Happy Long Conference Day to those who celebrate.

Building at scale directly on the ocean is just a matter of repurposing existing technology with a few modifications. Monolithic and others have been building up to 400ft diameter self supporting domes for the past 50 years. The process is simply inflating a giant airform, spraying concrete inside, and removing the airform. At sea this method can be used to make a variety of large scale shapes, including domes and towers, and spraying Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) provides an incredibly strong and impermeable shell with a 100+ year life in seawater. It’s not a big leap to go from land to sea with these methods to build floating communities of thousands of people each that can join and separate to form thousands of new cities.

People don't understand Napoleon's insane work ethic. Napoleon had secretaries rotating shifts so that he could wake up in the middle of the night and start dictating. Napoleon would sleep 3-4 hours on campaign in 15-30 minute segments so he could always be giving orders. Napoleon would read for 12hrs+ on abstruse subjects in a single day. Napoleon would position cannons himself when he saw soldiers not manning them. You think you're working hard enough but you're not. When you study the greats of history you realize the true level of output that it takes to be known by posterity.

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.

“The American culture is we start from scratch, and we beat you” - Lee Kuan Yew, describing the USA

Helen Andrews recently made an observation that stopped me mid-scroll. She pointed out that in the late Soviet Union, the 60s and 70s, not the Stalin era, no one was being thrown into gulags anymore. But it was still oppressive. Why? Because the government had a clear, specific ideology, and it embedded that ideology into every institution. Every factory, every academic institute, every workplace had a commissar whose entire job was to enforce the Party line. Her argument: We have that today. It's just called HR. Any institution with more than 10 employees likely has an ideological enforcer on staff. The government doesn't just ask for legitimacy anymore, it demands acceptance of a specific ideology. It's evangelical about it. And that, Andrews argues, is fundamentally incompatible with what America was founded on: freedom of thought and freedom of philosophy. Whether you agree with her or not, the structural parallel is hard to ignore: • A mandated belief system • A dedicated enforcer in every institution • Dissent treated as a disciplinary matter Her conclusion: You cannot have solid, independent, Republican citizenship if the government has an ideology it feels compelled to enforce on you. Do you think workplace ideological enforcement has gone too far, or is it a necessary part of running a modern institution?

RT @the_17thletter4: The man who tried to climb down the outside of Tower 1 on 9/11. This is his story.

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating. So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual. They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive. More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground. That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something. The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her. She was the last. After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody. Nobody. Day after day. The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone. A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite. It was breaking them. An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next. They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers. The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in. Picture that. A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog. And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive. And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates. They called them mock finds. They did it for the dogs. They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for. One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors. But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur. One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers. Corliss asked where his friend was. The man pointed at the pile. "He's in there somewhere." He kept petting the dog. Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11. On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep. Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past. They draped her in an American flag on the way out. Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living. They found one. And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart. That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really. Nobody could save the dead. So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island. Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand. They were looking for people. The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it. Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center. He drove back. The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way. The site was empty. So that is where the towers went. Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip. At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill. And then the sorting began. The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve. Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt. And along the belts stood the detectives. NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time. When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet. A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe. A piece of a person. The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed. You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look. Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow. Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal. The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months. By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury. When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered. It is a park now. Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it. Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place. Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Here is what you should know. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket. Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark. Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home. They did that for ten months. Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch. They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

I reread this every year. I cry like a baby every year. Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero. Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked. Lisa: I understand. Can they see you? Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake. Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor. Lisa: Are you okay? Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again. Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true? Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan. Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call. Lisa: I promise. Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy. Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.) Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol. Todd: I understand. I’ll be back. Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot. Lisa: What are you going to do? Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out. Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.

Why do we use the phrase “sacrifice your career” when someone quits to become a mother, but never “sacrificing motherhood” when someone chooses a career?

>sam altman: "we tried this because there were rumor on the internet" >rumor: math professor close to solving navier-stokes >the professor: using codex for a year >openai: has all his logs >checked every codex session tagged to N-S >found the most promising one >spun up 10,000 agents to finish the proof where he couldn't >they got caught >told the guy if you say anything you'll destroy your own career >he ruins his career over this >openai: "we did not see his work" >also openai: "we cannot rule out that de-identified data from their usage helped improve our models" they stole it lmao

>math professor spends a year on one of the hardest unsolved problems in math >"Navier-Stokes" >his drafts for the whole project went through codex sessions >openai had his logs in codex >suddenly rumor leaks AI solved it >he emails openai to ask what's going on >openai calls within days >"funny story, our model also solved it" >using his exact approach >asks openai: did you train on my sessions? >no answer

This is very personal for me to share. My biological mother was a stripper working at a club in downtown Seattle. My biological father was one of her clients. She became pregnant with me while struggling with addiction and used drugs throughout her pregnancy. When I was born, I was immediately taken to the ICU to detox and was eventually placed for adoption. By God’s grace, I was adopted by two wonderful parents who loved me deeply. I was four months old when they picked me up from the orphanage, and they are the only parents I’ve ever known. I never grew up feeling like something was missing. I never felt some deep longing to find my biological parents. I had a mom and dad who loved me, cared for me, sacrificed for me, and gave me a wonderful home. Years later, after I got married and we had our first child, my wife encouraged me to learn more about my biological history. If for no other reason, she thought it might be good for the sake of our daughter to know whether there was anything medically or genetically significant in my family history. So I eventually submitted my DNA to Ancestry. Through that, I discovered a half brother, aunts, cousins, and eventually was put in contact with my biological mother. We were able to meet. And when I met her, I got to tell her something I’d wanted to tell her for as long as I could remember: thank you. Thank you for giving me life. I got to tell her about the wonderful parents who adopted me. I got to tell her that I’d had a good life. I got to tell her about my wife and my children. I wanted her to know that the baby she carried in the middle of all that chaos became a man with a family, a calling, people he loves, people who love him, and a life for which he is profoundly grateful. I’ve never been angry with her. Never. Not once. For years I told my wife and children that if my biological mother ever found me, I knew exactly what I would say. I wouldn’t condemn her. I wouldn’t demand explanations. I’d simply thank her for allowing me to live. Because without that decision, I wouldn’t have the extraordinary wife I have today. I wouldn’t know the indescribable joy of my children. I wouldn’t have experienced the friendships, ministry, laughter, sorrow, beauty, failures, victories, and ordinary moments that have made up my life. There are people I love who wouldn’t know me, children who wouldn’t exist, and a story that never would’ve been written. She gave me the chance to live it. We still stay in contact. We speak every few months, and I genuinely enjoy hearing her stories and learning about her life. Since the day I met her, I’ve prayed that the Lord would bring her to Himself. I still pray that. I share all of this because lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about the choices parents make. About life and death. About how much hangs in the balance of decisions made in moments of fear, desperation, darkness, or confusion. And yes, I’ve been thinking about those three little children whose lives were taken by the very person entrusted with protecting them. It’s difficult for me not to think about my own story alongside theirs. Their lives mattered. Their futures mattered. Everything they might’ve become, everyone they might’ve loved, every ordinary Tuesday morning and Christmas morning and wedding and child and friendship that might’ve filled the decades ahead of them mattered. And it makes me profoundly grateful that my mother chose differently. So if there’s a mother or father reading this who’s in a dark place and wondering whether your presence matters, whether your decisions matter, or whether the people who depend on you would somehow be better off without you, please hear me: your choices matter more than you can see from where you’re standing. Choose life. Don’t make an irreversible decision in the middle of a season that will pass. Don’t allow a moment of darkness to make a permanent decision about a future you can’t yet see. Trust the Lord. Ask for help.

You can't expect me to believe there is a race of creatures living in well-ordered homes who spend all day making candy while their evil counterpart hides out in menacing fortresses that augur only destruction.

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person. - Immanuel Kant

Just incredible how far we’ve fallen.

Britain restored the gold standard in 1821, pegging sterling at £3 17s 10½d per troy ounce, and the following decades gave you one of the most instructive experiments in monetary history: falling prices coexisting with explosive real growth. Prices fell. Roughly 50% between 1820 and 1850 by some price indices. The textile mills of Manchester kept expanding. Railway track mileage in Britain jumped from virtually zero in 1820 to over 6,000 miles by 1850. Real wages climbed. The orthodox panic about deflation, the kind you still hear from central bankers today, would have predicted stagnation. Instead you got the industrial revolution, accelerating. The mechanism is simple once you strip away the Keynesian fog. Deflation under a gold standard reflects genuine productivity gains: producers squeeze more output from the same inputs, and prices fall because goods become cheaper to make. This is healthy deflation, not demand collapse. The cotton spinners of Lancashire caused falling yarn prices through innovation. Sound money advocates have always stressed this distinction. Falling prices from productivity growth reward savers, keep capital costs honest, and force businesses to earn their profits through efficiency rather than inflating their way to margins. The British experience between 1821 and 1850 is an inconvenient data point that modern central bankers quietly ignore: a hard currency, shrinking prices, and the fastest sustained economic expansion the world had yet seen. Simultaneously.

10/10. No notes.