corriejoy 🌻

just trying to survive in the lost and wayward Pacific Northwest, here for the hot takes and hopeful outlooks

[Patrick Ruffini @PatrickRuffini]

A strange party role-reversal is underway.

Dems: The most critical thing right now is slowing down the pace of technological progress.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration:

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

A couple years ago, Mikala Sposito applied for a work ethic scholarship from my foundation. She asked for $2,700.00 to help realize her dream of becoming a welder. (Actually, her first dream was to become an Olympian. As a kid, she excelled at horseback riding, dance, soccer, and track, but not quite at the Olympic level. So, Mikala adjusted her dream and focused on something within her reach. Precisely the kind of commonsense approach to making a living we try to encourage.) Toward that end, Mikala filled out the application, jumped through all the necessary hoops, and signed the S.W.E.A.T. Pledge, as all applicants must.

According to our internal ranking system, which is inherently subjective and relative to each batch of new applicants, Mikala scored a 94, and was awarded $2,100.00, or roughly 80% of what she asked for. This is typical of the average percentage awarded to an excellent applicant. As a rule, we almost never award the entire amount requested. We want our recipients to have some skin in the game, and we encourage all applicants to apply for additional scholarship funds elsewhere, which Mikala did. But in this case, if I had it to do over again, I think I’d have awarded Mikala the full $2,700.00. Why? Because this woman is precisely why I award work ethic scholarships in the first place, as recent headlines prove. Headlines all over the country that identify Mikala Sposito as the sole welder to represent Team USA in the upcoming @WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai.

This is a very big deal. The World Skills competition is often referred to as the Olympics of the skilled trades, so it looks like Mikala’s dream is coming true after all. And it seems to me her journey is worth a brief encapsulation. Before she applied for a scholarship from mikeroweWORKS, Mikala demonstrated an affinity for welding in SkillsUSA. As a senior at Dexter High School, she won 1st Place at the SkillsUSA Michigan high school competition and went on to place 14th nationally. Then, as a freshman at Washtenaw Community College, she repeated her success by taking 1st Place in the Michigan college division. She then advanced to nationals, where she finished 8th in the country. That earned her an invitation to the Team USA pre-trials, which whittled the nation's top 16 young welders down to three. At the final USA Weld Trials at the Robotics Technology Park in Huntsville, Alabama, each competitor was evaluated on precision, safety, technical execution, craftsmanship, and multi-process capabilities under extreme time constraints. Mikala Sposito took the Gold, officially becoming the first woman to represent the United States in welding at WorldSkills. Next week, she’ll face off against the absolute best of the best from all over the world.

I should point out that Mikala would prefer it if the press didn’t make a big deal of her gender, and I completely understand. (She’s a welder – not a “weld-her.”) But today, the industry is in desperate need of proof that women can and do excel in the trades. Nationally, just 4.3% of tradespeople are female. At mikeroweWORKS, our female applicants are closer to 20%, but I assure you that percentage could be much higher. Companies are anxious to recruit talented welders of any gender, and women need to understand and believe the opportunities are real. Mikala prove that in spades, and I want to offer her my sincere congratulations, and invite all of you to do the same. Because Mikala Sposito is exactly what our country needs a lot more of. People who understand that talent is never enough to compensate for laziness.

In her application, she wrote, “Hard work beats talent any day of the week, and nobody is going to outwork me. Period.”

She also connected with every point of the S.W.E.A.T. Pledge but said the final tenet resonated with her the most. “Some people choose to be lazy. Some people choose to sleep in. I choose to work my butt off.”
My favorite quote, however, is Mikala’s response to seasoned professionals who see her wield a torch and call her a “natural.”

“I’m not a natural,” she says. Far from it. And none of this came easy. I worked and trained 60-80 hours a week for two years to get here.”

Regardless of what happens in Shanghai, the job offers are already piling up, including the most recent from SpaceX. She hasn’t graduated yet, but the future looks bright, and I for one would not bet against her.

PS. I never do this, but since my name is in the title of the foundation, I suppose I can. Mikala – please accept the additional $600 you requested from mikeroweWORKS two years ago. Shanghai is expensive, and since you’re representing all of us, we’d like to provide you with a little walking around money. The check is in the mail.

Now…go get the gold!

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Everyone is too damn soft.

[David Ondrej @DavidOndrej1]

the chance AI will kill us all is close to 0%

the chance that Anthropic or OpenAI want to have ultimate control over humanity is close to 100%

few understand this.

[Jordan Schachtel @JordanSchachtel]

The unhinged narcissist doomer posting by employees at Anthropic is getting way out of hand.

We are dealing with a doomsday cult.

They want to control every lever of our society and they're trying to blackmail their way into obtaining unchecked power.

Ofc they rationalize this by claiming they are enlightened EAs who need to rule over us for our own good.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

I have a recommendation to help bring some sanity to this whole AI doomerism situation that is appropriately exploding today.

If any reporter can get one of the "true believers" to sit for a real interview (if they can't, that is an important tell), they should use a technique known as the "Five Whys" https://t.co/RqKrn4TNLa.

The "five" number is arbitrary, but the point is to drill down into the details and steps required to get to the catastrophic end-point.

You can't take down all of humanity without a few intermediate steps. Let's talk through each of those. It's quite a useful exercise.

It would help us all think more clearly, and possibly the doomerists as well.

[Parker Thayer @ParkerThayer]

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.

2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.

According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.

The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.

Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.

What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?

3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.

It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.

4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?

[Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter]

Right now, conservative opposition to @JDVance is scattered and weak, mostly because a lot of us feel much of the hits on him are unfair and oversold.

But if he starts pushing this socialist crap, he’s going to lose conservatives and there’s going to be an opening against him in 2028. I don’t know if the claim he is supporting this is true - I don’t believe anything anybody says until I hear it from them themselves – but it better not be true if he wants to continue to be a shoe-in.

Government shouldn’t be making us pay for other people‘s kids. That’s basic stuff.

[Alexandra Voetberg @Realalexclark]

@bennyjohnson This is socialism. Cut taxes instead.

[Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen]

Before Christianity, much of the world practiced child sacrifice

Now, many atheists will argue that child murder is obviously wrong, even without Christianity

However, as the western world has strayed from Christ, it's clear that child sacrifice is once again being normalized

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

They say we don't teach about socialism in schools. Yes we do: group projects. Where you do ALL the work because your 3 lazy teammates do nothing, but you have integrity and don't wanna fail, but they end up getting the same grade as you for nothing. That's socialism. It sucks.

[Selene Mariposa @Selene_Mariposa]

America turns 250 today.

Let me read back the resume.

We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing.

By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre.

We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country.

We strung a railroad across the entire thing.

We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat.

Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable.

You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai.

Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out.

We split the atom.

We put men on the moon in 1969.

Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not.

We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it.

We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth.

We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up.

We flew a helicopter on Mars.

We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising.

We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza.

Priorities.

We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them.

Baseball, basketball, and football.

Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections.

The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway.

And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it.

Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games.

If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again.

We would win it so often they would just rename it the America’s Cup and hand us the keys.

You are welcome for the suspense.

And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people.

Not every chapter was clean.

We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building.

That is the whole trick.

Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map.

Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king.

Happy birthday, America.

🦋

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

Compare Calvin Coolidge on America’s 150th anniversary:

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Every beheading on Western soil is a provocative act of raw subjugation and thus, a declaration of war.

To sever a head is a kind of psychological conquest, a deliberate humiliation designed to break the spirit of the host population, broadcast supremacy, and signal that the old rules no longer apply.

The left-leaning politicians and journalists say “don’t be divisive.” But what’s divisive is the blade that divided a head from a body, turning a human being into a trophy, a warning, and a desecrated symbol of a defeated civilization.

This is siege warfare by other means.

“We are here. We own this ground now. Submit or bleed.”

Beheadings declare total enmity and total dominance. They reject you and your way of life, your decency and your proud history, and replace them with medieval spectacle and religious terror.

After Lee Rigby (and Samuel Paty), the hammer should have fallen in the form of mass deportations, borders enforced, and zero tolerance for crime and third world behaviors.

Instead, Tories and Labour chose surrender. They opened the gates even wider, gaslit their own people, and let the siege deepen.

Enough.

[Chris Loesch 𝕏 @ChrisLoesch]

DeSantis is a gift to Republicans. He structured a plan that used every lever of power that was workable to make Florida more free and more conservative than any other state - then he had the balls to see it through.
I wish he could coach every other Republican governor.

[Sanjay S. Dhall @ssdhall]

Finally , a Washington politician gets it.
Hospitals and their C suites are fleecing America under the guise of healthcare

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

The Reflecting Pool is white granite. Keeping it from leaking while maintaining the white granite is expensive and complicated, because water tends to seep through the stone.

The Biden administration proposed a complicated restoration that would cost $310 million. Trump just painted the granite with swimming-pool coating to keep it from leaking.

Progressives online are complaining that the blue coating looks bad, but the untreated granite quickly stains green or brown from algae, making the water look muddy.

[corriejoy 🌻 @caseycorrie]

@james_roe @TedSinclairUSA @ddiamond Untrue I literally toured the White House last Wednesday they are open for tours

[Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich]

Rage is what I feel. An American dedicated thoroughly to his country and after multiple deployments, the same terrorist enemy hunted him down here - after our government repeatedly failed by granting citizenship and letting a killer out of prison. Disgusting and unforgivable.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

Blue state conservatives are far more radical than red state conservatives b/c of what they witness/observe - the hatred toward them. Then they get into potential leadership positions and red state ‘leaders’ are flaccid. So that weak Senator in Utah won’t back Jeremy Carl.