Prophasi

I never said rags to riches. I’m countering the manifestly false myth that their success was due only to money & circumstance. Jobs & Wozniak made Apple; they kicked him out and it tanked; he came back and made it a behemoth. I’m not talking wealth; I’m talking about success. Do you realize how many “wealthy finance bros” there are? How many Amazons are there? It’s a weird instinct to argue against all evidence that people who’ve done things few or none others have are not actually that special after all. What’s the motivation for that?

@Prophasi @FaithAndAlpha @moneywcontext @Pirat_Nation Bill Gates is a nepo baby whose mother got him microsoft. Jeff Bezos was already a wealthy finance bro when he founded amazon. Jobs didnt get rich off of doing stuff for Apple it was because he invested in Pixas and so on and so on. Stop peddling the rags to riches myth

You don't have to think very hard to realize that theory doesn't hold up. If it were only money or circumstance, there'd be tens of thousands of space launch companies or global electric car leaders or global satellite internet leaders or top AI models out there. It's definitionally false bc at the time he inherited money and had "good circumstances" there were thousands of people richer than he was. If the same rules applied to them he never would've stood a chance. Yet there they are and here he is, richer than them and with more to show for it. Weird how it happened time and time again to the same guy. You'd have to bend yourself into a pretzel to think he's no different than anyone else with money and opportunity. Just like Steve Jobs.

@Prophasi @secretchipa @FaithAndAlpha @moneywcontext @Pirat_Nation He bought the right companies at the right time purely because his father owned slave mines in South Africa If he was born in any other circumstance we would never know about him

@secretchipa @FaithAndAlpha @moneywcontext @Pirat_Nation I hear these args re Musk, but they don't explain his success. There are millions of nepo babies; do you think corporate America lacks bullies in every other industry? It's like saying Steve Jobs didn't solder the circuit boards & therefore had nothing to do w/ Apple's success.

@FaithAndAlpha @moneywcontext @Pirat_Nation Hes a nepo baby that had never worked and just bullies his way onto boards of companies he never founded or had a hand in building

@lpignate @RG_Leachman @eterevsky His reply was a lighthearted & self-deprecating way of saying he concedes your expertise but isn't as precious about it. You said your piece. Some people agree, but this guy has different goals than you. Is it so hard take the olive branch in good humor & part amicably?

@RG_Leachman @eterevsky No doubt. Keep playing knock-off piano hero. I can’t wait to see how this turns out for you.

I asked Claude to build my daughter an app that plugs into our piano, can read live key strokes, can show her sheet notes and key view and ends with a Guitar Hero style game. All while giving progressively harder songs. Today she’s using It and crushing It.

@NinjaBoffin @ns123abc I think you just wrote the NYT headline.

@ns123abc "caught on surveillance camera using a HAIR DRYER to swap serial number stickers" My guy was worth nearly half a billion and still decided to do things himself. Ngl, probably was a terrific boss and leader, not afraid to do menial tasks or see any task as "beneath" him

🚨BREAKING: SUPER MICRO CO-FOUNDER ARRESTED FOR SMUGGLING $2.5B IN NVIDIA GPUs TO CHINA >SMCI co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw arrested today >personally holds $464 MILLION in SMCI stock >charged with smuggling BILLIONS in Nvidia servers to china >used a southeast asian shell company to funnel $2.5B in servers to chinese buyers >$510 million worth shipped in just THREE WEEKS in spring 2025 >built thousands of fake dummy servers to fool U.S compliance auditors >caught on surveillance camera using a HAIR DRYER to swap serial number stickers >coordinated the whole thing over encrypted group chats >SMCI down 12% after hours >faces up to 30 years in federal prison ITS SO OVER…

@MsMelChen Knowing he did this sort of "arbitrage" (scalping) that makes everything less available and more expensive for actual customers only makes his more of a monster. It's creating a problem, not solving one, for opportunistic personal enrichment. A scourge.

NYT just cannot resist the anthropological contextualization and tender backstory meant to humanize a preferred terrorist. Behold! The Shopify savant and budding entrepreneur on the way to building a sneaker empire with only POSITIVE REVIEWS until SOMETHING nudged him of course. Always passive. Just the typical normal-kid-gone-wrong arc, as if bad things happened to him rather than him ever having the agency to do bad things.

@melissaeweiss No one has to be insulting, no; nor should anyone pretend that using "they" as a pronoun is uncorrelated with hard-left (if not extremist) politics. Don't even have to get into the whys or litigate transgenderism to observe that.

Also, to those of you in my replies, it’s very easy to take issue with this person’s professional background without being transphobic and cruel.

I don’t mean to be that person, but what kind of story about ISIS sympathizers did CNN think it was going to get when the reporter assigned to the story has a degree in gender and women’s studies from UC Berkeley?

@RawClipsDaily Delivery guy sucks. Customer service sucks even more. But yeah, there’s almost zero chance that drop broke the camera like that - they’re packed internally to survive a long journey of planes, trucks, drops, and tosses. A pricey camera is nestled in there like an egg.

@DschlopesIsBack COVID was in all caps when Biden said it, duh. You can't fool Snapchat.

Question: Did Joe Biden say, "you're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations"? Snapchat AI: “No, Joe Biden did not say that 'you're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.'" Also Snapchat AI: “Biden said, 'you're not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.'" Goebbels would be very proud of this new mass brainwashing/propaganda technology...

I didn’t make it past the 14d return window. Phenomenal hardware - felt like the future - but IMO Apple flubbed software & content. Given the cash they splashed and the whole “spatial computing” campaign, the lack of stuff to do on it was stark. What it does the best on a daily basis for normal people is home theater - gorgeous screen, cool environments, good sound - but it’s a solo experience. If you have a family you probably watch most stuff with spouse and/or kids. I still kinda want it back. But even in the first 2 weeks I went days without using it bc they didn’t make it indispensable.

@SadlyItsBradley @PalmerLuckey Even forgetting the cost, I wonder what % of users continued active use 1 year after buying them.

I appreciate @PalmerLuckey’s explanation of Apple Vision Pro here It’s spot on, and despite all the naysaying about the product, and Apple being the one to do it: I think it was the right choice for the to pursue the tech in the way they did (Apple Lisa bringing us to the Mac)

The distinction made between Christians & trans people is flawed & incoherent. One can recognize transgenderism as a belief system that self-declared trans people adhere to - while thinking the ideology itself is nonsense - just as one may do with religion. Neither denies anyone's existence.

🚨 BREAKING: Barry Neufeld, a former school trustee who opposed gender ideology in schools, has been ordered to pay $750,000 to the Chilliwack Teacher’s Assocation. The BC Human Rights Tribunal literally stated the following: “If a person elects not to ‘believe’ that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not ‘believe’ in transpeople. This is a form of existential denial. “A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.” The Tribunal has declared that all British Columbians must believe in gender identities.

@plzbepatient So case after case of harassing hapless innocents, all while protesters like him characterize every case of mistaken identity by ICE as unfathomable and literally the Gestapo.

Will can type this out and not think he’s the bad guy

@ImFiredUp2 Including “black” gangs as though they have anything to do with ICE or immigration gives up the real game here.

The Mayor of Long Beach is calling all gang leaders in his city to meet him to plan attacks on ICE. He should be arrested and questioned immediately this is the definition of insurrection. Blue city soft on crime policy ⬇️⬇️⬇️🤦🏼‍♂️

@LongZavier @xwanyex The same calculus treats them as forfeit, if not laughable to even consider. Some say aborted fetuses are just tissue. Or the victim was racist, no wonder he was murdered. You laugh at those who yield 1/3 of their laboring lives to pay for what the other half enjoys for free.

@Prophasi @xwanyex putting taxpayers in the same sentence as murder victims and aborted fetuses is hilariously stupid

I think this is at root the same phenomenon underlying what’s happening in the story about test scores that’s been going around, which is that it’s ultimately a refusal to accept the existence of irreversible consequences. In the one case, you committed the crime, and you get executed and there’s no rehabilitation, there’s no undoing it, there’s no coming back. In the other case, you didn’t learn the material in school, so you don’t get to go to college, and there’s no alternative path, no coming back. Both cases demonstrate an important current in modern liberal philosophy, which is that there should always be a way back, never any final consequences. This is why abortion must always be permitted. It cannot be allowed that there are final consequences. You must have a way back. It’s why divorce must in all cases be permitted. You cannot have futures that are foreclosed upon. There must always be some other way back. Some class you can take. Some rehabilitative program. Something, something, something.

@DannyDeraney As a kid I really, really wanted to know what those Doozer sticks they used in the tiny buildings tasted like.

43 years ago today, Fraggle Rock debuted. The theme song will always be a banger.

I didn't say what's an improvement and what's not. I'm contesting your claims that conservatives don't care about education, that it's not a campaign issue for them, and that they haven't done anything. BUT in the states we have MS, multiple effective school choice measures put in place, teacher salaries raised, phone-free school initiatives (which I think many people on both sides support), tackling absenteeism, and much more. Just like Dem-led efforts e.g. the whole-lang approach they took for decades, increased funding, more power for the fed, bigger admins, or strengthening the unions, some of the things that sound good actually suck. And often you don't know for a while or the effects are conflated. But suffice it to say some make intuitive sense & some are a point of argument, but conservatives have advocated for and achieved a panoply of big actions on ed, with the support of their base.

Progressive education policy is just an absolute disgrace. Progressives just dumb down education at every opportunity.

@EndWokeness Figured it had to be fake, but nope. While I couldn't find the video, the article is here and quotes her as saying this: kfvs12.com/2025/12/11/mis…

EBT mom on junk food cuts: "What the point of food stamps if it's just for real food?!?!"

I don’t have the data nor expertise to run a full calculation - none of us do - but based on the above, and assuming 10-20M illegals, they’re nontrivial. I think Vance’s claim that no illegals makes homes affordable, is tenuous. But no, I didn’t imply at all that they’re only a drain (esp not immigrants writ large vs just illegals), only that we can reasonably infer a nontrivial effect on home demand + prices. Moreover, a lot of that blame should be put on govt for offering those programs; immigrants act rationally by using them (provided no fraud).

@Prophasi @StanislavPetrov @BWH85 @jessesingal @cultn1991 Well it was certainly implied they are a significant factor, while no evidence was put forth And your are certainly implying they are nothing but a drain. Do I have that right? Do immigrants have no positive impacts on the economy or housing costs specifically?

Progressives went through a phase in which they tried to explain basically every outcome they didn't like via racism (sometimes dressed up as 'Whiteness'). It led to some profoundly pseudointellectual output. This is that, but way worse and more vicious.

As @cultn1991 said, not one said it's solely that. Illegals aren't (technically) eligible for food stamps. They'd be paying with cash - their own, often earned under the table, but also help from the govt in multiple big states with rental assistance or housing vouchers (that's despite not being eligible for federal Section 8). Certain classes of landlords in those places are induced to convert to state-funded housing: risk is lowered bc they're guaranteed the govt share, eviction risk is lower, they have a reliable tenant pipeline and low vacancy, etc. Other immigrants get assistance via paid hotels & shelters, which don't directly affect housing. But those, like many other programs - cheap or free healthcare, WIC, state food programs, SNAP for their US-born kids, sometimes even cash stipends - alleviate big expenses and leave them w/ more money to spend on housing... increasing demand... increasing prices. And of course, immigrants often pool their cash to jointly rent housing. Bear in mind a lot of them send remittances back home to e.g. Mexico, so they live here and have cash to spare.

@StanislavPetrov @BWH85 @jessesingal And they pay rent with food stamps? You have to be profoundly retarded to believe rising housing costs are solely attributable to working immigrants and there are no other impacts to the economy due to their presence.