Andrea

Weaponized autism value investor. Interested in genomics, hard tech and entropy-reduction.
🇮🇹

[𝐃𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐫𝐲 - biofoundationalism.com @BackTheBunny]

writing about another’s writing. philosophizing about a philosopher’s philosophies. critiquing the latest critique. definitions rearranged to prove definitions. a meeting about the frequency of meetings 01001

database loops with other database to verify database 0100 discourse disapproving of the discourse. talk show host delivers brutal takedown of rival talk show host.

crypto swapped for crypto to price crypto denominated in crypto 01011110 a portfolio of derivatives hedging against derivative risk. GDP growth by adding services that help GDP. 0101

therapy about your anxiety about therapy. meditating to optimize meditation. 001101 journaling about an inability to journal. 0101011

a podcast that interviews podcasters. content about content creation. seeking engagement to manufacture more engagement.

symbols citing symbols to prove symbols. words pointing to words to prove words 011101 mind referencing mind to validate mind 110110 reasoning leveraging self-referencing reasons to demonstrate its reasonability. 00110001 mirror faces mirror to reflect mirror.

philosophy claiming reality is a construct of philosophy. poison prescribing more poison to see health benefits of poison. an algorithm optimizing another algorithm that optimizes algorithmic optimization.

0111011 mind loops within itself 010111101 symbols stacked on top of symbols 010010111 only concerned with internal coherence, no external correspondence 1010111011 cognition folds inward 11010111111 recursion without exit condition 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

[Usopp @Usoppu]

3-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
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​6-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
​7-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
​8-Fig Net Worth: Uniqlo
​9-Fig+ Net Worth: Uniqlo

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

this is a skill issue, it’s really not that hard, you really just have to listen to women and cultivate empathy. the way women feel about men is closer to the way you feel about whether you’d go into battle with a man than the way you feel about women

[Andrea @andreabrt]

New EU-US trade deal: we send you all the hyperproductive, competitive, ambitious people we have left. You send us all your easily frazzled, lazy, slow-life, degrowth-friendly types in return.

[Riki @RikiRealEstate]

A New York family with a young daughter left $2,000/month rent behind and bought a house in a small hilltop town in Abruzzo, Italy for about $13,000 cash. They spent another $17,000 on renovations and now also rent out a second property they bought for $20,000, generating roughly $1,100 per month.

They moved permanently in 2023. Daily costs dropped sharply - preschool is $70 a month, groceries around $140 a week for the whole household. The wife now works locally and says owning their home outright brought huge financial relief and a much slower pace of life.

A practical example of how some Americans are finding affordable home ownership and lower stress by moving to rural Italy.

[Nicolas Colin @Nicolas_Colin]

I don’t understand the whole “AC in Europe” debate. The controversy mostly exists to avoid a much simpler reality: you cannot roll out air conditioning across Europe at the scale and speed needed to solve immediate problems such as the current heatwave.

Several factors are at play:

• Europe did not used to experience this level of heat. Climate change has changed the picture, and relatively quickly.

• Much of Europe’s building stock is old, often centuries old. These buildings were designed to moderate temperature with features such as thick walls and natural ventilation, not to accommodate modern air conditioning systems.

• Those historic buildings are a huge asset. Their façades are part of what makes European cities attractive and economically valuable. You cannot simply cover them with external AC units without damaging that heritage.

• Even with strong political will, who would pay for a continent-wide retrofit that preserves historic architecture? The cost would run into hundreds of billions of euros.

• And even if the money were available, could manufacturers produce the equipment fast enough? Could installers be trained and hired quickly enough? Europe already faces labour shortages in many skilled trades. So where would the workforce come from? More immigration? That would simply create another round of the same xenophobic arguments that already dominate public debate.

So that’s the short version: Europe will not have universal air conditioning anytime soon. Much of its building stock was not designed for it, and the necessary resources, money, industrial capacity, supply chains, and labour simply do not exist at the required scale.

Air conditioning will spread, and in many places it already is. But it will happen gradually, starting with newer buildings where installation is easier and cheaper, and expanding as investment, production capacity, and skilled labour grow.

There may even be an upside. As modern buildings become better adapted to hotter summers, some of the premium currently attached to beautiful old buildings may diminish, making them more affordable.

In the meantime, people invent cultural controversies. Americans, in particular, seem unable to resist them. A European heatwave somehow becomes another opportunity for Europe-bashing, social media outrage, and people taking sides in a debate that ignores the practical constraints. It’s much easier to argue about why Europe doesn’t have air conditioning than to explain how you would install it across an entire continent.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🤣🤣

[wanye @xwanyex]

You just have to understand that for the people advocating for this it would be nice if it were revenue positive, but that’s not really the point or a requirement. The whole point of all of this is that wealthy people have it too good and need to be taken down a notch.

[Andrea @andreabrt]

We transitioned from "Orwell's 1984 was not an instruction manual" to "Terry Gilliam's Brazil was not an instruction manual"

[FengShuiMasterZ @FengShuiFlowZ]

In Feng Shui, the fact that 80% of autistic people are bullied or used by 'friends' is because their mental layout is often an 'open Ming Tang (Bright Hall)'—no scheming, no defenses, straightforward. This extremely pure 'Qi field' easily attracts 'Robbing Wealth Afflictions' (people who plunder under the guise of friendship) and 'Hidden Arrow Afflictions' (betrayals from behind) in complex social Feng Shui. The post's grim data reminds us: 'Water that is too clear has no fish; a layout too open invites thieves.' Autistic individuals don't need to change their inner 'pure water quality,' but they must build a 'Xuan Guan (Spiritual Screen)' at their social boundaries. This screen acts as a 'buffer and filter': making the turbid energy of 'scheming' and 'calculating' detour at the door, allowing only the 'vital Qi' (true friends) tested by time to enter the inner chamber. Remember: Your kindness is expensive; it must have Feng Shui 'edges' and 'thresholds.' Don't let just anyone march straight into your natal layout.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Teachers average among the least intelligent university graduates. Little of what they 'learn' is even relevant to what they end up doing.

In a given year, the lowest-scoring groups on the GRE, SAT, and ACT are usually those pursuing degrees in education.

[Andrea @andreabrt]

If startup survival rates improved, VC returns would rise, more capital and more founders would enter, and the marginal startup would again be lower-quality, bringing the system back to equilibrium. This is in all likelihood already the case and why these lines are flat.

[Grant Gregory @grant__gregory]

I've been thinking a lot about the @ColossusReview essay about how startup success is still the same:

I think this video with Will strikes at the reason why: few people in the world can endure the pain. We've stripped a lot of the suffering out of startup land, derisked it.

Desperation leads to creativity. Urgency leads to execution.

If you take the most hardcore founder you know, and I bet their chances of startup success are higher than their peers.

[William Meijer @williameijer]

The fertility rate of US liberal White women aged 25–35 is 0.51 children.

White liberalism is now a death cult whose value proposition is: “Amuse yourself to death.”

Optimize for harm reduction long enough, and you end up optimizing for nonexistence—the only state without pain

[Andrea @andreabrt]

If this is true, the game theory leans towards intelligence agencies expending all the zero-days they have stored as quickly as possible

[Alex Albert @alexalbert__]

We released Claude Opus 4.6 just two months ago. Today we're sharing some info on our new model, Claude Mythos Preview.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

it hasn't sunk in for most people. we already live in a post-scarcity society. UBI is already here.

basic package: disability, medicaid, food stamps etc

bonus package: literally getting paid for staying at home and hanging out with your relatives

extra bonus: if you are willing to commit fraud, pretend your kids are autistic and get paid for that. get paid for watching your neighbor's kid. pretend you are taking care of your grandma. fake hospice clinic. fake rehab clinic. fake therapy clinic.

giga bonus: during a time of crisis take advantage of PPP or CARES and open a fake business and get paid for existing

people are shocked when they learn that defense is the FIFTH largest line item in the budget. ahead of defense: social security ($1.6T), interest on debt ($1.1T) medicare ($1T), medicaid + ACA ($1T), AND THEN defense ($0.9T)

complain about defense all you like, but healthcare fraud is a way bigger factor. hundreds of billions per year.

this is only going to get worse, because the fraud is a structural part of the system – payouts to client groups in exchange for votes (normally D).

in the US, only 47% of the population actually works (fully 14% of the population is working age and does not work). retirees are 18% and children 22%.

the system I described above subsidizes 50m non-working people absolute minimum, but really it's far more because people that are paid to stay home and take care of their relatives are considered "workers"

of that 47% of "actual workers" maybe one third does real work, the rest are shuffling papers around or doing fake email jobs. so you have, rough math, 50 million actual workers supporting 300 million dependents. that's the nature of the economy today. it will only accelerate. eventually you will have 10 million using AI tools to do all the work and 340 million dependents.

the reason no one roots out the fraud is because it's the system that keeps our extremely fragile polity intact. the fraud is the UBI. the purpose of the system is what it does.

of course, it's a deeply unfair system, because you are allowed to commit fraud if you are a politically protected client group of the democrats. DOGE was killed faster than any government program ever, because it attempted to root out the fraud. if you are honest and unwilling to commit fraud, you are a huge loser in this system. your neighbor will have their mortgage subsidized by some government program. they will get favorable SBA loans due to DEI. they will open a fake hospice or autism clinic. they will get paid for taking care of their neighbor's kid and vice versa. the primary skill in the labor market is learning how to extract money from state and federal government programs, not gaining skills or making yourself employable. if you are just trying to work an ordinary wagie job you are a huge sucker. you are paying 40-50% effective all in taxes to everyone else who is a net taker.

the sad part is because AI is such a substantial productivity boost, it will actually keep this system going for a while longer, and maybe in perpetuity. AI boosts the 15% of the population that is actually productive so much that the remaining 85% can coast by. no one in charge will change this because they can't think of anything else. the political costs of a real UBI program are too great and we don't have the money for it anyway. so we will keep this covert fraud-based UBI program running indefinitely. unfortunately, if you are an honest wagie, you lose.

[Andrea @andreabrt]

This feels eerily like watching Trump in a Mrs Doubtfire costume doing a bit for SNL

[EL ÚLTIMO COLINESIO Ⓜ️ @ultimocolinesio]

Donald Trump habla igual que su madre escocesa incluso hasta los gestos

[Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen]

The total number of smart people in the world has just peaked.

And now it's about to crash.

[Andrea @andreabrt]

@KipMock @GovNuclear @POTUS Third degree burn

[Andrea @andreabrt]

@DustinWalper Hi Dustin, can you open your dms or text me?