Chris Grey

A civilization isn’t measured by technology or by money. It’s measured by the absence of violence and fear of violence among the population. By that metric, we need to reconsider which countries are truly civilized.

The world’s largest military budget has produced an industrial base that cannot sustain a serious war. How is that possible? Because the system is not designed to produce military capability. It is designed to produce contracts. The five largest defense contractors employ roughly a thousand lobbyists in Washington. They distribute their suppliers across forty-five states deliberately, so no senator can ever vote to cancel a program without firing his own constituents. And here we are. The current leadership will keep fiddling on this as they see our apathy as permission.

@lulumeservey That show is really overkill. 🤦🏻‍♂️

men used to go to war, now they need 3.5 inches of foam to go for a run

@spencerpratt I’ve been going to Venice for at least 30 years and it’s safer and cleaner now than I’ve ever seen it. It used to be a mess. Downtown is a disaster. But each neighborhood is different. There is no single LA city. That’s a myth that anyone who lives here knows isn’t true.

Crime isn't down. Angelenos like my friend Harvey Levin have simply stopped reporting crimes because they've resigned to the fact that under Karen Bass, the inmates run the asylum, and nobody will enforce the law. This is why LA is voting for me.

@scottastevenson 🎯👏🏼

The golden years of AirBNB were a temporary arbitrage on depreciation. There was a universe of beautiful well-maintained properties and hosts that had not been worn down by short term guests. And the AirBNB hosts didn’t properly estimate the cost of depreciation to maintain that standard, so costs were irrationally low That era fundamentally cant return, it was a temporary arbitrage opportunity There was once a supply of fairly pristine unused space and now there’s not If a space does manage to hit the 2014 standard, it must charge a lot more to fight depreciation And at that point a hotel is generally better

BREAKING: Americans are feeling worse about the economy now than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial crisis, and following the 9/11 attacks, per YF

NEW: AI is reportedly pushing McKinsey & rival consulting firms to rethink pricing, as clients are “questioning the value” of human advice.

AI is excellent at polished reports.

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

Finally, a big name has the courage to tell it: we are nowhere near AGI. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel laureate for AlphaFold, put it neat and clear: "Today's systems are nowhere near [AGI]. Doesn't matter how many Erdős problems you solve… I think it's far, far from what a true invention, or someone like Ramanujan, would have been able to do." This is the elephant in the room that many AI enthusiasts prefer not to see, or are actively trying to hide. Erdős problems are well defined, often combinatorial, on finite spaces. They are exactly the kind of problems on which current AI can achieve spectacular performance with a lot of compute and knowledge. A neural network can search a huge graph of possibilities. It can recombine existing knowledge at unprecedented scale. It can discover surprising solutions inside an already defined conceptual space. But true invention is something else. True invention is not only solving a problem. It is inventing new objects, new dimensions, new connections. It is inventing new problems. From resolving to inventing there is a discontinuity that we don't know how to bridge. We are making extraordinary tools. But we are nowhere close to AGI.

That particular moment when a Dutch diplomat’s suitcase was seized at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport after he refused an X-ray scan. Inside his suitcase were Starlink units, satellite phones, and high-tech wireless equipment meant for covert operations.

Thomas Massie has said he will publicly read the names of the Epstein clients before his time in Congress comes to an end.

I cancelled all my all subscriptions to TV content today. I am fed up with all of them being bought by billionaires who do not believe in free thought, the public good, a sense of purpose, empathy for the less fortunate, simple kindless, dignity and democracy. This is our country’s 250th anniversary. Does anyone care? Someone has to take a stand about the “entertainment” and news business being controlled by people who believe only in money and fealty to those in power.

@streetwiseprof China’s economy isn’t based on asset speculation. They focus on making things and improving their society. So asset speculators look for other places that welcome asset speculators. China isn’t panicking at all. It’s the speculators who are panicking. You have things backwards.

Riddle me this: If China is the ascendent economic colossus it and western sinophiles claim it to be, why is it panicking about capital outflows?

@pitdesi He was back in the hospital recently for the third time in a few months. They are covering it up, but his heart is failing and he’s had multiple strokes. He’s very sick.

Ok now with the weekend behind us, I really don’t understand why he didn’t attend his son’s wedding.

@CollinRugg Sounds nice. But it’s unclear how 40K, and it’s really even more than that, fentanyl zombies and meth freaks will all go to Seattle on their own. Maybe if the city pays to put them on buses it would work.

NEW: Spencer Pratt fires back at reporter after he was asked about his plan for the homeless, says they will all end up in Seattle. Reporter: "What are your plans for the over 40,000 homeless in Los Angeles?" Pratt: "Well, they're not homeless, they're drug addicts... These people have been bused in by scam rehabs, scam NGOs, scam homeless nonprofits." "These people, when I unplug them ... they're all going to Seattle, where the mayor will welcome them."

@matthewstoller Maybe they’re trolling the West yet again with this obviously woke/fake liberal language. They have to know how this looks and are doing it on purpose.

Iran is getting into junk fees

@matthewstoller 🎯👏🏼

My dumb read on Iran is that you can tell it’s a real deal when Trump starts effusively praising Iran’s leadership in a cringe and slightly homoerotic manner.

The last time this happened it was a disaster for the Democrats. In return for her support, she insisted on a network of key appointments. One was Gensler, who alienated Silicon Valley to such an extent that many founders switched to supporting the Republicans.

Your language here is nonsense. Trump or any US leader cannot “hand over” Taiwan to China. Taiwan and China are part of the same country according to Taiwan’s own constitution, the UN charter, international law, and US official policy. Taiwan is self governed. Hong and Macau are also self governed. The dispute between China and Taiwan is over how Taiwan is self governed. Is it under an outdated civil war era system that acts as though the civil war never ended? Or is it under a modernized framework that acknowledges the civil war is over? That’s the disagreement and the negotiation. Unless you think Taiwan is a US colony like Hong Kong was to the UK, the US cannot “hand it over” to China. What it can do is stop creating more tensions and more hostility between Taiwan and China. If Trump does this, he’s helping Taiwan and the US. It’s a good thing for everyone except military contractors and war crazed lunatics.

I predicted Trump would hand over Taiwan to China. @ElbridgeColby should resign, but of course, he won’t.