Tom Trowbridge

⚡️Marc Andreessen is right and the mechanism he’s describing is one of the most underappreciated forces in modern political economy. The Economist excerpt is saying the quiet part out loud. EU regulation was sold to voters as a constraint on American tech dominance. It accomplished the opposite. GDPR, the AI Act, the Digital Services Act. Every one of these was framed as standing up to Silicon Valley. Every one of them made it structurally harder for European competitors to exist because the compliance burden is a fixed cost that only giants can absorb. A three-person AI startup in Berlin cannot afford what Google can absorb as a rounding error. So the regulation designed to limit American tech dominance ended up locking it in permanently. This is the same pattern that governs every heavily regulated industry. Dodd-Frank didn’t weaken JP Morgan, it destroyed community banks and made the too-big-to-fail institutions bigger. Pharmaceutical regulation doesn’t constrain Pfizer, it makes starting a new pharmaceutical company nearly impossible. Every layer of compliance is a moat around whoever was big enough to survive its introduction. The deeper thing Andreessen is pointing at: regulation is almost never actually designed to limit the biggest players because the biggest players help write it. The revolving door between regulatory agencies and the companies they regulate is not a bug. It is the mechanism. Staff leave the FTC for Meta and back. Staff leave Goldman for Treasury and back. The regulations that emerge from this process reflect the interests of the people who wrote them, which are the interests of the incumbents they’ll return to. The public-facing narrative is consumer protection or competition. The actual function is barrier erection. The uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: the modern administrative state has evolved into an entity whose primary function is the preservation of incumbent power structures, dressed in the rhetoric of consumer protection, environmental responsibility, competition policy, or social welfare. The rhetoric isn’t always cynical. Many of the people implementing it genuinely believe they’re doing good. But the net structural effect is consistent across domains. The big get bigger. The new is prevented from emerging. The existing order is protected from disruption. Andreessen sees this clearly because he operates in a sector where new entrants are the entire value proposition of venture capital. When regulation kills new entrants, it kills his business model. So he’s financially incentivized to notice something most commentators won’t. But being incentivized to notice something doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it visible. The real conclusion: most political conflict in developed democracies is not left versus right. It’s incumbents versus entrants, dressed up in ideological language. The coalitions look different depending on what’s being protected, but the structural dynamic is the same. Watch what regulations do rather than what they claim to do. The gap between those two things is where the real signal lives.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gives an excellent explanation on why the U.S. needed to strike Iran It's less than 2 minutes and is worth the watch

The Israeli Air Force has attacked the "Assembly of Experts" meeting in Qom, Iran as they were gathering to choose the new Supreme Leader. The council is comprised of 88 religious leaders from around Iran who choose the Ayatollah.

🛑It has been revealed who will replace the slain Khamenei Ali Reza Arabi has been appointed as the acting leader of Iran. For a certain period, he will serve as the Supreme Leader, reports the Iranian state media ISNA. Arabi is a prominent Iranian Shiite ayatollah. He is 67 years old. He oversees the spread of Shi'ism abroad. He previously headed the seminaries of Iran and was considered one of the potential successors of Ayatollah Khamenei.

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BREAKING: Netherlands’ House of Representatives has approved a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains.

1/ time for some rage bait DePIN is dying and i don't see it coming back the tokenomics of DePIN deny the physics of finance - these teams are trying to build perpetual motion machines (a violation of the laws of thermodynamics) onchain infrastructure finance is evolving...