Alex Smith

@AdamNa81 @MsMelChen Or maybe he just gets her. Because in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I still think Melissa is a warm and good woman. I am sure he sees that too.

@MsMelChen Your husband has a heart as wide as the ocean

Someone posted this story in the group chat and then someone else commented “must be nice to not have to bend down to tie shoe laces”

@MsMelChen I am tempted to post a community note regarding your personality, but I am not sure where to begin…

Me. I was the asshole who made that comment

@S___Elliott A comment I heard a lot: “It was a great movie but I did not understand it.” But a lot of people enjoy movies for different reasons. For instance, they may think Leo is hot. Perhaps nothing in the movie diverted you from how confusing it was?

When Inception came out so many people were saying what a great movie it was and I just... didn't believe them. Like, I thought they had convinced themselves they liked but there was no way they actually enjoyed the movie. It was a mass delusion.

@HistoryBoomer @AlexKepfer Is that the poker game where you put one of the cards on your forehead? Because that looks like serious poker.

@AlexKepfer All I play these days is Pot Limit Omaha, and it’s annoying when I have to explain them what that is

The key to winning at poker is to flop top set and get someone to call your post-flop all-in bet. I don't understand why more players don't do this.

@HistoryBoomer I might except I do not understand one term you just used. Maybe I would not be very good at poker. ☹️

@bendreyfuss It has even happened to police officers. Our instincts can lead us to overlook a basic distinction. Cover (which can stop harm) and concealment (which cannot).

In movies when cops are in a gun fight they always crouch down behind a car door, but I think the bullets will go through a car door? I wonder how many times in real life someone has crouched behind a car because of those movies and then just been shot.

@S___Elliott @moseskagan I totally agree. It is a solid cost control measure, and a retirement plan all in one.

@moseskagan Every small business should probably at least try very hard to own their own real estate.

Important reminder of the risks run by small businesses with serious customer concentration. The guy I know who has weathered this best channeled cashflow over the years to buy the industrial building in which he operated and some other rental property. Now, his business is closed, but he is sustained (at least in part - I don't know the full story) by the rents.

@csooran And so eventually we will have managers, nay even C suite execs with their parents in the background. Every business may be subject to family business dynamics.

"Parents helped complete work assignments."

@MsMelChen I see this progressive refusal to have any theory of mind, and wonder how they became so oblivious. Is it mis-guided empathy? Yet its outcome is really quite cruel. Chinese Americans are left unprotected. Real fear there. And the US faces these relentless incursions.

Americans need to contend with how poorly liberalism is designed to handle this. Libs simply cannot bring themselves to admit that the relationship between a Chinese citizen (or diaspora) and the Chinese Communist Party is not the same as the relationship between an American citizen and the US government. There is no wall. There is no Constitution telling the state it cannot compel the individual. In China the individual exists to serve the Party. We wrote the opposite into our founding document. Government cannot force your speech, your allegiance, or your silence. But liberalism’s one non-negotiable commandment is: Thou shalt not notice cultural or political differences Especially if noticing them might make you sound mean and do mean things such as pass an exclusionary law. So we’re told we must pretend every Chinese immigrant or student carries the exact same relationship to their government that Americans do. We must also somehow ignore the United Front Work Department’s explicit doctrine of using overseas Chinese as instruments of influence. We must treat espionage, propaganda, and infiltration as isolated “bad apples” instead of state policy. You realize that China doesn’t have to beat us in a fair fight? It simply has to walk through the door that’s propped open with our own suicidal ideology. Every time another Wang or Fang or CCP-linked “community leader” gets caught, the libs and progressives will shrug and do nothing. They refuse to even acknowledge the asymmetry. Which is exactly how Beijing turns American values and systems into fatal vulnerabilities.

@csooran Still, this reminds me of the “equities in Dallas” death trap mentioned in Liar’s Poker. Goldman Sachs: Salt Lake City!

Goldman isn’t making partners and MDs move. These are likely ops people, the middle class of Wall Street.

@ingelramdecoucy Its Variety. Not exactly a 100 IQ bunch.

Always breaks my heart to see Alec Guinness referred to as “Obi-Wan Kenobi actor Alec Guinness.” Dude had a legendary career filled with classic and timeless roles, immortalized to the modern mind as a character he briefly played from a movie he hated working on

I admire how solid a guy you are, with this in mind. I wonder, do you wonder whether it would have been better to have lived with your father, or the group homes? I guess I ask because sometimes in my life, with the fullness of time, a path most unwanted can turn out better than one might expect.

I was 13 when my mother died. Two weeks later I ran away from home. I was homeless for a year, all of eight grade. While I was on the streets my father moved so when I was arrested, because I didn’t know where my parents were, the state took custody of me. So that happened.

Since I left LA to move to Washington DC, finding good Chinese has been quite difficult. Vietnamese, Thai, and especially Korean, all good. But Chinese food has been a big let-down. If anyone has any suggestions for authentic quality Chinese food in Northern Virginia, I would be very grateful.

Why are there so few good Chinese restaurants in small towns in the United States? The so-called “Chinese restaurants” near my home mostly sell cheap takeout. The prices are low, but the food tastes terrible. There used to be a genuinely good Chinese restaurant. It was run by a couple—the husband had even won awards in cooking competitions and was the chef, while his wife handled front-of-house service. They had quite a few delicious dishes. But for some reason, not many people came, and after a few years, it closed. Meanwhile, there are two Japanese restaurants nearby doing fairly well. One of them isn’t especially outstanding, but it’s definitely better than those takeout Chinese places. At least it has a proper dine-in environment. Interestingly, both of these Japanese restaurants are actually run by Chinese owners, and the servers are all Chinese as well. So why is that? Why can Chinese owners succeed running Japanese restaurants, but struggle with Chinese ones? Today, my husband and I both ordered “hot stone pot”, $19.95 each. They even charge for hot tea, so the total came to over $50 with tip. What’s it like where you live?

That is not the premise of concern. It is a strawman in this case. AI will eat the vast majority of work. Because however much extra work there will be to do, AI will be able to infinitely fill that gap far cheaper and more accurately. There is practically no limit to the number of AIs and robots we can produce. This is not the same thing as labor displacement from industrialization. Your scenario worked out well in the end during that era, because we only had humans to do work. But I would point out that the transition even then was brutal and led to a few decades of some real misery for a lot of craftsmen.

If you start from the premise that work is finite, that there's a fixed amount of stuff to be done and machines are eating through it, then every conclusion you draw from that premise will be wrong. You'll predict mass unemployment. You'll demand UBI as the only possible response. You'll want to ban or throttle AI development. You'll see a zero-sum world where every machine gain is a human loss. You'll build policy around scarcity when the reality is abundance. And you'll be wrong about all of it. Not because you're stupid, many of the smartest people in the world make this mistake, but because the premise is wrong. The error compounds and radiates outward, corrupting every inference, every prediction, every policy recommendation. It's like building a skyscraper on a foundation that's three degrees off true. At the ground floor, you can barely tell. By the fiftieth floor, the building is leaning so far it's about to collapse. That's what happens when you get the foundation wrong on this question. The lump of labor fallacy is the economic version of this error. But the abstraction stack goes deeper, it's about the nature of problem-solving itself, the structure of progress, the reason technology creates more work rather than less. It's the metaphysical argument for why the doomers are wrong. Understand this and you understand the future. Understand that technology is abstraction stacking, that each layer creates more complexity than it resolves, that problems are the raw material of work, and that the raw material is infinitem understand that and the panic about AI evaporates. Not because there's nothing to worry about. There's plenty to worry about: the transition, the distribution, the surveillance, the weapons. But the "AI will take all the jobs" fear? That's not just wrong. It's the opposite of how progress works. The jobs are endless because the problems are endless. And the problems are endless because every solution is a platform for a hundred new problems. That's not a theory. That's the history of civilization. And AI doesn't break the pattern. It extends it.

@briab_briar @conorsen @mikesimonsen Surely we are a hell of a lot better off because of silicon valley companies than not.

@conorsen @mikesimonsen Surely Silicon Valley will react calmly and intellectually to the addressing of those negative externalities

I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for 28 years. I know several billionaires. In ALL cases the $ came from building a rocket ship company that people love I shared cube space with Jan and Brian as they built WhatsApp. I really think AOC just needs to get out of New York a bit.

She does not even need to leave Manhattan, where some of the most remarkable financial innovation ever accomplished has happened. Over time it has made people in that city trillions. Some of the products did not go well, but the vast majority of derivatives have been hugely beneficial. No one enslaved.

@MsMelChen I am always mystified by how far left women cannot see that they support mysogeny on various fronts. Enthusiastic support for importation of some of the most brutally anti-woman’s rights cultures. Rendering the designation female meaningless. Bewildering.

Of all the unhinged meltdowns over Reform UK, the women screeching that their “rights are going to be taken away” takes the absolute prize for deranged rhetoric. Where are they even getting this from? Who’s pumping this nonsense into their heads? It’s a persecution fetish that feeds their narcissism. Lib women in the West face no actual oppression so they have to manufacture it. The histrionics don’t match reality on any level. What right, exactly, do British women have right now that Reform is coming for? (The one where women can legally abort a healthy baby right up to the wire? I hope to God that Reform gets rid of this policy, actually) Reform wants fewer boats, lower taxes, and a country that doesn’t feel like it’s being handed over to the third world and rapists. That seems pretty pro-woman to me

@S___Elliott And the most ridiculous part is that he has been told and the asshole still won’t remove it. Come on, he is a crypto fascist.

If I unknowingly had a Nazi tattoo for 18 years, I’d be pretty mad at all the people that didn’t tell me.

@lthlnkso But they cannot get a kickback from diaper manufacturers that way. Sadly, I now believe that California is quite corrupt now.

Why not just give cash? Cash is simpler. Don't have to worry about getting, transporting, storing, distributing diapers. Cash is better. If the new parents want diapers, they can buy diapers with cash. If the new parents received a lot of diapers as gifts from friends or family, they could spend the cash on something else.

Her point, which I reject, is that billionaires need to do immoral things to get to that level. One of the most dire problems with socialism is their mistaken belief that everything is zero sum. So if I make a billion, I must have stolen much of it. But this is entirely not true in many instances because of innovation. I apply a new technology very well to a fundamental problem and improve things. So I charge for this good or service and get paid very well. This is obviously not cheating, it is in fact conjuring wealth out of thin air and is sublime capitalism.

You start a burger joint: Boomer Burgers. You hire 10 people to run it, and it makes money. Ok? You branch out and build 2 more joints. You make more money. You keep building new BBs. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. At what point does the money you're making become "unearned"?