Sandy Plunkett

@r0ck3t23 I’d love to hear what you think without AI doing the prose for you. 🙏

Cathie Wood just named the contradiction nobody wants to touch. She compared Elon Musk to Thomas Edison. Not as praise. As a pattern. Wood: “I think he’s the Thomas Edison of our age… he wants to do the right thing to transform the lot of most of humanity.” The media sees a reckless billionaire setting fires. Wood sees the only person in the room building anything at all. The gap between those two readings tells you everything about who controls the narrative. Start with Tesla. Wood: “Tesla was an environmental move, which I think a lot of people attacking his cars… they’ve forgotten.” He built the exact machine environmentalists spent thirty years begging for. Didn’t lobby for it. Didn’t write a whitepaper. Built it. Forced every major automaker on Earth to abandon the combustion engine. Then the second he won, the same movement made him the enemy. Because the establishment never wanted the problem solved. They wanted the problem funded. And those are two very different things. A solved problem kills the committee. Kills the nonprofit. Kills the careers built on managing the crisis instead of ending it. Musk ended it. And they have never forgiven him. SpaceX looks like an escape hatch if you never read past the headline. Which is exactly what the press counts on. Wood: “What we learn about material science and technologies… is going to help us here on Earth as well.” Mars was never the exit. It is the lab. Build under conditions so brutal that every breakthrough changes what is possible back home. You learn to keep a human alive in a frozen irradiated vacuum. Fixing an energy grid on a temperate planet becomes arithmetic. He is not running from the cradle. He is stress-testing the technology that preserves it. But that story doesn’t sell ads. Doesn’t move polling numbers. So they bury it under hit pieces and congressional theater and call it journalism. Most people who reach his level stop building and start protecting what they have. They buy senators. They buy newspapers. They buy silence. Musk keeps picking the hardest unsolved problems on the planet and running straight at them. That is what terrifies the establishment. Not that he might fail. That he might succeed without them. Without their funding. Without their approval. Without anything they can hold over his head. A man they cannot buy is a man they cannot control. So they do the only thing they have left. They send the media after him. Every legacy outlet runs the same playbook. Strip the context. Clip the quote. Frame the motive. Let the algorithm do the rest. It has worked on every builder before him. It will not work on this one. They will spend their careers trying to tear him down. He will spend his building the thing that saves them anyway. The stones always come from inside the walls.

@mtaibbi Curtis Yarvin always reads like the unfunny long form version of Tatiana McGrath.

Jesus. I’ll pass on a “hard party” like “the CCP in China.” I’ll pass on “official truth,” too.

@FootnotesGuy Where were any of them in the last five years? Crickets and conformity!

A rare moment… could corporate leaders actually start telling the truth about the cost of what we’re attempting to do with our energy system?

@BillAckman Whatever happened to “hi” - and just winging it from there?

I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, the online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers. As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that I found compelling. I would ask: “May I meet you?” before engaging further in a conversation. I almost never got a No. It inevitably enabled the opportunity for a further conversation. I met a lot of really interesting people this way. I think the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness. You might give it a try. And yes, I think it should also work for women seeking men as well as same sex interactions. Just two cents from an older happily married guy concerned about our next generation’s happiness and population replacement rates.

@ausvstheagenda Is the US not multicultural?

NSW Premier Chris Minns says Australia doesn’t have the same free speech protections as the United States, calling it a trade-off we must accept to safeguard the multicultural society we’ve built.

@ProfRoyGreen 👍 Fab photo

What was I doing on that fateful day Nov 11 1975? Presenting analysis of Treasurer Bill Hayden’s budget 📊 to the AMWU national organisers’ school (yes that’s Laurie Carmichael taking notes). By the afternoon it was Malcolm Fraser’s budget & school was out 😠

@matt_barrie Ive often observed that Sam Altman presents as unflappable. But he seemed very triggered in recent BG2 podcast when Brad Gerstner had the audacity to ask him how a 13 billion company could commit to spending 1.3 trillion. Was tense interaction. :) open.spotify.com/episode/0eKeey…

US AI Czar: there will be no OpenAI bailout

@MelbourneGeek @matt_barrie Would love to read that speech. Is there a transcript I could access?

I gave a talk in Canberra on geopolitics and cybersecurity covering this topic 2.5 years ago, and said the capital flight to the US for high tech was inevitable, just based on fundamentals let alone national security grounds. If you were looking to make $ in tech, you’d put your money in the US. The question is would this have happened regardless without a deal?

Err, so Albos deal is to send 36% of Australia’s entire superannuation savings to the US? Seven years of total contributions in the next 10 years? Bullish for the ASX and property ☠️

@walterkirn Yes love this book. Bligh it for my kids many years ago. A little gem.

This book has given me endless delight over the years, and still does. You're not too old for it, and few are too young for it. Makes you feel that just to be alive is to be part of a great, important tale, but a tale that can still be held easily in the mind and mulled over.

@p_m_robinson @nfergus @VDHanson A cracker of a conversation. More please.

Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Stephen Kotkin--all on the latest Uncommon Knowledge. Ask three of the finest minds on the face of the planet whether Donald Trump is historic, and you know what they'll agree on? Nothing. @nfergus @VDHanson youtube.com/watch?v=v1Gm1O…

@matt_barrie That’s what I keep asking!

Again, what KPIs is Albo using to define success?

@FootnotesGuy Really helpful thx!

This is just a phenomenal achievement from Rainforest Reserves. A map with every current and proposed renewable energy project on it. Simply stunning. rainforestreserves.org.au/renewablestrut…

Our Systems Work Exactly as Designed—Just Not For Us macrobusiness.com.au/2025/09/our-sy…

@itsalexvacca Doesn’t look good! 😩. But wondering what brain activity looks like when watching sport or movie etc - just as a comparison.

BREAKING: MIT just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users & the results are terrifying. Turns out, AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt. Here's what 4 months of data revealed: (hint: we've been measuring productivity all wrong)

@jansramek Hi Jan. Great thread. I’m a journalist based in Syd. Spent 15 yrs in SV/CA (venture capital /startup ). Would love to interview you. Lots of lessons for Aus et al in what you are doing. Pls DM me.

7/ People like the notion that manufacturing can be distributed, but empirically, manufacturing might has always been built in a handful of clusters that have the scale to move the needle. New York in the 1800s, Detroit in early 1900s, Silicon Valley in 1960s, Shenzen in 2000s.

1/ America cannot compete with China without building America's Shenzen – a place to build drones, ships, robots, and everything else cutting edge. Where? On @CAForever's 100 square miles in Solano, 60 miles north of SF/Silicon Valley, where we invent that stuff. Here's why. 🧵

@jk_rowling Bravo 👏!

Yes, if there's one thing we know about Shakespeare it's that he struggled to find words.

@AvidCommentator The dumbest country.

Of all the nations in an analysis by The Economist, Australia directly employs a larger proportion directly through the public sector than any other nation assessed.

@FootnotesGuy Thanks so much for this detailed and clarifying take on all this Aidan. What a fragile and potentially devastating mess it all is.

In about 3 years we'll have much more solar than Spain had today. DPV is Distributed Photovoltaic. And AEMO's status is "progressing understanding of the challenges". And it's not clear we know how to restart the system. I've said enough. AEMC is right. It's bad. 26/26

Spanish blackout 🧵. Conclusion: relying on wind and solar, ie 'inverter based resources' creates a fragile system, lacking the inertia/system strength that synchronous machines (turbines, from coal, gas or nuclear) provide to ride through faults. 1/

@matt_barrie It’s the govt’s innovative Munchausen by Proxy growth strategy. 👍

Budget forecasts Australians to become 32% disabled

@DavidFrankDean @megynkelly Hard to do!

@megynkelly I walked into my home last night to find my wife watching this. I kept a totally straight face while saying “She seems genuine.”

My friends, I am doing this for you (see how I love?). Full reaction tomorrow with the one and only Maureen Callahan.