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Government is the largest corporation of all and it has the monopoly of violence
Replying to @Rothmus
Those who are opposed to corporations and favor government do not realize that government is simply the largest, most monopolistic corporation of all and it has a monopoly on violence.
In the shadow of the Himalayas, Nepal doesn’t just build suspension bridges — it hangs them across one of the world’s deepest gorges so you can walk (or leap) above the abyss.
The star for pure engineering flex is the Gandaki Golden Bridge (Gandaki Sunaulo Jhula), a single-span steel suspension footbridge connecting Baglung and Parbat districts over the Kali Gandaki River. Opened in 2020, it stretches an uninterrupted 567 meters (1,860 ft) with no intermediate supports and hangs 122 meters (400 ft) above the river. At opening it was briefly the world’s longest single-span footbridge; it remains one of the longest in Asia and a top contender for dramatic length in mountainous terrain. Capacity: up to 612 people at once. It slashed a multi-hour slog of steep trails into a roughly 10-minute walk, linking communities that once detoured for hours or days.
Imagine stepping onto a narrow metal deck that sways gently 120–200+ meters above a raging Himalayan river, with snow peaks in the distance and nothing but air and cables between you and the canyon floor. No car, no guardrails that feel solid — just you, the wind, and the pure geometry of a suspension bridge doing its job in one of the planet’s most extreme landscapes.
Every winter, Mount Zao in Yamagata quietly stages one of Earth’s most surreal shows: an entire mountainside of trees transforms into a frozen army of “snow monsters.”
These aren’t sculptures. They’re Maries’ fir trees that get ambushed by Siberian winds carrying supercooled water droplets. The droplets freeze on contact, building layer after layer of rime ice while snow piles on top. The result? Hulking, ghostly white figures—some towering and rounded, others spindly and outstretched—that look like they wandered out of a Studio Ghibli fever dream or a Japanese folklore nightmare.
From late January through February they hit peak form. Ride the Zao Ropeway up from the onsen town and you step into a landscape that feels alien: endless white giants standing in ranks under a hard blue sky, or looming through fog like something ancient and half-awake. At night during the light-up season they glow in shifting colors, turning the ridge into a frozen theater.
You can ski and snowboard between them. The runs cut through the formations, so you’re carving powder while these silent white shapes watch from both sides. Afterward, drop into Zao Onsen—hot springs with a 1,900-year history and water so acidic it practically announces itself. Few places let you go from otherworldly ice forest to sulfur baths in the same afternoon.
Outside winter the mountain flips the script. The Okama crater lake (Goshikinuma, the “Five Color Pond”) sits in a volcanic bowl and shifts between emerald, turquoise, and deeper greens depending on the light and weather. It’s one of those rare places that feels equally powerful in powder and in summer greenery.
Mount Zao doesn’t just get snow. It performs with it—turning ordinary conifers into something that stops people mid-sentence. If you want Japan’s winter to feel like a different planet, this is the mountain that does it.
You don’t hear space.
That’s the part that unmakes you.
You float out of the airlock and the sound of the world just… stops. No wind. No engines. No distant city. Only the mechanical hush of your own suit: the pumps, the fans, the rhythm of your breathing suddenly too loud, too human, too small.
Earth is not “below” you. It fills everything. A living, glowing sphere so vast and close it feels like you could drag your gloved fingers through the clouds if the suit would let you. The blues are wrong. Too vivid. The storms look like bruises. The thin glowing line of atmosphere is all that stands between eight billion lives and the black.
You are moving at 17,500 miles an hour and you feel none of it. You are falling around the planet in perfect silence, a tiny pressurized animal on a leash.
The suit fights you. Every movement is work. Your hands ache inside stiff gloves. Sweat beads and has nowhere to go. The sun is a knife. Shadows are absolute. Turn your head and the universe is a wall of black so complete it feels like it has mass.
For a few seconds the task disappears. The bolts, the cables, the checklist. You just look.
And something in you quietly rearranges.
You understand, in a way no photograph ever taught you, how thin we are. How temporary. How lucky. The station behind you is a collection of shining cans held together by human stubbornness. Home is a blue marble hanging in nothing.
Then Mission Control speaks in your ear, calm as a librarian, and you turn back to the work.
You keep going.
Because that’s what we do out here.
We float in the dark, fix what we can, and try not to forget the view.
Most of the 200+ neoclouds are going to die 😱
Replying to @chamath
Pretty much.
As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers.
SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.
That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.
It’s a shame that a first world developed country like United States still doesn’t mandate Voter ID
Need ID to buy a beer
Need ID to enter Costco
Need ID to travel by air
Need ID for a bank account
Need ID for driving
Need ID to buy cigarettes/tobacco
Need ID to rent a car
Need ID to check into a hotel
Need ID to purchase a firearm
Need ID to apply for a job
Need ID to open a credit card or a loan
Need ID to enter a casino or gamble
Need ID to pick up prescriptions
Need ID to get a marriage license
Need ID to cross an international border
Need ID to board a cruise ship or a flight
…
…
But you don’t need an ID to vote
There’s clearly election fraud in USA
Here’s why American elections are corrupt and fraudulent at the highest levels.
Some liberal states don’t enforce voter id rules. They don’t even announce their election results in 3 weeks after the elections.
🚩Here are some countries that Enforce Voter ID Rules:
1. **Argentina** - Citizens must present a valid Documento Nacional de Identidad to vote.
2. **Mexico** - Voters must show a voter ID card which includes a hologram, photo, and other security features.
3. **Czech Republic** - Voters need to present an eligible form of photo ID like a passport or national identity card at the polling station.
4. **Estonia** - Although primarily known for online voting, each citizen has an electronic ID card which can be used for verification.
5. **Belgium** - While electronic voting is used, voters still need to present an ID when voting.
6. **Norway** - Voters must provide valid identification like a passport or driver's license.
7. **Switzerland** - For in-person voting, ID and a state-issued polling card are required.
8. **France** - Voters need to present their voter ID.
9. **Israel** - A voter ID is required to vote.
10. **Iceland** - Voters are required to present identification.
11. **Greece** - Voter ID is necessary to vote in elections.
This list was not exhaustive, but it includes several countries where voter ID laws are known to be enforced.
🚩Here are a few countries Known for Counting All Their Votes in a Single Day:
- **India** - India is the largest democracy in the world with over 1.5 billion people and they finished counting ballots in a day
- **Estonia** - While voting occurs over several days online, the counting of all votes is finalized on election day.
- **Australia** - Votes are counted and results can often be determined on election night, although some postal votes might delay final results slightly.
- **France** - Most votes are counted on the same day, with results often announced late into the night or the following day for very close races.
- **Belgium** - Voting and counting typically occur on the same day, with quick result announcements.
A thread on US election fraud👇
The curious thing about change is that people assume it automatically means “better.”
It doesn’t.
Change has no direction. It can just as easily be for the worse. Much worse.
It's time for a change.
Vote for leaders like @AbdulElSayed and @JocelynBenson who will work every day to make this country better.
DEMOCRATS ARE CORRUPT HYPOCRITES
In 2021 they told you a government card was the price of a normal life. No card, no restaurant, no concert, no job, no flight. The people who couldn’t produce one were not victims. They were the problem.
In 2026 the same people say a government card for voting is racist.
Not inconvenient. Not fixable with free IDs. Racist.
You already need that card to buy beer, cash a check, pick up a prescription, or board a plane. None of that was called Jim Crow. Only the ballot was. The rule did not change because the card got harder to get. It changed because the activity being gated stopped helping them.
James Talarico supports election fraud
Pic: @PlanetOfMemes
It’s a shame that a first world developed country like United States still doesn’t mandate Voter ID
Need id to buy beer
Need id to enter Costco
Need id to travel by air
Need id for a bank account
Need id for driving
Need ID to buy cigarettes/tobacco
Need ID to rent a car
Need ID to check into a hotel
Need ID to purchase a firearm
Need ID to apply for a job
Need ID to open a credit card or a loan
Need ID to enter a casino or gamble
Need ID to pick up prescriptions
Need ID to get a marriage license
Need ID to cross an international border
Need ID to board a cruise ship or a flight
…
…
But you don’t need an ID to vote
The tribalism is insane
FORMER FINANCE PROFESSOR at NYU Stern: "After 25 years teaching finance, I just realized at 58:
If the money printer grows 8-10% annually and the S&P 500 returns ~9%, it's just treading water. True wealth comes from outpacing the printer.
That's the Bitcoin journey."
H/t: @fiatarchive
Bitcoin is a drop in the ocean of worlds assets
Imagine owning a piece of real estate at the beginning of the 21st century in Manhattan, NY
That’s equivalent to owning Bitcoin now
Bitcoin is capped. Then it gets hacked. Then it goes to zero.
@chamath claims that Bitcoin could eventually go to Zero if recursive self-improving AI is pointed at the Satoshi’s wallet to be cracked.
‼️‼️Do you all agree with his take?‼️‼️
The buyer pool is limited. Retail and institutions can hold it. Central banks largely can’t — no real fungibility or privacy.
Real-world risk is already here. Forced disclosure of holdings has already led to kidnappings. Full transparency is a personal security liability.
The terminal risk is AI. Point recursive self-improving AI at cryptography and the highest-ROI target is obvious: Satoshi’s coins. Break the math, drain the wallets, short Bitcoin, then announce it. You make the money twice.
The community can’t fix it. They can’t even agree on the time and place of a meeting. Coordinating a fundamental quantum-resistant migration under existential pressure is not a plan.
Bitcoin’s entire value is trust in its cryptography. Once that trust is credibly broken at scale, there is no cash flow and no backstop. It goes to zero.
I no longer hold it directly. I moved the exposure into equity instead. That eliminated the custody and security risk. That was the correct decision.
Upside is capped. Downside is a one-way door to zero.
NO WONDER ELON MUSK IS PUSHING FOR SCALING ENERGY AND AI COMPUTE IN SPACE STARTING WITH NVIDIA ORBITAL VERA RUBINS
NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72
One orbital Vera Rubin NVL72 is a whole AI factory: 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs in one NVLink domain, about 3,600 PFLOPS of NVFP4 inference, ~20.7 TB of HBM4, and ~120–150 kW. No building. No grid. No water loop.
That is the unit cell. Heat goes straight into vacuum through radiators. Power comes from solar that never sees night in sun-synchronous orbit. The same NVIDIA stack runs on the ground and on Starmind, so software does not fork when the rack leaves Earth.
Scale is just launch cadence. At ~150 kW each, roughly 7,000 satellites are a gigawatt. Tens of thousands are multi-gigawatt. Starship flying dozens per flight turns that into a production problem, not a permitting problem. Land, substations, and cooling towers stop being the ceiling.
Petawatt-year is the end state of that loop: continuous orbital power, rack after rack, year after year, outside Earth’s energy and real-estate limits. Vera Rubin is how SpaceX makes each satellite a coherent supercomputer instead of a box of chips, so the constellation can actually add up.
NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 — space-optimized AI computer
A rack-scale system that behaves like one giant GPU. SpaceX and NVIDIA redesigned it for orbit: radiation-hardened, vibration-tolerant, radiator-cooled, and built to run unattended.
🚩Configuration
• 72 Rubin GPUs + 36 Vera CPUs in a single coherent NVLink domain
• 18 compute trays plus NVLink switch trays
• ConnectX-9 SuperNICs and BlueField-4 DPUs
• Ground version: cable-free MGX trays. Orbital version: denser, lighter, simpler than a standard rack
🚩Compute
• 3,600 PFLOPS NVFP4 inference
• 2,520 PFLOPS NVFP4 training
• 1,260 PFLOPS FP8/FP6
• 288 PFLOPS FP16/BF16
• 9,360 TFLOPS FP32 / 2,400 TFLOPS FP64
• Fits trillion-parameter and long-context agentic models inside one rack instead of a cluster
• Cuts GPUs needed for giant MoE training by about 4x versus the prior NVL72 generation
🚩Memory
• 20.7 TB HBM4 (288 GB per GPU)
• ~1,580 TB/s GPU memory bandwidth (~22 TB/s per GPU)
• Up to 54 TB LPDDR5X on the CPUs
• Large models stay in one fast, unified memory pool
🚩Interconnect
• NVLink 6: 260 TB/s all-to-all inside the rack
• 3.6 TB/s per GPU
• 65 TB/s NVLink-C2C between CPUs and GPUs
• Scale-out over Spectrum-X Ethernet and InfiniBand
• Non-blocking fabric — program the rack as one accelerator
🚩CPU
• 3,168 custom Olympus cores (88 per Vera CPU)
• Built for agent orchestration, RL, data prep, code, and simulation
• Up to 1.8x faster than x86 on those workloads, so GPUs stay on the model
🚩Power, cooling, space
• Terrestrial rack: fully liquid-cooled, roughly 180–230 kW
• Orbital version rejects heat into vacuum through deployable radiators
• Typical satellite compute envelope: ~120 kW average, ~150 kW peak
• No facility water loops. No on-orbit servicing.
🚩What it can do
• Train and serve frontier models off Earth’s grid, land, and cooling limits
• Run Grok-class agentic workloads in low Earth orbit
• Keep the same NVIDIA software stack from ground data centers to Starmind satellites
• Scale from one optimized payload to a constellation of orbital AI nodes
Power isn’t the AI bottleneck. Everything that makes power possible is.
Chips scale. Models scale. Capital scales. But the physical world does not. The real constraint on AI supercomputers is no longer silicon—it’s the brutal, cascading list of real-world limits that sit between “we need more power” and “we actually have it.”
Land. Permits. Grid interconnection. Transformers and switchgear. Noise ordinances. Clean air rules. Fuel security. Casting capacity for large components. The specialized lathes that turn massive shafts. Residential priority on the grid. Local political opposition. Supply chains that break on any single missing part.
Miss any one of these—however minor it looks—and the cluster doesn’t come online. The best sites are already claimed. Every new one is worse: farther from the grid, harder to permit, more expensive to interconnect, more politically contested. Marginal sites are getting worse every year, not better.
This is why the conversation has shifted from “how many GPUs?” to “where can we even put the power?” And it’s why space data centers have moved from science fiction to a serious engineering discussion. In orbit you don’t fight for grid access, fight noise complaints, or wait years for a substation. Energy becomes a scaling problem of solar arrays and radiators, not one of local politics and finite terrestrial infrastructure.
The next order-of-magnitude jump in AI compute may not come from a better chip or a better algorithm. It may come from escaping the list of constraints that currently bind every new data center on Earth.
Socialism and communism sell a beautiful lie: that if we just hand enough power to the right planners, we can abolish scarcity, greed, and unfairness itself. History keeps answering with the same brutal receipt.
The system does not fail because the wrong people ran it. It fails because it treats human beings as raw material for a blueprint. Once the state owns the factories, the farms, the prices, and the future, two things disappear almost immediately: the information that prices carry and the reason anyone has to work harder than the next person. You cannot calculate what a society actually needs when no one is allowed to bid, refuse, or walk away. You cannot keep people producing when the extra effort they give is treated as a crime against equality.
What remains is envy dressed up as virtue. The gospel is not “let us create more.” It is “let us take from those who already created.” The result is not shared abundance. It is shared shortage, shared suspicion, and shared permission for the new priesthood—the planners, the party, the bureaucrats—to decide who eats and who waits.
Look at the pattern, not the slogans. Collectivized farms that produced less food than the peasants they replaced. Industrial plans that built monuments while hospitals ran out of basic supplies. Borders that had to be guarded not to keep invaders out, but to keep citizens in. Every time the experiment is run at scale, the same sequence appears: first the confiscation of “the rich,” then the ration book, then the secret police, then the explanation that this time it was not real socialism.
Markets are messy and unequal. They leave some people richer than others. They also leave most people better off than their grandparents, because they reward the person who figures out how to make something cheaper, faster, or better. Socialism promises to erase the first fact and quietly delivers the second in reverse: it equalizes downward. The inherent virtue, as the old line goes, is the equal distribution of misery.
That is not a talking point. It is the empirical record of a century. People do not flee capitalist countries in homemade rafts. They do not invent new words for “empty shelves” under free exchange. They do not need a political religion whose god is the state when they are allowed to keep what they earn and trade with whom they choose.
The next time someone tells you we just need to try it again, only smarter this time, remember what the experiment actually measures. It measures how quickly a society can turn the desire for fairness into permission for control—and how long it takes ordinary people to remember that control is never temporary.
A thread 🧵 #48 on infographics for your awareness
How Americans aged 25-35 spend their free time, 1920-2026, starting with housework at the top in that order over the years
Housework
Listening to radio
Watching TV
Streaming Netflix/YouTube
Clip: @G_S_Bhogal
We avoid effort because it’s costly. Then we value whatever we spent it on more—precisely because it cost us. That’s the effort paradox.
The Ben Franklin effect runs the same logic through people. Do someone a favor and your brain revises the story: I must like them. Why else would I have gone to the trouble?
Now flip it.
When someone does all the work for you—always available, always solving, always giving their time—you often lose respect for them. Their effort was cheap. It required nothing from you, so your mind has no cost to justify and no reason to raise their value. The person who rarely gives their time, whose attention is scarce and whose help arrives only after friction, feels more valuable by contrast. Their restraint signals that their effort is expensive, so receiving even a little of it registers as meaningful.
We don’t just love who we struggle for. We quietly devalue who struggles too easily for us.
Replying to @elonmusk
@elonmusk and @SpaceX @Starlink did more to save Ukraine 🇺🇦 than any other private company in the world
When Russia invaded and tried to black out Ukraine’s communications, a single tweet to Elon Musk turned Starlink on the same day.
Terminals arrived within days. In the chaos where cell towers were rubble and conventional networks jammed, Ukrainian soldiers, hospitals, and civilians suddenly had internet that Russia could neither bomb nor silence.
Frontline accounts called it the difference between fighting and losing. It became the backbone of command, drones, and artillery targeting. Zelenskyy later awarded Musk one of Ukraine’s highest honors for it.
This was not aid by committee or treaty. It was a private company, using commercial rockets and satellites, giving a nation under attack the one thing modern war cannot function without: the ability to stay connected and coordinate.
Authoritarian power tried to isolate Ukraine. Private innovation refused to let it happen.
MULTICULTURALISM FAILED IN FRANCE
France’s banlieue “protests” aren’t about reform. They’re a ritual.
Trigger happens (usually a police shooting of a North African teen). Cars burn by the thousands. Shops get looted. Police stations and schools are attacked. Then it stops until the next time.
This has happened in 2005, 2023, and repeatedly since. The targets are never the specific policies or politicians. They’re random property and symbols of the state. That’s not activism. It’s scaled-up street crime in areas that already have elevated rates of robbery, violent theft, and drug dealing.
Maghreb and sub-Saharan African origin groups are heavily overrepresented in those offenses relative to population. Second- and third-generation non-assimilation produced enclaves where French law is weakly enforced and French norms are optional. Burning cars requires no organization, no manifesto, and no plan. It just works.
Real political change takes votes, work, and time. This takes matches and phones.




















