Howard Cogan 🇺🇸

After living here for a few decades I’ve come to the conclusion that California has violent terrain that shakes slides and burns and a hierarchy of corrupt self serving layers government that are completely incapable of dealing with it. Vote wisely my friends.

@r0ck3t23 also some dipshit will steal all the copper at 3am (like they do in LA) and the planet grinds to a halt

Elon Musk just revealed what’s actually holding AI back. It’s not chips. Not models. Not data. It’s concrete. Someone asked him the obvious question. Why not just build private power plants next to data centers? Bypass the grid entirely. His answer was four words. Musk: “The power plant makers.” There aren’t enough of them. You can design the best chip on earth. Train a frontier model. Raise $10 billion for a hyperscale data center. None of it matters if you can’t power it. Musk: “You can drill down a level further.” GPUs need power. Power needs turbines. Turbines need factories. Factories need permits. Permits need a government that hasn’t paralyzed itself. Every link in the chain is physical. And every one of them is breaking. We can train a frontier model in weeks. We can’t permit a power plant in under five years. The country that invented the assembly line now needs 40 agencies to approve a gas turbine. China doesn’t have this problem. They don’t run 7-year environmental reviews on infrastructure they need tomorrow. They break ground while America requests approval to break ground. The AI race won’t be decided by whoever writes the best algorithm. It’ll be decided by whoever can still build in the physical world. We spent 30 years getting faster in software and slower in steel. Outsourcing manufacturing. Hollowing out supply chains. Treating builders like liabilities instead of assets. Now the bill is due. Every breakthrough in AI is gated by atoms. Steel. Concrete. Turbines that take years to manufacture and decades to approve. The smartest code on earth is worthless without electricity. Musk didn’t give a speech about this. He didn’t need to. He answered one question and the whole infrastructure myth collapsed. “Where do you get the power plants from?” Follow that thread far enough and you stop finding a technology problem. You find a civilization that mastered thinking and forgot how to build.

@spencerpratt Also dude look at the bright side. When you win you get a free house

@elonmusk They need to sound more disgruntled impatient and apathetic

Try Grok Voice for your customer support

How about another concert for the victims of Fire Aid?

@WallStreetApes you mean "fine" not "fund" correct?

The Trump Administration has begun sending massive fund to undocumented people in America illegally One woman who’s been here for over 20 years illegally and had 3 birthright citizenship babies just received a $1.8 million dollar fine Undocumented people are now being charged $998 per day for being in America illegally This ain’t a new law, Trump is just enforcing the law The $998 per day fine comes from a 1996 law (8 U.S.C. § 1324d) that allows civil penalties for failing to depart after a final removal and deportation order. The law was rarely used before but is now being aggressively enforced under the Trump administration Fines can be applied retroactively up to 5 years, leading to bills of $1.8 million or more If you’re in America illegally, this is your sign to leave

@XFreeze Wait? so he's the beneficiary of the "Charity"? So it was setup to help HIM?

Greg Brockman ended up with ~$30 billion from a charity but never donated the $100k he promised

@nettermike And his genius strategy will be to gaslight you say that’s not true repeat 10 times we have the 4th largest economy in the world and no one is leaving the state and the choo choo train is going great.

Are you looking forward to paying another TAX just for driving your car? Gavin Newsom has quietly imposed one of the largest hidden taxes in California history — slipped into a bill marketed as “housing reform” while the public’s attention was elsewhere. In June 2025, Newsom signed AB 130. Buried on page 137, Section 58 quietly gives local governments the green light to impose Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) mitigation fees on new housing developments under CEQA. If a proposed home or apartment is projected to generate “too much” driving — according to government climate models — developers must pay steep fees to “offset” the impact by funding transit projects or low-VMT housing elsewhere. Those costs don’t disappear. They get passed directly to homebuyers and renters in the form of higher prices and rents. According to the CARE About Housing coalition, the added burden can reach $324,000 per unit over 20 years — roughly $16,200 per year, or $1,350 extra per month. That $600,000 starter home? Now closer to $924,000. That $2,500 monthly apartment rent? Closer to $3,850. What makes this especially punishing: the fee is based on the location of the home, not how much you actually drive. It applies regardless of whether you carpool, own an EV, bike, or work from home. The policy effectively penalizes suburban and family-oriented neighborhoods farther from dense transit corridors, while steering development toward high-rise urban projects favored by Sacramento planners. This isn’t housing reform — it’s social engineering disguised as environmental policy. It makes single-family homes and the kinds of neighborhoods where most families want to live even more expensive, while adding yet another layer of costs and uncertainty for builders already struggling with California’s regulatory maze. Newsom frequently touts his commitment to abundance and solving the housing crisis. Yet this bill does the opposite: it inflates the price of every new home, discourages construction outside preferred “smart growth” zones, and shifts the burden onto working families who simply want a decent place to live without government micromanaging their commute. This is textbook big-government failure — taxing the aspiration of homeownership, driving up costs, and labeling it “progress.” As more Californians leave the state for more affordable places, Newsom continues to push policies that treat owning a home as a luxury reserved for the well-connected rather than a realistic goal for everyday families.

@LeadingReport Do two fer Tuesday Jeffries and Thune

President Trump calls for House Republicans to start the process immediately to remove Hakeem Jeffries from office.

@tomselliott @mazemoore He had an amazing talent for being wrong about everything yet sounding certain about it. Like Biden Newsom level talent

AG Merrick Garland, March 7, 2023: "Our complaint alleges that JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit violate Section 7 of the Clayton Act. We allege that if allowed to proceed this merger will limit choices and drive up ticket prices for passengers across the country. "And we further allege that the impact of this merger will be particularly harmful for travelers who rely on what are known as ultra low cost carriers in order to fly. Those include working & middle-class Americans who traveled for personal as opposed to business reasons & who must pay their own way. By acquiring Spirit JetBlue will eliminate the largest ultra low cost carrier in the United States.”

I think the problem is we keep electing followers in positions of leadership Newsom follows Trump leads. If Trump was gov of California he'd be on the phone with every major corp that left and made deals to bring them back then making announcements every day on the booming businesses coming here not bitching about the federal government all day while the minions in Sacramento cripple the economy with new taxes and regulations

Newsom: “The biggest reflection of this moment, is how… just the sewer that we are now living in because of Donald Trump.” Maher: “Among all the people who may or may not be running, you are the one who kind of imitates his style with the trolling”

@TheKevinDalton Clown; "4th largest economy" like it was 400th before he was elected. Wait until they count the beans next year. The compass is no longer pointing north

Bill Maher just ended Gavin Newsom’s political career in 46 seconds

@libsoftiktok @CitizenFreePres She should marry her

Ilhan Omar secured MILLIONS of tax dollars for a Minneapolis health clinic that was run by… her sister! I’m sure there’s nothing to see here!

@dubsndoo No protests on stolen land

Totally. Shut down the World Cup in Vancouver, and make B.C. a global laughingstock. Nothing about this shithole province surprises me anymore.

@EndWokeness Just curious if someone gave me a Ford pickup truck and I demanded to vote in the Ford shareholder meeting cause I didn’t like the fan belts and therefore wanted to change the board of directors is that fair?

LA Councilman Hugo Soto Martinez: It is not fair that illegals are not able to vote!

@RichardGrenell Here’s the thing I could run for Gov in CA. Say I’ll jack gas up to $12/gallon make a “housing tax” take 50% of its value every year. Make prison illegal for criminals and put a (D) beside my name and I’d still win.

The California media is shameful to allow Democrats to blame Trump for our state’s problems. Democrats control all of Sacramento and all our cities. People can’t afford homes because of Democrat policies. People aren’t getting good paying jobs because Democrats chase businesses away. They raise taxes on everything. Stop voting for Democrats.

@EricLDaugh What a pain in the ass he is

🚨 WTF?! Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker just boasted that he is running a DATABASE TRACKER to punish ICE and CBP agents as soon as he can “They’re eventually both going to lose their jobs and even their FREEDOM.” Pritzker is a traitor. He should RESIGN!

@Geiger_Capital @Zigmanfreud Won’t pass Supreme Court and if they fail and seizure is legal then why can’t anyone take what they want when they want? Either there is private property or there isn’t and if there isn’t you’ll end up with anarchy.

The California wealth tax is not on income… It’s 5% of your net worth. It’s state seizure of private assets. This is now on the ballot and likely to pass. Realize where we are.

I’ve been here from almost day 1 and in prior years with a tiny following I could get likes and exposure literally by typing one word. Now I could break the story of the century and it’ll be exposed to 8 bots and if none of them like it game over. Don’t have a follow button if it means nothing. X right now is maybe 2k accounts posting to 100 million. The rest is invisible or just noise

The X algorithm is broken, and it's killing the platform from the inside out. It's gotten measurably worse, and it now barely registers something as fundamental as how many people chose to follow you. Small accounts can't grow organically. Large accounts watch their reach collapse month over month. Post too much and you're throttled. Post too little and you're forgotten. There is no winning move because the system isn't designed for anyone to win. It's designed to keep everyone anxious, posting more, and dependent on whatever the model decided that morning. I'm personally down 95% from a year ago. Ninety-five percent. I get more views and replies on Instagram with 20,000 followers than I do here with a following many multiples of that. Every serious creator, journalist, and news account I know is reporting the same collapse. This isn't a handful of cranks complaining but a structural failure visible in the numbers across the entire creator class. The damage runs deeper than impressions. The algorithm has quietly redefined what kind of person you're allowed to be on this platform. If you stay relentlessly inside one "niche," you get rewarded. If you post like an actual human being with multiple interests — politics, tech, gaming, culture, memes — you get punished. The system literally works against diversity of thought, which is supposed to be the entire point of a town square. It funnels everyone into narrower and narrower lanes until creators stop being people and start being content categories. The user experience is just as broken as the creator experience. Imagine subscribing to a dozen tech and science channels on YouTube and being shown unrelated slop instead. That's the For You feed now. Most of the accounts on my timeline are random accounts I never asked to see, while the people I actually chose to follow get buried. The "systems-first" approach the team is so proud of has turned a social network into a slot machine and the engagement numbers everyone is whispering about in group chats prove the experiment isn't working. Here's the part nobody at X seems willing to say out loud: followers used to be social capital, and the algorithm has retroactively devalued every account on the platform. All of us, aside from the legacy celebrities who arrived with audiences pre-built, clawed our way up from zero. We posted through the woke years, the bot waves, the policy changes, the verification chaos. We built something. And then one day a model decided our followers don't really count anymore. Treating creators this way is the digital equivalent of how communist regimes treat entrepreneurs: confiscate the value they built, redistribute it to whoever the central planner prefers this week, and call it fairness. It also makes no business sense. Creators are not a cost center on this platform — we are the platform. The reason anyone opens the app is because someone they want to hear from is here. When you suppress that signal in favor of algorithmic guesses, you don't just hurt creators — you train users to leave. People are already migrating their best work to Substack, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where follower relationships still mean something. X is speedrunning the same mistake every dying platform makes: confusing engagement metrics with actual loyalty. The fix isn't complicated: Give us back a real Following feed that respects the explicit choice users made when they hit the follow button. Let the For You tab handle discovery — that's its job — but stop overriding the social graph people built deliberately. Make follower count weight something meaningful again. Stop punishing topical range. Stop boosting unverified randoms over accounts users have actively opted into. And stop pretending an opaque ranking model is more legitimate than the user's own stated preferences. X is supposed to be the free speech platform. But suppression by algorithm is still suppression — it just has better PR. If the team is serious about this being a town square, the people who showed up and built it deserve to actually be heard by the audiences they earned. Fix the algorithm. Give followers back their meaning. Let creators be human again.

Another Giant Leap for mankind!