Dallas, Texas USA
Joined February 2009
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paul french retweeted
liz warren: we’re gonna stop the mayonnaise company from buying a hot sauce company
elon musk:
paul french retweeted
Just a little over 72 hours til my flight, 6 seats still available in first class.
@AmericanAir still has not cleared my complementary upgrade.
But the cash/miles upgrade offer is still available.
The system is broken!
So we are past the 100 hour EP window for upgrades and there are 6 first class seats still available on the flight.
But @AmericanAir did make sure to send me an email asking if I wanted to pay for an upgrade.
Still no complementary upgrade though!
The whole system is broken!
paul french retweeted
My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step.
Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.
What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation.
College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices.
Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode.
Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no.
So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same.
That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.
In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.
If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation.
If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.
Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
paul french retweeted
America & The House Next Door
The first time I understood what America meant, I was standing on a beach on Long Island.
My grandfather had come to America as a Hungarian immigrant fleeing the Holocaust. He arrived speaking little English. He installed carpets in hotels, built a business carpeting many of them, and changed the circumstances of his family.
By the time I was a boy, he owned a waterfront house. It had pear trees, boats and a beach. I thought of it as the trophy of his success.
A few years later, a heart surgeon bought the house next door. He was African American, a rarity along that beach.
I was eight years old. I didn’t have the language for what I was seeing. I knew only that people treated the doctor with great respect. He had devoted his life to becoming exceptionally good at helping other people.
We shared a beach. In the evenings, he would go fishing, and I would be his assistant, grabbing lures and handing him clips. We fished together.
My grandfather and the surgeon gave me two versions of the same lesson. My grandfather had crossed an ocean with almost nothing and built a life. The doctor had become one of the most skilled people in the most demanding profession I could imagine. People respected him for what he could do for them.
I did not think of this as politics. I did not think of it as capitalism. I thought it was how the world worked: a person’s beginning did not have to determine the ending.
That belief shaped how I saw my own life. It also shaped how I understood America.
The idea America has offered the world is simple and powerful: people can change their circumstances through creativity, intelligence and hard work.
Birth matters. Luck matters. The obstacles are real. But they do not have to be the final answer.
For generations, people around the world have looked toward America as a place where that possibility could be tested. They came carrying different languages, histories and hopes. They believed their children might have choices they did not. That belief is larger than any one family. It is a promise to every child who has been told that their starting point defines their future.
America’s importance to the world has never rested on its wealth or power. It has rested on the example of human agency: the ability to make something, learn something, serve someone, and change the shape of a life.
That promise is not automatic. A waterfront house does not prove that every person has the same chance. A heart surgeon’s success does not erase the barriers he crossed. My grandfather’s achievement does not make his journey easy. The point is that their lives were not fixed by where they began. They could act. Their work could matter. Their choices could open a future.
That is the fundamental promise we have to preserve—and make real for more people.
When institutions close paths to opportunity, when tax policy targets people who generate active income, and when concentrated power turns the economy into a system of extraction, children stop believing that effort can change anything. When voters are given increasingly awful choices, that loss reaches beyond one family or one country.
It weakens the foundational idea people everywhere have looked to America to represent.
I think about those two houses on the water. One held the story of an immigrant who built a life after surviving catastrophe. The other held a Black doctor who had devoted his life to saving people. I was a boy on the beach between them.
They made the American promise visible to me.
The world does not need America to be perfect. It needs America to keep proving that a person’s circumstances can change—and that what a person creates for others can change the course of a life.
paul french retweeted
This is a lie.
You can still study whatever you want. But your fellow Americans are not going to underwrite a loan you'll never be able to repay.
paul french retweeted
🦔The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says insurers paid out nearly $1 billion more than usual from AI-assisted hospital documentation in 2024-2025. Hospitals use AI to scan records and find secondary diagnoses that human reviewers missed. More diagnoses means higher reimbursements. But treatment levels haven't gone up.
BCBSA's SVP of data science said AI is "identifying more billable conditions, not sicker patients." Insurers now deploy their own AI to deny those same claims. Patients pay for both through higher premiums.
My Take
This might be the most American healthcare story I've ever read. Hospitals bought AI to find more things to bill for. Insurers bought AI to deny those bills. The technology cost money on each end and the tab went straight to patients through higher premiums. A billion dollars moved and no one got any healthier. The only thing that changed was the size of the invoices.
Two sides of a trillion-dollar industry found a new tool to fight over the same pool of money and the person in the hospital bed pays for all of it. Premiums go up, denials go up, and the AI vendors collect from everyone. If you want to know who AI works for, stop reading the press releases and look at where the money goes. In healthcare it went straight into the billing department.
Hedgie🤗
paul french retweeted
Had a helluva day, and I’m not a happy flyer. Boarded a connecting @AmericanAir flight operated by @SkyWestAirlines from PHX-SGU. It’s a small plane (CRJ900), so they had us leave carry-on bags on the jetbridge. Pretty standard, and when you land, they bring them to the tarmac. Imagine my surprise when it wasn’t there when we landed.
My first clue was a “carry-on left behind” message from my AirTag as we were rolling down the runway for takeoff. Literally everything I packed for this trip: suits, shoes, shirts, pants, socks, underwear, belts, toiletries - everything I’d need for 4 days - is in that bag. It’s in a carry-on because I don’t want the airline to lose it. Yet that’s precisely what they did.
I’m in St. George, UT for an event that requires me to dress up, so first thing I did was head to Dillards to get a new suit, shoes, underwear, socks… you get the picture. All said and done I’m at $1200 (it’s now like this city is a fashion Mecca), and that’s just stuff to get me through tomorrow.
What hasn’t happened is any contact by the airlines. When I landed, the SkyWest desk was clueless. She had no idea what to do. I called AA, hoping as an Executive Platinum I would get the ball moving. But nope. Got sent to the general baggage line. I told them I know exactly where my bag is (still at the gate after 2 hours). They said they can’t contact the gate and that I needed to fill out a form. I did that hoping my bag would be on the next flight. It wasn’t.
So my question for AA. Why has no one reached out to me? I provided you with the bag’s location and AirTag link. Why is it still sitting in PHX? I even had a fellow traveler (concierge key) stop by the gate. He talked to the agent who was aware of the bag. They said I needed to call the baggage office. There’s no answer. No one gave me that number. I had to find it myself.
I understand losing a checked bag. But how in the name of all that’s holy does a carry-on not make it onto the plane with the others? I was the first to board, too.
I’d call this experience a massively expensive fail. And I want my bag. Tomorrow.
paul french retweeted
For the record, I am hugely in favor of winning the midterms, and love much about this admin, but am strongly against bread and circus bribes.
paul french retweeted
Instead of nuclear fusion scientists should be figuring out how to harness the power of human stupidity.
Infinite energy hack.
paul french retweeted
When a Lyft driver wastes 20-30 minutes of your time driving around constantly updating pickup time to 4-7 min away until you give up and cancel, they should kick that driver off the system and make your replacement ride free (both Lyft and Uber surely know when drivers do this)
paul french retweeted
If you want evidence that capitalism is a force for good, just visit a grocery store.
My ode to the humble American supermarket, for @WSJFreeEx
paul french retweeted
Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday.
What I should have said:
There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this.
On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.
On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project.
On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns.
On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians.
On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers.
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries.
On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.
Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged.
When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America.
I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw.
Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.
paul french retweeted
I was given my name by the Iroquois Nation many hundreds of years ago. By 1660 my name was printed on maps by the Europeans as they accepted the Native name which means Beautiful waters.
In 1867 the Canadian government decided to use my name for their providence.
paul french retweeted
Texas is already more than 50% renewable energy, and there's a decent chance that by next year Wind overtakes Natural Gas as the single biggest source.
None of this is because Texas Republicans care about climate change. It's because their regulations let wind/solar build fast.
paul french retweeted
Can rent control fix the housing crisis? No. In fact, it could make things a whole lot worse.
Find out more in my latest for @WSJFreeEx
