Good idea. Good enough to pin.

SpaceX's 11th employee just became a billionaire. Gwynne Shotwell joined SpaceX in 2002. She was employee number 11, joining as VP of Business Development before the company had proven a single rocket could fly. She didn't even go there looking for a job. She had taken a colleague to lunch to celebrate him leaving for SpaceX, ran into Musk at the restaurant, and got interviewed on the spot. A week later, she joined him. Her job: sell rocket launches for a company nobody had heard of. She built the Falcon vehicle manifest to over $5 billion in commercial contracts. She managed SpaceX's growth to 22,000 employees. She was the one who told NASA, the Air Force, and paying commercial customers why SpaceX could get to orbit cheaper and faster than anyone before it. She was also the one who said no to going public for years. "I wasn't sure the company would go public," she said on CNBC yesterday. She resisted the pressure because she believed the public markets would force SpaceX into quarterly thinking, which would kill the mission. She finally decided it was time. "I do not want to focus on quarterly earnings," she said on IPO day. "What we're doing is very futuristic." Her stake is now worth north of $1.3 billion. She's SpaceX's fifth-largest Class A shareholder. The 24 years of operational work that made yesterday possible have Gwynne Shotwell's fingerprints on them.

This is great.

Great, now get rid of all the other manufactured "phobias" you have been pushing the past 30 years.

Yeats wrote his greatest poems after the age of 50 The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children: all written when he was old, sick, and largely dismissed as a relic He spent his youth writing folklore and chasing a woman who refused him four times She refused him again when he was famous He went home and wrote the poetry that defined the twentieth century The career most people would have called finished was the one that had not started yet

What does the average black applicant to Columbia, with an SAT score (1320) that no Asian or white student would even think of applying with, do with his University of South Carolina-level score? If he's smart, he doesn't submit his score to Columbia admissions. What does the average Asian applicant to Columbia, with an SAT score (1500) higher than the vast majority of black applicants, do with his amazing SAT score? He makes sure the admissions committee sees it, because if he doesn't, he's toast. If this system seems incredibly racist to you, it's because it is.

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

RT @BurggrabenH: There are plenty of warning signs In 2025, Google spent $80 billion on AI CapEx, which it funded mostly from its enormous…

META IS AN ABSOLUTE MESS INSIDE RIGHT NOW Wired just dropped an exclusive, and the details are wild. This week someone interrupted a livestreamed Meta meeting, open to thousands of employees, with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch." They told the presenters to find a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit." A presenter covered their face with their hands. Employees in the chat called the start "spicy." Here is what's behind it. Meta's AI restructuring cut 8,000 jobs last month, 10% of the company. The same restructuring feeds a unit called Applied AI, where 6,500 engineers and product managers have been drafted in waves since April. There is no application process. You get selected, and your options are join or leave the company. Members call themselves "draftees." The new job: writing puzzles and coding problems to train Meta's AI models, two tasks a week. People hired to build apps for billions of users now assemble training data for hundreds of AI scientists. "It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Another: "Most people find the work soul-crushing." At the same time, Meta started recording US employees' clicks and keystrokes to generate more AI training data. Over 1,600 employees signed a petition demanding it stop. The concession: employees can pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes. Zuckerberg's response came in an internal memo Friday: "We've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." He repeated his promise of no more mass layoffs this year. His fixes: limits on the manager ratios Meta had deliberately pushed to 50-to-1 on some teams, bigger budgets for team events, a hackathon next month, and assigned desks by the end of the year. That same memo says Meta's north star is "to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact." The most talented people in the world are writing puzzles for a model and asking permission to pause the keystroke logger. META declined to comment.

Someone asked me to recommend a good book on parenting. I would guess that most books about parenting are tedious. So my recommendation is to read autobiographies, the early parts of which are usually implicitly about parenting.

This is eye-opening. Even the weak Euro didn’t prevent the self-inflicted collapse of German industry. All the bad policies will one day be seen as the largest self-sabotage of an advanced economy ever. If the left can ruin Germany, imagine what they could do to your country.

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day. 400 of them are now worth over $100 million. These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries. Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000. Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous." The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before. Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

Berkeley math professor: “Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates' chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.” Berkeley admitted 45% of applicants from a high school where nearly 94% of “students failed to meet the state standards in mathematics.” It admitted less than 14% of applicants from a school where “nearly 100 percent of its students in AP Calculus BC pass the national exam with a perfect score of 5.”

La crisis de fertilidad no se arregla con slogans ni con ministerios. Se arregla cuando la sociedad vuelve a tratar a los hijos como una parte central de una vida buena, no como un accidente financiero que hay que postergar hasta que todo sea perfecto. El problema es que el momento perfecto no llega. Primero hay que estudiar, luego trabajar, luego comprar casa, luego estabilizar la pareja, luego viajar, luego ahorrar. Cuando por fin parece razonable tener hijos, muchas parejas descubren que la biologia no esperaba. Y nadie les habia explicado con suficiente claridad que la fertilidad cae antes que las ganas de ser padres. Tambien hay un error cultural enorme: presentar a los hijos como el final de la libertad. Mi experiencia es la contraria. Los hijos te quitan libertad superficial, pero te dan una libertad mas profunda: la de dejar de vivir solo para ti mismo. Te obligan a ordenar prioridades, a pensar en decadas, a construir algo que te trasciende. Los gobiernos pueden ayudar con impuestos, vivienda, guarderias y horarios laborales mas humanos. Pero la solucion no sera solo economica. Es cultural. Tenemos que volver a decir sin complejos que formar una familia es una de las grandes aventuras de la vida, no una renuncia. La tecnologia reproductiva ayuda mucho, pero no reemplaza una cultura que anime a empezar antes.

More and more people on the moderate and conservative side are recognizing that feminism has been harmful. They talk about how it lied to women, made women unhappy, damaged families, hurt boys, and left men struggling. But frustratingly, the conversation often ends in the same place: women as the primary victims. Women are the victims of dating apps. Women are the victims of birth control. Women are the victims of delayed motherhood. Women are the victims of feminism itself. Even if all those things disappeared tomorrow, the deeper problem would remain. Feminism’s greatest victory was not dating apps, birth control, or women entering the workforce. It was teaching us that every social question must be judged primarily by how it affects women. Can we say that children need their mothers without immediately shifting the conversation to whether mothers will be bored? Can we say that a struggling marriage should sometimes be endured for the sake of the children without immediately asking whether the wife feels fulfilled? Can we ask what men need from women without first reassuring ourselves that women will benefit too? The family was built on obligations flowing in all directions. Feminism taught us to see obligations to women as moral, and obligations from women as oppression. Until that attitude changes, feminism remains undefeated.

"... the political left has long had a remarkable lack of interest in how wealth is created. As far as they are concerned, wealth exists somehow and the only interesting question is how to redistribute it." — Thomas Sowell

I always did well in school, but never liked it much, until grade 22 when I did my masters in Air & Space Law. I always saw school as a necessity to build a better life - like an obstacle course. A former girlfriend of mine who also studied law but in another city, accompanied me to classes in my undergrad law school for several days. She loved school. After a few days sitting with me she said - "I think I have figured out why you don't like school - you look like a caged animal in class." She was right. That is exactly how I felt. She was the first person who described it correctly - like a caged animal. It never dawned on me to describe it that way. Anyway, the last day of school was always my second favourite day of the year, after Christmas Day. With six kids, five of whom are in school, it still is. Both my wife and I look forward to this day. It represents freedom from institutional thinking, arbitrary schedules, erratic schedule changes, group thinking, massive parental messaging, etc. However, most importantly it represents the opportunity to spend more time with our kids. It’s estimated that 90% of the total time we spend with our children happens before the age of 18 —a statistic you can’t fully appreciate until that time has passed. Enjoy!

I haven't posted recently about the war because to do it justice would require a very long post and would bring the usual retards into my replies. I'll try to make this short. My general opinion hasn't changed since my first post on the first day of the war: Military force to effect regime change is probably a bad idea (for a variety of reasons), but force to terminate Iran's nuke program has some chance of achieving its objective. Also: The only way to gauge the success of any sustained military action against Iran is to calculate whether Trump ultimately gets a deal that is materially better than that which Obama obtained (without having to use military force or harming the global economy). Trump gets one thing right. He has never veered from his core insistence that Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons. This is a necessary and coherent starting point. Unfortunately, the present negotiations don't show signs of producing anything on the nuke issue that Obama didn't get, and, even once you factor in the repairable damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran's undeniable asymmetrical successes in this conflict and its proven regime durability make the current US scorecard on the nuke issue arguably worse than it was under Obama. If Trump walks away now, this will be the most embarrassing defeat for the US since Vietnam because we waged a war and ended up with a less advantageous position for the US on nukes — notably, the reality of an emboldened (and more radical) regime with a confirmed effective asymmetrical war strategy and no future constraints on its program — than when it started. Sure, the US can go back to its pre-negotiations war plan and hope that it eventually wears Iran down (always a possibility), or Trump can go against the domestic political currents and put troops on the ground in an attempt to secure the Straits and retrieve the enriched uranium. Or maybe the US has something else up its sleeve we don't know about yet. Who knows. But either way, Trump's position right now isn't great.

Average SAT by major at Columbia. Classics improbably edges out Math and Physics for the top spot at 1529. Sociology is on the bottom (1422), though "Ethnicity & Race Studies", "Public Health", and "Human Rights" aren't too far in front. The within-school spread is 100 points or so — around half of a standard deviation of the SAT-taker population.