RVing Orchardist

The world is splitting between people who engage with reality to build the future and professional outrage artists spinning fantasy in the name of “accountability.” Wired has cast its lot with the latter. Wired talked to 37 people (including trying to talk to one employee's mother!) and discovered some Pultizer-winning stuff: defense manufacturing is hard, Grimm didn't like his lunch, and that we hold our people to the highest standards. Truly groundbreaking. After I suggested someone should buy them last month, this reads less like journalism and more like a petty grudge. An increasingly irrelevant tech publication put us in their burn book. Newsflash @Wired: this changes nothing about what the Pentagon needs or what our adversaries fear. What this half-reported screed can't capture (because it wouldn't know how and didn't take us up on our offers to help) is where we actually are: scaling faster than anyone in this industry, fixing problems as we find them, and building things this country hasn't built in generations. Don't like it? Don't Work at Anduril.

BREAKING: David @friedberg says "California is functionally bankrupt" "People don't realize how screwed California is, & I worry that if California falls, so does the union. "$250 billion to $1 trillion short." "This is because for California to get rescued would be a big cost to red states, & I think it creates in the years ahead a lot of tension." "California's functional bankruptcy is a major risk to the country. & I think we need to figure out what we can change to fix it." How we got here: "California has a public pension system, & that public pension system retirees have paid into it & they get some benefits out, & the amount that they're owed back out is somewhere between $250 billion - $1 trillion dollars more than has been paid in. $250 billion to $1 trillion short. If it was the federal government, it would be like, okay, we'll just print more money. California doesn't have the ability to print money, so California has to pay this out, and you can't restructure retirement benefits. There is a Supreme Court case in California that said that once an employee has been offered retirement benefits, even if they're currently an employee, you can never restructure their retirement benefits. It has to stay forever, and the state cannot declare bankruptcy. There's no way for the state to functionally declare bankruptcy. There's no law to allow it. No state has ever declared bankruptcy, and the retirement benefits sit senior to the bonds in California. So you have to pay out the retirement benefits before you pay out all the bond holders that have loaned California the money that they use to run all their programs and services." Hill & Valley Forum 2026 (@HillValleyForum)