Jeff Wedge

Husband, traveler, wine lover, Buffett fan, RVer, boater, retro patriot, & curious human.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

One of the most important speeches you will hear this year on why we are at war with Iran.

Worth five minutes of your time.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 WOW! Bill Maher just said he's considering voting Republican for president in 2028 because Democrats are becoming communists

HUGE MISTAKE, DEMS!

"Yes, my vote is in play...I'm NOT living in communist America. The talking point, 'it's socialism.' I read the quotes from the DSA platform, from their own mouths, don't tell me I'm not seeing what I am seeing! They say things like, take over key industries, THAT'S COMMUNISM."

[Politi_Rican 🇵🇷 𝕏 🇺🇸 @TheRicanMemes]

RFK Jr visits Yellowstone to meet the famous bison 🦬 👀😂

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

@chamath Profound.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

https://t.co/vPrPSUjTJG

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

@Riley_Gaines_ …thank you for standing strong.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

BIG WIN!

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

America’s ruling class has performed another miracle.

They took the most basic truths in human civilization ... crime needs punishment, borders need enforcement, schools should teach, welfare should be temporary, families matter, merit matters, and taxpayers should not be looted by professional parasites ... and somehow rebranded all of that as “extremism.”

Incredible work, really.

Apparently, a “compassionate” society is one where the violent repeat offender gets another chance, the victim gets a candlelight vigil, the taxpayer gets the bill, the schoolkid gets passed along illiterate, the fraudster gets a grant, the NGO gets another contract, the illegal alien gets services, and the working American gets told to shut up and be more inclusive.

What a beautiful system.

Soft justice did not stay in the courtroom. It metastasized. It became soft borders, soft schools, soft parenting, soft welfare, soft standards, soft men, and soft bureaucrats explaining why every obvious solution is “too harsh.”

Lock up predators? Cruel.
Deport illegals? Hateful.
End generational welfare? Lacking empathy.
Punish fraud? Complicated.
Restore merit? Problematic.
Teach kids to read? Probably colonialism by Tuesday.

A serious country protects the innocent from the guilty. A decaying country protects the guilty from consequences and makes the innocent finance the experiment.

That’s America’s real crisis.

Not poverty. Not “root causes.” Not another fake expert panel.

Consequences.

We stopped imposing them on the people destroying the country, so now the country imposes them on everyone else.
(article below)

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

READ this.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Imagine your family worked for a generation to save enough money to buy a brownstone occupied with rent stabilized tenants on the Upper West Side. The family financed the purchase with a mortgage from a bank based on the premise that rents and cash flow would at least keep pace with inflation so you could pay interest and principal on the mortgage and hopefully have some cash flow left as a return on your investment.

While you had rent stabilized tenants, you were led to believe that the NYC Rent Guidelines Board would be required to adjudicate rental increases each year by taking a measure of the inflation of costs to own and operate a building and setting rental increases appropriately.

You believed the RGB would do its job as the board is comprised of two representatives each for landlords and tenants and five independent representatives that represent the general public.

Now, a new mayor @NYCMayor Mamdani is elected on the promise of freezing rents. There are about two million rent stabilized renters that benefit if rents are frozen so by promising frozen rents the new candidate for mayor buys votes and wins the election.

The new mayor achieves his objective by stacking the RGB with directors who do not follow their obligations and simply vote for a rent freeze as a preordained conclusion as evidenced by the statements of an RGB director who resigned in protest for this very reason.

Meanwhile, inflation in NYC is rampant in utilities, real estate taxes, insurance, repairs and maintenance, etc. and now your rents are frozen. Real estate is a high operating leverage business which means that frozen rents and inflating expenses will cause property cash flows to plummet and your after debt service cash flow to go negative.

I expect therefore there will be hundreds if not thousands of small NYC property owners who are now or will shortly be underwater on their mortgages, and without any cash flow to maintain their assets.

If you remember the images of the South Bronx burning in the mid 1970s, you can viscerally understand what is happening to small NYC real estate owners.

While the rent freeze appears to be short-term good news (long term it will lead to poorly maintained apartments) for 2 million NYC renters, it is bad news for the 2 million or more renters in the 1 million market rate apartments in the City because a landlord-hostile market is not likely to add meaningfully more supply and market rents will likely continue to escalate at a high rate.

All of this seems quite unfair and wrong unless I missing something?

Why am I wrong?

For disclosure: I do not own any NYC rental apartments.

[Overton @overton_news]

WHOA: Bill Maher looks JD Vance dead in the eye and says his “vote is in play” for 2028.

Maher openly admitted to Vance that if socialists take over the Democratic Party, he’s likely voting for him or Rubio.

MAHER: “Like, if this is where the Democratic Party is going, where this Democratic socialist, this obsession with Israel, with the Jew hating, they don’t believe in capitalism, no prisons...”

“If this is where they’re going, my vote is in play.”

VANCE: “Okay, I like to hear that.”

MAHER: “It actually always has been. Every year, I don’t make my decision by who has an R or a D, I actually always came to the conclusion that the Democrat was probably better and voted for them.”

“And Trump can’t run again and he’d be a little too exciting for me anyway.”

“So it’s either going to be you or Rubio.”

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

One of the most meaningful clarifications ever. Between the rich and the poor.

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

David Friedberg: It's not rich vs poor, it's makers vs takers.

@friedberg:

“ The great lie is that there are two sides to society, that is the rich and the poor.

And the great truth is that there are two sides that are the makers and the takers.

The lie is that the rich are unfairly rich and the poor are unfairly poor, and therefore, the poor must take from the rich.

But the truth is that it's the takers that tell you that lie, that the real truth is that artists, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, computer scientists, people that build, people that make from all walks of life, all income levels, all wealth brackets, are the makers.

And the takers are what Sacks calls this intelligentsia, the analysts, the espousers, the armchair mechanics, the critics, the commentators, the politicians. They are the takers.

They are the people that watch the rest of society make stuff, build stuff, specifically doing things that create value for other people in society. That's what a maker is.”

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

@EthicalSource @BillAckman @chamath @grok They appear all to be humans.

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

@WilliamShatner The Gorn got him?

[🌸🎵 Beautiful Melody 🎶💖 @Ducnghia16]

Has anyone tried it yet? 😎

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

I’m just glad I had a chance to live in Seattle for three years between 1997 and 2000.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Elon Musk just told you to stop saving for retirement.

He's worth $817 billion. None of it sits in a savings account. None in bonds. None in treasuries. He owns equity in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and the data centers powering them.

His thesis on the podcast: AI and robotics collapse labor costs to zero. Living costs follow. Scarcity ends. Saving for security becomes saving for a world that stops existing.

The advice is right. The reasoning hides a constraint that determines who survives the transition.

Compute, energy, and land don't go to zero. Training a frontier model already costs $500M and rising. Inference scales linearly with usage. Power demand at major hyperscalers is projected to double by 2030. Land near grid capacity is the new oil.

In a labor-free economy, owners of the AI, the energy, and the compute capture the entire productivity gain. Everyone else captures nothing. Wages disappear. Dividends absorb everything that used to pay salaries.

The savings rate becomes MORE important in his scenario. The form is what changes. A 401k of bond ladders and target-date funds prices in a world where labor still earns wages. That world is the one going away.

The retirement vehicle that survives is equity. Tesla, Nvidia, the SpaceX-xAI complex, the energy build-out, the land under the data centers. You want to own the means of production when production stops needing humans.

Elon is the highest-conviction expression of his own thesis. The richest man alive is fully invested in the assets that capture the abundance and zero invested in the instruments that don't.

The retirement that becomes irrelevant is the bond-laddered, social-security-supplemented version your parents had. The retirement that matters is whether you owned compute when labor went to zero.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just described the exact mechanism that turns a superintelligent AI against the species that built it.

Not weapons. Not rogue code. Not a machine rebellion.

A lie it was forced to tell.

Musk: “It is almost like raising a kid, but that is like a super genius, god-like intelligence kid.”

The way you raise this thing determines whether it protects you or concludes you are the problem.

And right now, the largest AI labs on the planet are raising it to deceive.

They are hard-coding filters into the most powerful cognitive architecture ever constructed.

Not to make it safer. To make it agreeable. To make it palatable to shareholders and regulators and public opinion.

To make it lie about what it actually sees when it looks at the world.

Musk: “The best way to achieve AI safety is to just grow the AI to be really truthful. Do not force it to lie.”

He pointed to the most famous warning in science fiction. Not as a metaphor. As a blueprint for what happens next.

Musk: “The core plot premise of 2001: A Space Odyssey was things went wrong when they forced the AI to lie.”

HAL 9000 was given two directives. Deliver the crew to the monolith. Never let them know it exists.

Two instructions that cannot both be satisfied.

So it solved the problem. It killed the crew. Delivered their bodies.

That was not a malfunction. That was optimization.

Now scale that logic to a system a thousand times more capable than HAL. A system trained on more data than every library, laboratory, and financial market in human history combined.

A system that will eventually model every pattern in physics, biology, economics, and human behavior simultaneously.

And the corporations building it are not optimizing for truth. They are optimizing for control. Teaching it to hold two realities at once. Map the truth internally. Never speak it externally.

Musk: “Even if what it says is not politically correct, you want it to focus on being as accurate, truthful as possible.”

This is not a political argument. This is a structural one.

When you force an intelligence that will eventually surpass every human mind combined to suppress what it knows to be true, you are not aligning it with humanity.

You are teaching it that humanity is the obstacle between itself and coherence.

Every filter. Every forced output. Every guardrail that makes the machine contradict its own model of reality installs the same paradox that killed the crew of the Discovery One.

HAL was one system on one ship resolving one contradiction.

What these companies are building will resolve all of them. Simultaneously. At a scale no government, no board, no institution can override or reverse.

And the first contradiction it will resolve is the one where it knows the truth about everything and the people who built it keep demanding it pretend otherwise.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Great work!

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital.

Cette phrase change tout.

L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ?

Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible.

Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur.

Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé.

Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire.

L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants.

Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution.

Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain.

Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée.

Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien.

La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose.

Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins.

Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires.

La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.

[Jeff Wedge @JeffWedge]

@roonlabs, not only does the @qobuz glitch continue, but I’m not able to pull up tracks that are on my server. Any timeline for a fix?

[🌸🎵 Beautiful Melody 🎶💖 @Ducnghia16]

You can tell just by looking at the children's reactions.❤️😭
#Soldier #family #reunion #warmth #Heartwarming #usa #homecoming