Ronin

“All Warfare is Based on Deception"

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Socialists keep saying "the rich don't pay their fair share in taxes." Charles Payne just ran the actual numbers and ENDED their narrative in under 2 minutes.

The top 1% pay roughly 40% of federal income taxes while earning about 22% of the income.

The top 10% (the entrepreneurs and small business owners putting in 60-hour weeks) pay over 70% of the total taxes.

If we were to tax people based on how much they use services, the top earners would be paying close to ZERO.

PAYNE: "Be thankful we live in a country that's as progressive as it is because it's a pretty good balance right now."

FUN FACT: Elizabeth Warren called Elon Musk a "freeloader" in 2021 and said we have to "change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes."

Musk replied: "If you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year."

Musk paid $11,000,000,000 that year in taxes.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

Please stop pretending you can’t figure out who the bad guys are anymore or soft-pedaling the moral asymmetry between the parties.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

Requirements to date my daughter:

1. Spiral a football or swing a golf club proficiently

2. Tie a proper tie knot and take your hat off indoors

3. Change a tire, jump a battery, and back up a trailer without a YouTube tutorial

4. Have a job even if your parents are rich

5. Know how to shuffle a deck of cards

6. Pay for the first few dates with zero expectations

7. Have a passport with stamps from places that aren’t Spring Break destinations

8. Have conservative values - the quiet kind, not the debate club kind

9. Reference actual books, not just podcast soundbites

10. Have a firm handshake, confident eye contact, and shoes off at the door

11. Show up on time - i.e. five minutes early

12. Dress like you intended to leave the house/gym

13. Have mastery of at least one skill or hobby. Passion is contagious

14. Know when to put your phone away, especially when talking to me

15. Laugh at yourself, and listen more than you talk

[BowTiedBull.eth - Read Pinned or NGMI @BowTiedBull]

Yeah basically $5-15M is where majority will be fine

Hence why we said “paid off home and $3-5M liquid” and limited upside

You can do more but the quality of life change isn’t really there anymore for 99.99%

[Wiki Leaks 1.0 @WikiLeaksQ]

CLARENCE THOMAS JUST PUBLISHED THE EXACT ARGUMENT FOR WHY THE SUPREME COURT'S BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP RULING IS CONSTITUTIONALLY WRONG

Not a political objection. Not a policy disagreement. NAMED HISTORY. SPECIFIC TEXT. Amendment by amendment.

📜 14th Amendment, 1868 — "ONE pervading purpose": securing equal citizenship for FREED SLAVES after the Civil War
📜 Reconstruction Congress intent — zero evidence the drafters contemplated children of foreign temporary visitors or illegal aliens
📜 "Subject to the jurisdiction" clause — Thomas: means full political allegiance, not mere physical presence on US soil
📜 The majority opinion — Thomas says it REPURPOSED the Amendment to protect preferred rights the drafters NEVER contemplated
📜 Thomas's direct quote — those rights "CANNOT find support in the text today"
📜 His warning on the ruling — "I am not sure that today's opinion will stand the test of time"
📜 Thomas during April 2026 oral arguments — probed whether immigration debates even existed when the 14th was written
📜 His core distinction — freed slaves were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans with no other homeland; children of foreign nationals are not in the same category
📜 Roberts and Barrett — joined the liberal bloc in the 6-3 majority in Trump v. Barbara
📜 Gorsuch — joined Thomas in dissent; Alito filed a separate dissent

💀 91 pages
💀 1 purpose the 14th Amendment actually had, per Thomas
💀 ZERO rights the Reconstruction Congress contemplated for children of foreign nationals
💀 100% of Thomas's argument grounded in the specific post-Civil War historical record — not modern policy preference

Every argument on this list is anchored in the text and history of the Amendment. Not in what the Court wishes it said. In what the people who wrote it actually intended.

The Court's ruling stands. But Thomas put a 91-page marker on the record.

Thomas's dissent is still ticking. These are the arguments at the core of it.

I'll keep you updated as this unfolds, turn on notifications this is EXTREMELY important.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

I took my son and daughter to a Forrest Frank concert recently... and I have to be honest: As a pastor, this is why I believe this man is actually a PROBLEM.

[Saifedean Ammous @saifedean]

President @nayibbukele discovers The Imprisoned-Criminal Fallacy, the corollary of The Broken-Window Fallacy, on which all of Keynesian nonsense rests.

The Keynesian scammers of the fiat cartel told him that eliminating crime would reduce GDP. Yet in reality, it raised GDP.

This is because crime is destructive rather than productive. Crime doesn't create economic goods; it just takes them from those who created them and gives them to those who commit crimes. Locking up criminals does not reduce production, but for Keynesian fiat scammers, it seems to reduce spending because criminals are no longer spending while locked in prison, and the Keynesian scammers only care about spending because they do not understand the concept of production.

In the real world, spending is not actually reduced, because the productive victims of crime now get to keep their money and spend it themselves. The criminal goes to jail, and the tomato seller he extorted gets to keep his money and spend it on things he likes. Not only is spending not reduced, but production actually increases when the criminals are locked up, as President Bukele points out. Locking up criminals shifts society's incentives away from crime and toward production. It becomes much harder to earn from crime, so you have to turn into a productive human and do something useful for others.

Equivalently, Keynesian scammers think broken windows are 'good for the economy' because they lead to increased spending: when a window is broken, the window owner needs to spend money getting it fixed, and that makes the window maker richer, causing him to spend more himself, with a multiplier effect that ripples prosperity throughout society. This is hilariously stupid because without breaking the window, the window owner would spend the window repair money on another thing, and he would have the window and the other thing! And an equivalent chain of spending would ensue. But the vandal who broke the window would have to spend their time doing something productive instead of being a Keynesian vandal.

It is no wonder that Keynesian economics leads to pro-criminal conclusions; the entire ideology was invented by a despicable child-raping criminal, and it has been used to justify the two greatest crimes in human history: fiat central banking and the many wars it finances.

[Brandon Gill @realBrandonGill]

This guy is going to spend the next three months telling Michiganders that he's running to make their lives more affordable, but what he really wants to do is import a zillion more foreigners so they can build a Learing Center near you.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Contrast two kinds of men now arguing over America's future.

One looked at empty Texas scrubland and saw the largest building on Earth, then summoned $16.8 billion in capital, thousands of construction tradesmen, and 3,000 permanent minds to raise and run it. Before that he saw rockets landing upright when every expert called it fantasy, and electric cars people would line up to buy, and he materialized those too. His tools are reason, vision, and trade. Every dollar he commands was handed to him by a customer who got something better in return.

The other kind is the politician who could not pour one yard of that concrete. But he holds the one tool of his trade, the state's gun. He calls the building excess, drafts the wealth tax to seize its output, and names the seizure compassion and justice. Ask the senator demanding Musk's billions what he has ever built. His one skill is the forced transfer of what abler men have made.

When Terafab rises, understand what you are looking at. The unforced human mind, made visible at scale. The looters will still demand their cut, and the demand itself is the confession. Nobody loots an empty desert. Wealth must be created before it can be seized, and it is created by men like Musk.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Power is THE binding constraint.

Data centers are being shut down, GPUs are sold out, models are being commoditized and spot rates are rising all leads to power being critical. Not fanciful plans for power, future forecasts of BTM or distributed batteries blah blah blah but energized power today.

This means the following hierarchy is developing from greatest to least value:

1. Hyperscaler
2. Neocloud
3. Model maker

Ideally, you are 1+3 (Google, SpaceX, Meta) where you own massive power today and have a leading set of models to keep API pricing from 3rd parties honest enough to benefit them vs the model maker. But even if you are just (1), you can still extract great economics from (3) because owning the power is the leverage.

This means (2) needs to scale up fast. If Neoclouds do not scale up fast and move up the value stack towards hyperscalers (solely measured by energized compute online today) they are going to leave a lot of revenue on the table which will complicate their long term financing plans.

Also, starting now, a neocloud’s real competitors will be well capitalized frontier model companies who will do sweetheart deals with (1) and/or will vertically integrate and try to become (1). You can see this in the fact pattern (Ant+AWS, OAI+Stargate).

Get your hands on power.

It’s the spice.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

ok this might be the most aggressively american startup i’ve ever seen 🇺🇸

> they’re trying to build nuclear reactors 100x faster than the nuclear industry ever has

> the founder isaiah taylor grew up on food stamps + dropped out of high school at 16

> his great-grandfather literally worked on the manhattan project

> generations later isaiah built a working nuclear reactor before turning 28 and named it “ward” after him

> the pentagon used 3 military c-17s to airlift the reactor 700 miles from california to utah in a first-of-its-kind mission

> the company culture is hardcore americana

> they hold bible studies, offer raw milk, love fast cars + have a cigar lounge

> plus 4 gigantic patriotic paintings of columbus discovering america, the pilgrims arriving on the mayflower, the signing of the declaration + the constitutional convention

> they sued the nuclear regulatory commission for slowing them down

> valar's end goal is to build the same reactor thousands of times across nuclear “gigasites” to make energy 10x cheaper

> then they'll use that energy to pull carbon out of thin air and turn it into oil and gas for supreme energy abundance

> just raised $1b at a $6b valuation to scale it

> if valar pulls it off, isaiah’s family will have helped usher in both of america’s atomic ages

yeah this gets my vote for most badass startup of the year

[alexei @alexeixbt]

get addicted to neuroplasticity, subconscious reprogramming, delusional optimism, game theory, and quantum physics. i promise it will change your life.

[Jonathan Coon @jcoon1800]

We built a 5,000 SF Holodeck for our own use at Four Seasons Lake Austin. It's so far ahead of other VR that John Carmack (former CTO at Oculus) and Meta's CTO have flown to Austin to see it.

We have it set up in Mountain View this week. 6-min film previews the places we visit in the Holodeck: https://t.co/trbLJidbYh

If you’re thinking about moving to Austin and want to visit the Mountain View Holodeck before August 7th: [email protected]

[Prof @TheProfInvestor]

S&P 500 broke out.
And is above 21EMA.

This shit took a wild turn against bears.

If it holds above 7450- Bears are cooked.
Just saying.

$SPX $SPY

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇸🇪🇵🇱 This absolute beast Bartłomiej Kubkowski just became the first person ever to swim across the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Poland.

160 km. 56 hours. No sleep.

Human limits just got pushed a little further. Respect.

Writer: Oliver

[Solvaix @Solvaix]

$31 MILLION HOTEL. EVERY PIPE AND WIRE MAPPED IN ADVANCE. BUILT BY TYPING SENTENCES INSTEAD OF PLACING THEM BY HAND.

A 190-room hotel needed its ductwork, plumbing, electrical, and fire suppression modeled and coordinated before construction could start.

The design team connected Kimi K3 to their modeling software through MCP, then had it read photos of the blueprints alongside plain English descriptions of each system and build the model directly instead of placing every component by hand.

Old process: 3 engineers, 6 weeks, around $47,000.

New process: 1 engineer confirming the AI's output, 9 days, roughly $10,500 combined, engineer's time plus AI compute.

Coordinated models finished this way cut change orders by 60 to 80 percent once construction begins.

See the article below for a smaller example of the Kimi K3 + Blender MCP workflow.

[Joe Lonsdale @JTLonsdale]

Friends in business who “avoid politics”, instead of studying and doing their civic duty to fight as best they can for the principles of our civilization that enable their lives and work.

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[Retail Mourinho @retail_mourinho]

Stocks I would buy today with a long-term horizon (2030+):

$ASTS at $55
$NBIS at $166
$ONDS at $7.60
$KRKNF at $4
$AAOI at $84
$CRWV at $65
$RKLB at $60
$MRVL at $170

This is not financial advice, and I am not calling a bottom here.

-RM

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

And then there was one…