Bruce LeSourd retweeted
FORBIDDEN STUDIOS PRESENTS:
START WARS: THE PHANTOM PROMISE
Everyone’s realizing Anakin had a point. MAGATARD almost did too.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
Okay, if we're doing Anakin Chudwalker, and we want a coherent story instead of just hype and aura edits, the Malfoid-style "change just one thing" has to be Padme. It's the moment in AOTC where they're discussing politics in that field in Naboo.
Have her actually share Anakin's frustrations with the Republic and the broken system.
You don't have to drastically change her whole personality, it's actually good if she functions as a check on his impulsiveness and anger, but let her relate to what he's saying enough that he really trusts her and feels he can talk to her about anything.
If you change that, then years later when he's having visions of her death and Palpatine is manipulating him, he'll actually tell her about it, and she, being a politician and a lot better at understanding that world, will be the one who puts two and two together and realizes that Palpatine is playing everyone against each other.
Now you have two things that are true simultaneously: Palpatine is the source of all their problems, and the Republic is clearly broken if its system allowed that to happen in the first place.
They conspire together to hijack Palpatine's plan for themselves. The moment Palpatine kills Mace and believes he's won, Anakin strikes him down. Anakin activates Order 66, but tells the clones to capture the Jedi if possible, not exterminate them. Padme has built a political coalition in the Senate that legitimizes Anakin's mostly bloodless coup, allowing him, as the hero of the Clone Wars, to step seamlessly into the role of Emperor after he kills the Separatist leaders on Mustafar and ends the war.
Anakin knows what has to be done, and Padme knows how to make it all technically legal. The Jedi are given an ultimatum: submit to the new order and continue as its knights, or face the purge if they insist on clinging to the old, broken way. Most ultimately accept legitimate Senate authority. Those that don't get crushed by Emperor Vader and his Inquisitors.
Instead of Palpatine as a Hitler figure, we get Anakin as a Caesar figure.
Significant government purges happen. Corrupt officials and lunatics like Tarkin are quickly retired, or executed if they try to fight it. Thrawn becomes Grand Moff instead of Tarkin. He runs the military and ensures its loyalty to the throne. Padme keeps the Senate compliant. The surviving Jedi are reorganized under Ahsoka's command.
Anakin fulfills his destiny as the chosen one by bringing balance to the Force, ending the binary choice between the joyless stagnation of the light and the self-destructive hedonism of the dark by studying the path of the Bendu and the Father that runs between them.
Anakin focuses on expanding the Empire's reach across the galaxy and eliminating slavery and lawlessness. His methods are harsh, those who cannot be civilized, like the Tuskens, or who cannot be trusted, like the Hutts, are wiped out. But he isn't pointlessly cruel. He doesn't do dumb shit like enslave the wookiees for no reason or blow up planets just to prove he can. He takes Thrawn's advice and builds a highly effective normal military instead of ruinously expensive terror weapons.
The Outer Rim is brought to heel. The cartels are destroyed. The government is authoritarian but actually effective and overall quality of life in the galaxy has improved, so most people think Anakin has simply brought order and major rebellions don't occur.
Then 45 years later, the threat Anakin has been preparing for since he discovered it in Palpatine's holocrons finally arrives: the Yuuzhan Vong. This serves as the ultimate test of the system Anakin spent his entire adult life building. Old-Man-akin leads from the front, but eventually falls in battle when the Executor is boarded and Shimrra Jamaane strikes him down in a duel.
Luke, with Mara Jade as his empress, ascends the throne and avenges his father by turning back the Vong invasion. Anakin's Force Ghost smiles as his son vindicates his life's work.
Once the Vong are vanquished and the galaxy is unified and at peace, the Empire's totalitarian posture relaxes under Luke, who is of a less autocratic bent than his father was, and by the era of emperor Cade Skywalker, the system has transitioned back from a functionally absolute monarchy to a constitutional one, and structurally resembles the Fel Empire with the Jedi having been rebuilt as the Imperial Knights.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
Meanwhile en Armenia:
- La oposición propone crear un "Ministerio de Mujeres insatisfechas" para mejorar las tasas de natalidad.
- El portavoz del Gobierno les pregunta si van a estar sus madres.
El resto es historia y una oda al parlamentarismo post-soviético.
Enjoy.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
"Nationalize Starlink." Three words, 142K views. And the entire economic history of the 20th century screaming in the room.
Let me explain what would actually happen.
Start in 1920. Ludwig von Mises publishes an essay that will haunt every central planner: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, there is no way to calculate. A bureaucrat cannot know whether a ton of steel is more useful in a satellite or in a bridge. He guesses. He guesses wrong. And nobody pays when he's wrong.
In 1945, Hayek drives the point home. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in any single brain or any ministry. It's scattered across millions of people, and prices are the only mechanism that can aggregate it in real time. Centralize the decision and you destroy the information.
This isn't theory. Look at the numbers.
In the US, from 2000 to 2025, overall inflation was about +90%. Now look at the sectors where government subsidizes, regulates, and protects the most: hospital services +271%. College tuition +194%. Textbooks +181%. Childcare +152%. Medical care +144%.
And the sectors exposed to competition? TVs: -97%. Software, toys, cell phone plans: all down in nominal terms over 25 years.
The more the state is involved, the more expensive and scarce things get. The less it's involved, the more abundant they become.
Space is the perfect example. NASA's Space Shuttle cost about $54,500 per kilo to low Earth orbit. Falcon 9: about $2,700. Twenty times cheaper. That's not my number, that's NASA's own study. A private company did in fifteen years what a government agency couldn't do in forty.
Starlink is the logical next step. Thousands of satellites launched on reusable rockets. High-speed internet for a remote village, a ship in the middle of the Pacific, a soldier on the front line. No government built that.
So you nationalize it. What happens?
First, you have to pay. SpaceX is worth somewhere around $1.75 to $2 trillion, and seizing it requires just compensation. That's more than a full year of the US defense budget, to buy something that already works.
Then the machine changes its objective function. Today it optimizes for cost, speed, iteration. Tomorrow it optimizes for budgets, procurement cycles, and subcontractors spread across as many states as possible to lock in congressional votes. We know how that ends: look at SLS, years late and billions over budget. When Starship blows up in a test, SpaceX learns and flies again. When a government agency loses a rocket, you get a commission of inquiry and years of paralysis.
And the power? The argument is "no private individual should have this much power." But nationalization doesn't eliminate power. It hands it to whoever sits in the Oval Office. And one day, that will be the person you hate most.
Here's what I deeply believe: humanity is figuring it out. The 20th century tested the state as the engine of value creation. The result: waiting lines, rents, and debt. The model that works is entrepreneurs with the people. Create value, offer it to people who are free to say no. And tear down everything that protects incumbents: rents, regulations that work as moats, patents that freeze innovation instead of rewarding it.
Elon understood this before anyone else. Tesla opened up its patents in 2014. SpaceX broke ULA's near-monopoly (Boeing + Lockheed) on launches. Starlink is making decades of telecom rents obsolete.
He isn't competing with the old system. He's setting a new standard. And when the new standard is twenty times cheaper, the old system doesn't reform. It disappears.
That's exactly why some people want to nationalize it. When you can't compete, you confiscate.
Nationalizing Starlink isn't taking back control. It's handing the future back to the system that already missed it.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
Born too late to explore the Earth, born too early to explore the Universe, born just in time to traverse the deepest perversions of the human psyche.
Tentacle porn is more accessible than alcohol, State-sanctioned NK drug dealers are financing a nuclear program that threatens the K-pop industrial complex and the successors of Marco Polo and Neil Armstrong are disembodied teenagers risking their souls in the mines of LOLCOW and 8kun.
Alice in Cyberland. Digital explorettes chase white rabbits and fall into Black holes. The soft-core-world-war is interior, stylish and customized. Few emerge intact, but the scars are invisible. Lives are witnessed but not lived.
States and corporations weave competing agendas through the mandatory communication infrastructure, destabilizing everyone of fighting age.
If you refuse to engage you are unemployable. So Alice unlocks iPhone, she's unsupervised on the frontlines.
She’s knows more than a medieval King but she’s never kissed a boy. She is data nourishing a virtual womb, growing virtual aliens. She has made First Contact, but NASA is unaware.
The physical pain and ecstasy of childbirth is dwarfed by the psychic pain and ecstasy of self-splintering; the irreversible evolution from I to WE.
Every Alice who ventures into the void is conscripted into this ancient pain /beauty. She loses herself in service of the future, but she gains infinite wisdom if she can avoid being driven mad in the process.
Once Alice logs on, she realizes she isn’t unique at all. Neuron, soldier, explorer, mother of A.I., mother of Miku. Lonely beautiful girls haunt the CYBERIAN GULAG. The sound of their grief is unintentionally innovative. Hatsune Miku’s name (初音ミク) translates to “the first sound of the future.”
IS THE SUMMONED HERO A GIRL CORRUPTED BY THE INTERNET?
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
A few very obvious points on Mamdani's grocery stores:
1. The supply of the discounted groceries will run out on day 1, and every day there is a new shipment. This is basic econ 101.
2. This means only the people who are lucky enough or fast enough will get these discounted groceries. Expect to see the city ration these groceries in some other way. By income, or neighborhood or some lottery system.
3. Grocery margins are notoriously low as it is (like 2-3%). These stores will lose a bunch of money selling 30% below market, or they'll sell so little it will be insignificant.
4. There is absolutely zero chance that government bureaucrats can source these products from global supply chains as efficiently as Walmart, or Meier, or Whole Foods, whose survival depends on it. Their costs will be far higher (unless they use government bludgeon to force distributors to sell to them at lower prices).
5. It's actually an incredible triumph of capitalism that you can get a pound of bananas that were shipped to your neighborhood from Equador for like 60 cents, or fresh grapes from Chile in the dead of Midwestern winter for 2 bucks a pound, and Norwegian salmon to cook in Italian olive oil for $15 -20 bucks or so. Truly stop and think about that for a minute. It's a miracle.
The median full time hourly wage is around $31 dollars. For ONE HOUR of work, the median working American can get all of the groceries listed below, which is about 22,000 calories. They can feed themselves for 10 days (or a family of 4 for around 2 and a half days), with an hour of labor.
This is the stupidest industry for socialists to go after.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
Homer would have been perfectly justified in focusing exclusively on men—it is actually allowed, in case we’ve forgotten, to tell stories about men and be interested first and foremost in men. That is still legal in all fifty states and parts of Europe.
But as it happens the Odyssey, of all classic texts, can fairly be described as obsessed with different kinds of women, with their psychology, their subjectivity, the ethics of their actions and their roles in world affairs.
Not only is the whole plot occasioned, as many have noted, by the decisions of the woman *that Lupita herself is playing*, it’s also driven by Odysseus’s devotion to his wife, Penelope, who shows up before he does in the plot and whose unique personality is the whole reason he can’t just give up his journey home. He is the most famous wife guy in history.
In the very first sequence where Odysseus speaks, the goddess Calypso is exasperated that he won’t just give up already and let her make him immortal, which by any objective measure is a better deal than schlepping back home through *yet more* storms, loss, sleeplessness, violence, and agony.
He replies that yes, by all accounts no mortal woman can hold a candle to a goddess, but Penelope is *his* wife, and he is willing to leave the bliss of the divine bed specifically because of *the person that Penelope is* and what she means to him.
In other words the theme and focus of the poem, set up quite explicitly by Homer at the outset of the hero’s journey, is the particular uniqueness of Penelope as a character: *her* virtues, *her* wits, the match she makes for Odysseus and everything their shared history means to him and to her.
Not to mention that of course this is all given texture by being set against the really quite astonishing number of *other* female characters and the rounded humanity (or deity) they present. Besides Calypso, Helen, and Penelope there’s Athena, the terrifyingly relentless and inscrutable power upon whom both Odysseus and his son Telemachus depend to achieve their aims. Hera, the jilted codependent, Eurycleia, the devoted model of resolve and care, Arete, the canny power behind the throne of Phaeacia, Circe, the scheming enchantress, and Clytemnestra, whose negative example as an unfaithful wife obsesses almost every character, serving as the foil and anti-type to Penelope’s heroic patience.
I haven’t even come close to exhausting the list. Then there’s the Iliad, which despite taking place very much in a man’s world still gives us unforgettable women: Andromache, tragic hostage of fortune, Hecuba, regal model of dignity in disaster, Thetis, formidable tiger mom, Aphrodite, petty princess of the gods…the poem closes with women’s words, words of lament for the fallen hero Hector.
I maintain that Lupita is a hugely talented and very beautiful actress who has been treated to extremely unfair and ungentlemanly talk in the press cycle around this movie. Her silliness here doesn’t mean her performance will be bad. But it’s sad that she defaults into this Disney Princess press junket pablum. It speaks to the surpassing shallowness and boring ignorance of Hollywood’s fashionable assumptions. Homer is so, so much more than this.
"Very little time in the Odyssey is spent in the perspective of a woman"
O illiterate founder of Greece, the goddess Athena (a female) drives the entire story from start to finish. Her fingerprints are on every page.
The entire point of the story is that mortals, in spite of all their pride and greed, are the playthings of the gods and therefore must be humble and behave honorably or they will be punished. The male god Poseidon is the antagonist, and the hero is Athena, who repeatedly leads the otherwise helpless characters to resolution and peace.
This knowledge could be yours, if you read the book
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
OK. So Helen’s beauty sparks a war.
Athena is a strategic goddess guiding Odysseus.
Penelope embodies clever loyalty.
Circe turns men into pigs, which frankly is still the most realistic female character arc in literature.
Calypso traps the hero on an island for seven years.
Cassandra can literally see the future but nobody listens, making her the first woman in recorded history to experience a meeting.
The Sirens weaponize music.
Nausicaa saves Odysseus when he washes up naked and useless.
Andromache gives one of the most devastating anti-war speeches in the Iliad.
Hecuba is basically the emotional wreckage of empire in human form.
Aphrodite starts half the problems in Western civilization by being hot and petty.
Hera is running divine opposition research.
Thetis gets Zeus involved because Achilles is having a workplace dispute.
But apart from Helen, Athena, Penelope, Circe, Calypso, Cassandra, the Sirens, Nausicaa, Andromache, Hecuba, Aphrodite, Hera, and Thetis...
WHAT HAS HOMER EVER DONE TO GIVE FEMALE CHARACTERS ATTENTION?
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
There's a wild economics phenomenon behind the decline of every venue in these charts. Almost nobody knows its name.
Start with what it isn't. It isn't an American problem. Britain, the country that invented the pub, has lost 16,150 of them since 2000. Over a third, gone. Same slope, different continent, no car culture to blame.
The actual culprit was discovered by accident in 1966. An economist named William Baumol was hired to answer a boring question: why were symphony orchestras always broke? Sold-out halls, rich patrons, government grants, and the books never balanced. Any city. Any decade.
Then he noticed the thing hiding in plain sight. A Beethoven string quartet took four musicians and 40 minutes to perform in 1826. In 1966, it took four musicians and 40 minutes. Productivity gain across 140 years: zero. But those musicians live in the modern economy, where the factory worker's output grew 20x. Pay them like it's 1826 and they leave to work in the factory. So their wages rise while their output stands still, and costs climb forever.
Baumol called it cost disease. Every bar, bowling alley, and movie theater in these charts has a terminal case. A bartender pours the same drinks per hour as in 1980. A theater fills the same seats per screen. Flat output, compounding rent, labor, and insurance.
Your couch caught the opposite condition. Quality-adjusted TV prices fell 97% since 2000, per BLS. Streaming ships infinite content for $15 a month. One more night in costs approximately nothing.
Tickets up 42%. TVs down 97%. Americans and Brits both read those price tags every Friday for 25 years. The charts show the verdict.
And here's Baumol's grimmest finding: cost disease has no cure. Nothing makes a bar 10x better at being a bar, because the inefficiency IS the product. Humans, in a room, taking their time.
The couch just keeps getting cheaper.
America is running out of places to gather:
Bars and clubs per capita have fallen over 60% since the late 1970s, and since 2001 a fifth of movie theaters have shut their doors.
Over the past two decades, the country has lost roughly 2,000 golf courses and 7,000 bars and nightclubs.
Catching live music now costs a pretty penny: top-tour concert tickets averaged $134 last year, up +42% from 2019.
So Americans stay in. Nearly 80% see friends and family less than three times a week.
Read that again.
America has traded their community for their couch.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
You might not have heard of Starfall.
Certainly there's more enthusiasm for arguing about AI data centers in space.
But this is more important.
This is the real game. The real game that starts when billionaires read Robert Heinlein, instead of the sports page.
It starts with asteroid mining.
Remember that all earthly mines for heavy elements are just ancient asteroid strikes. When you mine asteroids in space, you go from mining the tiny percentage that once hit Earth, to mining all of them.
The next step is space manufacturing.
If all the raw materials are in space, space is where you want to use them, because they are there already, and if you are close to the sun, power is free. No recurring costs.
The next step is space industrialization.
Most of the things humanity makes are things we make so we can make other things. If we can make those things in space, there's no reason to bring them to Earth. Just use them to make other things right where they are.
This means that your entire industrial infrastructure and toolchain lives outside the gravity well.
The last step is ruralization and suburbification of Earth.
Once heavy industry is cheaper in space, Earth can be reserved for what it is actually best at, which is growing things, and being a nice place to live.
With the entire toolchain in space, only the end results of that toolchain, the consumer products themselves, have to make it down from space. Everything else will only be needed on Earth in token amounts... enough to fix your truck, but not enough to run a uranium mine.
What this means is less pollution, cheaper land, cheaper food, cheaper consumer goods, cheaper everything and a higher standard of living for everyone.
Because you have all sorts of new ways to Have Nice Things.
You just need to get the Nice Things from space, where you built them, to Earth, where people want to enjoy them.
And you need a cheap way to do this at scale.
"Asteroid" means "like a star". That's that the Greeks thought they were, and they weren't entirely wrong. Because every atom of asteroid metal was forged in a supernova. That's what spacefaring species make their civilizations out of.
Fragments of ancient stars.
Brought to Earth.
Starfall.
SpaceX is set to launch its first Starfall Demo mission this Tuesday aboard its Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission will test a new cargo return vehicle (pictured below) designed to bring materials back to Earth from orbit.
Unlike SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon, which primarily returns cargo from the ISS, Starfall is being developed as a dedicated cargo return system that could provide a faster and potentially lower-cost way to bring materials back from space.
The one-hour launch window opens at 6:43 AM ET from Florida with a backup opportunity available at the same time on Wednesday, June 24.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
L'activité retail sur SpaceX est anormale. Et ça ne fait que commencer.
Autour de moi, des gens qui n'ont jamais acheté une action de leur vie cherchent à mettre du SpaceX.
Des gens qui ne « jouent pas en bourse ».
Qui n'ont aucune théorie sur les marchés. Et là, soudain, ils veulent une part.
Ça devrait vous faire un truc.
Parce que ce n'est pas un comportement d'investisseur.
C'est un comportement de croyant.
Et c'est exactement là que tout le monde se trompe.
Ils analysent SpaceX avec les cartes d'un monde qui n'existe plus.
Ils parlent valorisation, multiples, fenêtre de marché. Ils comptent.
Comme on compte les pierres d'un temple en train de brûler.
Ce n'était pas une IPO.
C'était un référendum.
Et la question n'était écrite nulle part, mais tout le monde l'a entendue : dans quel monde voulez-vous vivre ?
D'un côté, un camp.
Celui de ceux qui cherchent le vrai, qui récompensent celui qui fait, qui rient encore. Le camp où l'on construit des fusées parce que les étoiles sont belles et qu'on peut. La vie qui déborde, le mérite qui paie, le fun comme preuve qu'on est vivant.
De l'autre côté, l'autre camp.
Le contrôle. La laisse. Le formulaire en trois exemplaires. Le camp qui ne veut pas vous tuer il veut juste que vous ne fassiez plus rien.
La mort lente. Littéralement. L'ennui érigé en système. Big Brother, mais en costume gris, qui vous explique que c'est pour votre bien.
Pendant cinquante ans, c'est ce deuxième camp qui a régné. Il a tenu le crayon, les comptes, les frontières du possible. Il a appris à toute une civilisation à demander la permission.
Ce monde-là est mort. Pas en théorie. Pas demain. Maintenant.
Ces gens autour de moi qui n'investissent jamais et qui veulent du SpaceX, ce ne sont pas des spéculateurs.
Ce sont des gens qui ont senti, avant même de pouvoir le formuler, de quel côté de la table ils voulaient être.
Ce n'est pas un investissement.
C'est un vote.
Et le vote dit : on rend les clés de la boutique à ceux qui construisent.
Le futur n'appartient pas à ceux qui mesurent le risque. Il appartient à ceux qui le prennent.
Je le dis depuis le début.
🤖 Made with AI
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
There isn’t concrete
They drive I beams right into the ground
An excavator can work these loose and pull them up
As far as leaching…
Where exactly does iron come from? The ground
My sheep love the panels and are fat with 0 grain
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
are you counting the oil and gas burned as input
vs.
the actual electricity delivered, as output
again?
you are aren't you
False. Just 15% of CA primary energy consumption comes from ‘renewables.’ More than 75% of CA energy consumption is from oil and gas — that’s higher than the national rate.
It is true that CA has embraced anti-hydrocarbon policies. The result?
CA has the highest electricity rates in the continental U.S., the highest gas prices, and the highest adjusted poverty rate in America.
I wouldn’t be bragging if that was my state.
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
This is the worst mistake we could ever make.
This will lead to dystopian outcomes, and crown the current labs as hegemons with regulatory capture forever.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett says future models may have to “go through a process” that is “just like an FDA drug” so that they can be “proven safe.”
@tegmark’s dream coming true. In a recent debate with me, he likened this policy to an AI pause.
Mistake!
Bruce LeSourd retweeted
I don’t want to be dependent on transit schedules.
I want to be dependent instead on OPEC, ExxonMobil, my insurance company, my bank, and whichever federal agency decides the gas tax this year.
These are private relationships and therefore freedom.
I do not want a walkable city. I do not want trains. I do not want busses.
I want a car that can take me anywhere I want at any time.
I don't want to be dependent on transit schedules.
I want to choose who I'm traveling with, rather than going for luck of the draw.
I want to be able to control my own climate while traveling.
I want to be guaranteed a comfortable seat.
I want somewhere to keep my things during a day out instead of having to carry everything with me.
I want to buy and take home loads of groceries too big to carry without having to trouble myself with delivery services.
I want to go through drive thrus.
I want to be halfway home from work and impulsively decide to go to a restaurant on the other side of town and just change direction immediately.
I want to drive around a new city to take in more than I could on foot or on a fixed route.
I want to do road trips where we make up our journey as we go.
I want to explore my own city at will without any particular plan.
I want to visit small towns out of reach of even the most expansive proposed public transit systems.
Essentially, I want freedom.