Harrison Mack

[Zeitgeist @zeitgeist_labs]

https://t.co/xOoRoKIOPJ

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

https://t.co/puLXpatHvd

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@DavidSacks Bulldozer analogy starts to lose credence when the @BedrockRobotics of the world enter the fold!

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The real signal is that a city that produces a meaningful fraction of global financial output just elected someone running explicitly on taking property from the people who produce it.

This is not a protest vote. This is the coalition stating its actual preferences. The preferences are incoherent with the city continuing to function as a financial center. One of those two things is going to give. The city is going to stop being a financial center, or the coalition is going to be politically defeated, or Mamdani is going to govern nothing like he campaigned. The third option is the most likely because it’s the standard pattern, but the first two are live.

The actual structural situation in New York: the top 1% of filers pay roughly half the city’s income tax. The top 10% pay around 75%. The math is that a small number of high earners subsidize services for everyone else, and the subsidy is what makes the city livable for the people who aren’t high earners. When those earners leave, the subsidy leaves with them, and the services they were funding get cut or the taxes on the remaining population rise. There is no version where you tax the rich into staying. They have options. The options are better now than they were five years ago and will be better in five years than they are now. Every marginal tax increase moves the departure math.

Mamdani’s voters believe the rich will pay more and stay. This is empirically false and has been for decades. The Laffer curve is a caricature but the underlying phenomenon is real at the state and city level because the substitution cost is low. You don’t need to emigrate. You need to move to Connecticut, Florida, Texas, or Tennessee. Millions of people have done this. The pattern is documented, measured, and predictable. Pretending otherwise is the policy equivalent of pretending gravity is optional.

The deeper thing Mamdani’s election reveals: a substantial fraction of urban voters now hold a worldview in which productive activity is theft, wealth is evidence of extraction, and redistribution is the primary function of politics. This worldview has specific intellectual lineage running from certain strains of Marxism through the academic left through social media radicalization. It’s not a serious economic framework. It’s a moral framework dressed as an economic one.

The moral intuition is that inequality is itself the injustice, regardless of how the inequality arose or what it produces. A serious economic framework would ask whether the inequality produces good outcomes for the median person, would note that high-productivity cities produce enormous surplus that funds services, and would balance extraction against the ecosystem that generates the wealth to be extracted. The Mamdani framework skips all of that and goes straight to: they have it, we want it, take it.

This framework, when operationalized, destroys the thing it feeds on. Every case study confirms this. No case study contradicts it. The cases where redistribution worked, Scandinavia in the twentieth century, post-war West Germany, Singapore, involved redistributing from productive economies that were allowed to stay productive. The redistribution was moderate, rule-bound, and applied to a capital base that couldn’t easily flee because international capital mobility was constrained. None of those conditions hold in New York in 2026. Capital mobility is near-frictionless for the high end. Rule-bound redistribution is not what Mamdani campaigned on. The ideological content is much closer to expropriation than to Nordic social democracy.

The broader United States pattern is that this dynamic is concentrated in the cities that already had it, and those cities are where the productive economy is also concentrated. The country has decoupled into two economic models. One model, roughly blue-state urban, runs on high-productivity services, high taxes, high housing costs, declining quality of services relative to what’s paid for them, and increasingly extractive politics.

The other model, roughly red-state urban and suburban, runs on lower productivity but faster growth, lower taxes, lower housing costs, and more functional services. The sorting between the two is accelerating.

People and capital are moving from the first to the second at historically significant rates.

The first model is not reforming because its political coalition is locked in by the voters who benefit from the extractive politics in the short term.

The second model is not free of problems but is currently winning the migration competition by large margins.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/qNAVuG3xsz

[Ethan Choi @EthanChoi7]

https://t.co/oqm3qYOMcf

[stf @stfbutnou]

You need to understand the fact of TSMC's historically conservative culture and their skepticism toward tech firm's tendency to overpromise. When a company that treats its capital as a matter of national security decides to deploy massive capex after rigorous due diligence, betting on an 'AI bubble' essentially implies you believe your judgment supersedes the strategic foresight of TSMC's management.

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@typesfast the next bezos sits in a call center in the philippines

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

This chart is nuts. Software developer jobs down 70% from peak.

People will blame the end of free money. But something way more interesting is happening.

The middle class engineer is dying. And it's dying because they're not needed anymore.

One good dev with Github Copilot ships what entire teams did five years ago. Microsoft just reported the highest revenue per employee in history.

The "entry-level engineer" doesn't exist anymore.

Instead, we have product builders who happen to code. Armed with AI, they ship entire products in days.

Meanwhile, the truly elite engineers are making more money than ever.

And they've shifted to working mostly on frontier tech. I mean the stuff that's really hard.

AGI at OpenAI.
Designing rockets at SpaceX.
Self-driving car tech at Tesla.

Product builders are becoming solopreneurs and creators Frontier engineers are making hedge fund money

In 2025, "software engineer" doesn't mean what it meant in 2020.

And that's what this chart really shows.

The middle is gone. The top is elite status. And everyone else is becoming a builder.

[Alex Reibman 🖇️ @AlexReibman]

It’s already happening

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@TheLongInvest Most of these growth stocks selectively operate at a near zero profit - much of the S&M / G&A overhead will be cut back once they hit market saturation and revenue growth stabilizes

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@jayparsons That’s one way to convince renters to help landlords optimize their lease expiration curves…

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

Inflation remains between a rock and hard place, where it has been for the past year:

Why Shelter Inflation Will Persist in a Higher for Longer Interest Rate Environment https://t.co/ylUUVNx2cW

[Tom Fornelli @TomFornelli]

The Jets are a Randall Cobb away from turning this thing around.

[Triple Net Investor @TripleNetInvest]

Barry Sternlicht recently went on an EPIC rant about the Fed, predicting when they'll lower rates and the challenges the US is facing

"Inflation will fall below 2% as soon as the rent component catches up to the data.

The question is, when will the Fed lower rates? But here's where it gets really tricky...

The economy is too strong.

It's too strong because of public spending. It's not too strong because of private spending.

Private spending is rolling over.... Everyone's laying workers off.

But the federal government's hiring them.... They're spending enough money to keep these guys employed.

So the Fed keeps using this really blunt, horrible instrument 5.5% interest rates with two huge victims, because we have a $34 trillion deficit, and the debt is going to roll over.

A third of our debt rolls over this year. He can pay 5.3% on it, or he can pay 3% if he lowers rates. That's $200 billion.

That's a quarter of the defense budget, which is the largest component of our budget.

So he has a choice. Pay $300 billion on $13 trillion, or pay $500 billion on $13 trillion.

It's up to you, right? So it's 3% or 5%. So that's one problem.

Second problem is the regional banks. He's blown a hole through their balance sheets.

There's $1.9 trillion of real estate loans in the regional banks... there's only $800 billion in the money center banks, and he blew their banks to garbage.

These banks are out of business. They can't make money offering us 5.5% CD rates.

So he's gonna have the next crisis if he doesn't lower rates.

It's a serious mess in the capital markets and real estate and fixed income... anything that was yield related.

Will he keep rates here?

Yes, unfortunately. Why? He's up for, he's leaving in January. Powell's out.

He's not going to be the guy who let inflation come back...

I don't think we'll get the March cut. I think the data, as soon as inflation falls below 2%, there'll be a lot of pressure on him.

That might be May. So I think June, you'll see cuts.

It'll become very obvious that the private sector is struggling as the consumer runs out of money...

And why has this economy kept going?

Not only his spending, people have jobs. And b/c they have jobs and employment rates are good, so they're spending.

But they're spending money they don't have. It's not in their savings account. It's all gone.

And now they're on the credit cards. [And now] Americans are willing to live on Affirm. Now we have new ways to spend money we don't have."

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@jayparsons •Have you paid additional costs above and beyond your existing liability payments, if so what and how much (utilities, management fees, condo fees, maintenance, coop fees, etc.)? (03I)

Don’t these concepts reflect OER from homeowners?

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@jayparsons •What components are included in your regular housing payments (principal, interest, escrow, PMI, etc.)?
•What is your mortgage payment per month, what is the interest / principal split?
•What is your monthly payment on your HELOC? Second Mortgage?

4/

[Harrison Mack @harrisondmack]

@jayparsons •What type of mortgage is outstanding (30-year, 15-year, etc.)?
•Is the mortgage fixed rate, ARM, variable, IO, etc.? What is the current rate?
•What was the initial debt proceeds amount at the time the property was purchased?

3/