James Lee

@jacksdiningroom @COSTco__ ceremonia?

@COSTco__ Just tried this today, didn’t love it

Is it just me, or are there not any good breakfast burritos in NYC? I don’t understand they can’t be that hard to make. Low key though, Golden Diner might have the best breakfast burrito no one knows about, gets very over looked by the pancakes. Who’s got recs tho? #nyc #food

RIP John Sterling, @Yankees can we bring back "Thuuuuuuh Yankees Win!" after each victory?

Cam Schlittler- “We're the Yankees. Everyone hates us. I find enjoyment in that."

rip Patrick, couldn't have said it better

I ❤️ NY

ok @doodles this is so cool

does this usa dr game have the most talented baseball field ever assembled in a game with real stakes?

soto breaking my heart twice now

walking nyc is the best i love the energy

let's go korea!!! japan ain't shit

so many smart mfers out there, gotta exercise the brain like a muscle to keep it moving

I think almost everything that can be said about Eileen Gu and Alysa Liu has already been said, but when I step back and look at the full picture, I keep getting blown away by how reality handed us a script far more perfect than anything fiction could invent. On one side, you have the cold, elitist “I’m the most decorated” athlete, raised in one of the wealthiest and most exclusive neighborhoods in the country, Sea Cliff, who gladly sold out the country that gave her everything in order to became the PR face of a brutal dictatorship in exchange for a few suitcases of cash. On the other side, you have the happy-go-lucky, “That’s what I’m fucking talking about” girl from working-class Richmond, coerced by Communist Party operatives, refusing to bow to them, and proudly representing the United States. And that does not even begin to touch on the tortuous path Alysa’s father had in getting to the United States, compared with the easy route taken by Eileen’s mother, or the many other layers of this story. And then, perfectly, one wins both her competitions and the other loses both. If anyone tried to make a movie out of this story, no one would believe it.

The Long Afternoon On the European and American minds, and what happens when the machines come for both --- There is a café in Paris where a man sits every afternoon at 2:30. He drinks a glass of red. He reads the newspaper. He does not check his phone. He is not retired. He is on his lunch break. It will last until 3:30, maybe 4:00 if the weather is nice. He has worked at the same company for nineteen years and will work there for nineteen more. He has never considered founding a startup. There is a WeWork in Austin where a twenty-nine-year-old has just closed a $4M seed round. He sleeps five hours a night by choice. He has a spreadsheet modeling his path to financial independence. Age forty-one if the exit goes well. He calls this his "number." The idea of working at the same company for nineteen years would strike him as giving up. These two men are about to get hit by the same wave. They will experience it as different catastrophes. --- ## The Leisure Problem No One Asked For The European social contract runs on a simple premise: work is a thing you do so that life can happen around it. The French didn't fight for the 35-hour workweek because they were lazy. They fought for it because they believed the purpose of an economy is to serve human living. Not the other way around. The American social contract is different. Work *is* the life. You are what you build. The entire mythology depends on work being central, challenging, and rewarded for those who swing hardest. Strip that away and you don't have an economic problem. You have a meaning problem. Now here comes AGI. Ready to automate not just the factory floor but the knowledge work, the creative work, the middle-management email-forwarding that constitutes a real percentage of GDP on both continents. The two civilizations will respond in ways that are almost comically predictable. #Europe: "We Told You So" Iceland ran its four-day workweek trial. 2,500 workers. Productivity held steady or improved. Eighty-six percent of Iceland's workforce now has access to shorter hours. The UK ran its own sixty-one-company trial. Ninety-two percent kept the four-day week permanently. Europe looks at AI-driven displacement and sees an acceleration of something they were already building toward. Fewer hours. More safety net. Work as a component of life rather than its organizing principle. Universal healthcare means losing your job doesn't mean losing your coverage. Strong unemployment benefits mean displacement is a transition, not a freefall. The European answer to "what if the robots take our jobs?" is: "Finally." The downside: Europe will innovate at the pace of a committee meeting. Finland ran its UBI experiment in 2017-2018. Two thousand unemployed citizens. €560 monthly. The recipients were happier, healthier, and no less likely to find work. People don't stop contributing when you stop threatening them with destitution. The policy change will require seventeen working groups, four years of deliberation, and a 400-page report nobody reads. But it will pass. For Europe, the question "what do humans do when work isn't central?" is not a question. It's a Tuesday. America: The Reinvention America has a different problem. It's not economic. It's narrative. The entire American project runs on the belief that effort compounds. That *you* are the variable. That the game is winnable if you play hard enough. AI doesn't just threaten jobs. It challenges the premise. If a machine does what you do, better, at marginal cost, then what was the optimization for? This is why American UBI will never be called UBI. It will be called a dividend. An ownership stake. A citizen's share. Americans don't want handouts. They want equity. The framing matters more than the policy. And the framing is better. Ownership beats charity every time. There's a model that works: Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend. Every Alaskan gets an annual check. $1,312 in 2024. Red state. Deep red. They love it. Not because it's welfare but because it's *their cut*. They own the oil. The fund invests. They get dividends. That's not socialism. That's capitalism with a broader cap table. This is how UBI comes to America. State by state. Experiment by experiment. Wrapped in the language of ownership. Stockton, California ran its SEED program. $500/month to 125 residents for two years. Full-time employment among recipients *increased* by 12 percentage points. The money didn't make people lazy. It made them stable enough to take better risks. The American version requires proof of concept, measurable ROI, and a name that sounds like an investment thesis. It's more work. It's also more resilient. Policies framed as ownership outlast policies framed as welfare by decades. The federal version will likely be a sovereign wealth fund seeded by AI productivity taxes. Corporate automation gains flow into a public trust. Citizens receive quarterly dividends. Republicans call it "ownership society 2.0." Democrats call it "economic justice." Both vote for it. The check clears either way. Capitalisms Diverge Neither system is wrong. They're optimized for different failure modes. Europe optimized for stability. The cost is dynamism. European tech is an also-ran because the culture doesn't reward wild swings. You don't get many Googles when "taking a reasonable amount of risk" is a compliment. But when the disruption wave hits, the shock absorbers are installed. The transition will be slow, bureaucratic, and humane. Also boring. America optimized for dynamism. The cost is exposure. The same system that lets you go from garage to IPO in seven years means the safety net has gaps. When AI displacement hits America's knowledge workers, the landing will be rough. But America builds the parachute on the way down, in public, while arguing about the design. Here's the twist: America might adapt *faster* because the crisis will cut deeper. Europe will manage the transition with maximum paperwork. America will reinvent chaotically, messily, and invent three things that don't work for every one that does. But reinvention under pressure is America's competitive advantage. Europe has a 400-year head start on work-life balance. America has a track record of going from "impossible" to "how did we ever live without this" in a generation. The man in Paris will still have his glass of red in 2035. His pension might be funded differently. His afternoon will look the same. The man in Austin will face a question he's spent his adult life avoiding: if the machines handle the work and the fund covers the dividend and there's no more ladder to climb, then what does he build? The answer, if history is any guide: something new, too ambitious, likely to fail, and if it works, world-changing. Europe already knows what humans do when work isn't central. Live well. Enjoy it. Don't overthink it. America is about to write its own answer. At speed. Under pressure. Which is exactly when America does its best work.

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics. “Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….” The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

For millennia, jocks ran everything. The nerds finally take over. And what do they do? Develop AI that wipes out their own coding/math/analysis moats. Creating a social premium on interpersonal skills. The irony.

Watch “You're In It Now || Premier League USA” on #Vimeo vimeo.com/1013644722?ref… I played soccer with the CD of this video every Sunday and I just learned that he passed away this weekend... Take care of yourselves y'all

I will tolerate no Doosan Bears slander in these mentions.