Dan Mera 🇺🇸

Finance, project management in A&D. ✝️🦅🏡

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

lol

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

@KRL_defi_ Almost negligent how bad this advice is

[Norgard @BrianNorgard]

If your aim is growth, when you’re young, spend time with older people.
When you’re old, spend time with younger people.

[Anton @Anton81191831]

Blue team is trying to save blue team from the problem blue team created for blue team by doing the only thing that creates the problem for blue team.

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

This is why socialism fails every time

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

[Palantir @PalantirTech]

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

https://t.co/8igjazz1On

[Charlie Veitch @VeitchAeternis]

THEY BEAT THAT FUCKER TO DEATH.

[Brittany Hughes @RealBrittHughes]

Ever wonder how so many people seem to be drunk on the leftwing Kool-Aid?

May I present: Apple News.

[Shibo @GodsBurnt]

Conspiracy theorists now that the world knows they're not crazy, they just got a higher IQ than most people:

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

This is SO true

[Chris Boettcher @chrisboettcher9]

I stopped taking advice from childless people.

Fitness. Productivity. Life advice. All of it.

And here's why:

It's not that they're wrong. It's that they're playing a completely different game.

Taking life advice from someone without kids is like getting marriage tips from a guy who's "really good at first dates."

Cool, bro. But you've never had to initiate the tough conversation and own your mistake just to keep the peace.

We're not in the same sport.

We've all seen some 25-year-old fitness influencer with non-negotiable 5am routine.

Wake up. Meditate. Journal. Cold plunge. 45-minute lift.

Sounds beautiful. You know what woke ME up at 5am last Tuesday?

A 3-year-old standing 3 inches from my face whispering, "Daddy, I frowed up."

There's no cold plunge for that. Just reality.

These people have optimized their lives around ONE variable: themselves.

I'm optimizing for:

→ A marriage that still thriving after 10 years
→ Kids who actually want to be around me
→ A career that provides for my family
→ A body that lets me keep up with all of it

That's a completely different goal and it requires a different formula.

Real discipline isn't waking up at 5am when your apartment is silent and your only responsibility is a houseplant.

It's a 10pm workout after the kids went to bed because your morning blew up showing up for your family when they needed you.

That's the game I'm playing.

Childless advice isn't just impractical. It's unrelatable.

Their goal: optimize for SELF.
My goal: optimize for FAMILY.

It's like a vegan telling me how to grill a steak.

You might technically know the steps. But I don't trust you with the tongs.

The best advice I've ever gotten came from parents in the trenches.

They don't talk about "optimizing morning routines."

They talk about:
• 20 push-ups while your kid eats breakfast
• Walking with your wife after dinner because it's the only time you'll get together
• Meal prepping Sunday because Tuesday night is a warzone

THAT'S advice that actually works.

So no, I'm not taking health advice from someone whose biggest inconvenience is their supplement stack being shipped late.

I want the guy who's been elbow-deep in a diaper blowout and STILL hitting their goals.

That's the guy who I'm listening to.

Find your people. Take their advice. Ignore the rest.

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

We cannot let them stay.

Debates regarding illegal immigration often focus on policy issues like welfare, healthcare, crime, economic contribution, etc. That is a distraction.

Democracy is the real issue. Status quo is that any city or state desirous of greater power can declare a suspension of federal law and import millions of illegal aliens for the purpose of inflating their electoral votes and Congressional representation.

Arguments about illegal immigrants voting directly in elections fraudulently usually miss this point. If you offer the political architects of these rebellions a trade, permanent amnesty and residency for all aliens with clear agreement that they cannot be counted for the purposes of electing our President or Congress, they will adamantly refuse.

Why? Because the people pushing this do not want immigrants from socially-conservative countries in Latin America to actually vote. They want to vote on their behalf via census representation, much like reconstruction-era Southern states demanded for newly-freed slaves. Their ideal situation is an urban core of deeply aligned ideologues voting with the power of millions of illegal aliens, currently worth dozens of Congressman and eight states worth of electoral votes.

There is an effectively unlimited supply of poor people from poor countries that want to live in the United States who can be used to fuel this strategy. Some might be net positive to the US economy, some might not be, but that is beside the point - all would equally contribute to a future where minority rules the majority with no recourse.

Rewarding states that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of American law ensures other states will use these same tactics, if only to maintain their own relative power. It will end our republic.

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

@Cernovich I don’t disagree, but mainly because I just started using Grok. It’s certainly powerful, but what’s most bewildering is sometimes just not even realizing I can ask it stuff. I think my brain would be wired differently knowing I could leverage Grok along the way.

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

@DOGE__news Masterful rage bait

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

100%, beyond dishonorable

[Cernovich @Cernovich]

Men will run the clock out with no remorse. Lowlifes. If a man wants to be a “playboy,” then that has a spiritual price but at least it’s honest. Taking 5 years of a woman’s prime fertility and beauty years, based on false promises of marriage, is scum of the earth.

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

@MAGACult2 This guy looks like he’s got his life figured out. I trust him. Whatever he says.

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

@cpscott16 Literally nobody is making the point you’re debunking, pal.

[Dan Mera 🇺🇸 @Daniel_J_Mera]

@JustinWolfers How many Greenlands since he took office?

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

>be Palmer Luckey
>born 1992, Long Beach, California
>homeschooled by mom, dad's a car salesman
>build railguns, Tesla coils, lasers in the garage as a teenager
>electrocute yourself, burn a gray spot into your own vision cleaning a laser
>no regrets
>start college courses at 14
>build a six-monitor gaming rig worth tens of thousands of dollars
>collect 43 VR headsets by the time you're 18
>largest private collection in the world

2009:
>found ModRetro Forums at 17
>turn old game consoles into portable units for fun
>work part-time at USC's Mixed Reality Lab designing VR for veterans with PTSD

2012:
>build the Oculus Rift prototype in your parents' garage at 19
>drop out of college
>John Carmack (Doom creator) demos your headset at E3
>Gabe Newell endorses it
>launch Kickstarter asking for $250K
>raise $2.4 million

2014:
>Mark Zuckerberg shows up
>Facebook acquires Oculus for $2 billion
>you're 21 years old
>Forbes estimates your net worth at $700 million
>described as "the face of virtual reality"

2016:
>donate $10K to a pro-Trump group
>post anti-Hillary memes on Reddit under a pseudonym
>get exposed
>game developers boycott Oculus
>Facebook pressures you to publicly endorse Gary Johnson instead
>refuse

2017:
>get fired from your own company
>Zuckerberg won't say why
>negotiate $100 million+ payout for wrongful termination
>immediately found Anduril Industries
>name it after Aragorn's sword from Lord of the Rings
>partner with Peter Thiel
>start building autonomous weapons and AI defense systems

2020-2024:
>win $1 billion contract with U.S. Special Operations Command
>drones deployed to Ukraine
>revenue doubles to $1 billion
>take over Microsoft's $22 billion military headset contract
>Pentagon can't stop writing you checks

2022:
>build a VR headset that literally kills you if you die in-game
>inspired by Sword Art Online
>three explosive charges aimed at your forehead
>call it "office art"
>"it won't be the last"

2025:
>Anduril valued at $30.5 billion
>announce plans to build Arsenal-1
>5 million square foot weapons factory in Ohio
>autonomous fighter jets, missiles, torpedoes
>China sanctions you personally
>net worth hits $3.5 billion
>pay yourself $100K salary
>still wearing Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops to Pentagon meetings
>own a submarine, helicopters, and a PT boat
>keep one of the world's largest video game collections underground
>married a woman who sews historically accurate Tudor costumes
>won first place at Texas Renaissance Festival dressed as Henry VIII
>Sword Art Online author drew your wedding gift

from garage tinkerer to youngest self-made billionaire to America's most important defense contractor

all while looking like he's headed to a beach party