Elon Musk’s “golden ratio”: 420 ÷ 69 ≈ 6.08696 The exact same ratio appears in the Falcon 9 rocket: its 70 m overall height divided by the optional 11.5 m payload-space height specified in SpaceX’s 2019 user’s guide. A nod to Leonardo da Vinci: while the classic golden ratio is approximately 1:1.618, @ElonMusk apparently has his own brand of numerical magic. Pure coincidence? With Elon, you never know. 😉

How the German Bundeswehr acquires new software and hardware for developing military technologies, like drones: 1) Soldiers identify their need and take their request to the Bundeswehr Procurement Office, which is headed by picrelated (I swear this is real). 2) A procurement officer then tries to understand the request and passes it on to BWI – the proprietary IT provider for the Ministry of Defence. 3) BWI then attempts to assess whether the procurement officer has correctly understood the soldiers' request. 3) BWI finally make an offer according to their understanding of the soldiers' needs to the procurement officer. 4) The procurement officer then tries to assess whether this offer corresponding to the BWI understanding of the soldiers' needs also corresponds to his understanding of the soldiers' needs. 4) If this assessment is positive, the BWI then gets an order for the goods – software, drone hardware, whatever. 5) When the goods are finally delivered, the procurement officer then tries to work out whether these correspond to what the soldiers originally requested. The whole process, in normal cases, takes about 2–4 years. Drone software in the Ukraine war is outmoded after about four weeks.

I still can’t believe this was what the military was like under Biden. Unhinged tbh.

Bernie Sanders is pushing AI legislation that he allegedly drafted with consultants from the U.K. Call me crazy, but America probably shouldn’t outsource its AI policy to a country that prosecutes its own citizens for Facebook comments. 🙃🇺🇸

This is why the average voter feels so apathetic about politics. We can’t even pass basic voter ID laws, meanwhile our Senators are throwing birthday parties for their dogs.

Why is Fox News acting like they were part of the media ban? LOL. You guys weren’t banned. You CHOSE to sit out and band together with CNN. Cut the shit.

🚨 DOGE ALERT: Elon Musk CONFIRMS that the voter database greenlit by the Supreme Court today was created by DOGE "Even this alone makes @DOGE worth it." Trump wanted a way to track down illegal voters, and Elon made it happen!

@Die_Gruenen also demnächst im Club der Antisemiten und der organisierten Kriminalität... Was für ein erbärmlicher, machtgeiler, verachtenswerter Drecks-Verein 🤢 #GrünerMist

BREAKING: The Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 to ALLOW the Trump administration to use federal voter identification database to verify citizenship. All illegal voters need to be REMOVED from the voter rolls. The 3 liberal justices dissented, of course...

as a german, this is embarrassing (but also oddly encouraging) > only 40% of founders surveyed who incorporated in germany would choose it again. in the US it's 85% > founders rate dealing with the german government 3.7/10. the US scores 7.6 but the encouraging part is when you look at the biggest problems european founders reported in the survey, they all seem so fixable: > notaries and registries > hiring and firing rules > slow responses > data and privacy rules > unclear or changing rules these are basically ALL bureaucratic issues drowning the massive talent and ambition we already have here. people *want* to invent things and build companies, but we're making them spend their energy fighting through rules and paperwork. we built this cage ourselves, and we have the power to open it so people can get back to building. i'd love germany to become the country founders would choose twice.

if germans are angry at billionaires remember they simply dont know entrepreneurship can make billionaires in other countries in germany billionaire = inherited sad.

This political cartoon is 22 years old

Peter Thiel says Europe fears success: "One of the things in Germany that people always talk about in this entrepreneurship context is there's a fear of failure. A 'no risk' culture... Perhaps there's also a fear of success." "If you have something that works, you're not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an @elonmusk or @finkd. At some point you'll sell the company or exit." "What's very striking is how few great new companies have been built in Germany in the last number of decades." "If you look at the 50 wealthiest people in the US, only 12 are Gen X or younger—people born 1965 or later." "In Germany, it's more distributed: 20 of the 50 people are Gen X or younger." "But here's the difference—in the US, 9 out of 12 of those people made their own money. In Germany, all 20 of those 20 inherited it. Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large, new scalable company." Via Mathias Döpfner

Remember when a Daimler exec said this about the @tesla_semi specs: “If Tesla really delivers on this promise, we’ll obviously buy two trucks — one to take apart and one to test because if that happens, something has passed us by. But for now, the same laws of physics apply in Germany and in California.” electrek.co/2018/02/21/tesla…

If you ran Washington like a business and had to cut 6% to stay afloat, you'd start with the fraud and duplication, then make even, across-the-board cuts. That’s not radical. That’s how every business survives.

This is why no one believes the corporate media when they claim to be ‘principled journalists!’ For a bigger bag of cash they’ll say anything. Before she was at CNN Kaitlan Collins was sounding the alarm that George Soros was trying to radically change America via mass illegal migration and open borders. Flash forward a decade, Kaitlan is now on CNN pushing for open boarders and fighting the Trump administration everyday on immigration.The very thing she was reporting against. These people will sell out their principles for a paycheck and a prime time slot for a corporate media company.

Every recent movie on Netflix is like: Gay guy is the voice of reason. White man is the bad guy. Mom is the breadwinner. Children are sexualized. Black man is the hero. Women has the balls. Dad is an idiot. Netflix is social engineering, not entertainment.

Peter Thiel says the growing US budget deficit is going to push America to "socialist levels of taxation" or massive cuts to welfare: "You have basically three choices": 1. Massively cut spending 2. Massively hike taxes 3. Keep kicking the can down the road "For close to 20 years, the answer's been #3. "Ever since the 2008 crisis, we've just been borrowing more and more money." "My intuition is we're close to point where that ends, and then you're going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution of either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures." Via Mathias Döpfner

Korea was one people until 1945. Today the men of the South stand up to three inches taller than the men of the North. Same ancestry, same language, the same height at the start. The border is 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. In the North, food comes through the state ration. Rice when there is rice, maize when there is not, and meat on a few holidays a year. In 2012 the army cut its minimum height for a recruit to 4ft 8in, because too few 17 year olds could reach the old one. In the South, meat consumption rose about tenfold in 50 years. Beef, pork, eggs and milk went from luxuries to every day. South Korean women gained 8 inches in height over the 20th century. It is the largest increase recorded for any population on earth. Children who escape from the North are visibly smaller than Southern children of the same age. Fed in the South, the young ones catch up. The older ones are too late. Nobody designed the experiment. But it has 75 million subjects, a genetic control and a hard border, and it has run for 80 years. One side of the wire was fed grain by a government, and the other side ate meat.

Germany is not merely being deindustrialized. It is being dismantled. Piece by piece, factory by factory, job by job. And the people driving this destruction are not hiding in the shadows. They sit in government offices, corporate boardrooms, and political institutions. German journalist Patrik Baab puts his finger on what Berlin would rather keep buried: Germany’s corporate giants do not appear to fear the collapse of German industry, because many of their decision-makers no longer have their interests anchored in Germany. Cheap energy is gone. Factories are closing or moving abroad. Jobs are disappearing. The industrial backbone is being hollowed out. And yet the DAX executives remain remarkably calm. Why? Because Germany, for them, is increasingly just another balance-sheet entry. American investment funds hold enormous influence. Production is being shifted to China, the United States, Uzbekistan and elsewhere. Germany is being treated less like the industrial heart of Europe and more like a cost center that can be cut, downsized, or written off. Meanwhile, billions are being poured into war. Not into rebuilding factories. Not into modernizing infrastructure. Not into securing Germany’s industrial future. Into weapons. And while taxpayers carry the burden, arms manufacturers and investors stand to benefit. For BlackRock and the global financial establishment, critics argue, Germany’s decline does not necessarily represent a disaster. It can represent an opportunity. That is the brutal logic of the system being described: One side loses factories, energy security and jobs. Another side collects contracts, profits and influence. War and deindustrialization begin to look less like separate crises and more like two sides of the same destructive process. And still, Berlin talks about “transformation” “Solidarity” “Adaptation” “Modernization” But behind the carefully chosen words, Germany’s industrial foundation is being stripped away. The factories disappear. The skilled jobs disappear. The energy advantage disappears. The economic independence disappears. And the political establishment keeps insisting that everything is under control. The real question is no longer whether Germany can afford this course. It is whether Germany can survive it as the industrial power it once was. Because a country does not remain an industrial nation after its factories, energy security, skilled workforce and productive capacity have been dismantled. At some point, there is nothing left to "transform" There is only something left to rebuild.

The presumption that the Fed raising short-term rates reduces inflation is predicated on the belief that higher rates reduce demand and investment. But what if higher rates don’t reduce demand and investment because the demand for intelligence and energy is unaffected by higher rates because winning the race for super intelligence has a near infinite ROI and the demand for compute will remain incalculable. Why won’t higher rates at this unique moment in history therefore lead to more inflation as interest costs are embedded in everything? And the problem is compounded as the more the Fed raises rates, the more inflation we will have and the more the Fed will need to raise rates further and so on. But what if the old models don’t apply to the current paradigm and the Fed is wrong? I think the Fed might have just made a mistake. Am I right or am I wrong?