In 2007 in Seattle I was making $135k a year at 24 and it felt amazing. a new 2-bedroom apt in downtown on the water was $1250/mo. I walked across the street and got greek food for $5. A latte at zeitgest was like $3.50. I walked to pike place market and paid $20 for a massive sack of veggies. Life objectively was better in every way than it is now.

The neoliberals really did believe their ideas. You capitulated to investors because, they believed, that was the best way to get rich; you let the central bankers control the knobs and kept the politicians out of the cockpit, because otherwise things tended to go badly wrong. You removed state controls on economic activity because that was the best way to purchase growth that would lift all boats. This was very much Americana. The confidence of the unipole was a confidence in American arrangements as a universal template—the Washington Consensus was a real consensus. They really thought that the US had solved the problem of growth and stability. And undergirding it all was confidence is American power. This was a vision of Utopia. The world was not so simple. All of the legs of the neoliberal vision would collapse one by one. The financial cycle returned after a half century of suppression. The second unbundling slowly led to Western deindustrialization and the revolt of the Western working classes. The antipolitics led to a condition where the production of consent became impossible, undermining state capacity in the Western core, especially at home in America. Our present condition is that the old god is dead and no one has arrived to take his place. Although I do not like the prefix very much, we are indeed in a period of post-neoliberal malaise and a post-unipolar world where American authority has collapsed but China is too ‘do nothing, win’-low energy to take up the baton. The situation is no doubt analogous to the interregnum between the world wars, when the US was preponderant but left the British to manage a world that they were no longer in a position to rule.

i observe this particularly when i walk around München or Bavarian towns. many of the natives here are so happy, zero fucks given. have job, go to job 32-35hrs per week. outside of job spend every waking second on enjoyable things: beer gardens, espressos in the sun, hiking in the alps, play sports, dinner parties, lounge around with friends, spend time with loved ones, etc etc. most don't read, let alone have awareness of AI, "future of work", "capital allocation", earning "high leverage income" or "asymmetric bets", and they couldn't give a flying fuck. could be on a different planet to me entirely. and frankly i'm envious of them. no matter how hard i try i can't function like them, that's not who i am. but the older i get the more i wish i did. i know most are happier, calmer, and have more peaceful lives. as i get older my life gets more complex with added responsibilities, and theirs is always "just the same". it's like the trite mexican fisherman story and i'm the fat american banker in the story. they have the basics covered and enjoy life, and i'm like "more more more more more"

HR is evil and the modern hiring process is ridiculous. HR people get off on having people jump through hoops and denying people jobs. I loved the story of the CEO who needed engineers and found out HR denied every qualified person and fired everyone in HR. HR are class enemies.

Like I’ve been saying… tech has been democratized. Businesses could teach anyone with an IQ over ~115 to do almost any ‘tech job’ in a matter of weeks to months. End the H-1B visa today.

-picture yourself achieving your goal -see the moment it happens -hear congratulations from someone you love -replay until you feel it -fall asleep as the person whose done this -wake up knowing how to achieve it

i’m not kidding when i say that every western country has to entirely overhaul how they’re doing construction projects because the budgets, the timeframes and even the planning have become untenable. not to mention the corruption in the construction industry

Anyone want to guess what that ‘something’ is?

🏬 What Actually Killed the Malls The dead-mall phenomenon is real, and it wasn’t an accident. It was a pincer movement. Amazon’s side (We won’t get into Amazon being subsidized by the intelligence apparatus/deep state) - E-commerce didn’t just take a slice of retail—it took the anchor-adjacent traffic. When people stop going to Sears and JCPenney, the small inline stores lose their foot traffic too. The whole mall model was built on anchors as loss leaders. - Amazon ran deliberately thin margins for years, subsidized by cheap capital and tax advantages that brick-and-mortar couldn’t touch. That’s not “better service,” that’s asymmetric warfare. Private equity’s side: - This is the part people underrate. PE firms bought mall REITs and retail chains, loaded them with debt, extracted management fees and dividends, then let them collapse under the leverage. When they hit financial turmoil, Uncle Sam was there to bail them out. The goal was all a small part of the plan to destroy the family unit. - Toys “R” Us, Sears, Payless, Claire’s, Nine West—the pattern is identical. Buy, lever, strip, bankrupt. The stores die not because they were unprofitable as businesses, but because they were made unprofitable as debt vehicles. They were gutted by modern-day pirates! - When the retail tenant dies, the mall’s rent roll collapses. Then the PE-owned mall gets sold for land value or bulldozed. It’s not a natural market death. It’s engineered extraction. With ties to communism. 🧠 “Corporatism Is the New Communism”? I’d sharpen this statement rather than dismiss it. The frame is imprecise, but the intuition is sound. Both systems concentrate power in a small class and route the state toward serving that class. The difference is the mechanism: - Classical communism: the state owns the means of production; party cadres allocate. - Corporatism: private entities own the means of production, but they capture the state—regulatory capture, revolving doors, subsidies, bailouts, tax carve-outs. The outcome converges: a small, connected elite; a hollowed-out middle; a dependent population; and a managed narrative that says this is all just “the free market” or “progress.” The revolving door is the tell. When the regulator used to work for the regulated, you don’t have capitalism—you have a cartel with a flag. ⚠️ Where I’d Push Back on the Traditional Framing Two caveats, because the “Amazon killed everything” story is incomplete: 1. Malls were already dying of self-inflicted wounds. Overbuilding in the 80s–90s, terrible mall design, high rents on inline tenants, and the retail apocalypse were predicted before Amazon was a threat. Amazon accelerated a structural decline; it didn’t invent it. 2. PE didn’t kill malls—it killed the tenants. Those are different claims with different villains. The mall landlord was often the victim too. 🎯 The Real Point—This Is VERY Important. It Was Exactly How They Controlled The Population During COVID! What died wasn’t just retail square footage. It was third places—the unplanned, non-transactional public spaces where Americans used to run into each other. Malls, bowling alleys, diners, Main Street. They must separate us. Divide us. United, we threaten their agenda. That loss has measurable downstream effects: declining social trust, rising loneliness, and a population that increasingly interacts only through screens. Amazon and PE didn’t set out to destroy community (the EU, Brussels and the WEF did)—they set out to extract value, and community was collateral damage. But the effect is the same. The replacement of in-person commerce with algorithmic delivery and of public space with private feeds is one of the biggest quiet transformations in American life. It got sold as convenience. It functioned as enclosure. Repeat after me: “Globalist One World Order”

tying britain's wealth to property was one of the biggest mistakes we made. stop building homes and of course prices inflate. then we called the inflation "wealth" and spent 30 years protecting it. so now we've got pensioners sitting in £600k semis on £12k a year, and 30 year olds on £80k who can't buy one. everyone's rich on paper and nobody's got any money. the house you live in should never have been your primary investment asset. it's now people's inheritance, pension, wealth. but it was the easiest way for a country to feel rich without building anything.

This is why China is catching up to the US. Gross fixed capital formation shows how much money a country is investing in productive capacity. China has strategic industrial policy. The US has financialisation, stock buybacks and shareholder value maximisation.

The Soviet Union had a federal jobs guarantee. Everyone was given a job. This was so appealing that the US temporarily created a federal jobs program to do the same. In 2026, the US thinks you should beg and if you don’t beg well enough then you should die homeless.

建议所有试图走出低谷或者想彻底换一种活法的朋友, 把 Dan Koe 刚发出的这套长文系统连看三遍。 很多人都有过同一种令人窒息的经历: 下定决心要早起、健身、做副业, 结果两到四周之后一切又悄无声息地滑回了原点, 甚至被同一个恶习生生困住整整十年。 绝大多数人以为这是自己意志力不够, 但从物理学上看, 你的起步策略从第一天就选错了。 火箭升空需要把总重量 85% 到 90% 的燃料在短短几分钟内全部烧光, 才能挣脱地表引力; 但只要冲破大气层进入既定轨道, 后续飞行的燃料消耗几乎就是零。 启动你人生的燃料, 和维持你人生的系统, 根本就不是同一种东西。 很多人最大的误区是用温吞的微习惯去对抗十年的重力惯性。 在最脆弱的启动阶段, 你需要的根本不是心平气和的自律, 而是极度浓烈的战术压力。 对自己所处现状的极度厌恶, 或者是主动把自己逼进不可退缩的绝境, 才是能点燃 90% 推进剂的脏燃料。 真正让我觉得有意思的是他指出的高手真相。 顶级创业者和运动员每天工作 16 个小时不觉得痛苦, 不是因为他们每天都在咬牙坚持, 而是因为卓越早就成了他们的出厂设置, 让他们去过平庸的生活反而像下地狱一样难受。 一旦火箭被推上了轨道, 就要立刻丢掉脏燃料, 切换到极简的环境自动回路。 输入端必须戒掉智力肥胖, 把每天刷几百条无用碎片的习惯直接掐死; 输出端则把行为拆解成最小可识别动作, 进健身房只承诺做一组硬拉, 坐到桌前只承诺写一行文字, 并在行为发生后立即绑定确定性的奖励。 痛苦和强厌恶负责把火箭暴力推离地面, 极简环境和最小动作负责让系统在轨道上零阻力滑行。 回看你过去经历过的最好的一次蜕变, 当时把你推离地面的到底是一次具体的暴击, 还是慢慢积累的顿悟? 我先说, 以前逼我彻底戒掉熬夜拖延的, 就是一次因为精力涣散当场丢掉核心客户的惨痛教训。 输入端节食与输出端四步回路的完整操作清单, 我整理好沉在一楼了。

I enjoy this period of corporate romanticism during the 1980s and 90s where ambition, possibility, distance and hierarchy were on full display. Contemporary corporate imagery prefers the language of openness and accessibility, along with an artificial assurance that you're already there. Image by Kent Hanson, 1990

Seems kind of obvious that the best possible form of urban living is small streets and 4-5 story dwellings , with lots of street calming and vegetation. Perfect density but still calm . Incredible walkability but also safe for kids. Mixed use zoning obviously Somehow we fell in love with towers and bungalows and parking and pedestrianization , huge parks and wide boulevards and the extremes

It does, and, after learning lessons from the failed USSR central command economy, China is a mixed economy model of the type I would support, adjusted for our different position in the global economy. But China's manufacturing strength, policy banks and capital controls have allowed it to fend off the money markets.

A lot has been said on X about East/South Asian "grinding" culture and academic achievement. I'm gonna give my "insider" view on this as someone who still does alumni interviews for my alma mater (elite college that everyone has heard of). Due to my involvement in admissions I see a lot of super talented applicants from top high schools and have a good pulse on what elite college admits look like. So here is what I have seen with respect to the Asian issue. 1) The credentials gap between Asian & White applicants has increased considerably over the years. This is a fact, and even admission officers have admitted this in private discussions. I don't know why this is the case, but the credentials gap is not just in grades & test scores. Compared to say 15-20 years ago, the Asian applicants are shockingly well rounded and not at all stereotypically Asian in terms of their resume & presentation. This is probably why Asian representation at elite colleges is going up (in addition to obviously SCOTUS decision). The mostly White liberal admission staff has always been uncomfortable with Asian applicants who are "too Asian" and punished them accordingly. The new crop of Asian overachievers however puts the admission staff at ease by having cracked resumes without being "obnoxiously Asian." There is certainly a generational element to this. If you're a college freshman now, you were born in 2007-2008. So these Asian kids were not only born in the U.S., a lot of their parents were also born here or came here at a very young age. Their cultural upbringing is thus different from those went to college in the 90s and 00s. 2) The common critique of White MAGA is that Asian American grinding & cramming culture is antithetical to traditional American culture. Let's leave aside the fact that their view of Asian American kids is hilariously outdated. What goes unsaid here is that elite American institutions -universities & companies - reward the so called "grinding." Asian overrepresentation is simply the result of this marketplace matching. Think about what is required to succeed in highly competitive environments of overachievers. Yes, you need to cross a certain IQ threshold. But ultimately, you have to flawlessly execute tasks/projects under enormous pressure, within specified time constraints. Asian culture is uniquely suited for this because it punishes blind aspiration lacking concrete results and optimizes for ruthless efficiency. One can hence argue that this is somehow "un American," but American institutions themselves are deliberately selecting for these qualities.

when people say “goycattle” this is what they mean can you even imagine such an existence...? ...let alone gleefully recording it....?

this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives. clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building? he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children. work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid. an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time. this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day. money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there. he died in 2020. one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you? the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.

I've made some form of this argument before, specifically that the real reason mass immigration exists is to prop up the economy which would otherwise experience chronic deflation, which by extension that applies to everything else and vice versa. But this captures the gravity of the situation a lot better. The short version is that nearly every loadbearing institution in Western society (in some cases, even the military) is dependent upon migration in some way because they are far too brittle to enact reforms, and too important to other important players or society at large to be allowed to naturally die. But there's an even shorter way of saying this: Western civilization is already dead.