Hoovering up digital ID for adults is the point. They want to end anonymity on social media so they can crush dissent. Being able to keep teenagers from reading wrongthink is just the cherry on top for them

Whatever is going on in the world, Thomas Sowell always got there first and summed it up perfectly.

Science is not a process, a credential, or an institution. It is the unflinching pursuit of truth, carried out by the few, co-opted by the many.

When politicians say they want to seize/tax "wealth" but actually mean "shares in your own company that you yourself founded", the real point is making it impossible for anyone to actually control their own company for more than a decade. They won't let you stay, either.

Is Infura down? @Safe and @MetaMask are not connecting. Expanding the error box details seems to point to @infura_io Please update status and let any hacks be known to the @_SEAL_Org Security Alliance. We tested with 3 computers, 2 IP domains, and 2 diff ppl. All failed. 🚨 x.com/Crypto_Socrates/status…

Is @safe down? Have tried connecting to app.safe.global on three diff computers by two diff ppl, from diff physical locations ina large city. All are seeing messages: `𝙴𝚛𝚛𝚘𝚛 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚋𝚕𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚗. 𝙿𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚛𝚢 𝚛𝚎𝚕𝚘𝚊𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚊𝚐𝚎.` Reloading does not help. The ordinary Help pages (help.safe.global) have nothing about the outage; and the (former?) chat option seems to have been shut down or is not working. This is highly unusual for the usually reliable Safe ecosystem.

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it. But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models. No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success. There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price. This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc. I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

“Free speech is outdated” usually means “I trust today’s censors more than yesterday’s.” But the old problem remains: If you give someone the power to decide which ideas are too dangerous to hear, don’t be shocked when that power gets used against you.

“Inflation is a quiet but effective way for the government to transfer resources from the people to itself, without raising taxes.” — Thomas Sowell

The SpaceX IPO today! in art & technology (full disclosure: I own no stock, and am not buying SPCX today)

Stephen @Kneubuehl , my grandson just excitedly called me to tell me he had spotted a Cybercab being tested in Denver. They were near the Target at 144th Ave & Huron St. Has anyone else reported seeing one?

High electricity prices aren’t a glitch to be swept under the rug. They’re the market screaming that today’s technological and regulatory paradigm can’t support decarbonization, data centers, new manufacturing, and electrification all at once

“If it were up to me, the age of adulthood would never have been lowered from 21 to 18. It would have been raised to 30. In recent decades, people have been taking longer and longer to mature—and increasing numbers never make it.” — Thomas Sowell

Closing the bathroom door: not suspicious. Sealing an envelope: not suspicious. Wanting your phone unscanned: not suspicious. Privacy is the default setting of a free society.

A timelapse view from our @SpaceX Dragon of the spectacular southern aurora seen in yesterday’s post, a result of a recent solar event. As opposed to the previous aurora I’ve seen, this one danced and snaked its way directly below us, putting on quite a show. I am in awe of this ethereal and emotionally evocative phenomenon.

Intellectuals keep getting seduced by the idea of a one world government. Even, in a space colonising future, a one solar system government. All of humanity organised under a single polity. This is a polity you cannot leave. It will forcibly prevent you. Like East Germany. If people like this ever succeed in shutting down the foot vote in this way, their system had better be perfect or they have condemned us to hell. Of course, they have immense faith in their own intelligence and benevolence. But those wiser than them with a grasp of history don’t share it.

The most plausible form of fraud is NGO operators casting ballots received on behalf of homeless people. - We know they receive these ballots and many go unclaimed - They would naturally wait until the last opportunity to cast it themselves - It can’t be detected

I organized an intervention to stop Elon from starting SpaceX. Here is the story... Twenty five years ago, Elon and I sat in a car on a dark stretch of Long Island highway, two neurodiverse geeks staring at the night sky and wondering what came next. We had both experienced substantial exits and felt the weight of possibility ahead of us. When I joked about 'space' while gazing upward, neither of us imagined we were planting the seed for what would become the largest IPO in history. We spent the next two hours debating why space was so hard. In the end, rockets are fuel and metal. We also debated where to go, and it was crystal clear that Mars was the only real destination. Upon returning to NYC, we embarked on a global tour of space, meeting space agencies and luminaries worldwide. This opened our eyes to an industry stuck in bureaucratic thinking. If things continued at that pace, it was clear that we would never explore space in our lifetime. So, we launched Life to Mars to show the world that two ambitious young men (29 and 30 years old), could send life to Mars without any government backing or support. We planned to send and grow plants on Mars, though some were pushing us to send mice. We had a $50 MM budget that rested on our purchase of two Russian ICBMs for $7 MM each. We assumed one ICBM would fail, and we would learn and fix everything before launching again. When Elon went back to actually buy the ICBMs, the Russians tripled the price, bringing out launch costs from a total of $14 MM to $42 MM. Our ambitious Life to Mars plan was no longer viable. As you might imagine, Elon was not pleased. So, he decided to start SpaceX and create his own Mars rockets. Now, this is a crazy idea, both now and at the time, so I organized a large panel of top space experts, and we ambushed him at the Georgian Hotel one morning. It was set up like an intervention for an alcoholic, but for space. Elon looked me in the eye when leaving the room and said, "I am going to do this." The intervention failed. Elon was committed. The rest is history. I am excited to see this IPO after 25 years of hard work. What SpaceX has done is a testament to human will and overcoming insurmountable obstacles. It's nothing short of amazing. Congratulations, E. Amazing.

Thomas Sowell on government interventions: “The imperfections of the marketplace have led many to see government interventions as necessary and beneficial.” “Yet the imperfections of the market must be weighed against the imperfections of the government.” “It always amazes me that people think that if you say the market is imperfect, that means the government must step in. We’re so much more rational in sports.”