Zach

[NCAA March Madness @MarchMadnessMBB]

Michigan State has plenty of history with iconic point guards 🤩

#MarchMadness @MSU_Basketball

[Jake “JBOY” Crain @JakeCrain_]

Somebody just donated a small country’s GDP to Michigan State

[Darren Rovell @darrenrovell]

Hell of a week for the East Lansing community.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Remember this chart

[Michigan State Hoops @michsthoops]

It’s Officially March. #GoGreen

(via yousefenayah on TT)

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

RAY DALIO Lays Out How DOGE Can Save America From a Debt Spiral:

@RayDalio has a three part plan:

✅ Cut HARD
-- goal: get the annual deficit down to 3% of GDP
-- this would mean cutting the projected 2025 deficit by more than half
-- $900B+ in cuts to a ~$1.8T 2025 deficit gets us ~3%

✅ Cut FAST
-- the faster you cut, the less you have to cut

✅ Own the number
-- everyone in government should galvanize around this

Dalio on the urgency to make cuts NOW:

" Do it soon, when the economy's good."

"In other words, do it now."

"If you have a bad economy, you cannot do it."

Dalio on bond and interest rate impacts:

" The other thing about it is to realize that if you make those moves, the bond market will benefit."

@friedberg:

" If the federal government were to cut spending significantly and quickly, the market would naturally react to lower rates."

As @elonmusk mentions in the clip below, cutting spending lowers inflation, which eventually lowers interest payments and makes bonds more attractive for investors.

Friedberg on avoiding the arithmetic death spiral:

" The longer we wait, the more you have to cut in the future to get out of the hole."

"And ultimately, this is the arithmetic death spiral that you get into."

"I think that is so important for any person in government listening: the faster you cut, the less you have to cut."

[Jay Cuda @JayCuda]

michigan vs. michigan state football rivalry recent history

[Danny Kanell @dannykanell]

Harbaugh knew.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Why I’m Backing President Trump

As many press accounts have reported, I’m hosting a fundraising event for President Donald J. Trump at my home in San Francisco this evening.

Over the last couple of years, I have hosted events for presidential candidates Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as several Congressional figures in both major parties. I give to many, but endorse few.

But today I am giving my endorsement to our 45th President, Donald J. Trump, to be our 47th President. My reasons rest on four main issues that I think are vital to American prosperity, security, and stability – issues where the Biden administration has veered badly off course and where I believe President Trump can lead us back.

1. The Economy

President Biden took over an economy that was already recovering strongly from the Covid-induced shock of Q2 2020. Demand had roared back, and employment had recovered. But he chose to keep priming the pump with unnecessary Covid stimulus – almost $2 trillion of it, passed on a straight party-line vote in March of 2021, with trillions more to follow for “infrastructure,” green energy, and “inflation reduction.”

Biden did this despite early warnings from former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers that it could lead to inflation. When the inflation came, the Biden administration dismissed it as “transitory.” In fact, inflation still remains persistently high even after the fastest interest-rate tightening cycle in memory.

As a result of Biden’s inflation, average Americans have lost roughly a fifth of their purchasing power over the last few years. Moreover, any American who needs a mortgage, car loan, or credit card debt faces much higher interest costs, which further constrain their purchasing power.

It’s no different for our federal government, which now must devote over a trillion dollars annually to interest on its $34 trillion debt, a massive sum that’s been growing by a trillion dollars every hundred days. This trajectory is unsustainable, yet Biden’s 2025 budget calls for even higher spending.

Growth has already slowed from 3.4 percent in the last quarter of 2023 to an anemic 1.3 percent in the first quarter of this year. We can’t afford another four years of Bidenomics.

2. Foreign Policy / Ukraine War

President Trump left office with ISIS defeated, the Abraham Accords signed, and no new wars raging on the global stage. Three and a half years later, the world is on fire. President Biden has made several strategic choices that have contributed to this situation.

In his first year in office, Biden unnecessarily alienated the Saudis before realizing that they are an indispensable partner in the Middle East. He also presided over a chaotic withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan (right policy, abysmal execution).

But his biggest blunder by far has been in Ukraine. His administration immediately began pushing for Ukraine’s admission to NATO, despite no unanimity among the existing NATO members that such a move was a good idea. When this predictably antagonized the Russians, the Biden administration doubled down at every turn, insisting that “NATO’s door is open, and will remain open” with respect to Ukraine. Biden himself baited Russia when he said he didn’t “accept anybody’s red lines.”

After the invasion, there was still a chance to stop the war in its early weeks before much loss of life and destruction had occurred. Russian and Ukrainian negotiators had signed a draft agreement in Istanbul that would have seen Russia retreat to its pre-invasion borders in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality. But the Biden administration rejected that deal as well as General Milley’s advice to seek a diplomatic solution in November 2022.

As the war of attrition grinds on, the Ukrainians face ever-mounting casualties and infrastructure damage. Still, President Biden keeps allowing the conflict to escalate and risk World War III. Every escalation that Biden initially resisted – Abrams tanks, F-16’s, ATACMs, allowing Ukraine to hit targets in Russia – he has eventually acquiesced to. There is just one more escalation to go: NATO troops on the ground fighting Russia directly. And our European allies like Emmanuel Macron are already spoiling for exactly this scenario.

With Biden, our choices are limited to fighting the proxy war to the last Ukrainian, or fighting Russia ourselves. President Trump has said he wants the dying in Ukraine to stop, and that he will seek to end the war through a negotiated settlement. Ukraine will no longer be able to get the deal we talked them out of in April 2022, but we can still save Ukraine as an independent nation and avert world war.

3. The Border

As an immigrant to the United States myself, I certainly believe in America’s history of strengthening its ranks by welcoming talented people from other nations seeking freedom and opportunity. But that promise requires an orderly process of legal immigration that emphasizes skills and the principles of American citizenship. This was the preferred policy under President Trump.

What Biden ushered in was a de facto open border policy. On his first day in office, he repealed President Trump’s executive orders restricting illegal immigration and stopped construction of a border wall, selling off parts of it for scrap metal. This quickly resulted in a massive spike in illegal border crossings and a chaotic and dangerous situation on our southern border.

President Biden (along with the hapless Kamala Harris and the malevolent Homeland Security Chief Alejandro Mayorkas) responded to growing concerns by gaslighting the American public, saying there was no problem at the border despite constant videos of masses of people sprinting across it.

When the situation became too dire to ignore or deny, Biden claimed he didn’t have the executive authority to do anything about it and blamed Republicans for not sending him legislation. But this week, facing abysmal polling numbers on this issue, Biden suddenly discovered he has executive authority after all. The order he signed is a tepid, too little-too late effort to slow the tidal wave of illegal immigration in time for the election. But Biden has shown he is not serious on this issue. If he wins a second term, the open border policy will resume, and tens of millions more illegals will stream across the border.

4. Lawfare

A bedrock of the political stability we’ve enjoyed in America over the last 250 years is that we don’t accept attempts to jail political opponents in order to win an election. Yet Biden has pushed for selective and unprecedented prosecutions of his once and future opponent from the moment he assumed office.

Merrick Garland took a long look at the January 6 situation and didn’t see a path to prosecute Trump, even after a one-sided Congressional committee sent a highly-prejudiced referral to his Justice Department. Press stories then appeared describing Biden’s frustration with Garland’s reticence. The result was Jack Smith at the federal level and Alvin Bragg and Fani Willis at the state level. All have pursued cases based on novel legal theories heretofore unseen and designed to get Trump. In the NY case, Bragg resurrected a dead book-keeping misdemeanor into 34 felonies by claiming it was in the service of a second crime that he never defined and that the judge never insisted the jury unanimously agree on.

My immigration to this country as a young boy happened because my parents disagreed with the political system of their home country. That government sought to solve its political disagreements by imprisoning its political enemies. What a sad irony that the lawfare we escaped has now reared its ugly head in America of all places.

President Biden keeps insisting that a return of President Trump to the White House threatens democracy. But his administration is the one that has colluded with tech platforms to censor the Internet, used the intelligence community to cover up his son Hunter’s laptop, and pursued elective prosecutions against his political opponents.

Conclusion: The A/B Test

The voters have experienced four years of President Trump and four years of President Biden. In tech, we call this an A/B test. With respect to economic policy, foreign policy, border policy, and legal fairness, Trump performed better. He is the President who deserves a second term.

[Brian Beers @brianbeers]

Unrealized capital gains 101:

You bought 100 shares of Zoom stock in Jan 2020 for $75 per share

Ends year at $350 per share but you didn’t sell giving you an unrealized gain $27.5k

Under Kamala’s plan you owe $6,875 in taxes (25% of $27.5k)

But you didn’t sell so you don’t have the cash. you pay taxes out of savings

You continue to hold until August 2024. Finally sell for $60 per share

You LOST $1,500 on the stock PLUS you paid the taxes on the $27.5k of “gains” you never actually received since they evaporated

The initial tax proposal is only targeting $100M+ but that’s just the start. It opens the gates to lower the threshold whenever they choose

Before you know it every person who owns a stock is paying this tax

People stop buying stocks. Companies have less capital to invest into new products and develop technology

Economy tanks. Jobs lost

What a joyful future

[Zach @Zachfran]

Scottie, Hit the range. AirPods in 🔁

[MSU Uniforms @MSU_Uniforms]

Tiger Woods' new caddie Lance Bennett rocking the MSU yardage book cover. #GoGreen

[Zach @Zachfran]

Walker
Akins
Carr
Kohler
Booker

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Stripe founder & CEO Patrick Collison: Joining a startup is a great way to benchmark yourself

"Whether or not you're the best or worst person in the world, you're probably not going to significantly alter Google's trajectory. Whereas if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is quite compelling to a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to go test that.”

Source: @ycombinator

[Zach @Zachfran]

There’s a guy at gym with a dead serious Mohawk. one of the all time haircuts. Going to be a GREAT day

[Zach @Zachfran]

Wb @cron?

[Notion @NotionHQ]

Meet Notion Calendar.

Beautifully designed. Fully integrated with your Notion workspace.

All of your commitments, now in one place.

[Zach @Zachfran]

If it’s the acl, then it’s the acl. But we don’t root for injury

[Los Angeles Rams @RamsNFL]

WHOOOOSE HOOOUUUUSE?!

[Zach @Zachfran]

📈

[Eyewitness News @ABC7NY]

Bull on the loose on train tracks near Newark Penn Station https://t.co/Z4o5dnwhqr

[Tech Sales Guy @TechSalesGuy]

AE on our team just hit $1M in sales this year.

I asked what's working and he said "socratic questioning."

Rarely hear sales questioning framed this way in trainings and liked it: