Dear Europeans... Buck-ee's is just normal stuff to us. Yeah, sure, it's freakishly big, and has lots of cool stuff. But "freakishly big and has lots of cool stuff" is also a pretty good way to describe America. Why? It's not because we're somehow genetically superior. We come from roughly the same genepool. And it's not because we somehow looted the third world... you did a lot more empire-building than we ever did. It's because of the difference between your politics and ours. And between your social mores and ours. We have what we call a permissive environment. That means that if someone sees a possibility, wants to solve a problem, comes up with a better way to do something, even something small... He's encouraged to try. The government won't make him fill out 67 thousand forms and make him wait five years for permission. His neighbors won't sneer at him and say he's getting ideas above his station. Investors will actually want to talk to him, and think seriously about whether they want in on the action. We know this seems brash and arrogant and reckless to you. We know you think a lot of these ideas are stupid. Some of them are. But every creative idea, even the best ones, seems really, really dumb when you first come up with it, haven't tried it out, haven't refined it into what it eventually needs to be. "He shoots spiderwebs out of his hands? What kind of useless power is that?" "They're wizards who fight with magic swords, but they fly around the galaxy in spaceships?" "Nobody is going to want to buy books online! How are they supposed to thumb through them?" "The best minds have been trying heavier-than-air flight for years and failing." "Reusable rocket boosters are a pipe dream." Name any good idea anyone has ever had, and I can describe it the way it might have looked to people of its time, which makes it sound dumb, or wicked, or hopeless, or reckless, or arrogant. If Buck-ee's had occurred to a European, which it easily could have, he would have been laughed off the stage. Or unable to raise money to try it. Or regulated out of existence. This is why you're poor. It's not because you suck. You don't suck. But you are micromanaging yourselves and each other out of existence. Your ancestors weren't like this. And you don't have to be.

California is turning UC Berkeley (whose professors won 4 Nobel Prizes last year) into remedial school. No SAT for admissions and a new mandate to make everyone's "outcomes similar." No mention of excellence. This is how bureaucrats kill the nation’s best public university.

Islamic preachers in America: “The greatest mission of Muslims in America is to destroy Christianity.” “Oh Allah, kill them one by one, do not leave a single one of them alive!” I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen leaders of any other religion be like this!

Everyman Library gifted a set of 300 literary classics to state schools, including mine, for the millennium, at a cost of £19m. The idea was to furnish young minds for another millennium, but almost all of them were thrown out within a few years, thanks to lanyard-wearing vandals

I was told today by a 17-year-old that there was no way people were writing 10 page papers without Al. Dude, I was writing 10 page papers without having read the book.

“Sugar, butter,, and pure methamphetamine.” Yep!

This Frenchman describing Buc-ee’s is the only thing you need today (IG: Erosbrousson)

There's no way Cape Canaveral/KSC would be attempted today or doing so would create a generation of litigation before starting.

Not in Atlanta ! $3 soft drinks $3 waters $3 french fires $5 cheeseburgers

"The pope's brother attended the gladiatorial combat held to commemorate the empire's 250th anniversary" is the kind of fun fact you'd hear in a history podcast and go "huh, wild"

The morning sun found me again at the House of Waffles. Beside me, a man spoke a string of foreign sounds to the cook, who instantly understood. "Scattered, smothered, covered," he said. That is not food. That is an incantation. Three words, spoken without fear, and the kitchen MOVED. I studied the menu. The spell has more verses. Chunked. Diced. Peppered. Capped. Topped. Country. Eight sacred words, and you may combine them, and the grill obeys. In my land, we have tea ceremonies that take four years to learn. America has the hash brown liturgy, and truckers are its priests. I attempted it. I gripped the counter. "Scattered," I began. "Smothered. And, forgive me, covered." "You don't gotta apologize to the potatoes, hon." I did, though. One must respect any power one does not yet understand. The cook called my words back in the order I spoke them, like a vow being witnessed. Then the man beside me leaned over. "First time?" "Is it so obvious?" "You bowed at 'covered.'" I confess it freely. I bowed to hash browns. They arrived scattered, smothered, covered, and I understood at once why the words exist. The dish is too mighty for a single noun. A spell does not reward the loud. It rewards the precise. I am learning the remaining verses. One per visit. The day I order all eight at once, I ask only that someone be there to witness it. Diced is next. I have been practicing in the car.

Elon Musk reveals that SpaceX was forced to strap a seal to a board and put headphones on it to test sonic boom sounds "We were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal, and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed. This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures." Lex Fridman: "I would love to see this." Elon Musk: "Yeah. I mean, sorry, there's a seal with headphones. Yes, it's a seal with headphones strapped to a board. And the amazing part is how calm the seal was." Lex Fridman: "Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely going to eat me. How will the seal, when the seal goes back to other seal friends, how are they going to explain that?" Elon Musk: "They're never going to believe them. It's sort of like getting kidnapped by aliens and getting an anal probe. You come back and say I swear to god I got kidnapped by aliens and your seal buddies are never going to believe him. And by the way we had to do it twice." Lex Fridman: "They let him go twice? You had to catch the same seal?" Elon Musk: "Well no, different seal."

Almost every single person on Earth lives with rats. Only 5 million people out of 8 billion live rat free. They are the Albertans. Alberta is the only significantly human-inhabited place on Earth that is rat free. It achieved this in the 1950s as rats invaded from the East, by introducing a rodent surveillance state, obliging every citizen of the province to report them and terminating any sightings with extreme prejudice. They laid 63,000 kg of arsenic across a 600-kilometre-long, 29-kilometre-wide Rat Control Zone along the province's Eastern border. Back then, rats were so unfamiliar in Alberta that officials distributed preserved rat corpses to teach people what the enemy looked like. One pest-control officer held public meetings at which he ate warfarin-soaked oatmeal to show it was safe. And it worked! They held rats off and numbers remained so low that the surveillance and eradication system could keep numbers at essentially zero for years, at extremely low costs – Alberta spends about 11 cents per resident on rat control measures, much less than neighbouring provinces that are infested. Today, Albertans have grown so unfamiliar with rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats. Pet rats are banned, vehicles entering Alberta are checked, and sightings are responded to with overwhelming force. Could the rest of the world manage it? Probably not. The secret was to stop them before they could establish themselves. For the rest of us, we probably need gene drives. Read the story of how Alberta won the war on rats at Works in Progress now. worksinprogress.co/issue/alb…

I enjoyed the Hell out of reading Red State Mars by @MorlockP. This review shows what a fun ride it is. Review: Red State Mars, by Travis Corcoran open.substack.com/pub/upstre…

A recent Southern Living ranking named Southern Soul Barbeque the best BBQ spot in Georgia. The St. Simons Island restaurant has been serving barbecue since 2006.

A Georgia Tech alum will now be the president and CEO of the @aspeninstitute. Cabrera has led Georgia Tech in a remarkable period of growth since 2019 — increasing enrollment by 55% to 56,000 students. Congratulations, President Cabrera! 🐝 | c.gatech.edu/presidentcabrer… #WeCanDoThat

The plan is to first do a mission to show that we can go out and get hundreds of tons of asteroid material for a few tons of consumables first. Would like a C type, or maybe X/M for metals and semiconductor raw materials. C is for propellant. Later, we will be getting a few hundred asteroids of all types to enable massive industrialization. This is the best way to build data centers in space, no question. SO much easier than the Moon, but the Moon is important also.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine thousands of Mackenzie Bezoses stepping on human faces, forever

I have always said that @SpaceX was about going to Mars. Even 20 years ago, when people asked me if we were all insane for starting the company. It's only been in the past few years that this surreal vision has begun to seem very real. I believe that Elon and SpaceX will make this happen. cityam.com/dont-ask-spacex-f…