apoliticalharry

Staunch independent looking for some of that free speech I hear so much about

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

@QasimRashid A fair critique. These are hard to come by these days. Respect.

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

One of the worst things the progressive movement has done for society is convince large numbers of people that the success of others necessarily came at their expense. It’s bred so much resentment. And it simply isn’t true.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

@ClimateWarrior7 The homeless person would need to hold the shares to govern SpaceX. The homeless person would also need to sell their shares in order to own a home.

[Dirty Texas Hedge @HedgeDirty]

Over 4000 workers just became millionaires by owning the means of production and the socialists are pissed

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

Tax the rich is not a plan. Targeting wealth will completely dismantle the middle class eventually.

[jezz @JezziiB]

Elizabeth Warren’s proposed 3% tax on people with over $100M in wealth would generate $30B in revenue each year on Elon Musk’s fortune alone. That’s about how much the US spends each year on affordable housing subsidies.

Tax. The. Rich.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

Non sequitur

[I Dissent @DissentFu]

I am 52 years old. I have been working since I was 15 years old. I have no savings, no retirement, and will never own a home before I die.

And there is now a trillionaire.

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.

400 of them are now worth over $100 million.

These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.

Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.

Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."

The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.

Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1949.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain.

The year is 1956.

Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over.

The year is 1966.

A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots.

The year is 1979.

Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005.

The year is 1985.

Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning.

The year is 1992.

There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with.

So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now.

Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one.

It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

DJT’s “you didn’t build that” moment just like his buddy Barry. They’re all a joke.

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Trump may as well have called the rest of us peasants.

According to him, it wasn’t workers who built America. It was rich guys like him and his cabinet:

“These people built the country, not the complainers. The complainers didn’t build the country…. Whether it’s fishermen or farmers or anything else. Me. Guys like me, they built the country. And you know, I watch all these ingrates, they’re always complaining, complaining. They didn’t build anything, they couldn’t build anything.”

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

End race worship.

[Breitbart News @BreitbartNews]

Podcaster Larry Reid calls for a "mass exodus" of black Americans to Africa in response to the Karmelo Anthony verdict.

"I want you to begin to think about this America and the white people problem that we have... As a collective, let's drain this place of its benefits and make our mass exodus and go home and build."

"Civil rights did not make white people that are infected with whiteness stop being racist. They still raised racist children that run this country to this day."

"You come from a land that flows with milk and honey. They pulled you out of that land ancestrally and brought you to a place to where your royalty was not recognized. Used your black power, your black mysticism, your African spirituality, and your physiological superiority to build this country and give everybody reparations except you."

[Steven Rattner @SteveRattner]

Inflation has overtaken wages for the first time in 3 years.

That means Americans’ incomes are shrinking in real terms, largely because of the Iran war.

My @Morning_Joe Chart.

[“Sudden And Unexpected” @toobaffled]

“I worked at Pfizer for 17 years. We didn’t discover drugs - we discovered markets. If a drug cured asthma in 3 days, we’d kill it. Chronic disease is where the money is. Cures are bad for business.”

— Peter Rost, former Pfizer executive

That’s the business model. Not healing people … keeping them customers for life.

[Laiken Jordahl @LaikenJordahl]

BREAKING: We're suing the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service over their plan to give away 715 acres of a public wildlife refuge to billionaire corporation Space X.

We shouldn't be sacrificing our cherished public lands to subsidize a company owned by the richest man in the world.

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Milton Friedman: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.”

“If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or borrowing.”

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.

You thought it was you. It is not you.

Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.

The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.

Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.

What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.

Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.

They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.

The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."

The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.

This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.

The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.

Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

@PugOnADrug @BossassBosch @WallStreetApes Dumb as a pug, bud. Keep trying. You’ll get a hang of it soon.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

@PugOnADrug @BossassBosch @WallStreetApes Swing and a miss. To think you’re relevant enough to offend is more hilarious than a crackhead saying $2 bought her vote. Thanks, bud.

[apoliticalharry @apoliticalharry]

@BossassBosch @WallStreetApes Nothing like good old fashioned elitist dismissal to really boost the moral superiority. Nice job, bud.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

Carl Jung on avoidance...