Travis Addair

LiteLLM HAS BEEN COMPROMISED, DO NOT UPDATE. We just discovered that LiteLLM pypi release 1.82.8. It has been compromised, it contains litellm_init.pth with base64 encoded instructions to send all the credentials it can find to remote server + self-replicate. link below

The best parts of this very good @60Minutes segment have gotta be when @cpgrabow tells @LesleyRStahl a few basic Jones Act absurdities, and she repeatedly gasps "NO!" in disbelief - truly shocked that a century-old US law could be so dumb and counterproductive. Sadly, yes.

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One of the most persistent myths is that public services fail because they’re “underfunded.” In reality, many are saturated with funding but starved of accountability. When spending rises and outcomes stagnate or worsen, the problem isn’t a shortage of money. It’s how that money is insulated from consequences. Bureaucracies don’t operate on profit and loss. They operate on budgets and incentives. Failure doesn’t shrink them. It often justifies expansion. So the cycle repeats: poor results → demand more funding → more waste → worse results. Then the explanation is recycled: “we just need more.” If a system can continuously grow despite declining performance, the constraint isn’t funding. It’s the absence of discipline and basic competence.

We're all waiting for @GovBobFerguson to say these magic words: “We want businesses to come here. We want them to pay their employees a lot of money. We know every state and region is in competition for good jobs, and we want to win.” Washington already has a jobs crisis, and instead of trying to fix it, our state government is passing legislation that will make this problem so much worse. "Late last year, the Association of Washington Business released an employers survey that asked: Does your business plan to expand in Washington in the next year or two? Eighty-six percent answered No." seattletimes.com/opinion/wa-has…

“The tax code has a hundred ways to protect wealth you were born into. Only one protects wealth you created. New York wants to eliminate it.”

IRS net migration data is out of 2023: 🔴 Red states gained $37.2 billion in income and 492k filers. 🔵 Blue states lost ~$40.8B and 520k filers. CA −$11.9B, NY −$9.9B, IL −$6.0B, MA −$4.2B, NJ −$2.8B.

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Washington state enacted a major capital gains tax in 2021. It didn't solve their budget woes, because high earners began fleeing the state. Now they're going to enact an income tax on those earning over $1 million a year, and hope that works better.

I think we need to acknowledge that if we are spending $81k per homeless person who is sleeping on the street, our approach has failed and everyone involved in the status quo should be ashamed.

Bill Maher drops a reality bomb on Zohram Mamdani voters with a brutal history lesson on socialism. “We’ve run this experiment many times, and the results are always obvious,” Maher said. He looked straight into the camera and delivered a blunt warning about Mamdani. “Democrats must recognize that Zohran Mamdani is the future of the party. Unfortunately, it’s the Republican Party.” “Here’s capitalist South Korea at night from space,” Maher presented, showing a country lit up and thriving. “Here’s socialist North Korea,” he followed, with the map pitch dark. “Yeah. In 1990, Venezuela was wealthier than Poland. But then Poland, finally free of Soviet style economics, went all in on capitalism and now their economy is as big as Japan and people there have high wages, low inflation, cars, vacations, homes.” “Meanwhile, Venezuela traded capitalism for Hugo Chavez’s socialism for the 21st century, which turned out to be like socialism in the last century or any century, a f*cking mess.” “It turned one of Latin America’s richest countries into one of its poorest. Low wages, high inflation, shortages, outages, 8 million people fleeing. If you think New York can somehow reinvent this wheel, you’re in for a rude awokening.”

The best version of the Democratic Party is a party that taxes the public to fund an efficient, simple, robust safety net, and that can build public infrastructure fast. The worst version of the Democratic Party is economic slop about 'nobody should pay taxes but millionaires', and also grinds economic activity to a halt with a million regulations on everything. The first actually believes in the power of the state to do good. It thinks the system is worth funding and defending. It believes in the fairness of a safety net but also in the power of economic growth and dynamism. The second is cynical crap that just wants to identify heroes and villains and hysterically strike out at whoever is 'bad'. Rich people bad, only they should pay taxes. Big Companies bad, they shouldn't be allowed to do anything. It has no actual vision of the good.

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After 40 years (born and raised) I left WA. Moment is leaving this month as well. I'm not even a millionaire affected by this tax. But when you add up all the costs to run a business in WA we can't afford it. You can build a remote team and re-open in Wyoming, removing all of these costs. WA is incredibly beautiful (especially the summers) and the people are great. Unfortunately the numbers don't lie and unless you run a super high margin software business, WA is just too expensive. Personally...you'd never pick WA to start a company. - Gas taxes (now some of the highest in the state) - Sales tax (up to 10.5% in Seattle) - Property tax (1% of your home value with a path they can take this to 3%. In total $ this tax they have increased nearly 100% over the last decade) - Capital gains tax (new in the last three years went form 0 -> 9%. it targets business owners and not real-estate). - Estate tax (they recently changed it to a progressive system that is up to 35% just to the state of WA) - Housing prices are some of the highest in the country. - Food costs are unreal, just visit a Seattle restaurant or grocery store. Business... - Very little capital. Great angels but almost no VC or larger funding sources. - Super high salaries for tech talent (this has changed but amazon, microsoft, etc paid very high rates for a very long time). - B&O Tax: paid as a % of your sales. - Sales & Use Tax (this is the real killer) What pushed us out was the recent change to Sales & Use Tax. It used to be you paid this tax on physical things you bought for your business, similar to sales tax. Now you pay it on 100% of the items you buy, think shopify, aws, google, etc. Even if your team is remote you pay 10% sales tax on 100% of these purchases no matter where peole are located. But the real kicker, was they expanced this law to be a tax that applies to all digital advertising. Run FB ads in Germany? You pay WA state a 10% tax. Overnight that is a+$200K a year tax that did not exist last year. Again not even based in where your ads run or where your team is. Incorporated in WA state? You will pay this tax. What makes this sad is all political diversity disappeared years ago. It's that debate that keeps government from taking everything. One political team has run the state for +30 years and Seattle for more than 50 years. This train has been coming for years and is now accelerating. WA government can never have enough $. I hope there is a new generation of company builders who see this is an opportunity and can run into the burning building.

*bans an entire category of housing*

A small piece of good news out of Olympia: The bills that would have imposed Washington capital gains tax on Section 1202 / QSBS gains — SB 6229 and HB 2292 — did not make it out of committee this session. So for now: If you are a Washington resident selling qualified small business stock, the Section 1202 exclusion still works for Washington capital gains tax purposes. Up to $10M (or 10× basis) can still be excluded ($15M for stock issued after 7/4/25). 1202 lives in Washington. For now.

@asymmetricinfo Sadly, the proposals will most likely be around punishing people for trying to leave, rather than creating incentives for them to stay (the stick, not the carrot).

If we really see capital flight from CA/WA, tax competition is going to become a major progressive focus over the next 5-10 years. They will float proposals to prevent red states from poaching their tax cattle. I don’t know what these proposals will be, but I’m betting they’re coming.

BOOM: Autonomous agent hack on McKinsey's AI Platform, Lilly Scale of data accessible without authentication (How We Hacked McKinsey's AI Platform) Codewall.AI autonomous agent hacked Lilly and accessed: → 46.5 million chat messages (containing a lot of confidential company information) → 728,000 files → 57,000 user accounts → 384,000 AI assistants and 94,000 workspaces → system prompts and model configurations → 3.68 million RAG document chunks → 1.1 million files and 217,000 agent messages routed through external AI APIs buff.ly/YgG0elK

“Amazon is not going to leave Seattle over the head tax” [Amazon begins moving to Bellevue] “Rich people are not going to leave over the Capital Gains Tax” [Jeff Bezos moves] “Big companies are not going to leave WA over bad policies” [Starbucks announces new HQ in Tennessee] “People are not going to leave over the income tax” Following the passage of the income tax, Howard Schultz announced he is leaving WA and moving to Florida.

@jclothier12 @geekwire There is ample evidence that people migrate from high tax states to low tax states: taxfoundation.org/data/all/state….

@geekwire This article ignores that there is simply no data to suggest than any meaningful amount of people leave states that already have a similar tax. It's also a tired argument about appeasing wealthy elites/corporations in hopes we get some bread crumbs.

Opinion: The wrong tax at the wrong time for Washington geekwire.com/2026/opinion-t…