Ben Wright McGee

Space geophysicist, nuclear responder, hoopy frood. Digs asteroids, atomic rockets, space archaeology & jazz/blues. Explorers Club Fellow. Opinions mine.

[Ben Wright McGee @bwmcgee]

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over and through me, and where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

[Cato Institute @CatoInstitute]

Adam Smith saw it 250 years ago: protectionism doesn't serve the public, it serves the firms that lobby for it. America's tariff experience – past and present – proves him right. The fix isn’t better politicians but better rules that take trade policy off the auction block, says Cato's @scottlincicome.

https://t.co/qc5B28uMfF

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

Are the 2020s a new "Gilded Age"?

We can only wish, argues @BrianDomitrovic.

"The two greatest decades of American economic growth, if you look at the blunderbuss GDP statistics, are the 1870s and the 1880s ... 6% growth per annum.

Ours is 2% today, if we’re lucky."

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman: “I believe in free markets, but that doesn’t mean I’m a defender of big enterprises.”

“I want competition. The essence of a free market economy is that it prevents enterprises from exploiting anybody else.”

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

People ask me how I stay so optimistic. The honest answer: I read the data, not the headlines.

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."

— Ayn Rand

[F. A. Hayek Quotes @FAHayekSays]

George H. W. Bush awarding F. A. Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991

“We honor Professor Friedrich von Hayek for a lifetime of looking beyond the horizon. At a time when many saw socialism as ordained by history, he foresaw freedom’s triumph.”

“Over 40 years ago, Professor von Hayek wrote that ‘The Road to Serfdom’ was not the road to the future or to the political and economic freedom of man.”

“A Nobel laureate, he is widely credited as one of the most influential economic writers of our century.”

“Professor von Hayek is revered by the free people of Central and Eastern Europe as a true visionary, and recognized worldwide as a revolutionary in intellectual and political thought.”

“How magnificent it must be for him to witness his ideas validated before the eyes of the world. We salute him.”

[Eric Berger @SciGuySpace]

A Falcon 9 rocket exploded on a launch pad as part of a static fire test in Florida ten years ago. What can Blue Origin learn from this?

https://t.co/aglS3E2SY5

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman on why liberty must come before equality:

“A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty.”

“A society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”

“You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to take things from others.”

“What ultimately happens when you aim for equality is that A and B decide what C should do for D, except that they take a little bit of commission off on the way.”

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Can't remember if we've ever gotten this view before, but damn is it cool.

[Steven Greenstreet @MiddleOfMayhem]

@DrFrankTurek Intelligence community disinformation mixed with religious true believers inside government mixed with a whorish news media who will literally print anything for clicks.

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

Adjusted for population, climate-related deaths have fallen more than 99 percent over the last century.

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman:

“Economists don’t know much, but there’s one thing we know very, very well—and that’s how to produce shortages.”

“You want a shortage of housing in New York City? Set a maximum price on rent, and you will have a shortage of housing.”

[Future Adam Curtis B-Roll @adamcurtisbroll]

A humanoid robot tumbles while dancing to Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ and lies motionless before being dragged offstage, May 2026.

[Mises Institute @mises]

Can government policy replicate a market economy and improve the outcomes? That is the subject of the book, Moonshots and the New Industrial Policy. @MatthewsLipton takes a deep dive into these questions.

https://t.co/HhirWuUJDz

[F. A. Hayek Quotes @FAHayekSays]

“Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.”

— Friedrich Hayek

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

“The programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.”

— Milton Friedman

[Human Progress @HumanProgress]

The time price of paper has fallen by 99.78 percent over the last 200 years.
https://t.co/zvSFcSFeYq

[Everyday Astronaut @Erdayastronaut]

SpaceX is about to launch their first V3 Starship and it’s by far the biggest and most radical change to the program to date.

Here's a super quick overview of what all is new and different including the incredible new Raptor 3 engines, the new launch pad, and everything else that’s debuting on Flight 12.

00:00 - Intro
01:07 - Pad 2
03:15 - Raptor 3
04:59 - SuperHeavy V3
07:56 - Starship V3
10:52 - Flight 12 Profile

[How To Prompt @HowToPrompt__]

Apple has published a paper with a devastating title: “The Illusion of Thinking”

It argues that AI models, no matter how brilliant they may seem, do not understand what they are doing.

They do not solve problems. They do not reason. They merely generate text word by word, trying to sound coherent.

Apple tested the most advanced reasoning models in the world on controlled puzzle environments. They tore open the internal "thinking" traces.

What they found shatters the narrative that we are getting closer to AGI.

Current models don't scale with complexity. They have a hard mathematical cliff. And they do not degrade gracefully. They collapse.

But here is the most unsettling part.

When a problem gets too complex, the AI doesn't use its remaining compute to try harder.

It just gives up.

Its reasoning effort actually declines. It stops thinking and starts guessing.

Then Apple ran the experiment that closes the casket on the reasoning debate.

They gave the AI the exact, step-by-step algorithm to solve the puzzle. The cheat codes.

All the AI had to do was follow the instructions.

It couldn't do it.

Performance didn't improve at all.

When the complexity gets high enough, these models fail because they cannot actually execute a logical sequence.

They are not reasoning. They are just pattern matching.

When you give them a simple problem, they overthink. When you give them a hard problem, they collapse.

Paper: The Illusion of Thinking, Apple, 2025

[Steven Greenstreet @MiddleOfMayhem]

The US gov't has released UFO information to the public at least 17 times since 1947.

Anyone acting like the recent gov't drop of "UFO files" is something new is either ill-informed or trying to sell you something.

And there's still not one shred of evidence of aliens.