Startup billionaires

 

Linas Beliūnas

@linasbeliunas

All of Cursor's founders - 25-26 years old MIT dropouts - are now multi-billionaires following SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition Their story remains one of the wildest ones in tech ever: → 4 MIT students start a side project in 2022 (initially for CAD/mechanical engineering) → Pivot hard and create Cursor, the AI coding tool that developers love and & helped popularise vibe coding → Hit a $10B valuation → Decide copilots aren’t enough, so they move into agentic AI teammates & their own models → Need massive compute to compete with OpenAI & Anthropic → Meanwhile xAI is losing the coding race → Elon realizes catching up could take years, so he skips the line & buys Cursor for $60B → Cursor gets the world’s largest GPU fleet and compute, while SpaceXAI gets the coding leader → Founders become multi-billionaires; the first 50 hires ~$20-500M each This is the beauty of startups at its finest.

Raw electricity

 

GeniusThinking

@GeniusGTX

Elon Musk says the AI boom hits a WALL this year when we run out of power to run the chips. He says the whole industry is about to learn a hard lesson in hardware. Chip output is exploding, but electricity is nearly flat everywhere outside China. So the two lines cross this year. He says by the end of the year, we will be making more AI chips than we can actually turn on. Millions of them pile up with nowhere to plug in. In his words, the bottleneck for the next year is not chips, it is raw power. Whoever can turn on the most chips fastest wins the race. In the end, the AI race comes down to one thing: Raw electricity. — Elon Musk (.

@elonmusk

) on Dwarkesh Patel's (.

@dwarkesh_sp

) podcast

Milton Friedman on free enterprise

 

Milton Friedman Quotes

@MiltonFriedmanW

·

20h

Milton Friedman casually dismantles the “capitalism = greed & exploitation” narrative on national television: “Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. The only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. The record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprise.”

The People's MMA 

@ThePeoplesMMA

·

12h

The PURSUIT of happiness. The key word being 'pursuit'. It implies effort, exertion, tenacity & will power. Most of those who support communism, socialism & oppose capitalism are the weak minded who ALSO want things (without earning them) & they hide behind social justice.

The Six Nooses: How Interventionism Is Strangling the Family’s Will to Reproduce

https://mises.org/mises-wire/six-nooses-how-interventionism-strangling-familys-will-reproduce

by Felix Yang

Felix Yang is the author of "Why the Cradle Stands Empty: How Interventionism Strangles Fertility."

The total fertility rate needed to sustain a population is 2.1. Averaged over 2020-2024, South Korea's stands at 0.78, Taiwan's at 0.89, and Hong Kong's at 0.79. Mainstream demography still treats these as cultural anomalies, when they are in fact the terminal readings of a century-long experiment in administrative intervention.

The standard explanation blames housing costs, changing values, or the burden of raising children in a modern economy. Examined through the lens of praxeology - the deductive logic of human action - that explanation gets the causation backward.

Childbearing is, at bottom, a long-horizon investment: a rational actor accepts a low time preference, sinking two decades of capital and labor into a payoff that only matures across generations. That calculation depends entirely on a stable institutional environment in which the link between sacrifice and reward holds. Modern interventionism, the self-reinforcing pattern Mises identified in which each intervention's side effects become the pretext for the next, has severed that link through six distinct mechanisms.

The first is fiat-currency inflation. Since the Federal Reserve's founding in 1913, the dollar has lost more than 96 percent of its purchasing power. Money's evolved function as a store of value across time has been replaced by a bureaucratic IOU that depreciates by design. A family cannot rationally sink twenty years of capital into a child when the currency in which that capital is denominated is being quietly devalued year over year.

The second is the socialization of old-age support. Pay-as-you-go pension systems are, by their own actuarial logic, generational Ponzi schemes: they accumulate no real assets and depend entirely on new entrants to pay existing claims. The US Social Security Trustees project the OASI trust fund will exhaust its reserves by 2033, at which point benefits fall automatically to 77 percent of what has been promised. Once old age depends on the political solvency of a pooled fund rather than on the number or quality of children a person raises, raising children loses its economic rationale as an intergenerational contract.

The third is medical monopoly. Administrative licensing and price controls replace price rationing in healthcare with queue rationing; the scarcity remains, only relabeled. In Canada, the median wait from referral to specialist treatment now exceeds thirty weeks, the longest in the Fraser Institute's thirty-three years of tracking; an estimated 24,000 Canadians died last year while still waiting for treatment they were promised for free. When survival itself becomes a bureaucratic waiting list, family planning becomes an act of faith rather than calculation.

The fourth is the nationalization of education. Before compulsory public schooling, private and community-funded education had already brought English literacy to roughly 85 to 90 percent in Britain and the United States. Compulsory schooling was not introduced to fix a market failure; Prussia's own architects of the system said openly that its purpose was to discipline the individual will to the needs of the state.

Modern public education systems - lacking any price mechanism or profit-and-loss discipline - level toward mediocrity, forcing families into a second, private tuition market simply to buy back their children's competitiveness. Demographer John Caldwell's Wealth Flows Theory shows that fertility collapses precisely when the direction of intergenerational wealth reverses, from children supporting parents to parents indefinitely subsidizing children, a reversal driven above all by the spread of compulsory schooling.

The fifth is the stripping of housing sovereignty. Zoning and land-use regulation manufacture artificial scarcity, transferring wealth from young families to entrenched incumbents under the banner of protecting communities from externalities. A natural experiment between two American cities makes the point starkly. Houston has rejected zoning by popular referendum three times - in 1948, 1962, and 1993; its price-to-monthly-rent ratio (PM/R, sale price divided by monthly rent) sits near 108, and its total fertility rate holds at 1.98. San Francisco - fully regulated under the California Environmental Quality Act - has a PM/R above 360 and a fertility rate of 1.49. Even Houston's relatively favorable outcome still falls short of replacement, because housing freedom alone cannot offset the other five nooses operating at the federal level.

The sixth is administrative relief. When government nationalizes a function that was once a community mutual-aid contract grounded in local knowledge, it does not eliminate poverty; it manufactures a self-perpetuating administrative class with every incentive to manage poverty rather than end it, along with well-documented adverse selection. In the United States, the extension of welfare benefits conditioned on remaining unmarried is directly implicated. In Thomas Sowell's research, the rise of single-parent households among black Americans increased from roughly 22 to 67 percent between 1960 and 1985.

These six mechanisms compound each other rather than operating in isolation, closing a systemic trap across four dimensions of family sovereignty: the financial, the physical, the temporal, and the spiritual. Rome ran the same experiment two thousand years ago.

Bread-and-circuses welfare, currency debasement from a near-pure silver denarius to a five-percent-silver disc, and the administrative capture of the yeoman farmer class produced, over four centuries, the same terminal outcome: infant abandonment recorded in the papyrus record of Roman Egypt, and a city of a million reduced to roughly 100,000 residents by the sixth century.

The conclusion is not a call for better-designed subsidies. Every subsidy is simply a further extension of the same interventionist logic that caused the collapse in the first place. Each of the six nooses was, in its own time, sold to families as a trade: surrender this piece of sovereignty, and the state will guarantee that safety in return.

Benjamin Franklin's words - later carried into Hayek's The Road to Serfdom - exposed exactly where that trade always ends: those who would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. The family bore that trade six times over and has a falling fertility rate to show for it - the safety was never delivered, and the liberty is gone.

The only path back is the restoration of private property and the family's own sovereignty over its financial, physical, and intergenerational decisions.

Use the democratic institutions of a high trust state to destroy a civilization

Who knows?

Remember the Names

“. . . it’s subversion and nothing about it is accidental. it’s a well worn playbook to use the democratic institutions of a high trust state to destroy a civilization.” —El Gato Malo on Substack

James Howard Kunstler

Aug 21, 2026

https://www.kunstler.com/p/remember-the-names

An eerie quiet masks the panic rising among the many players in the long-running train of crimes carried out under color-of-law against the people of the this country that goes roughly under the clunky name of The Grand Conspiracy. What is Joe DiGenova up to, exactly, in the Southern District of Florida, with its several grand juries grinding away? Indictments will fly, for sure, but then who will flip on whom? It won’t take a whole lot of flippers to seal many fates in this skein of sedition and treason. The tension must be terrible for them.

The question has long been: how do you even begin to organize a set of coherent cases around this roaring avalanche of nefarious acts that got bigger with each successive attempt at cover-up? Let’s see if we can block out a panoramic picture of potential prosecutions. The gigantic mess must be separated into packets.

It’s probably best to begin with the FBI’s “Midyear Exam” op of 2016 — the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. You can bet that the server contained evidence of HRC’s two seminal crimes that kicked things off: 1) the transfer of US military technology to Russia’s Skolkovo high-tech hub and payments from seventeen companies involved coincidentally received by the Clinton Foundation when she was Sec’y of State; and 2) the “Uranium One” deal transferring US-owned nuke material to Russia (via Canada) that required a State Dept signoff by HRC — coincident with husband Bill receiving a half-million dollar “lecture fee” from a Russian bank. Players involved in Midyear Exam: Comey, Strzok, McCabe, Page, then-AG Loretta Lynch.

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That potential embarrassment of this sketchy business was simply squashed by Lynch and Comey, while HRC took care to physically destroy the server and devices linked to it. But it also prompted the creation of the Russian collusion prank against then-candidate Donald Trump, (“Crossfire Hurricane”) to distract attention from all that. . . which turned into the huge RussiaGate operation that marshaled the FBI, the CIA, the Senate Intel Committee, and offices deep in the Pentagon to put over a gigantic hoax. It was green-lighted by President Barack Obama and organized by CIA-Director John Brennan, with FBI Director Comey and DNI James Clapper. Supporting players (potential defendants) include Susan Rice, Sally Yates, Veep Joe Biden (or “Joe Biden”), then White House aide Lisa Monaco, and CIA agent Eric Ciaramella (who wrote the actual Intel Community Assessment that jump-started the op). McCabe, Stzrok, Page, Ohr (and wife, Nellie), Rosenstein, and many FBI agents are potential defendants. Also Gina Haspel, CIA London station chief, who coordinated with the UK’s MI6 agent, Christopher Steele of the Steele Dossier. Throw in DOD-sponsored spook Stefan Halper and FBI liaison in London, Alan Kohler. After May, 2017, Christopher Wray was responsible for all FBI mischief and FISA Court irregularities (along with FISA Judge James Boasberg).

The Mueller Investigation was a subset of RussiaGate, but deserves its own case packet. It was an attempt to legitimize the RussiaGate hoax, and to keep the news media fed with innuendo. In effect it was a hoax unto itself, consumed $32-million, and ran nearly two years. It produced exactly nothing in evidence that President Trump had “colluded” with Russia about anything. Since Robert Mueller was mentally incapacitated, the investigation was run by subordinates, Aaron Zebley, Andrew Weissmann. Attorneys Jeanie Rhee, Elizabeth Prelogar, Brandon Van Grack and others. It was a fraud on the public and probably an obstruction of justice.

Impeachment No. 1 (the Ukraine phone call impeachment) was an entirely false operation cooked up by lawfare ninja Norm Eisen in collusion with Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff, with assistance from CIA agent (“whistleblower”) Eric Ciaramella and NSC member Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, with a boost from then-IC Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Eisen later admitted on a video that the aim of the impeachment was to “prebunk” Veep “Joe Biden’s” bribery and grift activities in Ukraine as the Democratic party prepared to run him for president in 2020. Ciaramella had accompanied Veep “Joe Biden” on several trips to Ukraine and knew what “JB” was up to there. Indict them all for sedition and treason.

The 2020 election op was pulled off in coordination with the Covid-1 scam that positioned the nation for massive mail-in ballot fraud, which was coordinated by lawfare ninja Marc Elias, then employed by the Democratic Party law firm Perkins Coie. Elias was assisted by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, now Meta), whose nonprofit, Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), distributed over $400-million to roughly 2500 election districts around the country, much of it used to pay select officials who would count and report mail-in ballots. The mail-in ballot fraud had been planned and gamed-out previously by the non-profit org Transition Integrity Project, run by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman.

In October 2020, fifty-one former intel officials signed a public letter denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop as having “the earmarks of Russian disinformation.” The letter was organized by Antony Blinken and former CIA-Director Michael Morrell. It was done in coordination with a social media campaign to suppress public knowledge of the laptop (and the Biden family record of international grift inside it) to influence the presidential election a month later. Potential fraud indictments.

The Jan 6 riot at the US Capitol has never been adequately investigated. FBI Director Wray was allowed to evade answering to Congress about the number of FBI agents and associated employees (including CIA personnel) that were mixed in with the crowd to provoke the intrusion inside the building and related violence. Speaker Nancy Pelosi engineered the situation so that the certification of electoral vote slates would not be challenged as procedure allowed. Sedition and Treason.

The Jan 6 Congressional Committee was a fraud on the American people put together by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to coverup her involvement in the crimes behind the Jan 6 Capitol riot. The members involved likely enjoy Congressional immunity for the spectacle itself, but perhaps not for destroying all the evidence that was collected in the course of the investigation. Chairman Bennie G. Thompson was responsible for that.

The Mar-a-Lago raid of August 2022 was authorized by Attorney General Merrick Garland and carried out by FBI Director Wray with Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono. Three months later, Garland appointed Jack Smith Special Counsel to oversee the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which he botched, resulting in its dismissal two years later. The raid itself arguably lacked probable cause and was based on an improper scope of evidence sought. Indict Merrick Garland under 18 U.S.C. § 241, conspiracy against rights.

The lawfare operations of 2023-2024 in several jurisdictions resulted in indictments against candidate Donald Trump and others in Fulton County, GA, and New York City. The Fulton County case under DA Fani Willis (later disqualified for “the appearance of impropriety”) was assisted by the “Joe Biden” White House, possibly by attorneys Richard Sauber and Beth Mueller in the WH Counsel’s Office, giving it the odor of a purely political prosecution. In the the Stormy Daniels hush money case against Donald Trump brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, DOJ officer Matthew Colangelo left his cushy position as Principal Deputy Associate US Attorney General to take a job assisting DA Bragg in the NYC court. Colangelo delivered the opening statement at the 2024 trial and played a central role in the prosecution. The trial was presided over by political judge Juan Merchan. Just days ago, The New York Times reported that the Democratic Party fundraising company, Authentic Campaigns, previously owned by Judge Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, has been under investigation the past year. Anybody detect the odor of politics? Malicious prosecution, improper judicial conduct.

Many of the political celebrities mentioned above, and probably many not-so-well-known players, must be freaking out as the waves ominously pound the beach and the summer days tick down toward the ill winds of fall. I’m pretty sure that readers and commentors can add some candidates to the list of potential indictments, and perhaps some ops I might have overlooked. (The entire odious Covid-19 affair is partly a separate matter, but that has also commenced a new phase with the guilty plea deal announced days ago by Dr. Fauci’s chief advisor, Dr. David Morens.) Even former President Obama looks boxed-in. He enjoys immunity from actions he took as president, but that immunity prevents him from hiding behind the fifth amendment as a now-private citizen in a court of law. Things are livening up.

Realignments: A sane society cannot debate its way out of psychosis.

Related: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/socialist-leader-says-quiet-part-out-loud-affordability-pitch-masks-guerrilla-class-war

Realignments

“A sane society cannot debate its way out of psychosis. It must diagnose the patient with lethal precision and restore the ancient boundary between the mad and the free.” —LHGrey on "X"

James Howard Kunstler

Aug 17, 2026

Back in the days of sailing ships, a certain subtropical zone of the ocean became known as the “horse latitudes.” There, an eerie windless calm prevailed, sometimes for weeks, stalling the progress of ships in mid-crossing. In desperation to save water on-board, captains ordered the horses being transported to America to be cast overboard, and the animals’ bloated carcasses drifted in an ominous cortège of warning to other mariners entering the zone of stillness and death.

This stretch of weeks in late summer has become the horse latitudes of human affairs for American politics. The primaries are mostly over, at least the ones that mattered. Congress has departed the Potomac swamp for the lakes, seashores, and the county fairs out where the corn grows high. The heat in the Arabian Sea must turn the deck of an American aircraft carrier into a giant hot-plate sailors fear to tread. Even the country’s multitude of lawyers turn off their cell-phones and contemplate the blank, watery horizon with heads full of iced brown liquor.

We civilians are stuck between that old rock and a hard place. . . two political parties whirling around the drain of extinction in a nation seeming to drift toward the edge of the known world. In the background, a massive realignment grinds away. The old parties of labor and of property have forgotten their reasons for existence. Labor vamoosed to Mexico, China, and obscure faraway lands decades ago. Property is still here, but it’s all been collateralized into grift and fraud.

In the absence of working people to defend, the Democrats became a party of racketeering race-and-gender hobgoblins, now marshaling into an insectile host of predatory Marxists, and altogether their antics present as a spectrum of mental illness. Voters who somehow managed to preserve some sense of mental decorum increasingly abandon that lunatic coalition — but where to go? 

This is exactly what is happening in the state of Michigan with the rise of Abdul el-Sayed, who adds a caboose of jihad to his choo-choo train of Bolshevik nuttery. Long-time Dems like Democratic attorney Julian Epstein are publicly jumping ship to support el-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers.

The clueless old gorks in charge of the Democratic Party — the likes of Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Warner, Liz Warren, Chris Murphy, Sheldon Whitehouse — are suddenly nowhere to be seen or heard. They don’t dare denounce this latest onrush to new-and-improved insanities because, apparently, insanity is all the party has left — stealing other people’s property. . . pretending to change sexes. . . organizing giant frauds. . . demanding payoffs for hallucinated affronts. . . and feeding the vicious Leviathan they want government to be.

And don’t be too sure that coalescing around the figure of one AOC in 2028 is going to save this outfit. Sandy is trying to pretend she’s somewhere in the middle, between the feckless old official leadership and the outright commies, but she’s still a member of the odious “Squad” composed of Somali fraudster Ilhan Omar, jihadist Rashida Tlaib, and race-hustler Ayanna Pressley — meaning, it’s just the same brand of crazy the party has been cultivating for more than a decade. What remains for America to discover about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that she’s a mere opportunist with nothing inside except some skill at middle-school girl games. . . Eva Peron without the savvy.

On the other end of the political transect stand the Republican phantoms of Congress busy getting nothing done for the past year and a half despite holding the majority in both houses. They’re personified perfectly by Senator Mitch McConnell, quite possibly dead for all that anyone really knows. In John Thune you have something like an anti-leader, doing everything possible to evade his duties, squashing election reform under arcane procedural bullshit, obstructing the confirmation of important agency nominees and federal judges, and “gaveling-in” ghost sessions of his chamber to prevent the president from making recess appointments. And why? Probably for no better reason than he just wants to dissociate himself and many of his fellows from the president because he’s seen as too gauche for their club.

Speaking of whom, you see Mr. Trump and his faction stand apart, but not alone, in this big game. He’s going through a rough patch in these horse latitudes of summer. But despite some appearances, and despite the bluster emanating from Tehran, he has already succeeded in neutralizing Iran while Secretary Bessent keeps the maniac IRGC in an ever-tightening economic squeeze. There’s reason to believe this will end well for the Middle East, actually in an epic realignment of actual interests, rather than obsolete tribal animosities.

Mr. Trump is also working hard to realign American interests at home into an economy based on making things of value instead of just taking profits on financial shell-games. It’s a gigantic task and one that will take time to get working because factories can’t be built overnight and the demoralized working class can’t be instantly realigned to opportunities that are months from materializing. In the meantime, have a little faith if you can, even though these have been notably faithless decades for our sore-beset nation, and we are too accustomed to bad faith.

Just power through these listless, torpid dog days of August and gird your loins for action in the fall because it’s coming. And that includes a long-awaited accounting for the many crimes against the people of this land by some of our own people. A new permission structure is building out there in the foggy gloaming: you will be set free to stop pretending about a lot of stuff that matters.

motte and bailey doctrine

 

Wall Street Apes

@WallStreetApes

This is EXACTLY what’s happening “The political left mastered an old mass manipulation strategy that lets them push any claim, no matter how radical, wrong, or stupid, into the mainstream without ever having to defend it. And once you know it, you'll see it everywhere, even in daily arguments It's called the motte and bailey doctrine - The bailey is the radical, extreme version of a claim - The motte is the small defensible tower next to it, the mild version of the claim In the public's mind, the 2 are never actually separated. They live together as one position. So when someone attacks the bailey, the radical version, the motte gets defended instead, the reasonable version. And because the public sees the motte and bailey as the same claim, successfully defending the motte automatically validates the bailey, too. Attacking the radical position now looks identical to attacking the reasonable one, which makes the radical position untouchable by association” “This is how the Overton Window is moved, through hundreds of small, unwinnable fights over the motte, each one quietly making the bailey a little more acceptable, a little more mainstream, until what used to be radical is just the new normal. And from there, real political power follows” Let me give you a real world easy to understand example of this, Let’s take the Left’s plan to Defund the Police - The Bailey, the radical claim: Democrats say they want to cut or abolish police departments. Reduce their funding so severely that traditional policing becomes impossible - The Motte, the mild, defensible version: Democrats say “We just want to reallocate some money to mental health services, social workers, and community programs so the police don’t have to handle everything.” Here’s how it works, When critics attack the radical version saying something like “You want to abolish the police and leave cities less safe”, the defenders immediately switch to the mild version “No one is saying abolish the police, we just want better resources for communities” But in reality, they plan us to abolish the police The Left uses this tactic ALL THE TIME