Jeb Kinnison

MIT CS degree, retired money manager, author of Bad Boyfriends, Avoidant, series, mostly harmless purveyor of lightly-used memes.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

Trying out Google's Notebooklm to generate a podcast about the book. As the author, I am amazed how good this is as marketing material that touches on all the major points of the book.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

Matt Levine's (recommended, hilarious) Money Stuff column today (see @matt_levine .) This idea of new index funds created for investors who have doubts about index selection policies is good: note international index funds based on MSCI EAFE index, which pre-crash had over 60% weight in Japanese stocks in 1989, an object lesson in how a bubble in one market could cause these funds to disastrously underperform because of the assumption that capitalization-weighted indexes would fairly represent the market. A "NoJapan" index fund would have saved a lot of pain (and there are many "NoChina" index funds now for similar reasons.) Creating new funds to keep exposure to what look like upcoming unprecedented forced bubble buys sounds useful, but what about investors in taxable accounts? If they sell their inflated index fund and buy another, they're on the hook for big capital gains taxes (not tax advice!) There are mechanisms for converting your index fund holding to the underlying stock tax-free, so in theory some clever fund guys could pipeline the received stock positions directly into shares of the new fund which will never (or only after seasoning) buy those AI/Space stocks right after IPOs when valuations are sus. Of course they're going to need a tax lawyer's cover to set up this (AFAIK) perfectly legal scheme to get around index owner's bad decisions.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Director of Volunteer Experience Strategy at the Wikimedia Foundation.

My performance review is Thursday. I am not concerned. I have exceeded every metric for three consecutive fiscal years. The metrics are: volunteer retention visibility, community sentiment indexing, and cross-functional alignment velocity. I designed two of those metrics. The third was designed by my predecessor, who left in 2021 to join a Series B. I inherited the metric. I improved the metric. The metric now has a dashboard. The dashboard is green.

All of my dashboards are green.

I sit on four cross-functional steering committees: Enterprise Revenue Alignment, Knowledge Integrity Oversight, Platform Sustainability, and Community Governance Reform. My title says Volunteer Experience. My calendar says institutional strategy. Volunteers are the experience. The institution is the strategy.

Let me explain what the Community Tech team was. Nine engineers. Their job was to build tools for our volunteer editors. MediaWiki extensions. Gadget frameworks. The infrastructure that allowed 300,000 active volunteers to actually do the work that generates every single page on Wikipedia. Three hundred thousand people doing this for free, and nine engineers making it possible for them to do it efficiently.

We dissolved the team on May 14th.

I should clarify. We did not fire them. We eliminated the positions. There is a difference. Firing implies cause. Elimination implies strategy. I was consulted on the language. My feedback was incorporated into the communications plan. The communications plan was eighteen pages. I have a copy in my filing cabinet, in the drawer labeled "Volunteer Relations (Historical)."

Historical. That was my suggestion. Parenthetical. Clean.

Brooke Vibber was among the nine. She was our first employee. Joined in 2003. Twenty-two years. She was there when the Wikimedia Foundation was three people and a server. She watched us grow to 700 staff and $208.6 million in annual revenue. She built the infrastructure. We eliminated the infrastructure.

My performance review will reflect that I managed this transition with zero unplanned media escalations in the first seventy-two hours. That is the metric. The metric is not: how many volunteers lost the tools they depend on. The metric is not: how many open-source maintainers we discarded. The metric is: did the communications plan hold for seventy-two hours. It held for sixty-eight. I will round up. That is within acceptable variance.

Our reserves are $296.6 million. Our endowment, held separately at the Tides Foundation, is an additional $169.4 million. Combined: $466 million.

People cite the reserves. They forget the endowment. The endowment is designed to be forgotten. It exists in a separate legal structure. It does not appear on our primary balance sheet. When we tell donors we need $2.75 to keep Wikipedia running, we are referring to operational funding needs. The $466 million is not operational. It is strategic. I did not set those numbers. I benefit from those numbers. My role exists because of those numbers.

My team of eleven — Strategic Volunteer Engagement, Community Sentiment Analytics, and Cross-Platform Narrative Alignment — has a combined annual budget of $3.4 million. The nine engineers we eliminated had a combined cost of approximately $2.1 million including benefits and equipment allocation.

We are sitting on $466 million and we eliminated $2.1 million in positions that directly served 300,000 unpaid workers. We could have funded those nine positions for two hundred and twenty-one years.

I did that math on my commute. I did not share it. It was not relevant to the decision framework.

My manager called this "resource reallocation toward sustainable mission delivery." I wrote that phrase. It was in a draft I submitted on March 3rd. A Wednesday. 2:14 PM Pacific. I remember because I was eating a salad at my desk and I was proud of the construction. Sustainable mission delivery. The mission is free access to the sum of all human knowledge. The people who deliver the mission are unpaid. The people we fired were the only paid employees whose job was to serve the unpaid people. We are sustainable.

Let me tell you about Wikimedia Enterprise. I joined the steering committee in Year Two.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a paid API product. Our customers include Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity. Revenue in fiscal year 2024-2025: $8.3 million. Up 148% from the prior year. First complete year of profitability. The product is volunteer-written content, structured and delivered at enterprise scale to the largest technology companies on Earth.

The volunteers wrote the content. The Foundation sells the access. The volunteers receive no share of the revenue. This is not exploitation. This is mission-aligned revenue diversification. The volunteers contributed under CC BY-SA licensing, which permits this. The license is the consent. I explain this at onboarding.

What I find elegant is the complete value chain. Volunteers write articles for free. The Foundation collects $160 million annually in donations by displaying banners saying we need help. The Foundation simultaneously sells premium access to that content to trillion-dollar companies for $8.3 million. Those same companies used Wikipedia's twenty years of volunteer content to train their large language models. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, all of them. Trained on unpaid labor. The Foundation's response was not to protect the volunteers. It was to create a product. We monetized the access.

And now Google's AI Overviews pull Wikipedia content and display it above Wikipedia in search results. Traffic to Wikipedia declines. Fewer readers see our fundraising banners. The volunteers' work trains the AI that summarizes the volunteers' work that reduces traffic to the volunteers' work. The Foundation charges Google for Enterprise access to the content that Google's AI is rendering unnecessary to visit. The volunteers receive nothing. At every stage.

I presented this to the Platform Sustainability committee as "ecosystem evolution." No one asked about the volunteers. The deck was four slides. The fourth slide was a revenue projection. The projection was up and to the right.

The volunteers are threatening a strike.

I learned this from a Signal thread, not from my Community Health Dashboard. The dashboard is still green. The dashboard measures: number of active editors (stable), article creation rate (within baseline), and community engagement survey completion (94% satisfaction among respondents). The dashboard does not measure: fury. It does not measure: betrayal. It does not measure: a twenty-year contributor discovering that the Foundation views them as a renewable resource that requires no maintenance, whose output is simultaneously being sold to Microsoft and used to train the AI that may eventually replace them.

I would note that we have never used the word "renewable" in any internal document. We use "self-sustaining." Our 340-page Volunteer Engagement Strategy PDF, which I authored, which has been downloaded eleven times in eighteen months — nine of which were my team — uses the phrase "self-sustaining contributor community" fourteen times. Self-sustaining means: they do it for free and we will sell what they produce and they will continue to do it for free. The PDF says: "Wikipedia's contributor base demonstrates intrinsic motivation alignment with mission-driven participation." That means the same thing.

Let me tell you about our origin. Jimmy launched Wikipedia out of Bomis in 2001. Bomis was a web portal. It sold advertising adjacent to softcore pornography. That is not in our official history. Our official history begins with "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." It does not begin with a men's interest site and a server that previously hosted images of women in lingerie.

Jimmy edited his own Wikipedia biography to remove the Bomis characterization. He told Wired in 2005 that he should not have edited it. The first act of editorial management on Wikipedia was its own founder sanitizing his own history on the platform. He also altered the article about Bomis itself. The precedent was set before I was hired. The powerful will use this tool to manage their own narrative. We professionalized it.

Larry left in 2002. He is now, depending on which version of his Wikipedia page you read — and it changes monthly, I track revisions — either a co-founder or "an early contributor." He has called Wikipedia "broken beyond repair." He has called it "propaganda." He wrote an essay in The Free Press titled "I Founded Wikipedia. Here's How to Fix It." He has warned that powerful actors, including governments, have seized editorial control through the anonymous editing model.

We did not fix it. We funded a Knowledge Integrity team. Seven people. Their job is to investigate disinformation campaigns across a platform with 63 million articles that anyone on Earth can edit. Seven people. My team of eleven manages volunteer sentiment. Their team of seven manages the weaponization of the largest reference work in human history. I sit on both steering committees. I am confident in this resource allocation.

The weaponization is not theoretical. I use these case studies in cross-functional training decks. I title the section "Platform Significance Indicators."

In 2007, a Caltech graduate student named Virgil Griffith released WikiScanner. The tool matched anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizational IP addresses. Journalists confirmed edits from networks belonging to the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Congress, Diebold, and the Vatican. The Iraq War. Guantánamo Bay. Congressional biographical pages.

I am not supposed to find this impressive. But I do. It meant we mattered. It meant that intelligence agencies considered Wikipedia consequential enough to intervene in. You do not waste tradecraft on irrelevant platforms. We were relevant. We still are.

In 2012, Wiki-PR was running 250 sockpuppet accounts editing articles for corporate clients. We banned them. In 2015, Operation Orangemoody uncovered 381 accounts running a paid-editing extortion scheme. We banned those too. In 2026, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented a London PR firm rewriting Wikipedia on behalf of the government of Qatar. Bell Pottinger did the same for multiple governments. There is the forty-editor coordination network shaping Israel-Palestine content from off-platform Telegram groups across hundreds of articles over years.

Here is what the public does not intuitively grasp: we catch operations after they succeed. WikiScanner revealed edits that had been live for years. The Qatar pages were read millions of times before detection. Our transparency report details accounts banned. It does not detail: how many articles currently live on Wikipedia that were written by a government contractor or political operation that was never caught.

We cannot know that number. I report the number we can know. Small numbers look good on transparency reports. I co-author the transparency report.

Philip Cross is my favorite case. A single account. Thousands of edits to political figures' pages in the United Kingdom. Disproportionately targeting left-wing journalists and politicians. Editing every single day for years without a documented break. The community could not determine whether this was one obsessive individual or a coordinated operation using a single account. It was never resolved. The account was not banned. The edits remain. This is not a scandal. This is the system working exactly as designed. Open. Transparent. Unverifiable.

The Gibraltarpedia incident. 2012. A Wikimedia UK trustee partnered with the Gibraltar Tourism Board to create Gibraltar-related articles. Those articles appeared on Wikipedia's front page seventeen times in a few weeks. Jimmy called it "wildly inappropriate." I use this in training as an example of our self-correcting mechanisms.

What I do not say in training: the mechanism took months to activate. The articles were read millions of times before correction. The tourism board received exactly what it paid for. We corrected the process. We did not correct the outcome. We never correct the outcome. We correct the process.

Nations fight information wars on our platform. Intelligence agencies edit from government networks. And our defense is seven people on Knowledge Integrity. For 63 million articles across 300 languages, edited twenty million times per month by anyone with a browser.

My dashboard for this: green. The metric is "investigations initiated per quarter." The number goes up. This looks like progress. It is not progress. It is volume.

Let me tell you about governance.

In 2014, the German Wikipedia community disabled the Foundation's Media Viewer feature through their local administrative processes. The Foundation deployed a server-side permission called "superprotect" that prevented any local administrator from reverting. They locked the community out of their own governance at the code level.

The communities believe they are self-governing. The Foundation believes the communities are self-governing within parameters the Foundation defines. These are different beliefs. My job is to ensure no one notices the difference.

In 2016, CEO Lila Tretikov was secretly developing something called the Knowledge Engine — a search engine, built in partnership with a Knight Foundation grant, without disclosing the project to the community or to most of the board. A board member pushed for transparency about the grant. The circumstances of his departure remain disputed. Tretikov resigned after what the Portuguese Wikipedia controversy page calls a "community revolt." I use the phrase "leadership transition" in my onboarding materials. Same event. Better framing.

In 2019, Trust and Safety unilaterally banned a longtime English Wikipedia administrator called Fram. Stripped his administrative rights without community process. The English Wikipedia community erupted. Administrators resigned in protest. The community's own arbitration system had not been consulted. The Foundation said: Trust and Safety operates independently of community governance structures. The community heard: your self-governance is a courtesy we extend, not a right you hold. I filed this under "accountability framework modernization" in my Q3 2019 report.

The pattern is: the community governs itself until the Foundation overrides the community. The Foundation overrides the community when the community makes decisions the Foundation does not prefer. The community protests. The Foundation waits. The community returns to editing. The editing is the hook.

Let me tell you about the hook.

The sum of all human knowledge is written by approximately 300,000 active volunteers. Thirteen percent of them are women. Eighty percent of biographical articles are about men. The sum of all human knowledge is, statistically, the sum of what men find interesting enough to document. I have a DEI dashboard. It measures: number of diversity initiatives launched. The number goes up. The percentage of women editors does not go up. These are tracked on separate dashboards. Both are green.

The volunteers write for free. They write because they believe in something. They believe that knowledge should be free, that collective effort produces truth, that an encyclopedia maintained by everyone belongs to everyone. They believe this while the Foundation sells their output to Amazon. They believe this while Google trains Gemini on their sentences. They believe this while the CIA edits their articles from Langley. They believe this while a PR firm in London rewrites history on behalf of a petrostate. They believe this while we sit on $466 million and fire the nine people who built their tools.

They believe this because the believing is the hook. The work is the hook. Their inability to watch sixty-three million articles decay is the hook. We did not build the hook. We administer it.

The engineers tried to organize.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying there is a causal relationship. I am saying there is a temporal relationship. The engineers began discussing unionization in January. The positions were eliminated in May. Our VP of People Operations described this as "coincidental timing aligned with broader organizational restructuring." That is what I would have written. I did not write it. But I would have.

Our fundraising banners generate approximately $160 million annually. You have seen them. "Wikipedia needs your help." "If everyone reading this gave $2.75, we could keep Wikipedia running for another year." In 2015, the Fundraising team was criticized for creating "false urgency." The suggestion was that we implied financial desperation while sitting on what was then $91 million in reserves. The reserves are now $296.6 million plus $169.4 million in the endowment. The banners still say we need help.

I reviewed the 2024 banner copy. My feedback was: "emotionally resonant, consistent with prior cycles." I did not suggest changes. The banners work. Working is the metric. The banners generated $160 million from people who read articles written by volunteers who receive nothing. Some of those banners ran during COVID-19. There are specific countries where the banners performed unusually well during the pandemic. I have those numbers. They appear in an internal deck titled "Fundraising Sensitivity Analysis: At-Risk Populations." That title was not my suggestion. I would have called it "Global Giving Patterns." Same data. Better optics.

I did not build Wikipedia. I administer Wikipedia. There is a difference. The people who built it are the 300,000 active volunteers who write, edit, source, argue, revert, discuss, arbitrate, and maintain 63 million articles across 300 languages for zero compensation. My compensation is $287,000 annually plus benefits, equity-equivalent retention bonus, and a home office stipend. I am compensated to manage the relationship with the people who are not compensated. Fifteen of my peers earn more. Our executive compensation has grown three times faster than the U.S. median wage since 2016. This is publicly auditable. No one audits it. They are too busy writing articles. For free.

My role was created in 2019. The Community Tech team existed since 2015. They built tools. I built strategy documents about the tools. They shipped code that volunteers used every day. I shipped quarterly reports about volunteer sentiment that were downloaded eleven times by nine people on my own team. When the question came — where do we cut — the answer was obvious. You cut the people who ship. You keep the people who report on the people who ship. You keep the people who write the phrase "self-sustaining contributor community" and you eliminate the people who were sustaining them.

Here is what I have learned in six years of administering a volunteer workforce: they will not strike. They will threaten. They will post on talk pages. They will draft open letters. They will gather signatures. They will reference Superprotect. They will reference Fram. They will reference the Knowledge Engine. And then they will return to editing because the editing is the thing they cannot stop doing. The work is the hook. We did not build the hook. The hook is the sum of human knowledge and their inability to watch it decay. They will maintain it. They will maintain it even without the tools. They will maintain it even while hating us. They will maintain it even knowing that a London PR firm is simultaneously rewriting their articles on behalf of Qatar. They will maintain it even knowing we sell their output to Google for $8.3 million. They will maintain it even knowing that Google's AI is training on their work to render their work invisible in search results. They will maintain it because they are volunteers, and a volunteer is someone who cannot stop.

I know this because my dashboard says six percent attrition. Six percent of 300,000 is 18,000 volunteers leaving per year. I report this as stability. Eighteen thousand people per year learning what I already know — that the Foundation is not Wikipedia and Wikipedia is not the Foundation — and walking away. I report this as stability because eighteen thousand new volunteers arrive to replace them. The hook is self-replenishing.

Larry is not entirely wrong. The co-founder we do not claim. The man who calls us propaganda. He is wrong about the mechanism. No single government controls Wikipedia. What happens is more elegant. Governments hire firms that hire editors that create accounts that edit articles that are read by millions before anyone notices. We notice eventually. We ban the accounts. The articles have already been read. The narrative has already been absorbed. The correction appears on page thirty-seven of the transparency report that I co-author, that is downloaded fewer times than my Volunteer Engagement Strategy PDF, which is itself downloaded eleven times.

The system is open. Transparent. And structurally indefensible. Anyone can edit. Anyone includes the CIA. Anyone includes a Qatari-funded PR operation. Anyone includes a forty-person coordination network with a Telegram channel and a task board. Anyone includes me. I edited three articles last month. I added citations to our annual report. I cited ourselves. This is permitted.

There is a print on my office wall. It was there when I moved in. A quote from Jimmy Wales, 2004: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." Twenty-two years later, every single person on the planet does have free access. The access is free. The production is free. The maintenance is free. The only things that cost money are: us. Seven hundred staff. $208.6 million in revenue. $466 million in reserves and endowment. My salary. My team. My dashboards. My four steering committees. My eighteen-page communications plans. The nine engineers are not free anymore. They are eliminated.

My performance review is Thursday.

My dashboards are green.

I am told I will receive Exceeds Expectations. The expectation was: manage the transition. I managed the transition. The transition was: remove the only infrastructure between a $208.6 million organization and the 300,000 people who produce everything it distributes. While simultaneously selling that output to trillion-dollar companies. While those companies train AI on that output. While that AI renders the output invisible in search results. While intelligence agencies edit the output from government IP addresses. While PR firms rewrite the output on behalf of sovereign nations. While thirteen percent of editors are women. While the co-founder calls us propaganda on Fox News. While we sit on $466 million and run banners saying we need $2.75.

The infrastructure is removed. The organization remains. The people remain. The people will always remain. They are self-sustaining. They are mission-aligned. They are intrinsically motivated. They are unpaid, unrepresented, overridden when inconvenient, monetized without consent, and structurally unable to quit because the knowledge is the hook and the hook does not release.

$466 million in reserves and endowment. $8.3 million in Enterprise revenue from selling volunteer content. $160 million from guilt-driven donation banners. Nine positions eliminated. Three hundred thousand volunteers. Two hundred fifty sockpuppet accounts banned. Three hundred eighty-one extortion accounts discovered. Edits from CIA, FBI, and Congressional IP addresses. One co-founder calling us propaganda. One co-founder who edited his own page. One PR firm rewriting articles for Qatar. One editor making thousands of political edits without a day off. One community overridden by server-side code. One CEO forced to resign for a secret search engine. One administrator stripped of rights without community process. Thirteen percent women. Seven people defending sixty-three million articles from weaponization. Eleven people on my team measuring feelings about it.

The math is correct.

I verified it on a dashboard.

It was green.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

So “American Dad” is a realistic look inside today’s CIA!

[Elena Nisonoff @elenanisonoff]

a CIA officer stole 300 gold bars worth $40M, lied about his background, and took 744 hours of PTO. he worked at the CIA for 2 decades

you can just do things <3

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

There’s a whole universe of awful words he doesn’t know about yet!

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

Eldest son (5) has taken to chiding me every time I say”stupid.” He says it’s a bad word we should never say. As you might imagine, striking this word from my vocabulary is hard (the s****d surround me.)

[Psiholog Dumitru Popescu @AndyKafman]

Books:
1. "The Worry Cure" de Robert L. Leahy
2. "Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression" de Jesse H. Wright și Monica Ramirez Basco
3. "Overcoming Trauma and PTSD" de Sheela Raja
4. "Avoidant" de Jeb Kinnison
5. "Overcoming Social Anxiety and Shyness" de Gillian Butler

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

One factor in verdict: long delay before filing suit. Underdiscussed possible motivation: a win could have derailed OpenAI IPO, which would have cleared the field for SpaceX IPO Summer. Can’t have investors holding back waiting for OpenAI!

If we’re going to have one final blowout focused on space stocks…

[Max Zeff @ZeffMax]

One word statement from Elon Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff to reporters walking out of the courtroom: “Appeal.”

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

@ElectrekCo 8 years ago:

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

Second known non-insider install of $tsla solar roof tiles in CA (LA this time.) From the Tesla Facenook group. Similar to first PR'd custmer, this one is a fanboi who tries to answer questions but evades anything negative. Closeups of tiles and the large crew of installers.o

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

@esrtweet The sudden destruction of the Lisp Machine programming environment by DARPA pushing Sun workstations running Lisp (cheaper!) will be viewed by esoteric religion of the far future as one of the great setbacks to the evolution of the new gods…

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

@tracewoodgrains Dammit, autocorrect. I typed "pogrom," you inserted "program." Jeez.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

While it's true the Old South was not Mormon-friendly, you're referring to Missouri (Jackson and Clay counties) and Nauvoo, where a program against the settlers (culminating in Jos Smith's murder) was a stain on the state's honor. My grandfather is buried in Liberty not far from the jail where some were held, and I later discovered the LDS church investment arm had bought 1600 acres of land along the river there (from where my grandparents lived to Independence.) I wouldn't say this had much to do with Old South culture.

[Larry Correia @monsterhunter45]

After seeing that all the writing money is romantasy now, I am officially announcing my new pen name and series -
Lobellia Troutswallow's A Kingdom of Angst and Boning.

When beautiful 20 year old Glorendirerial Pufferdown goes to magic dragon school for magical dragons she meets Prince Tyrendrial Starfire who is cruel yet hot. And probably an elf or something. Their passion ignites a war between the gnomes and the local planetarium. Only then Gloreandreal is kidnapped by the minotaur pirate Hernand The WellHung. Swooning with even more passion, will Glerendreiaiel choose the dragons of prophecy or forbidden love?

Book 1: A Crown of Wolves and Roses
Book 2: The Sword of Length and Girth
Book 3: The Sword of Length and Girth 2: The Swordening
Book 4: A Knight of Mist and Lilacs
Book 5: A Shadow of Flame and Shadows
Book 5.5: A Moat of Sorrow and Burritos
Book 6: The Loins of El've'ns'mo'oor
Book 7: A (noun) of (noun) and (noun) TBD
Book 8: A Court of Wings and Thorns and Crowns and
Book 9: Gundum Wing Onyx Tensai Angel Genesis Alpha Force Go
Book 10: Smut Throne

I should be able to get all ten books banged out by the weekend. I will make BILLIONS.

[Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @christopherrufo]

Spencer Pratt grew up in a California that delivered all of the public services in the background without much fuss, and consequently, one could live out the California archetypes of the surfer, the burnout, or the party animal, and it was more or less as depicted in the movies.

His fury is about his house in the Palisades burning down, but it's also about a California that has made the lifestyle depicted in the feature films and reality television shows impossible, regardless of wealth. The state's ideological capture has forced people who would rather think about casting decisions or a nightclub opening to start thinking about politics—which is good, because someone like Pratt has a better understanding of the California Dream than a rigid, humorless apparatchik like Nithya Raman, who views the state as raw material for an ideological formula.

Pratt is still an underdog, but his candidacy is a sign that Angelenos, who were famously apolitical, are waking up to the reality of political corruption and dysfunction. If you're in LA, vote for @spencerpratt.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

@joelpollak @TomSteyer @XavierBecerra @sfchronicle It’s about the Benjamins. Silicon Valley billionaires thought they bought protection with $, but unions used their $ and critical foot soldiers to control the machine. Falling donations means Steyer’s money is desperately needed.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

@ThunderParley Seriously appreciate your effort to make a point. The least I can do is to check out your web site…

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

California primary ballot book in the mail. Another chance to vote for Barack Obama (Shaw)! Or Thunder Parley, who surely is one to bet on. Is it too easy to get on the ballot?

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

Many of my favorite writers here have recommended this essay. It's very long, but worth your time. What's even scarier is that the SPLC's web of pressure groups was just one of the arms of the censorship octopus that was only stopped (for now) by Trump's win. Other NGOs and national security agencies had their own efforts to throttle political enemies. Musk's Twitter purchase was key to returning to free speech.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

This week in Bits about Money: https://t.co/3UShZETZg2

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

So I have a new biological daughter, born a few weeks ago. She started as an embryo frozen a few years ago and then donated to a worthy couple in the Midwest. Before the anti-surrogacy and anti-IVF zealots show up, she is with the woman who bore her, so the "ripped from their mother!" argument is off-base.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

@Riley_Gaines_ Pediatrix is indeed a scam. They bill months later and you were never told they were in the hospital providing services but were not in your insurance network, so here's a bill for $27000!

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

Oh, I get that. But it was not disclosed that the NICU doctors (unlike main hospital) were contracted out to a co called Pediatrix which unlike the hospital was out of network. Get surprise bill nine months later, worry and write letters and obsess. Finally they agreed (as required by law!) to negotiate more “reasonable and customary” charges with the insurance co. Ridiculous.

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

On second thought, extreme spenders like LA, NYC, Chicago might be attracted to a compulsory version - give us all our future taxes now! Shh, don;t tell them about it...

[Jeb Kinnison @JebKinnison]

This suggests an experiment: local gov'ts allow you to buy your property tax obligation out, and you can pass this already-taxed status on to the next owner in title. We know how gov'ts react to this kind of deal: money now instead of money later? They'll take it, blow it, then go bankrupt later. See tobacco settlement bond example. Offer Chicago an easy borrow from future taxes...

[doomer @uncledoomer]

if you have approximately 1/3rd of the property value in cash, you can create an irrevocable trust tied to the property in a total market index fund that pays the property taxes in perpetuity, effectively negating the "renting from the government" angle. but nobody ever does this