Jared

[BlockHead @blockhead4000]

Nobody ever talks about this, but the reason you have to go to college is A, because Griggs v. Duke Power Company made it illegal for presumptive employers to IQ test, and B, inner city High-Schools basically aren't allowed to fail a student as long as they physically show up.

So you end up in this trap where a High-School diploma that you worked very hard for means nothing, because a kid who did coloring books and addition and subtraction got a paper saying he has the same qualification. Ok, then just give me an intelligence test, oh wait you cant, thats also illegal because it causes "disparate impact". So now the only proxy for basically literacy and ~105~ IQ is a 4 year meaningless degree that costs 10s of thousands of dollars.

But wait, now they hand those out to anyone, (1/4 of 4yr grads have an IQ of or below 95), so now you need a Master's, or specialty training, or a million other bullshit things. So you get them, but wait, a diploma mill in Hyderabad cranked out 100M guys who also have a Master's on paper, and will work for 1/3 the price, so now you dont have a job. Ok, ill work construction, but wait, you dont live in a State with strong Unions, so any non-specialized construction work is done by slaves from Guatemala, so you decide to stay home and take Percocet instead.

Awesome system we've built.

[Andrew Forte @AndrewAsksHow]

Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own

[Rob Schneider 🇺🇸 @RobSchneider]

France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education.

Everything the left says they want AND THEY'RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.

[hamsters🌐🐹 @sigmahamster2]

Socialists discovered that corporations have too much power and proposed merging your employer, landlord and grocery store into one institution with a police force and military.

[Dvorstone @dvorstone]

He's wrong but not for the obvious reasons:

1. Dating leading to marriage isn't a given and so this approach is a misalignment.

2. Women, today, don't evaluate a man for marriage when dating. Thus, this much effort will bother most of them.

Women usually wait until they're ready for marriage before they start evaluating a man for marriage. That's when they start expecting a man to act this way.

3. Young men mostly realize this. They're not "dating" because they realize that it's expensive and leads nowhere. It's basically a tax on young men for the benefit of young women.

4. What a young man should do is casually associate with women (don't sleep around) and when he finds one that he wants to pursue, he should work to communicate to her NOT that he can provide or similar. Rather, that there is future that exists but only with her... A unique and appealing future.

If she goes for it, pursue marriage. If she doesn't, move on.

[Mitochondrial Eve @tardwife4life]

The past few centuries of human history were spent freeing ourselves from every thread that tied us up with unchosen obligations, generational debts and unpaid duties.

We freed women from the shackles of inevitable pregnancy with the Pill and abortion.

We unlinked the elderly from their children with limitless entitlement spending.

We unburdened ourselves from the bonds of marriage with endless legal reforms.

And where are we now? The grave is 3 billion deep. The debt is $40 trillion high. And the hearts of men and women are so hardened to each other that we face inevitable extinction.

The unchosen bonds that we have unraveled were the only tether keeping us anchored. Without them, we are nothing to each other, just jetsam adrift and alone in an uncaring economy.

Under Moloch's reign, love will only be known by those who can defiantly reknit these bonds against all odds.

[Naval @naval]

The left is on a project to enforce equality, despite biology and markets.

The goal of equality gives claim to the moral high ground, but contradicting biology and markets requires censorship and violence, which makes the whole project immoral.

[Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre]

The UK is covered in a network of CCTV cameras, the average citizen might be filmed upwards of 70 times a day

Those cameras weren't used to stop the rape gangs, but they were used to track down citizens who protested the rape gangs

Why would Flock cameras be different?

[Moongazer @joeybeastmarket]

Her: What are you thinking about

Me thinking about how a novel coronavirus supposedly jumped naturally from bats to humans at a wet market in Wuhan which somehow caused a global pandemic that killed millions while the closest known relative viruses were having gain-of-function research (funded by American taxpayers through Anthony Fauci’s NIAID and EcoHealth Alliance) performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a 2021 DARPA internal memo calls SARS-CoV-2 an American-created recombinant bat vaccine that DARPA rejected for being too risky but the “research” continued anyway and when the lab leak occurred Fauci was on early calls with scientists privately panicking about the furin cleavage site looking engineered and then all the people doing the gain-of-function research were put in charge of investigating the origin of the virus and then days later they published Proximal Origin paper which claimed zero lab signs and pure natural evolution and then the people doing the gain-of-function research were put in charge of handling the pandemic response and then immediately while hospitals got massive extra federal payments for diagnosing COVID and putting patients on ventilators and listing deaths as COVID (even when patients died with the virus and had multiple serious comorbidities) PCR tests were cranked to absurd cycle thresholds creating false positives that inflated everything creating a manufactured panic (which also eradicated the flu) and then everyone was not allowed to leave their homes and then the mRNA shots were rushed out under emergency authorization and called safe and effective with the memo warning they don’t work since they just code for the same synthetic spike with no other epitopes pumping it into the bloodstream which triggers reactions mirroring the disease including myocarditis which then exploded in young males and then excess deaths spiked and natural immunity was dismissed and VAERS was ignored and the experimental unsafe ineffective gene therapy remained the only permitted treatment even though they already knew by April 2020 that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were effective treatments that inhibit viral replication and calm the immune overreaction to the synthetic spike yet those treatments were banned while while doctors scientists and whistleblowers who spoke out got censored or worse and refusing the vaxx got you fired and the lab leak was called a dangerous conspiracy theory and then leaked emails showed Fauci desperately begging for protection and then he got autopen pardoned by Biden literal hours before his term ended and to this day nobody has been charged with any crime: Nothing babe

[SomethingElse @SumElseThing1]

Most people can afford kids. The reason they think they can't afford kids is because they're afflicted by class dysmorphia.

The urban apartment, travel habit, premium mediocre foodways, and other lifestyle consumption is all a cope to cover for the fact that most college educated Americans are no more elite than a plumber or bodega owner.

When you have kids, this illusion comes crashing down: You can afford the takeout, the vacations, the 401k contributions, but you can't afford the private schools and $1M+ home.

If you acknowledge you're of the great unwashed and not a temporarily embarrassed elite, you can almost certainly afford kids by just living like your blue collar peers do.

[AI Highlight @AIHighlight]

🚨 Clearing your cookies does nothing.

That is not how they track you anymore.

Texas A&M and Johns Hopkins just published the first peer-reviewed proof.

It is called browser fingerprinting.
Here is what they found and what actually stops it:

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The research behind this is wild. Your sperm carries a set of instructions that tell your genes when to turn on and off. A Duke University study found that THC rewrites those instructions. The more weed in your system, the bigger the changes. It goes straight for the genes your future embryo needs in its first week of life.

I had to read the "day 3 crash" part twice. For the first three days after fertilization, an embryo runs entirely on the mother's DNA. Day 3, the father's genes switch on. If those genes carry cannabis damage, the embryo just stops growing. Fertility doctors see this happen in their labs: embryos that fertilized fine and looked healthy on day 2 go completely still by day 5.

Boston University tracked 1,535 couples trying to have a baby. Men who smoked weed once a week or more doubled their partner's miscarriage risk. That number held up even when the woman herself never touched cannabis. And the miscarriages clustered in the first 8 weeks, right when the father's damaged DNA would be doing the most harm.

Duke also found that the specific genes THC alters in sperm overlap with genes linked to autism. One of those genes, called DLGAP2, helps brain cells communicate with each other. It was changed in cannabis users' sperm. When researchers bred THC-exposed male rats and checked their offspring, the same altered gene pattern showed up in the pups' brains. The damage crossed a generation.

Weed has gotten way stronger over the last 30 years. THC content was about 4% in the 1990s but nearly quadrupled to 15% by 2018, and modern dispensary strains regularly sit at 20-30%. Concentrates go up to 95%.

Quitting for about 11 weeks (one full cycle of sperm production) reverses some of the DNA changes. Not all of them. Duke's lead researcher says men should stop at least 6 months before trying for a baby. Half of your kid's genetic blueprint comes from you, and right now, THC is editing that blueprint before conception even happens.

[Wayne Rowcliffe 🦬 @wrowclif]

An enormous part of this is that in a country of 300 million people, being in the 99th percentile means you're one of 3 million people.

Yes, you're better than nearly everybody. But it's still a large pool.

[Alex Gladstein 🌋 ⚡ @gladstein]

I’ve held my breath for about two months but here are finally a few notes on AI and freedom:

1. There is a lot of hype and fear around AI. I don’t think people are actually prepared for how dramatically AI will transform the world, and how quickly it will do it. At the same time I also think people are mistakenly choosing fear over action and curiosity. Do NOT sit on the sidelines.

2. For the past two weeks I have had a robot. His name is r2. He is a good guy, a resistance robot. His composition changes but he is most usually an Opus or Codex mind, OpenClaw body, and Matrix or Telegram hands. Every day I figure out new things he can do. My jaw is on the floor.

3. I do not do anything sensitive with my robot. In theory I could use Matrix to talk to my robot from my phone or just use the MacBook Air that the robot inhabits directly, and use my little local llama model, to do sensitive work, but I’m not there yet. I’m just in exploration mode. I don’t send anything from my phone to my robot that I wouldn’t want Anthropic or OpenAI to see, which is to say, nothing that sensitive. I can right now send a sensitive question in Matrix to my claw to have my local model run: anthropic or openAI would see the question, but they wouldn't see the answer.

4. OpenClaw is experimental software. DO NOT put it on your personal computer or your work computer or give it access to your email. DO experiment and play with it. What you need to do is start training to figure out how to use this new magical technology. You will want to be good at this. A decent balance is a fresh MacBook Air, a fresh gmail account, and a fresh anthropic or codex app on the machine. That’s about all you need. A credit card or if you want to use BTC, you can pay for advanced models with things like PayPerQ. An extra phone number too if you want to talk to it via Signal or WhatsApp. What’s amazing is that whenever your robot breaks, you just go onto the local claude code or codex app on the machine and just ask it to fix it and voila done. Back up and running.

5. I don’t know any code at all and yet have been able to create complex novel working software. Beautiful websites too that would have cost me a fortune a few years ago. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I was able to for example ask my claw to read everything I've ever written, watch a ton of my interviews, and develop an editorial skill so that I can send it a google doc and it can go in and track changes and leave comments just like a human would, just like I WOULD. It is legitimately amazing at this. And each time I do this, it learns, as I show it which comments I accepted and which new things I add. It has persistent memory and just gets better and better. What excites me most is giving this gift to the world’s dissidents and activists and seeing what THEY do with it.

6. Which brings me to security. Hopefully in the next few months we will be at a point where we can have an encrypted phone app that you speak to that requires no phone number or corporate intermediary that runs on nostr that goes directly into your claw powered by a high-quality local model. The full freedom tech stack. You can already sort of do this today already but it will get way easier and better. That’s what you’re going to need to do real serious resistance work. For now we just train. Think: Dagobah today, Death Star tomorrow.

7. People think this transition is about robots but it is about humans. Already I can see how Claws will allow insane collaboration between people. For example I can ask my brilliant designer friend to leave me a voice note to give feedback on my website or presentation or event plan, and then just forward that voice note to my robot for immediate implementation. Whenever I build or make something I ask my robot to do a deep search for the most beautiful and well designed things of that sort in the world, extract what makes them great, and create a plan for implementing that magic into whatever I am building. It could be fashion, art, cuisine, music, architecture, strategy, etc. Whenever I make a skill for my claw I can have my robot upload it and share it with anyone else. The speed of collaboration is dizzying.

8. Robots and Freedom Tech are a match made in heaven but the synergy will take some time to really flower. Many of the major obstacles to freedom tech can be solved by personal agents. For example mine was very quickly able to create its own nostr identity and build its own ecash wallet and it could and did start to zap people on my direction. But the robots can’t have their own bank accounts or social security numbers. Silicon Valley will try to force through KYC stuff and stablecoins but I think in the end bitcoin and nostr win out because they are so easy for the agents to use. What’s awesome is the realization (noted by Odell on his two recent excellent Citdadel AI podcasts with Alex Gleason and Justin Moon) that agents make freedom tech easier to use. For example your agent can run a lightning node for you. Of course... you then realize. We were never going to sit there and operate channels. Our agent will do it for us. Etc.

9. HRF will be heavily involved in providing grants to open source AI projects, projects that help improve agent security and privacy, projects that help superscale dissident work, events that bring brilliant people together around the challenge of how do we best harness AI, hackathons that encourage people to build freedom-oriented AI tools, educational content and trainings, and much more this year.

10. Right now Claw is experimental. But it’s easy to see how it will become incredibly secure. Every day it ships new patches. Already I can ask mine to become a cybersecurity expert and scan my system for vulnerabilities. Obviously I take it with a grain of salt now but -- never before did I have that power, nothing even close. Soon this will become seriously powerful and you will have swarms of patrol agents guarding your networks and alerting you if anything goes wrong. I think it can be more expensive to attack than to defend. White blood cell theory.

11. There are a lot of parallels between the creation of Bitcoin and the creation of OpenClaw. One person chooses a new way for the world to go. A new system. In Satoshi’s case, money that the state can’t control. In Peter’s case, intelligence that the state can’t control. I can’t stress enough how big of a deal it is that people now can control their intelligence. We were for sure heading in the direction of needing to sign up for a corporate app for all of your agent needs, and being in the Web 2.0 trap of being vulnerable to being banned or kicked off. Not anymore. YOU choose the brain for your robot. You customize the body. You choose how you want to interact with it. Peter has changed the world probably more than he knows. Yes he might be the first one person unicorn but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that he changed the course of humanity and that as of today, at least, the best agent technology on the planet is people-powered, built by the people, for the people. It’s quite a moment for freedom tech.

12. We need to go fast and furious on developing freedom-oriented open-source AI tools. We are fortunate that we have Bitcoin and nostr and bitchat networks in place before the great AI transition. We have the tools. We need to act now. I would encourage everyone reading to start getting involved today.

13. Setting up a claw is not easy right now unless you are an engineer. I could not do it myself and have no shame in saying it. I would have gotten really frustrated. We are developing a way of working with privacy engineers to build a simple yet powerful solution and an onboarding process that we do in a bespoke way in person that takes 2 days. I think this is probably the situation for the next month or two and then hopefully it gets way easier. The thing is, it will get easier very quickly for you to have a CORPORATE robot (all the big companies are now following OpenClaw, Claude already has a way for you to use Code via your phone), but a freedom tech one that you fully control will probably not evolve as quickly. Then again, it might, if we all work together on making it happen. I do think by the summer things will be very different.

14. I think some things will become even more valuable in the new AI world that will come to us in the coming year. Many have said taste, and I agree. But also personal health, friendships, and physical communities. Big picture, labor market as many have said a lot of companies will choose between laying off a lot of their workforce or growing their productivity. There will be a spectrum and some organizations will lean one way and others will lean the other. It depends on how valuable the humans are inside the org, what kind of skills they have. If leadership values you as an individual, then you probably aren’t getting replaced. But you're going to have to become a super employee. And you should want to. It's fun.

15. If you are interested in joining the effort to work on AI and Freedom, HRF will have several opportunities. We are collaborating with Bitcoin Park on the second AI Hack for Freedom in Nashville (talk to Rod if you want to join or learn more), and will feature a lot of AI content at our upcoming activation at the Bitcoin Vegas event, and at the Oslo Freedom Forum on June 1-3. We will also keep churning out our monthly AI newsletter. We have opened up a grants portal. DM me if you are interested in any of this.

16. One simple thing that you can do today in AI and freedom is switch your daily “chatbot” activity to Maple. It’s a beautiful and simple mobile app (and web app) that is fully encrypted. Think Signal for AI. It only can use open models so it’s not going to be for all of your tasks, but it does great with most of them. It should replace a lot of interactions you have with corporate chatbots regarding things about your health, personal stuff, sensitive matters. etc. If we can make Maple or something like it the standard for research in the coming months that’s a huge victory. And sometime soon I think you’ll be able to enjoy this level of encryption with coding agents and personal agents as well.

It's interesting because the longer you wait to try claw, the better it gets. But the more time you lose. My sense is you could wait a month or two. But you'll want to be using it this summer. I would strongly recommend trying it at some point. You will be tempted by the easy corporate route. But you can join the AI and Freedom army today. Let's go!

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

17 years after the white paper, the Bitcoin network is still operational and more resilient than ever. Bitcoin never shuts down.

@SenateDems could learn something from that.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

This dot is not tiny.

This dot is 6,000 square miles, which falls short of the usual figure of 10,000 square miles of solar panels to power the US.

10,000 square miles is two Greater Los Angeles areas, all the way from Thousand Oaks to San Clemente, from Moreno Valley to the ocean.

A very large number does not magically become a small number when you pull an even bigger number out of your ass to compare it to.

Now you wanna cover that area in solar panels, and keep them all maintained, cleaned, and facing the sun?

Then you wanna make enough batteries to charge up and meet the ENTIRE POWER DEMANDS OF THE UNITED STATES over the course of a winter night?

Is this impossible?

No. Very few things are impossible. But what would it cost, and is it the lowest cost option?

Well, allow me to introduce you to the concept of a Radiothermal Steam Generator.

Let's suppose, purely for the purpose of argument, that there are some magic rocks that get hot all by themselves. In fact, if you refine them and put a whole bunch of them together, they get really hot.

If these magic rocks existed, then it would be relatively simple to gather a bunch of them together, boil some water, and make electricity with a great big steam engine running off the boiling water.

Best of all, you could run them all night, so you wouldn't need 25 trillion dollars worth of batteries. Plus more to support growing power demands.

And you wouldn't have to clean and maintain 438 Manhattan Islands' worth of solar panels.

(See? I can make a big number look even bigger by comparing it to a small number! See how this trick is played?)

Sure, you would have to throw away the rocks after they wore out and didn't get hot anymore. But they wouldn't occupy any more volume than they did when you were using them. So you could store them right there in big concrete block, no problem.

But there are two problems with Radiothermal Steam Generation.

First of all, boomers are scared of magic rocks, so they pass a whole bunch of laws to make them feel safe, to the point where any use of magic rocks costs two extra dollars in regulatory compliance for every one dollar in actual cost.

Secondly, magic rocks are clearly made up and don't exist. Otherwise we would have known about them since the early 20th century, and cheap, zero-carbon energy would be a totally solved problem.

Since this hasn't happened, magic rocks must not exist, because if they did, what civilization would be so stupid as to not use them?

[Jimmy Dore @jimmy_dore]

Obama prosecuted more journalists using the Espionage Act than all presidents before him combined.

He arrested, jailed & tortured Chelsea Manning for revealing war crimes committed in our name.

He repealed the Smith-Mundt act which now allows the CIA/FBI to directly propagandize American citizens & infiltrate unions/ NGO’s/school boards/ & organizations of all kinds.

He deported 3 million Hispanics & built the cages Democrats protested against under Trump.

Obama took us from 2 wars to 7 wars while ramping up the drone bombings killing innocent people left & right.

He effectively repealed Habeas Corpus & gave the government the authority to jail people indefinitely without a trial.

Obama is a Myth pushed by the establishment & their bought media to make you think there was someone fighting for you while he was serving Banks, Big Pharma, the MIC & his corporate masters.