Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️

Ex-Tesla engineer, ex-neuroscientist, ex-candidate for Mayor of San Francisco. Focused on abundance: Universal Basic Income, housing, effective government.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

California's jungle primary leads to massive vote splitting between ideologically similar candidates. We could fix this bug with one simple tweak: allow voters to choose all the candidates they approve of. See reply for a link to the fix: a three-word change to the Elections Code

[Jack @jackunheard]

Democrats in California are facing a NIGHTMARE scenario: a Republican governor.

Polling shows Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton could end up as the top two candidates. Shutting Democrats out entirely.

They are COOKED.

Is California going red?

[clay shentrup 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 @clay_shentrup]

@decunningham2 this!!

[Eric Cunningham @decunningham2]

Just saying, if approval voting was used instead of RCV we’d be done on election night. Less drama, though, if you’re into that.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@Andercot Pretty wild that you could willfully misunderstand the difference between carbon dioxide, the gas, in our atmosphere, and carbon, the element, in every organic molecule.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@SusanDReynolds 💯

[David Shuster @DavidShuster]

Iran says Strait of Hormuz won't have "tolls" but will have "fees." That's because charging a toll is illegal under international law. But fees are allowed for "services," like the service of not hitting your ship with a drone. https://t.co/6tqK4lKdbG

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@rodmanmaffet @XFreeze It's planned obsolescence. The theory is that the technology will improve at such a high rate that by the time any damage or failure occurs the chips should be replaced with the latest generation anyway.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@elonmusk @pmarca Oh yeah? Kinda like what you're doing on X?

[Rep. Jack Kimble @RepJackKimble]

I’m sorry, but sterilizing flies isn’t the answer to screwworms. We need abstinence only programs.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@wlmsears @Turbinetraveler Obviously making exceptions for families with children wouldn't make a big difference to the overall time. Besides, every airline I fly with already has families with children board first, before everyone else, anyway. Adults being split up can suck it up and be apart for 10 mins

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Boarding back to front feels efficient and it's the reason you're still standing on the jet bridge. It loads an A320 in 31 minutes. The fastest known method does it in 11.

Boarding speed is a luggage problem. A plane fills only as fast as people can lift bags into bins, and just a few can do that at once without standing in each other's swing space. Walking to your seat is a rounding error.

Load the last rows first and twenty people pack into the back of the cabin reaching for the same bins, each one blocking the person behind, while the front half sits empty. Back to front nails the variable that barely matters and wrecks the one that decides everything. That's how the tidiest looking method becomes the slowest.

The fix came from Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist who measures planets orbiting other stars. He got stuck in a jet bridge in Seattle in 2005, went home annoyed, and pointed his exoplanet optimizer at the problem. The answer: seat everyone in line exactly two rows apart. 12A, 10A, 8A, 6A. Now nobody is ever stowing a bag in front of the next person, so the maximum number of bags go up at once and the aisle never clogs. A 2011 test with real volunteers and real carry-ons confirmed it.

Even random boarding (17:59) beats back to front, by pure accident. Scatter people and they spread out, so more bags go up at once.

No airline runs Steffen for the same reason it works. It means splitting up families and boarding strangers one at a time in a fixed order, and a gate full of people won't comply. So the math sits on a shelf and we keep boarding the slowest way because it looks the most organized.

[Alex Mas @AMLabEcon]

I often get asked by parents, what does my kid need to achieve to earn a place at UC Berkeley? The answer is, I don’t know.

There used to be an implicit social contract that if a California resident excels in school and is a very high achiever, there would be a predictable path to one of the leading campuses of the University of California system. Until the early-2000s this was explicit in that between 50-75% of incoming classes had to be admitted on the basis of academic criteria alone (GPA, SATs, APs). A high school student basically knew what they had to hit to get admitted to Cal.

UCs no longer considers SAT/ACT scores, and letters of recommendation are generally not part of the application. The remaining academic record is heavily based on grades, course-taking, "school context", supplemented by personal insight questions (in the AI era!) and activities. But in an era of substantial grade inflation, transcripts have become a noisy signal. True academic achievement matters much less than it used to.

The result is, while not literally random, highly unpredictable and illegible admissions. For California families, it is no longer clear what level of achievement is enough for their kids, or even what kind of achievement the system is trying to reward.

I suspect that is not what most families in California want.

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

The White House was built to serve the American people.

Tonight it was used to promote a company the President owns stock in, sell subscriptions, promote corporate sponsors, push Trump crypto, and enrich the President and his family.

The founders warned us about kings enriching themselves from public office.

They did not fight a revolution for this.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@StephenM @ChristieArray Is this a parody account?

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

It’s funny, motocross at the White House is, like, fine with me. But here’s an example of something that is genuinely unforgivable but that a lot of people seem to have moved right past.

[Sam @DigitalSamIAm]

Can we debunk this nonsense?

Elon Musk was awarded (note: not given) cost-per-result contracts to perform a service for the US government. The total of those for SpaceX specifically is ~$22B, which includes repaid loans, state tax incentives, etc.

The deal was simple: put stuff into LEO at or below a set cost. If SpaceX does it below the set cost, SpaceX keeps the difference. If it doesn’t, the company is responsible for the overrun.

End result? SpaceX & Elon lowered the cost of getting 1 kg into LEO by 95-97% vs what NASA was paying previously.

And for the record, every other company around at the time was offered the same opportunity to bid on the contract - Musk/SpaceX just took it.

The handout narrative implies the taxpayer is the patron and SpaceX the dependent. The cost data shows the opposite: before SpaceX, NASA paid Russia’s Soyuz $80-86M per seat; SpaceX delivered at ~$55 million. SpaceX saved the US taxpayer $300M-$465M each year on that alone (the US sends 12-15 astronauts to space each year)

On the lunar lander, NASA estimated SpaceX’s fixed-price bid saved $20B-$30B vs the Boeing-preferred cost-plus approach.

So: SpaceX saved the US taxpayer more than the total value of contracts it earned on a single project, PLUS provided the US government with the requested services (put stuff in LEO) at the best possible price.

[Brett Meiselas @BMeiselas]

The new blue bottom really makes that green algae pop

[Scott Santens @scottsantens]

Trillionaires shouldn't exist while poverty exists.

Or as Paine wrote, "I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene."

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

I swear the quasi-religious opposition to anything that involves AI in any way is going to be the downfall of the Progressive movement and all the causes it cares about.

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@ClydeFarquarth @TheMarinaTimes Tell me The Marina Times isn't a bastion of journalism without telling me. How can they post that drivel about him being a transient before doing a shred of investigation into who the man is?

[Dylan Hirsch-Shell 🧢🔰🗳️ @dylanhs]

@SusanDReynolds @ClydeFarquarth @TheMarinaTimes Yeah, wtf is right. As in, why the f didn't The Marina Times do the bare minimum expected of a "news" outlet of at least a few minutes of fact-checking research into who the man actually is before posting unsubstantiated assumptions about him being a drug-addict transient?