Weston retweeted
A lot of uneducated people fall into this capitalism vs public trap. So let me explain why the "public" side of this debate comes down to one thing: it doesn't work.
And it's not because the State is evil. It's because the State is made of people. Same people as everywhere else. Same incentives, same laziness, same temptations. The only difference is whose money they're spending.
Milton Friedman nailed it. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you watch the price and the quality. Your money on someone else: you watch the price, less the quality. Someone else's money on yourself: you stop caring about the price. Someone else's money on someone else: you care about neither. Every public budget on earth lives in that fourth box.
Now let me explain it like you're 8. Picture a schoolyard. 100 kids, Pokémon cards handed out at random. Nobody plans anything. Kids trade, collectors sort, good players accumulate. Very quickly every card ends up with the kid who values it most. Then the teacher walks in, decides it's unfair, confiscates everything and redistributes it herself. Problem: she has no idea who wants what. She can't. Nobody can. Trades stop, good players quit, and somehow the kids sitting closest to her desk end up with all the rare cards.
That last part is the one everyone forgets. When money flows from a central desk instead of voluntary trade, the winners are the people who know the desk best. Lobbyists, connected contractors, consultants billing 10x. California high-speed rail: budget tripled, still no train. That's not a bug, it's what happens every single time someone spends money that isn't theirs, on people they'll never meet, with zero consequences if they fail.
And here's the irony in your take. The capitalists who love public infrastructure the most are the cronies who win the contracts. That's not the free market. That's the exact opposite of it.
The free market is the only system where bad allocators lose their money and good allocators get more to allocate. Profit is the signal. Losses are the correction. The State has neither. A failing company goes bankrupt. A failing ministry gets a bigger budget next year.
So if you actually care about the common good, you should want more free market, not less. Freedom means the freedom to build, to trade, to keep what you create. It does not mean the freedom to hand other people's money to people who've proven they don't know how to invest it.
The question was never capitalism vs public. It's who allocates the next dollar best. 200 years of data, same answer every time.
Weston retweeted
Dans 50 ans, les livres d'histoire diront qu'Elon Musk a gagné une guerre que personne ne savait qu'on était en train de perdre.
Une guerre commencée il y a 100 ans, dans une cellule de prison italienne.
En 1926, Mussolini fait arrêter un intellectuel sarde de 35 ans. Au procès, le procureur aurait dit : « Nous devons empêcher ce cerveau de fonctionner pendant vingt ans. »
Il s'appelait Antonio Gramsci.
Son cerveau n'a jamais cessé de fonctionner. En prison, il a rempli des milliers de pages qui sont devenues l'un des textes politiques les plus influents du XXe siècle. Je pense qu'on est en train de vivre le moment où sa théorie s'effondre.
Laissez-moi vous expliquer.
Gramsci se posait une question simple. Pourquoi la révolution communiste a-t-elle réussi en Russie mais échoué partout en Occident ?
Sa réponse : en Occident, le pouvoir ne tient pas seulement par l'État, la police et l'armée. Il tient par la culture. Par ce que les gens trouvent normal, évident, « de bon sens ». Il appelle ça l'hégémonie culturelle.
Donc, pour prendre le pouvoir, il ne faut pas d'abord prendre le palais. Il faut d'abord prendre les esprits. Les écoles. Les universités. Les journaux. Le théâtre. L'édition. Les tribunaux. C'est la « guerre de position » : une conquête lente, institution par institution. Quand la culture a basculé, la politique suit toute seule.
Quarante ans plus tard, l'activiste allemand Rudi Dutschke en fera un slogan : la longue marche à travers les institutions.
Pendant des décennies, on a vécu avec une énigme que personne n'arrivait vraiment à expliquer.
Pourquoi presque tous les artistes sont-ils de gauche ? Les acteurs, les chanteurs, les profs, les journalistes, une bonne partie de la magistrature. Pourquoi un pays pouvait voter à droite élection après élection et voir quand même sa culture parler d'une seule voix ?
On nous répondait : « c'est parce que les gens éduqués sont de gauche. »
Je crois que la réponse est plus simple. Gramsci avait écrit la recette, et elle a été appliquée. Quand tu contrôles qui obtient la subvention, le poste, la bonne critique, le prix, l'invitation sur le plateau, tu contrôles ce qui devient « la culture ».
La même énigme existait à l'échelle du monde.
Pourquoi tant de pays en développement, notamment en Amérique latine, revotaient-ils encore et encore pour des gouvernements socialistes ou de gauche radicale ? Venezuela, Bolivie, Nicaragua, l'Argentine des Kirchner, la Colombie de Petro. L'économie s'effondrait, les cartels prospéraient, le chaos s'installait. Et pourtant le même vote revenait.
Ma conviction : la pauvreté n'était pas un accident du système. C'était un électorat. Et autour, il y avait tout un écosystème d'ONG, de médias « indépendants » et de programmes de « société civile », financé en grande partie par l'argent occidental.
Puis, début 2025, il s'est passé quelque chose que personne n'avait jamais osé faire.
Elon et DOGE ont ouvert les livres de USAID. Une agence quasi intouchable depuis 1961, des dizaines de milliards de dollars par an. La grande majorité des programmes ont été coupés, et l'agence a été absorbée par le Département d'État.
Le robinet a été fermé.
Et regardez ce qui s'est passé depuis.
Bolivie : le MAS perd le pouvoir après presque vingt ans. Équateur : Noboa réélu. Honduras : la droite reprend le pays. Chili : Kast élu. Argentine : Milei remporte largement les élections de mi-mandat.
Et il y a deux jours, le Brésil.
Jair Bolsonaro est inéligible, condamné à 27 ans de prison. La gauche pensait avoir refermé le chapitre. Lula, 80 ans, briguait un quatrième mandat face à un pays qu'on disait acquis.
Dimanche, son fils Flávio est arrivé en tête du premier tour. Plus de 47 % contre près de 45 % pour Lula. Lula lui-même a reconnu un résultat « inattendu ».
Le plus grand pays d'Amérique latine est à un second tour de basculer.
Le plus grand virage à droite du continent depuis des décennies.
Coïncidence ? Je ne crois pas. Quand le financement disparaît, le récit perd ses haut-parleurs.
Il reste un dernier vrai bastion. L'Europe.
Bruxelles finance ses propres réseaux d'ONG, avec une opacité que même la Cour des comptes européenne a pointée. Les grandes fondations comme l'Open Society de Soros. Les entités supranationales qui produisent de la norme sans jamais passer devant un électeur.
C'est la dernière forteresse de l'hégémonie culturelle. Et elle commence à se fissurer.
Je suis convaincu que tout ça va s'effondrer, et plus vite qu'on ne le pense.
Gramsci avait raison sur un point essentiel : la culture précède la politique. Mais il avait oublié que ça marche dans les deux sens. Quand une culture artificielle perd ses perfusions, ce qu'il y a de vrai en dessous remonte à la surface.
Ce qui vient après, je crois que c'est une renaissance. Une culture qui recommence à aimer la beauté, l'ambition, la science, la civilisation qui l'a fait naître.
Et dans les livres d'histoire, on se souviendra que tout a commencé quand un homme a décidé de regarder les comptes.
Il fallait quelqu'un d'assez riche pour ne dépendre de personne, d'assez fou pour s'y attaquer et d'assez libre pour encaisser la haine qui allait suivre.
Merci Elon.
Weston retweeted
US airlines' net profit per passenger per flight is $7
US grocery stores' combined net profit per person per year is $47
US health insurers' net profit per insured person per year is $34
In these industries, high prices are not the result of high profit margins.
Weston retweeted
Freemint registration is live for Nearlios
Only 1,000 spots are available. Register here: nearlios.xyz/
Weston retweeted
how can you not believe in God when octopuses DREAM and otters have a favorite rock they carry around in a little SKIN POCKET and cows have BEST FRIENDS and bees are out there communicating the coordinates of flowers through INTERPRETIVE DANCE and they have REGIONAL DIALECTS??
cats are PURRING at frequencies associated with bone healing??? forests get absolutely incinerated and respond by growing FLOWERS??? dolphins literally invent NAMES for themselves and yell them across the ocean??? penguins are waddling around Antarctica looking for the PERFECT LITTLE ROCK to give their beloved???
CROWS REMEMBER YOUR FACE. THEY TELL OTHER CROWS ABOUT YOU. THEY TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT YOU. YOU CAN HAVE GENERATIONAL BEEF WITH A BIRD.
goats have ACCENTS. rats GIGGLE when you tickle them. elephants mourn their dead. whales make SONGS and then OTHER WHALES LEARN THE SONG and suddenly everybody across the ocean is singing the new hit single.
monarch butterflies are born knowing how to fly thousands of miles to a place THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN. sea turtles hatch out of an egg, immediately sprint toward an OCEAN they have never seen, disappear into it for like THIRTY YEARS and then somehow come back to THE SAME BEACH???
birds can see COLORS THAT WE CANNOT SEE. there are colors happening RIGHT NOW that we don’t even get to know about.
there are sea slugs that eat algae and STEAL ITS CHLOROPLASTS and then are just like great thanks I’ll be PHOTOSYNTHESIZING NOW. there are mushrooms communicating underground. there are seeds sitting in the dirt for DECADES like no actually I will wait.
squirrels plant MILLIONS OF TREES because they simply cannot remember where they put their snacks.
A CATERPILLAR GOES INTO A LITTLE BAG, DISSOLVES MOST OF ITS BODY INTO ORGANIC SOUP, REARRANGES ITSELF, GROWS WINGS AND LEAVES.
and you’re telling me a tiny acorn knows how to become a 70-foot oak tree??? nobody tells it what to do??? it just has TREE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE IT???
your body started as ONE CELL. ONE. and that cell divided itself into a brain that can think about its own existence and eyes that can look at stars and hands that can hold somebody else’s hands and a heart that runs on ELECTRICITY without you even asking it to???
the iron in your BLOOD was made inside a STAR.
I’M SORRY?????
we are walking around on a wet rock covered in bioluminescent oceans and singing whales and laughing rats and birds holding lifelong grudges and flowers exploding out of FIRE and somehow we’re supposed to act like this is a normal place to live?????????
how can you not believe in God when octopuses dream, otters have a favorite shell that they carry all their lives, cows have best friends, bees have different "dialects" of dance depending on the region, cats purr at a frequency that accelerates bone healing, the forest grows flowers first after a fire, dolphins give each other names and respond to them, penguins make proposals by giving each other the most beautiful pebble, crows will tell their children about you, goats have accents, rats giggle when you tickle them, sea slugs become powered by the sun just by green algae and squirrels plant millions of trees every year just by forgetting where they've buried their nuts!
Weston retweeted
WHISTLEBLOWER: BREAKING DOWN THE TRUTH BEHIND NEAR PROTOCOL, ILLIA POLOSUKHIN, AND THE NEAR FOUNDATION
"NEAR" is not what you think it is. I saw it from the inside for four years.
It is ran by globalists for globalist agendas. I attempted to blow the whistle in 2024.
Weston retweeted
>all the times ive ever been the most successful in my life is when ive not told a single soul what im doing
>whether it was buying property, investing, building a brand or business, moving continents
>i never told a soul and it has a 100% positive strike rate
>every time ive shared my ideas, hinted a move or invited advice into my world, ive either been distracted, discouraged or questioned my judgement
>never ask for advice from someone who has base desires, consistently wilts away in an unproductive environment, accomplishes little to nothing and is willing to sacrifice absolutely nothing in their lives
>let your own private innerworld garden blossom outward from acquiring new knowledge, helpful networks, mentors, a positive and grateful outlook
>set a unrelenting desire towards accomplishing your goals and helping others along the way
>this is purpose and direction and very few ever come into contact with it
Weston retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Weston retweeted
Far too many people are worried about super HIGH intelligence destroying humanity, when we should be worried about super LOW intelligence destroying humanity.
Weston retweeted
RuneScape is the reason I have had any success in life.
Starting at the age of 7 I grinded cutting yews, picking flax or fishing in Catherby. I saved diligently to buy our first granite maul. I dedicated thousands of hours to this game and it taught me more about life than any hour spent in school.
I learned about:
(1) Supply demand
(2) Catalysts
(3) Arbitrage
(4) The value of hard work
(5) Long term investing
(6) Compounding
There is nothing I am more passionate about than my time in Glienor. Thank you @Jagex!
