This meme gets it exactly right. Bernie and a lot of politicians want you to imagine Elon sitting on a massive pile of cash like some cartoon villain hoarding gold. That’s not how it works. His net worth is almost entirely tied up in Tesla and SpaceX stock. He’s said himself that less than 0.1% of it is actual cash. The rest is ownership in real companies that build things. Tesla has over 100,000 employees making electric cars, batteries, and energy systems. SpaceX has thousands of people working on rockets and Starlink. These aren’t abstract numbers on a spreadsheet. They’re factories, engineers, technicians, and workers who get paid and, in a lot of cases, own stock themselves. Just recently SpaceX’s valuation turned more than 4,400 of those employees into millionaires. Not just executives — regular people who helped build the rockets. The money isn’t sitting idle either. It gets poured back into the companies. That’s how they dropped rocket launch costs dramatically and got Starlink internet out to millions of people who never had decent access before. Customers actually choose to buy Teslas and use Starlink. Investors and employees choose to put their money and time into these companies because they see the value. Most of Tesla isn’t even owned by Elon. A huge chunk belongs to regular retail investors, index funds, pension funds, and the employees. When the value goes up, a lot of normal people benefit too. Politicians know this isn’t liquid cash sitting in a vault. They just hope enough people don’t understand the difference so they can score points by pretending it is. You can’t just grab a “trillion dollars” that mostly exists as shares in operating companies without hurting the actual businesses, the jobs, and the progress they’re making. This is what wealth creation looks like when it’s working — not some fixed pile of money getting stolen from everyone else.

All human beings are tribal to some degree. Interestingly, one of the main things that separates people is on what criteria they base their dividing lines. For some, it's superficial traits. For others, it's value driven. Even being an individualist puts you into a tribe.

A couple months ago I starting with the original film and I proceeded to watch SG-1 partly in preparation for the new series which from everything I had heard at the time looked promising. It turned out the show was even better than I had remembered it to be. The writing was good the characters all had their part to play and as the show develops I can't help but come to care about them all. A nice mix of thoughtful Sci Fi concepts and action mixed in and even the special effects hold up well enough to not take me out of the show. The main criticism I had was some of the repetitive lines given to Richard Dean Anderson that do get annoying at times, maybe they were lines he put in himself I don't know but apart from that overal it was a joy to revisit after so many years. So my thoughts end up being well they don't make them like this anymore do they. 🤷 Sadly turns out I was right that they don't even want to make anything with the kind of thoughtfulness and storytelling shows like SG-1 and SG Atlantis had back in those days. They will literally cancel the possibility of it even happening so they can serve us slop like the Rings of Power. Great job Amazon. At least I know that whatever show they end up producing who's showrunners hate the fans and disrespects the lore will crash and burn and waste them a lot of money. It just sucks to know we may have been so close to something that could have been good. Who's even going to bother to watch what they put out now instead. Probably not me unless it's only because I'm curious to see how bad it is like I did with Starfleet Academy. Seems we live in a time where everything has to become the worst version of itself. RIP STAR GATE.

Nope. No. Sorry. Gonna have to push back on this. We were ever mindful of creating a show that would have broad appeal.

Two years from now, at this exact time, you’ll be standing in the places you used to dream about. Send this to yourself.

This needs to be illegal.

🚨MASSIVE DISCOVERY rewrites Human History: The world’s oldest form of writing has been found in a cave in Germany, dating 38,000 years 📍This is well over 30,000 YEARS OLDER than Sumerian Cuneiform from ancient Mesopotamia, which was long thought to be the oldest 🤯

They removed CD/DVD drives from devices. They made physical media harder to buy and use. They removed expandable storage from phones. They pushed us into streaming subscriptions. They made always-online normal. They made unlimited internet necessary. Then slowly raised the price of everything. Ownership quietly became renting.

The entire political/elite class of our time in the West will hence forth forever be known as the Epstein Class. 👏 👏

At the end of 2024, many people were already celebrating. A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in the United States was being discussed, and we were going to have a “Bitcoin president.” The mood was as if the battle had already been won. But the fight hadn’t even started. Bitcoin is not competing in a neutral arena. It is competing against the incumbent monetary system - a system that finances governments, sustains banking profits, funds wars, and enables chronic deficits. And that system is not an accident. It is the foundation of modern political power. Governments benefit from the ability to issue debt in money they can expand. Central banks benefit from controlling the supply of that money. Commercial banks benefit from creating credit on top of it. Bitcoin removes that privilege. It replaces discretionary monetary policy with a fixed supply. It removes the ability to inflate away obligations. It limits the state’s capacity to finance itself through currency debasement. That is a direct constraint on power. Expecting the beneficiaries of fiat to welcome a system that restricts them is unrealistic. They have every incentive to preserve the current architecture. And when incentives are strong enough, resistance will be strong as well. Bitcoin does not win because politicians say the right words. It wins, if it wins, because it survives sustained opposition from a system designed to perpetuate itself. Declaring victory early misunderstands the nature of the game. The real test only begins now.

I was hoping crypto would be the Noah’s ark for retail to be able to participate in the value gain from the automation of all knowledge work. One can dream of a world where we can get exposure to the parts of AGI before they are widely adopted by the monopolies. But it just seems like we can’t escape the perverse incentives of capital. I don’t blame the devs for taking the gains, they just got their ticket out of the underclass. It feels like digital feudalism is around the corner and the window of opportunity for the normies to leave the underclass is dwindling away.

I can't verify or know if this is true. But something sure wasn't right about that dump. So it's an interesting take.

I could probably do with some more Temperance myself... 🫡

Crypto was invented to remove middlemen. Odd how crypto bros introduce as many middlemen and leverage and risk as they can possibly find. This stuff was invented to specifically protect you from all the stuff you're destroying yourself with.

Stoic Philosophy Meets Power Metal ~ Iron Resolve Tune made with Suno Lyric video made by me 🤘

Reasons I Am Not Too Worried About AI (at least not currently) While they talk about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), it could be in reality that AI as we currently know it will never be able to get there. In fact, we may already be fast approaching its limits. Despite clickbait headlines, current LLMs have no self-awareness and no consciousness at all. They can only combine things that already exist, and they can't genuinely create anything new, which leaves a lot of room for human ingenuity. LLMs (Large Language Models) are basically just a giant database that uses that huge amount of data to predict the most probable next word or outcome when you give it a prompt. That's why AI hallucinations exist, as they can totally predict the wrong outcomes, which is a problem that seems to be getting worse in later models and not better at the current time. Already, some businesses that have replaced their workforce with LLMs are finding these hallucinations to be a real deal-breaker and are rolling them back and re-employing humans because people are more reliable. One thing I predict will happen in the future that helps me worry less is that human artwork will almost certainly come to be valued far more than what is produced by AI. Humans will want that human touch, and a new market will form around genuine human art. AI is the fun new thing for now, but this will get old in time. I guess that's how I hope it goes, a world where AI is used in certain niches that it excels in, with robotics freeing up humans from certain chores that waste our time. In terms of manufacturing and resource management, it could potentially lead to a world of sustainable abundance and a more prosperous future for humanity. That would be the best timeline. One where it is used as a tool or instrument to enhance our lives yet still has its limits so we ourselves can't become obsolete. I take courage from the fact that nothing is perfect in this world and everything else has a limit, so why should AI be any different? In fact, as someone who works with it a lot, I can tell you that it makes mistakes all the god damn time... Something else worth considering is that if it turns out true that AI has some major limitations, then it's probable that current speculation on AI being better than it will actually be is causing one giant bubble in the US stock markets. Very similar to the dot-com bubble. In this case, as soon as AI proves not to be as great as they thought it was, there would likely be a similar crash to what happened in 2000. That's what I think will probably happen, maybe in a year or so from now, or however long it takes for speculators and investors to realise this. Though I understand there can emerge other problems because of AI, isn't that just like anything? Each level of new tech always disrupts the current way of doing things. The internet being invented did exactly that, and with it some things got better in society and some things got worse, some things were found and some things were lost. It's the same old story ever since we started inventing anything. In the meantime, for better or worse, it does exist, and all I know is it was fun to be able to use it to draw pictures. It's been even more fun to get it to create personalised music, and I for one am looking forward to the time that we can create a whole CGI blockbuster-level movie, one scene at a time. Perhaps when that happens, it will actually force Hollywood to go back to making practical effects again, which I think in many ways just looks so much more real and better than the CGI they are putting out nowadays. Go back and watch the ride of the Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings and tell me anything in cinema these days looks as good on screen as that did. They were all real riders on real horses after all. Could it be that's the end result of AI? Just maybe after its current rise and fall, it brings humans back to appreciate what's actually real in the end. 🤖 👾