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We are now in public beta at do.dev Many of our dev components are now available under a common API key. We are looking for LOTS of partners to help test and move things forwards. DMs are open.
Tim Meade retweeted
If someone asks you how much a single family's life is worth to the United States Navy, tell them the exact price: ten million dollars of steel.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon fell, a tiny two-seat wooden-and-fabric Cessna plane with almost no fuel left circled desperately above the American aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Inside that tiny cockpit, a father named Major Buang-Ly had crammed his wife and five small children, including a baby. He scribbled a note on a map, wrapped it around his pistol so it would not blow into the ocean, and dropped it onto the carrier deck.
A young American sailor picked up the crumpled paper and ran it up to Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The note read: "Can you move these helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child."
The flight deck of the USS Midway was completely jammed from bow to stern with military helicopters. A Cessna has no tailhook to catch carrier wires, and its pilot had never landed on a ship in his life.
By every military regulation, Captain Chambers had been in command for only five weeks. Throwing millions of dollars of U.S. government aircraft into the sea without permission from Washington could end his career in a court-martial.
Chambers looked up at the tiny plane circling in the wind with five children inside. He did not call an accountant in Washington.
"Clear the deck," the captain ordered.
Hundreds of young American sailors in yellow and green jerseys ran to the edge of the ship, put their shoulders against massive Huey helicopters, and shoved ten million dollars worth of machinery straight off the cliff into the South China Sea.
Captain Chambers turned the giant carrier into the wind at twenty-five knots. The tiny Cessna came down, bounced once on the steel runway, and rolled to a safe stop with feet to spare.
When the cockpit door opened and five small children stepped out onto the deck, three thousand American sailors roared so loud it drowned out the engines, and immediately passed around a hat to collect cash for the family's new life in America.
When the math says a child's life is too expensive, an American throws the math into the ocean.
🤖 Made with AI
Tim Meade retweeted
Honestly, it’s pretty crazy how many people think they’re intelligent just because they can sit on some dumb podcast and mock a man who’s actually building the future… only to expose their own room-temperature IQ the moment they try to make an argument
“He’s just a lucky billionaire”
Lucky?
Lucky once: PayPal
Lucky twice: Tesla making EVs mainstream when the entire auto industry doubted it could be done
Lucky three times: Building orbital rockets with boosters that literally fly back and land
Lucky four times: Starlink bringing internet to places that never had it
Lucky five times: Neuralink letting people with paralysis control computers using nothing but their thoughts
At some point, it stops being luck and starts being the work you’re too lazy to see or understand
Most of the people attacking Elon have never shipped a product, never made a payroll, never bet everything they own on an idea the whole world laughed at
You have to be a special kind of stupid to have never built a damn thing yourself and still think you’re smarter than the man who’s actually building the future
Elon did exactly that in 2008 and almost lost everything trying to keep Tesla and SpaceX alive
And in 50 years, nobody will remember the takes
Everyone will remember the rockets
Very very well said. Simple yet explanatory. Must read.
On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.
And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.
I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.
A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.
Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.
At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.
At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.
Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.
At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.
B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.
When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.
In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.
The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.
C. Suffering demands a culprit.
A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.
But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.
And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?
D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.
Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.
Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?
No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.
E. One lens, a thousand causes.
And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.
F. The perfect inversion.
Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.
It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.
G. The ballot box confirms it.
In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.
In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.
H. The way out.
These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.
The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.
That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.
Tim Meade retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Tim Meade retweeted
Feels like gameday 🥹
#GoBucks
I word. @elonmusk
Kind of a way to go through life. 1 step at a time; straight forwards
In 1984, a German correspondent in Paris shared his unusual advice for safely crossing the chaotic Place de la Concorde: “Walk in a steady pace and never look at the drivers, then they’ll think you need to stop for them”.
This classic 1984 archival clip shows a German correspondent in Paris demonstrating his surprisingly simple strategy for surviving the notoriously chaotic Place de la Concorde. Walking confidently into the stream of traffic, he keeps a steady pace and deliberately avoids looking at the drivers, believing that hesitation would only make the crossing more difficult.
Surrounded by vintage cars, buses, and nonstop traffic, the journalist calmly makes his way across as if it were completely routine. Decades later, the clip remains both hilarious and fascinating—a memorable glimpse of 1980s Paris and a lesson in how confidence and body language could apparently go a long way when navigating its streets.
Tim Meade retweeted
The data center discourse is funny because trade unions obviously like them and the jobs they provide, but Dems like hating technology more than they like the actual working class so here we are:
Tim Meade retweeted
HISTORIC MOMENT TODAY! 🙌🏼🏈
After a decade of being shut out for his Christian conservative views, my friend @JackBrewerBSI was finally welcomed BACK into the Minnesota Vikings stadium!
What a powerful moment of redemption!
GOD IS GOOD!! 🙌🏼🔥
Yea I got to go more that the political situation is the cause over AI
Perhaps sky high city (and state taxes), insane real estate taxes passed through on rental rates, punishing regulation and a mayor who has surrounded himself with overt terror supporters, Israel bashers and who disparages business builders has also contributed to the decline in jobs (along with a mass exodus of these cities too tax payers). The reduction of these job opportunities, as evidence by the expansions of Goldman, JP Morgan and Citadel, started long before the impact of AI. These are the very jobs that our financial institution can easily relocate to more business friendly cities and states.
Chag Sameach in this Simchat Torah and Sukkot.
