Reality vs expectations

 

Peter Girnus 

@gothburz

I am an Enforcement and Removal Operations officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. I have worked this job for ten years. I still have the button from the first Trump rally I went to, in 2016, before I had the badge. It's in my truck, in the console, under the registration. I don't wear it. I just haven't thrown it away. Sometimes I open the console for something else, my sunglasses, a parking pass, and there it is, and I close it again without deciding to. That year felt like something was actually being built. Not a policy. A room. Everyone in it believed the same six things and every one of the six things was going to fix something specific. Trade. Borders. Epstein. Forever wars. The people who'd stopped listening to us. It felt big because it was aimed at big things with big energy. Epstein meant the people who never get touched finally get touched, all the way up, no matter whose name was in the book. Forever wars meant my sister's kid doesn't get a fourth deployment to somewhere he can't find on a map. Those weren't abstractions to me. I could tell you the address of the room the six things were said in, and I could tell you who I was standing next to. I want to describe what it's aimed at now, because I read the news like anyone else, and I still say "we" about all of it, and I've started to notice that the "we" covers a lot more ground than it used to, and I keep looking for the version of it I signed up for and not quite finding it, the way you keep checking a pocket for something you already know isn't there. This week alone. The Secretary of War removed or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, something like 1 in 10 of the top brass, and put his own former aide in as acting Army chief. He called it a cleansing. The Army Secretary resigned in the middle of it. The math on who got cleansed and who got promoted is not subtle, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't see the numbers on that. The President renamed a lake. Signed the paper himself, in the Oval Office, said it was official and effective immediately, over a trade argument with Canada. The order doesn't bind New York, doesn't bind Canada, doesn't bind anyone but the federal government, which means the only entity required to call it Lake America is the government that renamed it. I keep turning that over. We used to talk about winning countries. Now we're relabeling a lake we already owned half of, for an audience of federal letterhead. The FBI put a former congressman on a nine-hour flight and had air marshals watch his phone the whole way to see if they could read his passcode. He was a manager in an impeachment trial once. That's the offense on file, as far as I can tell. Nine hours over the Atlantic, two federal officers, one phone. And Epstein. I have to talk about Epstein, because it was one of the six things, and it's the one I think about longest. There was a release, millions of pages, back in January. Then in July there was a memo. No client list. No blackmail. Nothing but what the first report already said about how he died. That was the finding. I read it the day it came out, standing in a parking lot on a break, and I remember not being able to make my legs walk back inside for a minute. He said he'd release it. He said it enough times that I stopped hearing it as a promise and started hearing it as a fact that hadn't happened yet. Then the memo said it had already happened, and it was nothing, and I was supposed to just carry on with the shift like the ground under that particular thing hadn't moved. Meanwhile there's a real war a few time zones over, and a new oil deal in Venezuela, and a Treasury Secretary using the word asphyxiate about another country's economy on the record, and I clock in Monday like all of that is a normal week, because at this point it is. That same weekend he posted a video of an island "being blown to smithereens," two exclamation points, over footage nobody at the Department of Defense could confirm happened. No strike record. Just the video. I watched it twice before I clocked that it was generated, which says something about the video, or something about how used to this I've gotten, I honestly can't tell you which anymore. The other video from that weekend was geese. A flock of them, wearing his hairline, holding rifles, standing guard over the lake he'd just renamed. I don't know which post he expected people to read as intelligence and which one he expected people to read as a joke. I don't think that's a field on the form either. None of that is free, and I don't mean what we spend on it. Gas is close to $4 a gallon nationally, up more than 30% since this war started. The 30-year mortgage rate is 6.72%, and the reporting on why cites this exact conflict by name. Home prices are up about 17% over the same stretch, the median payment is $2,191 a month now, and grocery bills are climbing faster than most people's raises. In that same stretch, the family running the war has made about $4 billion off businesses that didn't exist before the second term, most of it crypto. One venture alone moved $1.4 billion in token sales, and the family's own entity kept 75% of it. I'm not an economist. I process removal files. But I can read two numbers in the same news cycle. One of them is going up because of the war. The other one is going up because of the war too. They are not the same family's number. I signed up because I was scared of something. I still am, if I'm honest, the same something, government deciding what you're allowed to keep, deciding it's not really yours. That fear was the whole engine. I built ten years on top of it. What I can't work out anymore is whether the thing I signed up to stop needs us at all to make its case, or whether we've spent a decade doing its opening argument for it for free, one grocery bill and one mortgage rate and one gas receipt at a time, while the people telling us to be afraid of it get richer than anyone in that argument has ever been. And then there's the file I actually touched. We arrested a man at the airport in New Orleans for overstaying a visa and missing his hearing. Routine removal order, routine flight home the next day. He'd spent years telling anyone who'd listen that officers like me deserved total immunity for doing exactly this job. He meant it. I believe he meant it. The form does not have a box for that. I checked, the way I've checked before out of something like curiosity. There's a box for entry date. A box for hearing date. A box for status. His said removable, the same word it says for everyone else's file in the drawer. I used to think the point was the six things. Borders, trade, Epstein, no more forever wars, the people who stopped listening. I still think that's what it was, in the room, in 2016, when it was a room and not yet a filing system. I don't think anyone renamed a lake for those six things. I don't think 80 generals got cleared out for those six things. I don't think the plane full of air marshals was about those six things. I don't think the memo that closed the book on Epstein was about those six things, and I don't think the file on the man who wanted us protected was about those six things either. I think the six things built the machine, and the machine outgrew the six things, and what's left doing the work now is just the machine, running on its own weight, filing whoever's in front of it under whatever box fits, while the six things sit in a truck console like a button nobody's thrown away. I kept the button. I never got a box that said which side you were on. Nobody did. That was never a field on the form. I just thought, in 2016, that we were building the kind of thing that would have needed one.

Anyone can code

 

Dustin

@r0ck3t23

·

2h

Marc Andreessen described people at his firm shipping software who have never read a line of code. Andreessen: “A fair number of people who we both know are former programmers who stopped coding at one point and then, all of a sudden, have picked it back up again.” Start with the ones who already knew how. They had the skill and stopped using it anyway, because building something small was never worth the hours it cost. Every capable person carries a list of things they could make and never will. The skill was not the binding constraint. Andreessen: “We also have partners at the firm who have actually never coded, who are now ripping out software like crazy. They’ve turned into ‘AI vampires.’” The people who never had the skill at all cleared the same bar in the same year. Whatever was stopping both groups, it was one thing, and it sat somewhere other than talent. Andreessen: “I asked him, he vibe coded the whole thing, ‘Have you looked at the code?’ And he was like, ‘Hell no, I’ve never done that.’” For as long as software has existed, building it meant handing your idea to someone who could translate it. Every product that exists is the version that survived being explained. An idea leaves your head as words. Those words reach a person who has never stood where you stand, and they build what the words described. A fraction of what you meant. You look at it and say not quite. Months of that, and you ship the closest approximation anyone had the patience for. The trap is that the deepest problem knowledge is the hardest kind to say out loud. Fifteen years at a hospital intake desk gives you an understanding that lives in your hands and your instincts. Michael Polanyi had the phrase for it. We know more than we can tell. So the filter was never whether an idea was good. It was whether the idea survived being described to a stranger with a keyboard. The ones that failed that test never got as far as being proposed. Andreessen: “He’s not a programmer by background, and yet, all of a sudden, he’s hyper-productive.” Now you can show instead of describe. A working version exists in an hour, and you correct it against the thing itself. Correction is something everyone can do. Nobody needs vocabulary to recognize wrong. Multiply that by every operations lead, every teacher, every nurse, every machinist who has spent a decade knowing exactly what should exist and lacking the words to commission it. Andreessen’s partner did not become an engineer. He stayed the person who knew the job, and the distance between knowing and having went to zero. Software has been a record of what could be explained. It is becoming a record of what people actually understood. The thing you have been describing badly for ten years does not need better words anymore.

Quite a lot of prosperity

Look at what Elon is building—not as a list of startups, but as a single gesture.

Internet everywhere. Starlink. The end of territorial monopolies on information. A villager no longer needs a ministry’s permission to access the world’s knowledge. Abundance arriving. Digital intelligence becoming commoditized. Physical-world intelligence following. Robots. At the G20, Elon said something almost flat, and that’s why it’s so violent: digital AI will do everything that doesn’t require hand-shaping atoms, probably by the end of next year. Then humanoids. A billion robots in ten years, each several times more productive than a human. Physical labor tipping to the side of electricity and silicon.

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Translated from French

I just rewatched Elon’s speech at the G20. And I’m not sure people realize what they’re looking at. The world he’s building doesn’t “compete” with the WEF’s vision or Europe’s. It makes it obsolete. Like an operating system no one installs anymore—not because it’s been banned, but because no one needs the machine it was written for. We can grant the WEF something. We have to, or we understand nothing. They weren’t preparing a world of abundance. They were preparing a world of scarcity management. When the pie stops growing, or you believe it won’t grow anymore, the only question left is administrative: who cuts, who rations, who monitors, who gets to speak, who gets to move, who gets to transmit. So the elite wouldn’t get devoured by the people, they needed a world state, a world police, a world justice. A kingdom without a king. A conglomerate that captured institutions through corruption, regulations, funding, the prestige of summits, and the vocabulary of virtue. We’re still partly there. Especially in Europe. The problem isn’t that they were all movie villains. It’s that they had the wrong software. Software designed to administer scarcity. And that software needs three things to survive: scarcity, victims, and middlemen. Scarcity justifies rationing. Victims justify moral policing. Middlemen justify their own permanence. Remove one of the three, and the system wobbles. Remove all three, and it has no purpose. We need to understand what they really built. Not a parlor conspiracy. An architecture. Agencies, directives, taxonomies of good, a pedagogy of guilt, an aesthetic of degrowth, a religion of limits. The world as a fixed pie to be shared more equitably, under the guardianship of those who know how to share. It’s coherent, if you accept the premise. The premise is false. Now look at what Elon is building—not as a list of startups, but as a single gesture. Internet everywhere. Starlink. The end of territorial monopolies on information. A villager no longer needs a ministry’s permission to access the world’s knowledge. Abundance arriving. Digital intelligence becoming commoditized. Physical-world intelligence following. Robots. At the G20, Elon said something almost flat, and that’s why it’s so violent: digital AI will do everything that doesn’t require hand-shaping atoms, probably by the end of next year. Then humanoids. A billion robots in ten years, each several times more productive than a human. Physical labor tipping to the side of electricity and silicon. Transport tending toward near-free. Cybercabs have started in Austin. It’s no longer a slide. It’s a city on wheels. Free speech everywhere, backed by a payment system via X. Speak, and trade, without asking permission from a caste that’s captured the banks and newsrooms. And a project so those who still want to work hard can do so. Work will become optional. People will seek reasons to live, not a permit to survive. It’s a phrase many hear as lazy utopia. It’s the opposite. It restores dignity to work: a choice, a creation, a calling—not a chore extracted by fear of lack. Put together, it’s not a series of products. It’s a complete rewrite of the West’s software. At the G20, facing ministers including Europeans, Elon said the technical phrase that contains the entire clash of civilizations underway. New things must be legal by default. Not illegal by default. In Europe, it’s the reverse. Everything is suspect until a committee signs off. It doesn’t stop progress. It slows it just enough for the old software to survive a little longer, and for those who live off it to keep their desks. That’s why he funds the fight against the woke mind virus and globalism. Not as a cultural hobby. Because he wants to stop the evil eating away at the West. A civilization that no longer dares say something is true, something is beautiful, an heritage deserves transmission—it won’t build rockets, robots, or cities. It will administer its own decline with refined vocabulary. But his project, globally, is so disruptive that it makes the EU’s model, the WEF’s, and this hyper-centralized video completely obsolete. You can win every election in the world and stay prisoner to scarcity software. He’s not just fighting in the arena of ideas. He’s changing the physics of the problem. When physical labor costs nothing, the current hyper-centralized model makes no sense. No need for a world apparatus to manage scarcity if scarcity disappears. No need for a caste of middlemen if intelligence and action become abundant. No need to guilt the people if the pie explodes instead of being re-sliced. Rationing is no longer a virtue. It’s a habit. Everything must be reinvented. I strongly believe in city-states, with nations as guardians, respect for cultures, and total destruction of the evil gnawing at us in the years ahead. Not a single empire speaking for humanity. Places that build, peoples who remain themselves, a civilization that becomes capable of admiring again instead of just suspecting. Elon isn’t “winning against Davos” in a wrestling match. He’s making Davos irrelevant. On one side, he kills bad ideas. On the other, he builds a world where those ideas no longer take hold, because the scarcity that fed them vanishes. That’s saving the West from both ends. Stopping the poison. And rewriting the software, much more justly, because it no longer needs to monitor famine to justify its power. An entire generation learned to manage scarcity and never learned to produce abundance. An entire generation knows how to regulate and no longer knows how to build. An entire generation sees climate, identities, borders, data, and nowhere sees the possibility of a world where man is no longer a file to administer. What’s being built now, in factories, in labs, in cities where taxis drive themselves, in constellations above our heads—that’s the answer. So, to work.

France and socialism

 

Brivael Le Pogam

@brivael

Message from a French friend who has seen socialism. I am writing this to you with affection. Not to lecture you. To keep you from repeating our suicide. In the 1970s, France still made people dream. The Trente Glorieuses were not a slogan. They were a machine. We were building the Concorde. We had nuclear power. We had an industry. We had a pride in making things. We still had a place in the century. A Frenchman and an American produced roughly the same thing. In 1980: $12,565 per head in our country. $12,575 in yours. Almost a draw. We were in the game. Then we handed over the keys to the house to two people: François Mitterrand and Jacques Attali. Attali is somewhat the French George Soros. Less the checkbook. More the orchestration. Adviser glued to Mitterrand for ten years. Sherpa in the shadows. Theorist of world government, of “nomads,” of governance without a people. The man who loves humanity in general and treats the nation as a relic. Mitterrand, for his part, installed the software. 1981. Nationalization of five major industrial groups. Nationalization of thirty-six banks, plus Paribas and Suez. Retirement at 60. A 39-hour week paid as 40. A fifth week of paid vacation. Wealth tax. The Auroux laws. A rise in the minimum wage. Hiring of civil servants. Stimulus through spending. Within a few months, the state became France’s default software. The franc was devalued three times. Capital fled. In 1983, they pretended to step back. The “austerity turn.” But the software was already engraved. You could change prime ministers. You no longer changed operating systems. Then, the long descent. Not a spectacular crash. Worse. A sagging. Year after year. Government after government. Even the right never uninstalled the program. It administered it. It dressed it up. It called it something else. The reflex stayed the same: a problem appears, you create a benefit, a regulation, a committee, a tax. You no longer create wealth. You redistribute it. Until there is hardly anything left to redistribute. Look at the figure. In 1980, we were on equal footing with you. In 2025, French GDP per capita is $48,986. Yours is $90,027. You produce almost twice as much per person as we do. Even in purchasing-power parity, the decoupling is clear. The average income of a French adult was worth 85% of American income in 1982. 70% in 2018. We were 13th in the world in 1980. 24th today. This is not a cyclical gap. It is a civilizational decoupling. Forty-five years of socialist software. And the gravest part is not the figure. It is the spirit. We are no longer capable of creating companies. You have 700 unicorns. We have about thirty. And a quarter of those that remain have already moved their headquarters to you. Everyone has become a mental communist. Not with a flag. With a reflex. People no longer know how an economy works. They believe wealth is a stock sitting on a table, that it would be enough to slice it better. They no longer see the flow. They no longer see the risk. They no longer see the person who creates before sharing. It is not that they are wicked. It is colder than that. They received a software. Often out of generosity. Often because the word justice sounded better than the word responsibility. The result, today, has a face. A character like Macron. Completely out of touch. Elegant. Empty. A product of the same pipeline. The same floor above the country. Since 2017, French public debt has gone from €2,281 billion to €3,345 billion. A thousand billion in debt. Without having created any form of value to match it. Just the software that keeps running. We borrow. We redistribute. We communicate. We call it a startup nation while the builders leave. France did not build a Concorde. It built an addition. My American friends. You are the United States. You are still the hope of the West. You are the lungs of the West. Do not fall. Ban socialism. Not only the word. The software. The one that promises justice and manufactures dependence. The one that speaks in the name of the people and ends up despising them. The one that today marries something else: Islamo-leftism. That alliance of a guilty state and an identity that does not want to assimilate. The same contempt for reality. The same need for an abstract victim so as not to have to hear the neighbor. We already ran the experiment for you. The result is before your eyes. Keep your builders. Keep your mental borders. Keep the right to create. Keep your keys. The 21st century will belong to those who build. Not to those who divide up what they no longer have. Yours sincerely, a Frenchman who has seen.