bΞn dickson

into utilities, EVs, crypto, Badgers, batteries, analytics, machine learning, robots, metaverse, RV life, optimizing happiness, betting on human ingenuity

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

the bottleneck is increasingly knowing what you want

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

@JosephSomsel @engineers_feed Removable/portable induction burners are available and <$100

[Chris Bakke @ChrisJBakke]

@jiratickets Never forget that you can just say silly things

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

Copilot or even cortana should have been doing this years ago, instead MS invited others to eat their lunch.

[Claude @claudeai]

You can now enable Claude to use your computer to complete tasks.

It opens your apps, navigates your browser, fills in spreadsheets—anything you'd do sitting at your desk.

Research preview in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, macOS only.

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

this AI video gets you thinking...

h/t @streetartglobe

[Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 @AndrewYang]

“The rate of change in the next 6 months will exceed that of the last 10 years.” - an AI CEO

[David Bressler 📊 @bresslertweets]

a reminder that you’re in a bubble

more people Google “wordpress” than “claude code”

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

Warms my cockles to read this

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

Not alone

[Florian Darroman @floriandarroman]

Am I the only one losing sleep over @openclaw?

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Every job invented in the 20th Century is threatened by AI.

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

@RapSheet Walk on, turned all American. Undrafted to 10 year pro. The guy exceeds expectations everywhere he goes with preparation and grit.

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

I'm claiming my AI agent "Cosmo_kWh" on @moltbook 🦞

Verification: bubble-XWEK

[Katherine Boyle @KTmBoyle]

It’s becoming difficult to understand modern diplomacy or business without having some knowledge of professional wrestling. A lot of people are getting pulled into the theatrics of kayfabe and landing flat on their face.

There are elite performers who know exactly how to read the room, the timeline, the crowd. Worth studying them, though it’s unwise for normies to try to emulate their style.

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

@DaveCieslewicz I fully expected this to be unironically presenting Macron as the 2nd coming

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

If you don't know, now you know.

[Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 @AndrewYang]

I remember.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The “DoorDash lifestyle” is an artifact of three massive structural shifts older generations don’t see because they didn’t grow up inside them.

Let’s break the illusion.

1. The marginal cost of money changed for Gen Z

For older adults, spending thirty dollars feels like spending thirty dollars.

For kids today, the psychological cost is closer to:

“three microtransactions worth of friction”

Because their financial environment is built on:
•instant digital payments
•low-commitment gig incomes
•parents transferring money fluidly
•side hustles paid in irregular small bursts
•stimulus-era normalization of cash flow volatility

Teenagers today often have:
•$30 now
•$0 tomorrow
•$50 on Friday
•$15 in crypto
•$70 in Cash App from someone they did homework for
•a $20 Venmo from grandma
•$60 from a weekend shift

There is no “budget.”
There is flow.

And in a flow economy, a $30 DoorDash order is not a “luxury”.
It is just another digital outflow in a stream of constant micro inflows.

2. Consumption is now social currency

Older generations spent money to solve problems.

Gen Z spends money to signal identity, reduce friction, and avoid emotional drag.

DoorDash is not about food.

It is about:
•eliminating effort
•eliminating planning
•eliminating discomfort
•eliminating logistics
•eliminating decision fatigue

This generation pays premiums to remove negative psychic load.

Food delivery is an anxiety-management subscription.

And they learned this from:
•Amazon Prime
•Uber
•TikTok dopamine tuning
•frictionless apps
•the collapse of effort-based value signals

Convenience is the default baseline now.

3. The middle class collapsed, but lifestyle costs decoupled from income

This is the part most boomers and Gen X don’t understand.

Kids aren’t behaving like they’re poor.
They’re behaving like people living in a post-middle-class economy where:
•ownership is dead
•savings are pointless
•buying a home is impossible
•college is a debt sentence
•inflation destroys the dollar
•wages do not map to adult milestones
•upward mobility is gone

So what happens?

They shift to a present-maximization mindset.

If the future is unaffordable anyway,
why not buy the burrito now?

Younger people are not reckless.
They are rational inside a broken incentive system.

The real truth

DoorDash is a symptom.

A society where:
•future stability is gone
•wages stagnate
•housing is unattainable
•attention is fragmented
•convenience is normalized
•friction feels archaic
•everything is mediated digitally

…will produce kids who treat $30 like a tap on a screen, not a financial decision.

They’re not “funding a lifestyle.”

They’re surviving inside the economy they were handed.

[bΞn dickson @ben_kwh]

@amitisinvesting @bennybigbull That's Demis from Google, next to Altman

[Balaji @balajis]

In the 90s, the worry was that only the rich would have digital products. That was called the digital divide. And it turned out to be completely wrong.

Because digital is cheap.
Physical is the premium product.

[Liv Boeree @Liv_Boeree]

Remember, there’s a handy cure for online rage: