the internet. In London tests, messages traveled more than 150 km through the MeshCore network. The same technology could be used for Bitcoin transactions. A signed Bitcoin transaction is a small piece of data. It could travel over LoRa radio, hop through repeaters and eventually reach a gateway connected to a Bitcoin node, which could broadcast it to the network. That could give Bitcoin users another way to send transactions when local internet access goes down.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
“We will immediately begin the process of developing a large Military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland, of which there are many.” @USNorthernCmd 🫡
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
Our house in Toronto had this fancy glassed wine cellar, but we are not big wine drinkers. Anyways, it had good climate control so here is my rack cellar.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances. What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation. Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture. It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off. Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle. It starts with METR. Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models. He proposes METR for this purpose. But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock. Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio. And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million early last year. It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later. METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth. Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well. But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much. The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all. The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll. If this were the end of it, that's bad. But that isn't all. The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom. The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others. They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's. All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile. As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder. Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created. From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts. This itself is an objective fact. The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it. But the problem also goes in the other direction: If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die. Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen. Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly. They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic. And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly. What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations. The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. And that feedback loop is winning. That's what Jacob Coxon is. China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China. America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level. Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences. Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully. It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America. Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear. Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers. Congress must investigate. Evidence and Github in next post. Then some supplementary figures.
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Our Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine solicitation is now live. The @DeptofWar is looking for AI-based software tools to turn fragmented sensor data into a continuously updated understanding of space and missile threats fast enough to drive operational decisions. Submissions are open through September 24th at 23:59:59 Eastern time. diu.mil/work-with-us/submit-…
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
By now, it's amply clear that the big bosses of US frontier AI labs are really, really scared of China. And, fascinatingly, part of the answer why might be a tiny place in Inner Mongolia that you've probably never heard of: Ulanqab prefecture. Heard of it? Didn't think so. Even myself, who's traveled to Inner Mongolia twice, had never heard of it before researching this story. This is because, at first glance, this place is pretty unremarkable. Check its Wikipedia page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulanqa…) and you’ll see the only thing it’s famous for is being the birthplace of He Pingping, who briefly held the Guinness record for world’s shortest man. That’s it, that’s the list! Otherwise, it's just a sparsely populated - 1.5 million people, minuscule by Chinese standards - stretch of windswept grassland on the Mongolian plateau. Except there is one number that tells you there is more to this place that meets the eye: this tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year. And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce. In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers. So what are the Ulanqabese doing? Are they all running 10 American households' worth of appliances? Here is another number that might clue you in on the answer: over the past few years, this unremarkable prefecture has quietly signed over half a trillion yuan (and, yes, that’s trillion, with a "T") worth of investment deals from all the major Chinese tech giants. What is going on, you'll have guessed by now, is the most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth - and it's really surprising this hasn't been talked about more because the scale is beyond anything else, and by an immense margin. Take Elon Musk's so-called "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee which he pitches as "the world’s largest AI supercomputer." According to their own numbers (x.ai/colossus), Colossus has 200,000 chips, which, let's be clear, is already super impressive. In datacenter lingo, this converts to roughly 5000-6000 "racks": you know, the fridge-sized cabinets full of blinking lights you see in every movie scene set in a server room. How many racks are they building in Ulanqab? Over 5 million. Yes, about one thousand times the scale of "Colossus" 🤯 I tripled-checked the number: it is indeed the official number published by authoritative sources such as "Science and Technology Daily", the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology (stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2026-08…). This is an absurdly large amount of compute. What we see appearing in this Inner Mongolian steppe may be the closest thing to a world brain humanity has ever built - a place where a large share of the world's thinking will physically happen. And - as we'll see - what makes this story so fascinating is not just the scale, but why it's getting built in this particular patch of Inner Mongolian grassland which combines a number of characteristics unlike anywhere else. If you believe, as I do - and as both China and the US obviously do as well - that AI will be the defining technology of the 21st century, this makes Ulanqab one of the single most relevant geopolitical places in the world right now. The full story - the Chinese government plan Ulanqab is part of, energy prices, chips and the strategic questions this raises - is here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
MUST WATCH: The incredible true story of the U.S. Air Force officer shot down in Iran, his heroic rescue, and his faith that sustained him. The greatest military in the history of the world. @60Minutes
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
I feel that the 25th anniversary of 9/11 has caused a critical mass of Americans to reach an inflection point on their understanding of that event. We are starting to realize that we lost the Global War on Terror. We did not lose it on military grounds. We lost it on spiritual grounds. Domestically we are succumbing to the goals of Sharia and jihad, which was EXACTLY what the 9/11 terrorists sought to bring about with their heinous actions. Now that more and more people are seeing this, we can combat it--not with tanks and bombs and rifles alone, but with our words, voices and votes. We must actively combat the Islamification of America. Sharia and jihad are wholly incompatible with the Constitution. Islam is a political movement hiding beneath the cover of freedom of religion. When a "religion" itself is not free, it is no longer a religion and no longer enjoys the protections the Constitution affords. Spread the word.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
This is what Dario and Sama fear - - the cost of fine tuned open source models trained on custom data was 95% less than the frontier models - And they performed better than the frontier models - And they could train them in less than 48 hours The big AI labs have no moat.. Even at the enterprise level.. Any sane company would prefer a custom trained open source model instead of paying API pricing to Anthropic and Open AI If open source keeps growing at the pace it is, frontier labs' business collapses.. only way out is oldest trick in manipulation - FUD -> Fear, Uncertainty, Death Step 1 - Seed the psyop - Test a swarm of agents trained to "hack" - The swarm does what its supposed to do - hack - Publish a report - AI is too dangerous Step 2 - weed out the doubters - Get an employee to quit your company - Go viral saying both companies are not doing enough to self regulate AI - AI is dangerous - will kill humanity by the end of the decade Step 3 - Prepare for fruition - write an "essay" to "pace the frontier" - Advocate regulation - Only a few holier than though companies get to build AI - Scare the world into agreeing with AI Doom - Effectively turn your competitors into criminals (genius business strategy) Endgame - - Become a cartel that controls AI (and the world) - Raise prices (coz business is unsustainable... ofc) - IPO (offload liability of said unsustainable business to the public) Laugh all the way to the bank 🤑 Win!
.@L3HarrisTech says Palantir helped them beat frontier AI models in less than 2 days, at 95% lower cost: "When we fine-tuned open source models trained on our own data, we were able to outperform the frontier models in less than 48 hours." "The cost of our fine-tuned open source model was 95% lower than the frontier models we were using." "AI is a commodity. It's all about the data. We view our data as a corporate asset. It's our unique hard-earned knowledge." "We believe American defense companies should not be a vassal for frontier AI labs, handing over our data and institutional knowledge, hoping to rent back the intelligence it creates." " We own the model, we own the compute, we own the advantage."
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
Replying to @GadSaad
My meeting at Cantor, top floors, was cancelled that morning so others could play golf. I knew dozens of people who died. I was just lucky. What we did in response - 10x’d Muslims in the USA - is insane, and evil. Suicidal empathy, one might say. Never forgive, never forget.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
Mamdani and AOC are spotted laughing with each other as people cry while the names of those who died are read during the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
WHY I SERVED AFTER 9/11: A WARNING ON ISLAM On 9/11, nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered. I joined the military to kill the monsters responsible. I deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 as an Infantry Rifle Platoon Leader. It was the deadliest year of Operation Enduring Freedom. I saw Islam up close. My men and I fought alongside Afghan soldiers. I respected them. I would never want them living in my Iowa neighborhood. I would never want them around my wife and children. They beat their women. They raped little boys. It was culturally acceptable. U.S. troops were told to focus on the mission. We had women attached to my unit. My soldiers had to protect them on every patrol. Local men lingered around them. They had no respect for those women. They would have beaten and raped them if given the chance. As a Platoon Leader, I ran Key Leader Engagements with Afghan elders. Little boys served the tea. Those boys had been sold into slavery and sexually abused by the men in the room. I did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build. I went because Americans were murdered, and somebody had to answer for it. Now Islamists are invading America. Not with planes this time. With open borders and politicians too stupid or too cowardly to stop it. Never forget 9/11. I didn’t fight them over there so we could import them over here.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
Few phrases in American history are quoted more often than Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church and State.” But Jefferson was not writing to atheists who wanted religion removed from society. He was writing to Baptists who feared government interference with their faith. The phrase appeared in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. At the time, Connecticut’s Congregational churches occupied a privileged position within the state. Baptists and other dissenting Christians could worship, but their liberty was often treated as an exemption granted by government rather than an inherent right. That deeply troubled them. In their 1801 letter to Jefferson, the Baptists argued that religion was a matter between a person and God. Civil government possessed authority over harmful conduct, but not over religious belief. They complained that their religious privileges were considered “favors granted,” rather than “inalienable rights.” These were not secularists attempting to drive Christianity from public life. They were Christians seeking protection from a government-supported religious establishment. Jefferson answered them with a statement of principle. He wrote that religion was a matter lying “solely between Man & his God,” that a person owed no civil account for his faith or worship, and that the legitimate power of government extended to actions rather than opinions. He then quoted the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These two protections formed what Jefferson called “a wall of separation between Church & State.” The purpose of that wall was not to make Americans irreligious. It was to prevent civil authorities from assuming power over religious belief and practice. Jefferson’s surviving draft provides further context. He originally connected this principle to his refusal, as president, to proclaim national days of fasting and thanksgiving. The British monarch was the legal head of an established church. The American president was not. This did not mean religious people could not influence public life. Churches and individual believers remained free to preach, pray, persuade, vote, and participate in politics. The distinction was between religious influence and governmental religious authority. “Separation of Church and State” did not mean separating religion from society, morality, politics, or public discussion. It described a boundary between two kinds of authority. The church was not to possess the coercive power of the state. The state was not to establish worship, govern doctrine, or treat religious liberty as a privilege it could grant or withdraw. Jefferson’s wall was a defense of liberty of conscience. Faith cannot be produced by legislation, compelled by force, or safely placed beneath the authority of civil rulers.
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
My dad gave me a MILLION Confederate dollar bill when I was a kid. When I asked him what I could do with it, he said, "Nothing." That's what's coming for the US dollar. First, a few retailers will say, "we accept Bitcoin” and then a few will say, "we ONLY accept Bitcoin." The moment that happens, people will panic and run to the bank. They’ll pull their dollars out and convert to Bitcoin. Please own some Bitcoin, so you don’t panic when people don’t accept your dollars. This is why I'm telling everyone the same three things right now: 1. Buy enough Bitcoin to keep your family alive for 6 months. 2. If you run a company, hold enough Bitcoin to pay your employees for 4 weeks. 3. If you manage a government treasury, put some percentage in Bitcoin. Full conversation with Coinage is linked below. 👇
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Prescott Paulin retweeted
Your entire life changes the moment you realize you have main character armor. You're going to make it through every hard, insane, surprising thing the movie of your life throws at you except for one: the end. So you might as well dream big and shoot big because you're going to make it through, no matter what, except for the one time you don't. And the moment that happens you don't have to watch the movie anymore.
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They hate him because he speaks the truth!
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