Power has already shifted! The mere fact that regular folks can directly own & self-custody their financial assets WAS the huge shift. People can now walk with their feet! Most will still rely on service providers but the key is that they don’t have to — it’s now their choice. 🙏

The current state of the US government: $40 trillion of public debt + over $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities being serviced by approximately $5 trillion of tax revenue annually while running $2 trillion deficits. This is like a person who has $2.8 million of debt, take home pay of $100K and personal expenses of $140K, adding $40K+ to that debt very year.

I do have a meme for this

You can't "oppose imperialism" or "oppose colonialism" without opposing Russian imperialism and colonialism.

I'm so over w gvmt monopoly education. The incentives are just so wrong, on every level from teacher to student to administrator to public policy politico.

Time magazine's doomer covers: 1954 nuclear war 1960 population explosion 1970 ecological collapse 1982 nuclear war 1989 endangered Earth 1992 ozone 1999 Y2K 2001/2006/2007 climate 2005 pandemic 2009 extinction 2013 bees 2019 climate 2020 pandemic 2023 AI extinction 2026 AI tipping point

The First Amendment starts with a pretty radical bet: people can be trusted with ideas, even bad ones. That experiment has worked out pretty well. Happy Constitution Day to the amendment built on the unfashionable idea that nobody gets the final word on what may be said!

For thirty years we've argued that software deserves First Amendment protection because software is speech. But the Constitution gives us another reason: software is a press. The Free Press Clause protects not merely expressive outputs but the individual's freedom to possess and use technologies for producing and disseminating expression. The founding-era printing press is the paradigmatic example. That is the original understanding of the clause. Software and open-weight generative models are modern instances of the same constitutional category. Regulation directed at their capacity to produce or disseminate expression and an Americans' right to own and control them directly implicates the Press Clause even when government characterizes the regulated object as a machine rather than speech.

Milton Friedman: “I am not a conservative. I’ve never been a conservative. Hayek was not a conservative.” “We are liberals in the true meaning of that term: concerned with freedom. We are not liberals in the current distorted sense—those liberal with other people’s money.”

I distinctly recall the first time this happened to me. 2018. Std biz meeting where we were discussing/defining a new tech product concept, w a team that had recently picked up several ppl whose startup had been been shutdown. One of the new ppl responded to my input w "You're cisgender." Had to go home and look it up. I didn't know the word "woke" at the time, but I was aware of a subculturel within the company that was beginning to wreak havoc with identitarian left positions taking ppl heavily or mostly for their personal characteristics that they cannot change. I just referred to that cabal as "social justice warriors", and knew they were using a large amount of company resources to push their agenda. But, yeah, was explicitly to marginalize me, and my input. I retired from that company a year later. And the whole SJW internal divisions & conflicts was an important part of me deciding it was not worth the trouble to keep working.

Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

Unacceptable! Firewood use should be banned. And firewood stockpiles? Not in this valley.

Orbital Failure Rates creates interesting context for global historical launch. Really puts into perspective how difficult reaching space is, and how impressive SpaceX has been in quickly achieving the lowest cumulative orbital failure rate in history. in case you think i'm selecting datasets to paint a more rosey picture for Spacex. i've included the full table of entities and their failure rates in the comments.

The European political elite can't seem to help themselves. They shape gvmt rules to ensure the kind of top-down planned economy they've been pursuing for decades, and fail to build the institutions that could unleash European intellect & industrial capability in the way the US does. Their space sector is just one sad example of this. Even the new proposed enabling legislation (The EU Space Act) doesn't apply until 2030, 45 yrs behind the first US law enabling private space flight. The EU act will still force euro companies to launch as tenants at existing or newly commercialized ports (Andøya, Kourou’s opened Diamant pad, SaxaVord, Esrange) rather than owning and iterating on a private site the way SpaceX can do in Texas & Louisiana. Overflight corridors, environmental permitting & national land-use rules will remain slower and more fragmented than the U.S. range-leasing model SpaceX used at Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg and Kennedy before starting their first private site in 2014 at Boca Chica. Expect continued US and Chinese dominance in launch, for a decade or more.

Thomas Sowell on how executive overreach destroys the separation of powers: “If you can have a president who by executive order can nullify acts of Congress, can decide that some portion of the law that he likes will be enforced, and other portions that he doesn’t like will not be enforced, then we no longer have the separation of powers—we have the executive acting as the overruling power in the nation.”

Why good government is extremely rare

Precisely. Tribalism is hard-wired. Only a thin overlay of universalism restrains its potential to split us and cultivate hatred of the other. Fixated on race and animated by vindictiveness, “anti-racism” delivers the opposite of what it promises: more racism, not less.

“In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people—and to hate those other people.” — Thomas Sowell

St. Augustine: “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention… For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I'm called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you're called an emperor.’” (City of God, Book IV, Chapter 4)

Easily the most interesting paper I’ve worked on! A few fascinating patterns: • Educated elites are more susceptible to preference falsification traps (as Prof. Kuran noted) • Those who discuss politics frequently are far less willing to switch public stances. #EconTwitter