Thomas B Cox

Player Lineup - a tool for growing your team. Listen to M2: Managing Managers on Spotify open.spotify.com/episode/59xxon…

Free market capitalism has turned what was once luxuries reserved for the very richest into everyday necessities for the masses. Socialism, where it has been tried, has managed the reverse: turning life’s necessities into luxury items for the elites.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

I was told this never happens

This from Paul Ehrlich will make you think "If I'm always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I've gotten virtually every scientific honor." Link in reply

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. - Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.” — G. K. Chesterton

This is the way

Elon Musk explains his 5-step algorithm for running companies “First, make your requirements less dumb. Your requirements are definitely dumb… It’s particularly dangerous if a smart person gave you the requirements because you might not question them enough.” In this interview at Starbase, Elon elaborates on his methodology for shipping everything from electric cars to rockets. Here’s his “algorithm” quoted in full from the Walter Isaacson biography: 1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department" or "the safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out. Elon shares a costly example of doing this process in reverse on the Tesla Model 3 production line and optimizing a part that didn’t even need to exist. “It’s possibly the most common error of a smart engineer to optimize a thing that should not exist. Everyone’s been trained in high school and college that you answer the question — convergent logic. You can’t tell the professor your question is dumb or you’ll get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone, without knowing, basically has this mental straight jacket on and they’ll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist.” Video source: @Erdayastronaut (2021)

When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems,” “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!) My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative They didn't like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference One of my professors even had a running joke she'd use to preface discussions on Islam—she'd do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie's take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn't know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it's one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today

The Iranian women’s national football team refused to sing the anthem of the Islamic Regime. Tonight. At the opening match of the Asian Cup. In front of the entire world. So, to all liberal Western women: Watch and learn. THIS is what real feminism looks like.

People don’t work harder when they’re scared. They work harder when they know what to expect. Clear rules give people courage.

@0xzak Love this.

RTFM Testing Or: If an amnesiac can't follow your docs, your docs suck The problem with documentation is that the person who wrote it already knows how everything works and they fill in gaps unconsciously. "Oh, they'll figure out they need to run npm install first." "The env vars are obvious." Nah bro they're not. So I came up with this new methodology to dogfood your documentation and make it ironclad. You spawn a completely fresh agent, give it nothing but the documentation, and tell it to complete a task. Zero context or hints. No "oh I forgot to mention." Just the docs. Then watch it fail. Every confusion, every wrong turn, every "I don't see where this is specified" is a documentation bug. Not a user bug. A doc bug. The agent has no pride. It won't pretend to understand. It'll just... try. And when it can't, it'll tell you exactly where it got stuck: [GAP] MISSING_PREREQ Location: Step 1 "Clone the repository" Problem: No repository URL specified Impact: Cannot proceed Suggestion: Add: git clone github.com/org/repo.git Fix the docs. Respawn. Try again. Repeat until a cold-start agent can complete the task from docs alone. We track it with a Cold Start Score which is the number of spawn cycles until success. Lower is better. Docs are RTFM Certified when a fresh tester achieves success with zero blocking gaps. The trick isn't having someone review your docs, but having someone review them who has no memory of why you wrote them that way. If a blank-slate agent can do it, a human probably can too. Skill here: github.com/zscole/rtfm-te…

The Supreme Court has explicitly said that due process applies to “all persons within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” Zadvydas v. Davis (2001)

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.” — Friedrich Hayek

“Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong.” — Thomas Sowell

A Final Message From Scott Adams

🚨BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV calls out the EU and British government: "A new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fuelling it."

BREAKING: The UAE announces it will cuts funds for citizens who want to study in the UK out of fear of Emirati students being radicalized by Muslim Brotherhood Islamists on British campuses. An Arab state now views a European state as a dangerous Islamist radicalization hotspot

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world. Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime. Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it. Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people,” Arabs, or “the Middle East,” as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine. This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs,” “all Arabs are Muslim,” and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers.” Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture—Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable—are erased. By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them—or ignores them entirely. There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues. As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises. Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically. This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language. Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape. That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored. So the silence continues.

Tailwind lays of 75% of their team. the reason is so ironic: > their css framework became extremely popular w AI coding agents, 75m downloads/mo > that meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings > resulting in 40% drop in traffic & 80% revenue loss