Thomas B Cox

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

"Socialism is a political religion whose God is the State and whose priests are the bureaucrats... It is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal distribution of misery." Winston Churchill

Jobs aren't finite -- that's the "lump of labor" fallacy, falsified by every tech transition in history. ATMs rolled out across the US through the 1980s. Bank teller jobs doubled between 1980 and 2010 -- because cheaper branches meant banks opened more of them. Money saved by automation doesn't vanish -- it gets reinvested, lowers prices, and funds industries that don't exist yet. This model assumed its conclusion. That's not a proof.

🤯BREAKING: Researchers just mathematically proved that AI layoffs will collapse the economy: and every CEO already knows it. The AI Layoff Trap. A game theory paper from UPenn + Boston University is glaringly important! 100K+ tech layoffs in 2025. 80% of US workers exposed. And no market force can stop it. → Every company fires workers to cut costs → Every fired worker stops buying products → Revenue collapses across every sector → The companies that fired everyone go bankrupt It's a Prisoner's Dilemma with math behind it. Automate and you survive short-term. Don't automate and your competitor kills you. But everyone automating destroys the demand that makes all companies viable. UBI (universal basic income) won't fix it. Profit taxes won't fix it. The researchers found only one solution: a Pigouvian automation tax "robot tax" The AI trap on the economy is here!

Thinking about this Bono quote again

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