Spreading Models

It's incredible the extent to which the social sanctioning engine has simply seized up. Hit pieces that would have been 5-alarm fires 5 years ago now come and go with no notice. Nobody cares, it's over.

Low-agency people are embarrassed by exposure: being seen trying and failing, being seen as incompetent, being seen as different. High-agency people are embarrassed by waste: wasting their potential, wasting opportunities, wasting time performing competence instead of building it.

In just two years, whites went from a majority of births in 21 states to a majority of births in 40 states. Even diverse blue states like New York and Illinois now have a majority of white births. Don't tell me that electing Trump didn't matter.

I don't think you'll be able to find a conversation like this one on the internet. I interviewed @EthanEvansVP (former Amazon VP) about every possible corporate politics situation I could think of and he told me everything since he's retired. Topics we covered: • Managing people out + promos via reorgs • Orgs trying to steal scope • How to fire managers • What leverage engineers have when getting managed out • Handling politically skilled operators • Examples of political messaging • Handling bad managers and mutiny • Empire building + effective backchanneling • Influence without authority • How to avoid politics if you hate them It was fascinating in a morbid curiosity kind of way. I heard so many things in this conversation which I wish weren't true but are. Hopefully this conversation is helpful for people navigating corporate politics. Where to watch: • YouTube: youtu.be/6WaeGfLnRvc • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6GKb77… • Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the… • Transcript: developing.dev/p/amazon-vp-re…

Skin mirrors the liver. Posture reflects fascia. Fat distribution follows hormonal state. Jaw structure reflects airway health. Fluid retention reflects lymphatics. Tongue coating mirrors the microbiome. Muscle tone marks longevity. Appearance matters because the body is honest.

Zohran Mamdani will now take the tax dollars of New Yorkers struggling to pay for their own child care and give it to government workers to pay for their free child care. Our founders never intended for governments to act this way. Small and limited was the original idea.

You have built an entire identity around being someone who could succeed if they tried. That identity is a warm blanket. Real action is a cold shower. When you finally attempt something, you risk losing the story that has comforted you for years. What if you try and discover you are average? What if you try and find no special talent? This is not fear of failure. This is fear of ordinariness. So you stay in the planning phase forever. You buy the notebook. You watch the tutorial. You tell friends your idea. Anxiety spikes whenever someone asks for a deadline. You are not protecting your future. You are protecting a fantasy that has already expired.

This is the bottom thanks Jim $SPY

Clavicular says that going to a pub, having a beer, and watching sports is one of the worst things you can do “Engaging with people in real life? There’s really not that many people that are worth interacting with, I would say” “Most people have completely misprioritized lives. The average person you meet is like an enjoyer of sports who drinks beer, like ‘let’s go have a beer at the pub and watch Sunday football,’ and that’s the worst thing you could do. You should be on PubMed reading studies on how you could look max” “Most of humanity is sort of enslaved to these consumer habits that prevent them from ascending”

*taps sign*

@ihatepivots A lot for rent if you don't have kids

wake up, $250 in rent for the day, ride subway with 5 homeless people, $20 midtown slopbowl, get reamed by work, $80 for 2 drinks after work

@skominers @joshgans An elo ranking or similar is a pretty interesting idea

As @joshgans and I show, there are better options. We could report course difficulty, or use finer rating scales like 1-100. Better yet, we could use statistical methods to account for course competitiveness — similar to the Elo system in chess. x.com/joshgans/statu…

Under Harvard's proposed new grading policy, the 10th-best undergraduate out of 10 in a graduate-level elective would be capped at an A‑minus. For honors evaluation, they would be recorded as "0th percentile." That's not a typo.

having a job lowkey makes you chopped. you start going bald and missing workouts

@PlatosGooncave @memeticsisyphus The 10 years from 2015 to 2025 have felt like a lifetime

This story about Zoran Mamdani’s wife just highlights how left wing people used to be normal and they all had mental breaks when they found out everyone wasn’t in on how Obama was changing the country and Trump was going to become president. They have no leg to stand on saying republicans shouldn’t trawl through her old posts to make her look bad because they all used the same tactic to force social media companies to change their TOS and have their political enemies erased from the internet until Elon purchased Twitter.

@rennyzucker I love the seagram building

What a unit

@yacineMTB Only ‘mods’ could ruin this like reddit

If anything, they should just make muting faster and easier to do. Do NOT ship the dislike button unless you want this place to turn into a shithole like reddit

If they actually do this, it is going to turn the website into reddit. They should never, ever, ever, ever do the dislike button.

@TMTLongShort Just Another Podcast Guy Thanks for another rec

PM for Claude Cowork….. sub-3k views

@DarioCpx @DeepDishEnjoyer discuss

Trump just claimed gas prices will drop as soon as the US-Israel war on Iran is over, "which will be soon." Here is what I just told a friend: "It's Iran's strategic interest to show the world they can effectively retaliate if attacked again in the future by sending the oil price to an unbearable level for US and their allies' consumers. Furthermore, Iran is now openly targeting GCC countries, and it's fair to assume it has a plan to inflict long-lasting damage to their revenue sources, mostly linked to oil and gas exports, so they won't be able to use those to strengthen their armies by building capabilities to strike back at Iran from their territories in the future. As a consequence, the decision to end this conflict as things stand now is not Trump's. In the same way, everyone with 2 grams of brains knows military escorts through the Strait of Hormuz are impossible; the same applies to the possibility of a ground invasion of Iran (it will be a brutal carnage because of the type of advantage Iran's territorial structure gives to the Iranians). By now it's even clear that the majority of Iranians living in Iran support the local government, even if Western media tried so hard to convince everyone outside Iran of the opposite. If this weren't the case, the original plan of taking out Khamenei to trigger a popular uprising would have worked. Period. The only option to tilt the balance of power back onto the US side lies in the use of tactical nukes, but this option is and will always remain off the table because it can open a geopolitical Pandora's box; no one has a clue how it can play out globally. Bottom line: Iran will carry on with its strategy to create an oil price shock till the price is high enough to serve as a future deterrent against any action towards them, and till is high enough, the US and its allies' population will force them to cease the hostilities from their side first." I strongly believe we are heading towards an incredible oil price shock that is inevitable at this point; the only unknown is how long it will last and its magnitude. Feel free to bookmark this post and bring it back up in the future if I am wrong

@SuitablePolitic The US could tax any ships going through the straight

The Strait is not closed. It never was. It never will be. Trump was offering the Europeans the opportunity to go solve a fake problem. They look good. We get people to realize the Strait is not actually closed. We all go home feeling happy. This WAS all worked out. Now that the Europeans rejected the offer, as any planner worth their salt would acknowledge as overwhelmingly likely, we're going to use that as a leverage point to do what Trump has wanted for years... Leave NATO. Or wrangle them into total submission. The Strait will "reopen" by some other fake means, befitting the fake problem of it being "closed" in the first place.