italian-american legitimate businessmen’s club

@GamewithDave Moon Tycoon

For anyone who used a computer between 1990 & 2005… what’s the one game you still think about?

@EricC_2002 I-80/90 between South Bend and Toledo

Ya know I have an idea: ranking boring stretches of interstate 1. I-95 through South Carolina (exception is over Lake Madison) 2. I-20 in Georgia from Augusta to Lake Oconee 3. I-95 in North Carolina 4. I-95 in Virginia (except near Richmond and DC)

U.S. Automakers: “Americans don’t want inexpensive EVs. We’re cutting our losses and stopping all plans for future EV development.” Also U.S. Automakers: “If we allow China to sell inexpensive EVs here, we’ll go out of business because Americans will buy those instead!”

Yet another reason property taxes are the best form of taxes is because they match the perpetual liabilities of civilization (schools, courts, police, etc.) with a perpetual asset (the land). Your obligations to your community don't stop just because you've paid off your home.

@JoannaStern Mailspring

Is there a great Mac email client? Like an actual great one where I won't find myself going back to Gmail web four days later.

Very inspiring to see him rolling back decades of neoliberal propaganda, reasserting the dignity of public sector work and workers

I agree with this. The default assumption is that any additional revenue is just going to be captured by special interests i.e, old people, public employee unions, environmental lawyers, non-profits, etc.

@nateberkopec I found this to be the same. What I did was use code fences with 4 backticks in a Markdown file. Then wrote an obsidian plugin to parse the markdown into turns. You can edit the conversation doc like markdown including trimming old turns that are problematic.

I just think the chat interface of coding agents is entirely wrong. It creates this illusion of "talking" to a "thing" when really what you're doing is iteratively adding on to a prompt, which gets shoved to a brand-new just-born agent every time you press enter.

@IceSolst This is how you end up with ossified process that takes 500 steps when you could usually safely do it in eight

postmortem 101

a bike lane is literally just paint on the ground. green paint. that's the technology. and it does more to reduce american dependence on the strait of hormuz per dollar spent than any weapons system in the pentagon's budget. the paint. the green paint. we won't even do the paint

Inject it into my veins.

"populists" are converging on slop: - banning "blackrock" from buying homes - boomer tax cuts - wealth taxes that don't work zero constituency for: 1) make government efficient + able to build/act directly (vs. nonprofit grift) 2) subsidize the welfare state w/ population growth

@jdcmedlock @PEWilliams_ someone please stop the slopulism! we are not the party of no taxes we are the party of the new deal that will use a progressive but broad tax structure to enact social programs like universal healthcare/childcare and build amazing things like transit & clean energy

What if, and hear me out, we connect all these trailers together. Maybe stack them on top of each other. Then we connect them to some engines with a driver and a conductor and have them travel on their own road. And to make it even more efficient, that road is made of steel rails

You WILL sell the F150. You WILL buy the sensible Kia EV. We are no longer asking.

[a split second before every bone in my body is shattered by an octogenarian motorist who mistook the accelerator for the brake pedal] o well at least I never had to use one of those woke bullshit railroads

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

Toll evasion is terrible yet carries none of the stigma of fare evasion because it's perpetrated from a multiton vehicle Toll evaders not only take from transit riders and other drivers but also evade traffic safety cameras Unlike fare evasion, toll evasion can kill

@Kathleen_Tyson_ Remember the Maine

We’ll never know if the missile sinking the USS Gerald R Ford was fired from Iran or Israel. Outcome is the same either way. “You do not park a $13.3 billion carrier where the enemy’s return fire will hit it unless you want the enemy’s return fire to hit it. The Ford is not there to prevent escalation. The Ford is there to guarantee that if escalation comes, it comes on terms that make American restraint politically impossible.”