Owen Barron

@ScopophiliaCap1 @WillManidis @GrdDscntN2Madnz I’m building a database listing every housing project in a single city and all the zoning & permitting hurdles it has to get through, and it’s really complicated!

@ScopophiliaCap1 @WillManidis @GrdDscntN2Madnz I think the problem is that local municipal and state zoning / permitting often make new industrial construction effectively illegal by default. To properly represent that you’d need a comprehensive database of basically every state and city land use regulation! Quite hard.

Built a website to help track state level data center bans and moratoriums datacenterbans.com

@Andr3jH @asymmetricinfo Bombshell revelation about “zero-days”, aka the amount of time he’s spent writing Winds of Winter since the show finished.

BREAKING: GRRM claims The Winds of Winter is "too powerful" to be released to the public, will restrict preview access to ~40 r/asoiaf mods.

@HowlingBunghole @oren_cass In all of this Trump and the braindead followers who are still with him are acting like the guy who started a fight at a bar and is now pissed at his buddies for not joining in on the fight. Like, yes I agree that me not helping is making it harder for you. That’s on you, though!

@HowlingBunghole @oren_cass Yes, I think it’s fair to say we don’t have the stomach for a war that we didn’t vote, for, that was unpopular the moment it started, that was launched by a president who campaigned as the peace candidate, and that has no clear aims.

I mostly avoid commenting on what President Trump says from day to day, while pulling no punches in my assessments, whether positive or negative, of his policy. His Iran ultimatums feel different. Making such threats is a policy. If he were to follow through on them, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic on a world-historical scale. So while some will inevitably insist he should be “taken seriously rather than literally,” or that he is executing a sophisticated “madman” strategy in a complex game of 5-D chess, or that he needs everyone’s steadfast support to maximize his leverage, now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions that he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake. Simply put, what’s the point of all this? If these are empty threats that we all know he will not carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are on X too!), merely making the president and our nation look foolish. If they are not empty threats, then the president is asserting the American position that such actions are acceptable in this situation and ones we are willing to take. We are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him. Whether the threats are empty or not, we should be willing to say: This is wrong. We should not establish a pattern of threatening escalation from a blockaded strait to elimination of a civilization. We should not launch strikes intended to devastate the lives of millions of people and take our nation to total war without indisputable justification, or before the American people have deliberated upon and assented to the path with full understanding of what total war might mean for them. Those principles are vital to our Republic, independent of whether the strategy could “work.” But it’s also worth emphasizing that the strategy is a dead end. This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges. It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use. Our choices for continuing the war appear to be catastrophic escalation of the air war or extensive deployment of ground troops, neither of which were planned or had support at the outset. Stepping back from these threats and admitting such actions do not offer a path to resolving the conflict may be unpalatable, but it is by far the least unpalatable option available. Let us all hope cooler heads prevail.

@LizMair I guess I'd say the biggest issue with how he's handling Iran is not his potential game-theoretical mistake, it's that he started a war of choice with no clear goals or exit strategy and is now threatening to genocide an entire civilization to cover up his failings.

Reupping my tweet below from yesterday. This is the biggest issue with how Trump is handling Iran. He’s assuming the leadership cares about having a country or surviving. I’m not sure they do.

@miketermaat_ @marklevinshow I think threatening to commit genocide against an entire civilization is pretty extreme.

@marklevinshow Feels like everything turns into a weapon now. Those processes were meant for extreme situations, not just political fights.

At this moment, the Woke Reich neo-fascists are parroting the Democrats, demanding the triggering of the 25th amendment.  None of them actually know how the 25th amendment works, but they're all about drama and propaganda.  So, now, they would (if they could) use the 25th to remove a president because they disagree with him.  The Democrats have essentially said the same thing when it comes to impeachment.  These are a complete bastardization of impeachment and the 25th amendment, but they don't care.  They are radical and nuts.  And they cite the Constitution, which they don't even believe in.

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community. The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship.

@questionableway @jdcmedlock Unironically a moderate Democrat should run on Medicare for Kids as the centerpiece of a Family Security agenda which is otherwise moderate and growth- and inflation-focused (repeal trump tariffs, all-of-the-above energy, permitting, housing, etc.

expanding medicare to apply universally to all children has gotta be the single biggest unattempted no-brainer in all of american politics

@MazMHussain I had a great time on the White Dudes for Hormuz call. Vibes were peak, Hormuz is #brat. I think we’ve got this one.

Big Zoom call is definitely going to do it.

@TheStalwart I’ve been using it for internal presentations where its main function is “unpack this dense bundle of info into something structured so I don’t overwhelm ppl”. It’s ok that it sounds a little shitty and ai-generated because I spent 30 mins on it instead of 3 hrs!

Starting to appreciate AI’s so-called “jagged frontier.” It’s obviously really powerful for coding, accounting, graphic design, economics, trip planning, reviewing legal documents, DIY projects marketing, advertising, etc. Yet somehow still terrible at writing and interviewing.

@lionelbchadwick @CenTexLib It’s dumb to refuse to express an opinion you actually have just because people in coalition with you hold a more extreme version of that belief. You can actually just say what you think!

@CenTexLib exactly, the leftist community won't stop with demanding g*nocide of the j*ws. the leftist community ALSO demands g*nocide of whites foxnews.com/us/professor-w…

“I fear the left’s growing power, but not their antisemitism. In fact, I agree with that part, actually. So let’s sell Jews down the river as a treat to the left, and then hopefully they’ll stop. Signed, One of the Good Ones™️”

@MDMatt1128 @cnnbrk This is a total Republican cave. Dems have been offering to fund non-ICE parts of DHS for weeks and Trump has been telling Rs not to. Yes the ICE money from OBBBA is untouchable, but Reps have been trying to allocate more, and the Dems absolutely have not caved on it.

Sorry fake news, ICE pay is already guaranteed pay through 2029 via BBB. The Dems CAVED because Trump was going to order TSA paid regardless. DEMS knew they would have to sue Trump to stop him paying TSA so they knew the optics would be horrible , and they caved. WHAT FAKE NEWS CNN😉🤣🤣🤣🤣

Senate unanimously moves to fund most of DHS, except ICE and border patrol, in rare overnight session. cnn.it/4s1KMKJ

@KutterIsKing Least embarrassing J Hicks appearance

Fork found in kitchen

@btharris93 @CathyYoung63 The gorilla channel: never wrong, just early

People need to realise that Trump is both not mentally with it but also genuinely stupid. So many calculations do not take these basic facts into account.

@inerati I don’t get this encryption stuff. my 1password clone just writes user passwords to a markdown file that I promise not to look at.

this doesnt seem that hard to make. one of you people should claude up a 1password competitor that just syncs encrypted passwords.sqlite to google drive or something.

is there anything better than 1pw this is like insane

@_SofaVC @JimPethokoukis sorry your president sucks so bad

'Leaving Iran with its nuclear capabilities intact, an awareness they can control the strait going forward/leverage the US/west with it and then saying: yes, we are going to sanction their oil now. That seems like a victory Iran could claim, not the US.' - JPMorgan trading note

In fairness to Trump, nobody knew that a unilateral regime change war against a country of 90 million people that sits at an economic chokehold and has a devolved power structure of fanatical paramilitary battalions would be so complicated.

@HerExcell @arcDev12 @AndyMasley @mauddweeb I mean they were inevitable because Frank Herbert wrote the book to make them inevitable. He never does the work to show “here’s this horrific thing Paul will do later and this is why it’s actually necessary.” It’s the “draw the rest of the owl” of interplanetary genocide.

Yeah I apologize for thinking Paul Atreides was cool. I know the whole book is about how messianic leaders are bad. When he nuked a mountain and rode a worm through, I should've been shaking my head the whole time saying "Not cool, not cool at all"

@Alan851603 @NY_LBSS @mattwridley I assume you can choose the 4 out of your 5 family members, friends and acquaintances that you wish didn’t exist? Or are you talking about sterilizing only other people?

@NY_LBSS @mattwridley I wish he'd sterilised many more. Billions. We're overpopulated by a factor of 4 for the lifestyle *I* want. I want a LIFE, not to be a slave to your weird fertility obsession, ok? That applies to many billions of other people, too, so please think about what you're saying.

Where, on this chart, is the evidence that Ehrlich's predictions of inevitable, imminent, worsening global famine, starting in the 1960s, were "premature" rather than wrong?