Alex Jacobson

[joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) @JoshuaSteinman]

Libertarians yearn for a high trust society but are unwilling to do what it takes to make one.

[ib @Indian_Bronson]

A hypothesis says mass immigration reversal, immigration restriction (including of students or talented workers), and tariffs on imported goods are bad because that risks nuking American/Western living standards.

Not only will it—it should.
You WANT it to do so. Why?

Consider a classically “powerful” and “wise” and “brave” person; a King. No one is more in charge than a king. A king receives tributes, information, has authority, considers, and commands. All serve him.

Kings have other people dress them and feed them and deal with their excrement.

But so do ‘weak old people’; the elderly.

And so do ‘week old people’; babies (and really young children for a while).

Absolute and total power *looks* a lot like dependence.

Americans in their history *did*—at various points in time,and in some locations, synchronously and not——did get extremely accustomed to having masses and masses of Blacks, Hispanics. and Asians doing much of their work; imported, outsourced, enslaved and free, legal and illegal, low and high skilled labor——with most of the benefits accruing to the very top strata of White American society, which has been playing increasingly self-serving financial games while becoming increasingly incapable of genuine work of any kind, backed up by the muscle of the bottom of White America to fight in global wars and maintain infrastructure (look up Smedley Butler, this is a very old pattern):

Effectively ‘all the soldiers and all the firefighters’, so to speak, have also been Whites, true, but generally *not* the Whites enjoying the benefits of anything from large plantations of slaves to extremely cheap factories in outsourced labor markets.

In fact that’s rather explicitly the way in which caste is delineated among White Americans (sorry to break it to you, but you guys have it, too) — and among Anglos generally. If you *have* to move heavy things around and swear and sweat while doing so in the course of your occupation, you are not part of the upper castes. If you are not mostly making decisions for others to implement, you are not part of the upper castes. This has nothing to do with your worth as a person, it’s an anthropological observation.

Where has this mismanagement, compounding and compounding in a near worthlessly inflated dollar led?

Americans (and Westerners writ large) now look a lot more like *dependents* on others to get dressed, more so than Kings being garbed.

Here is the thing; the choice then is;

Poor Baby, or Rich Elderly.

Are your best days AHEAD, and filled with struggle, learning, and growth?

Or are your best days BEHIND, and the future filled with comfort seeking, replaying memories, and decay?

So, yes. Bring on the extremely expensive groceries and fruit rotting in the fields. We will double our efforts to build robots to harvest them. Bring on the shuttered science departments and understaffed hospitals. We will push ourselves to study and research and engineer solutions to care for the sick and injured—our own sick and injured. Bring on the sharply cut money supply and the lack of leverage. We don’t mind every asset being marked to market. We don’t mind having to liquidate some early. Americans will have to worship at the altar of the Gods of the Copybook Headings, and not the easy lure of Mammon, but they do it or they die.

[TBPN @tbpn]

We talked with @alexjacobson (Co-Founder & Managing Partner) about the evolving private markets.

"SpaceX gives employees equity and runs tenders regularly so that equity becomes liquidity. Although the liquidity price is lower than public market value, employees know their equity will grow because SpaceX keeps expanding.

"The strategy is to give employees certainty that the equity they've been issued will be worth a lot more in the future. That is harder to do in the public markets because everything is perfectly priced. In private markets, if you run your process properly, you can have this very deterministic outcome for your employees."

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

I'll be on at 1:50p.

[TBPN @tbpn]

Morning. On today’s stream:

– How serious is Google’s Genie 3 model?
– The new 5-level framework for robotics
– Cerebras proves it can actually work
– @pmarca (a16z)
– @harleyf (Shopify)
– @antonosika (Lovable)
– @ashtom (GitHub)
– @alexjacobson (137 Ventures)
– @nicckopp (Rillet)

See you all on the show.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

These circles are not moving

nor changing size or shape

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@seehafer @patrickc Thanks. @patrickc will DM you.

[Alicia Jackson @DrAliciaJackson]

Lost his USAID funding. Looking for a place to live.

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

Hypnotizing 😍😍

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In 1951, Adelbert Ames created the mind-boggling ‘Ames Window’. It’s so effective that even when you know how it works you can’t break the illusion

[video from The Curiosity Show: https://t.co/DF82ASFj1a]

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@balajis After the Spanish Flu, we also had Prohibition and its associated organized crime.

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@balajis https://t.co/OjpJS9fuhS

[Khai @ThamKhaiMeng]

This arrow by mathematician and sculptor Kokichi Sugihara can't point left. Here's how it works: It's 3D-printed with a bunch of curves our brains don't register.

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@ElemiFuentes @Freeredcaz Ww

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

Congratulations to @balajis as new Coinbase CTO and on the sale of https://t.co/Y9TsH4EFAY! https://t.co/Hg7Pt2CaxE

[Balaji @balajis]

Got a nice announcement for you today in three parts. First, Earn is joining Coinbase! Read all about it here: https://t.co/6oIbrP1Vg7

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@benjaminwittes ok for source to share this material w/ wapost? (Also long time no see)

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@sarahtavel @benchmark Strike!

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

Verizon, Twitter and AOL now called Oath. So, close to oauth. If they also bought a u, they could provide secure identity.

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@naval Being a vassal to avoid fed taxes might be a net win for residents. Just LA-SF exit would eliminate state pension overhang too.

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

In Defense of Trump's 'Day of Patriotic Devotion' - Bloomberg View https://t.co/LrrScWubhy

[Alex Jacobson @alexjacobson]

@Balajis and Jim covered as potential health revolutionaries by Scott Aaronson one of the smartest bloggers. https://t.co/5WfVghaW9a