Shawn Yarbrough

Smart, powerful, good, people, looking out for society, has no substitute. With them, any political or economic system will work. Yes, even the ones you hate. Without them, your pet political or economic system will collapse.

@Noahpinion Until drone defenses mature.

The age of the rifleman draws to a close

@paulg @CarlJWhyte Their false claim isn’t a very important mistake. Some billionaires made that money by doing bad things. Saying “not all billionaires” is missing the main point.

@CarlJWhyte No one would disagree with that. But their claims are far stronger. They claim that if you become sufficiently rich it must have been by doing bad things.

A friend's startup is growing at 93% a month. I pointed out that her net worth is also growing at 93% a month, and that she can thus feel, in her own life, the falsity of politicians' claim that you have to do bad things to get rich. They're just focusing on making users happy.

@techmudder @Strandjunker None of this is true.

Lmao, the German-rooted “nomad print artist” and professional “strong voice against Trumpism” just had her big history-class epiphany: advanced civilizations CAN collapse. Congrats on the 10-year-late realization, Andrea. You’ve been doomposting “the end of democracy,” nuclear Trump, Epstein conspiracies, and “patriarchy lies” non-stop since 2016 while ignoring the actual rot: open borders, crime spikes, cultural self-loathing, and birth-rate collapse your crowd cheered for. Newsflash: the only thing falling apart is your worldview. Civilizations don’t die from mean tweets or strong leaders, they die from the weakness and grievance you sell daily. Stay dramatic and terminally online, sweetie. History’s verdict on people like you isn’t kind.

In history class, I never understood how “advanced” civilizations could collapse. It just didn’t seem plausible. Anyway, I’ve seen enough. I get it now.

@paulg The person who IS a thief? But didn’t steal anything this time? That’s who is indignant? Weird.

No one is more indignant when falsely accused of theft than a habitual thief.

@RichardHanania What does democracy have to do with this? Why aren’t you asking about the effects of Spanish grammar or jungle climates or banana plantations on murder rates? Those topics make about as much sense.

Some countries have seen "Bukele in reverse." Brazil democratized in the 1980s, and has been more violent ever since. If democracies can't deal with crime, then that will only discredit the very idea of democracy.

if you’re neurodivergent this problem just keeps recurring at higher and higher levels of abstraction (behavioral, emotional, conceptual) until you die

Samuel Alito quoting FAKE DATA in his ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act should be GROUNDS FOR DISMISSING THE DECISION AND FOR HIS IMMEDIATE REMOVAL.

@QueenNighthawk @reesetheone1 The Democrats are a centrist party. There are no left-leaning parties with any power in the USA, unlike other civilized countries. Conservatives have utterly destroyed the left to where “hey please stop killing people in the streets” is considered a “radical left” idea.

@reesetheone1 There’s a lot of people who will still vote red because of how far left the Dems have gone! They will almost eat the gas prices just for that reason!

In the doctor's office. Older white couple bitching about 6 dollar diesel prices...... says the government is screwing folks. 😂😂😂😂 Sixth months left. Stay pissed and ready to vote.

@Tesla Terrible judgment.

The last Model S & the last Model X have been produced at Fremont Factory 14 years of history for Model S, 11 years for Model X 🫡

@RpsAgainstTrump At least they were mostly stealing from other rich people. (Mostly.)

Someone quietly placed a massive $920 million crude oil short at 3:40 a.m. ET this morning. Just 70 minutes later, Axios reported the U.S. and Iran were close to a 14 point deal to end the war. Oil prices crashed, and someone made a fortune. The golden age of corruption.

Obama was so real for this

@quirkyllama @Noahpinion DEI means “don’t reject qualified candidates for a job simply because they aren’t white males”.

@Noahpinion What do you think DEI *means*? If I say "I'd really like it if there were more Red&Blue M&Ms in each pack" what does that mean for the other colors?

I will never cease to be amazed at conservatives' ability to invent a Fantasy Obama in their heads to get angry at

@PlanetaryIntel @ZMadon @FillingTheCrack Iran has demonstrated that blowing things up doesn’t always make the government collapse. However, western military still can not be stopped from blowing things up. If NATO was goaded into entering the Ukraine war, Russia’s military there would cease to exist.

@ZMadon @FillingTheCrack You are delusional. Iran has demonstrated the limits to western military power. The empire is in terminal decline.

Intuition sagt mir, irgendwas passiert in Russland die nächsten 2-3 Monate. Es ist immer klarer, dass - Russland diesen Krieg nicht gewinnt; - die Ukraine diesen Krieg nach Russland bringt & Infrastruktur dezimiert; - wie horrend die Kosten für die Wirtschaft sind. 1/2

@Noahpinion Disagree. Democrats good. Tired of pretending they're not. All the crazy shit of the left is grouped in the leftists. Republicans ARE the crazy shit of their side.

@dominic_n51289 @DemocraticWins The 5.032 price under Biden was four years ago in 2022 so the post is correct not fake. In 2021-2022 Biden was dealing with the pandemic and trying to recover the nation from Trump’s first term so it was a very different time from today.

@DemocraticWins This is more vague news. I paid over five dollars a gallon in Arizona under Biden for over a year maybe two years. I just paid 424 at Costco. This is such fake news. I’m so tired of these fake losers. All they can do is spread lies instead of facts

BREAKING: New reporting reveals the Trump Administration is panicking after gas prices hit their highest levels today in over 4 years. This is Trump's fault.

@stellaaaaaa55 @DemocraticWins The 5.02 price (actually 5.032) was four years ago in 2022 so the post is correct.

@DemocraticWins Lying BOT POS! Average price today is 4.05 a gallon and under your idiot Bumbling Biden average price was 5.02 which is the HIGHEST PRICE EVER !!! and for NO REASON! At least we have a good reason for higher gas and personally ill pay more to see IRAN free from Islamic regime!

@b24liberat0r @fjzeit That’s odd, LLMs follow my specs reasonably well. Not perfectly of course, but well enough to greatly magnify my productivity.

@fjzeit For me, that sweet spot implies writing code by hand in many cases. After a while, you develop the intuition to know where AI can help and where not. But agentic coding is nonsense. No matter how detailed specs you write, the LLMs will treat them as suggestions in most cases.

all the best programmers i know spent effort testing the practical limits of AI. they identified a sweet spot that delivers productivity improvements while retaining control of design, implementation, and cognitive ownership so they could remain responsible and accountable.

@nxidis @aakashgupta Not really. Google an essay called “Tragedy of the Commons”. This is an ancient problem affecting probably all societies.

@aakashgupta It says something profound about the direction of our society that we’ve gone from a mostly self regulating population to one that requires sophisticated cages.

BART spent $90 million on new fare gates. They're recovering about $10 million a year in fares. That's a 9-year payback on paper. The actual return hit in six months. Embarcadero station went from 112 hours of corrective maintenance in the six months before installation to 2 hours after. Daly City saved 109. Balboa Park saved 75. Across the system, 961 hours of cleanup work disappeared. Corrective maintenance is the term BART uses for graffiti, heavy soiling, vandalism, the damage that needs a crew not a janitor. At several stations it dropped to zero. Crime fell 41% year over year. Riders who reported seeing fare evasion on their trip dropped from 22% to 10%. Citations issued by BART police went from 2,200 in January to under 1,000 in July, because there was nothing to cite. The gates were a filtering project disguised as a revenue project. Old BART gates were waist-high orange fins designed in the 1970s. You could hop them in under a second. That made the station effectively a public space, and the rider mix reflected that. The new gates are 72 inches of polycarbonate with 3D sensors that detect tailgating. You either pay or you don't enter. Once you don't enter, you also don't smoke on the platform, sleep in the elevator, or harass other riders. BART tried hiring more police for years. Blitz operations at high-traffic stations. Increased patrols. Dedicated transit cops. None of it moved the numbers the way six feet of polycarbonate did. The $10 million in recovered fares is the smallest line in the return. Fare revenue used to cover 70% of BART operations. After the pandemic it collapsed to 22%. The gates won't fix that gap directly. They fix the precondition for fixing it: a system that office workers, families, and tourists are willing to use again. Ridership growth at stations with new gates outpaced ungated ones before the rollout finished. A $400 million annual deficit is heading to voters in November as a sales tax measure. Voters don't approve sales taxes for transit agencies they don't feel safe in. The $90 million on gates is buying BART the right to ask the public for more money. That's the real return on six feet of polycarbonate.

@JamesCh67471584 @Strandjunker The USA spends literally trillions of dollars on pointless wars.

Number of deadbeat NATO countries. ALOT. Europe asked for 2% of GDP and ten years to get there and 30% still failed. I don’t understand why the ones above the line don’t call out their deadbeat neighbors. Seems Eastern Europe gets it and Western Europe is happy on the American tit and arrogance to judge us.

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss: 🇦🇺 0 🇨🇦 0 🇩🇰 0 🇫🇮 0 🇫🇷 0 🇩🇪 0 🇮🇸 0 🇮🇪 0 🇮🇹 0 🇯🇵 0 🇳🇱 0 🇳🇴 0 🇵🇹 0 🇪🇸 0 🇸🇪 0 🇬🇧 0 🇺🇸 530,000 There’s a lesson there.

@AskCoachKev Nice trick to calculate calories.

Pillar 1) Calories A simple way to get started is take your current body weight and multiple by 10-12. - 10 for more aggressive fat loss. - 12 for a little slower (but more sustainable). 180lbs? Start between 1800 and 2160 calories per day.

If I woke up 30lbs overweight tomorrow, I could eat Chick-fil-A 5x a week and still lose all of it. Here are the only 5 things I'd focus on to do it: