here are some facts about California. some of this is hard to believe.
first of all, it's important to understand the concept of "ballot harvesting," which is perfectly legal in CA. this refers to a situation where someone completely unaffiliated with the voter can collect and submit their ballot for them.
this flow is completely legal:
- a homeless person arrives in LA, where they are eligible for cash assistance, SSI, food stamps, healthcare through medical, and an array of other taxpayer-funded services
- they are registered to vote by an NGO (many such NGOs exist and explicitly do this).
- they do not have to provide a residential address or any proof of residency to vote. they only have to provide a mailing address, which can be anywhere (church, NGO HQ, homeless shelter). their home address can be "a park" or "an underpass".
- their ballot is mailed to the homeless shelter (or whatever address the NGO elects for them)
- the only verification done for the mail-in ballot is "signature verification" and uniqueness (only one vote per person is counted theoretically).
- the signature can be an X. if they register with an X, they can sign with an X. that is sufficient to pass verification. signature verification is also deliberately loose. the signature does not have to be a perfect match.
now consider the hypothetical scenario, which is fraudulent, but virtually impossible to detect:
- a homeless person cycles through the LA system. they get registered with their mailing address listed as the NGO HQ or homeless shelter
- they "sign" their registration with an X or nondescript, easily replicable signature
- they disappear. never seen again. or they exist, but it doesn't matter. they don't get purged from the voter rolls for 4-8 years typically.
- the address where they registered receives their ballot for several cycles
- operatives are aware that they have X amount of votes to make up. they fill in X many thousand mail-in ballots themselves. the ballots are manually postmarked (permitted). they forge the signature to match whatever signature (could be an X) was submitted upon registration
- ballots can be accepted even if they are postmarked at 11.59 pm. polls closed at 8 pm. (you would need an accomplice who is a USPS employee)
- the only fraud checks are de-duplication (if the homeless person through some miracle voted in person, only one of their ballots would be counted) and signature verification
- because very few of the homeless people in question would have voted in person, this gives NGO operatives tens of thousands of possible mail-in ballots to submit unilaterally.
the big problem is that there is NO way to detect this type of fraud. NGOs that register homeless people to vote exist. that isn't a secret. ballot harvesting is fully legal. voting by mail is encouraged. signature verification is as loose as possible. de-duplication doesn't solve anything, since few homeless people vote in person. and no one in power locally is going to spend political capital on rooting out such fraud, since they are all wholeheartedly committed to "voting rights".
in a situation where fraud is undetectable, the absence of hard proof of fraud is not evidence that no fraud exists.
Raman has gained around 20k votes since election night. She is around 3k votes ahead of Pratt now.
there are over 72 thousand homeless people in LA county.
Spirit Airlines died tonight at the hands of the socialist crusader, Elizabeth Warren
She must be so proud to add another casket to her achievements.
Tonight at 3am, Spirit turns off the lights. 14,000 jobs gone. 30+ smaller airports lose service.
JetBlue offered $3.8 BILLION in cash to buy Spirit in 2022. Shareholders, flight attendants union, literally everyone voted yes.
The combined company would have held 9% of the US market against a Big 4 that already owned 80%.
For anyone who understands numbers: 9% isn’t a monopoly against 80%.
Warren said no.
She wrote letters. She pressured Buttigieg. Biden’s DOJ sued. A federal judge killed the deal in January 2024.
Her argument: the merger would cost consumers $1 billion a year.
Now look at her collateral damage she dusts under the rug.
510 pilots gone in the months after. 1,800 flight attendants furloughed in December.
14,000 jobs in 2023. 7,500 last week. Zero tonight.
And that’s just the people in Spirit uniforms.
Catering goes. Fuel guys go. Baggage crews, gate agents, airport coffee shops, hotels and rental cars in 70 cities Spirit flew to. Every airline job carries 3 more on its back.
40,000 people out of work because of one woman’s moronic crusade against the market.
And the math ain’t mathing.
Spirit abandoned 90 routes during the death spiral. Fares on those routes are up 14% on average. Oakland to Newark: $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan: $92 to $219. Kansas City to Newark up 66%.
That’s reality. Not some BS number from a “study.”
So @SenWarren tell me how this saves the consumer money?
Cheap carriers in a market drop fares 21% across the board. Southwest did this in the 90s and saved Americans $68 BILLION over 20 years.
Warren killed it. That’s what moronic politicians led by socialism do.
Then with her own blind arrogance, she tweeted Spirit’s collapse is “a Biden win for flyers.”
A win.
14,000 people are reading termination letters tonight.
And she’s taking credit.
This is socialism in 2026.
A senator who’s never made payroll thinks she knows how to run a market better than the people who own and work in the company.
She saved you a billion on imaginary paper.
She cost you ten times that in real life.
She didn’t protect consumers from anything.
14,000+ will go from working to welfare.
She will make sure to blame billionaires, hardworking tax payers, AI, capitalism and whatever monster they will make up tomorrow hiding under your bed.
Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. More expensive everything.
She called it a win. I hope you enjoy winning.
DYSTOPIAN doesn't even begin to cover it. You'll want to sit down for this one.. hopefully it's not in your new black mirror vehicle. 👇
In new patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (Serial No. 20250104469), Ford is envisioning a future where your pickup turns into a rolling police station. And we don’t mean just a bunch of new safety features; the new patents envision your truck as a 24/7 surveillance outpost.
👁️ Biometric Checks: From the comfort of your own driveway, your eyes will be scanned, and that iris and fingerprint checked against a database of criminals - real-time results received within seconds.
🧠 Did you know? Your car can put you in an Emotional Lockout! If your vehicle senses that you are in a “panic” driving state or have the “big eyes” (unintentionally locking onto an object for too long), the vehicle will determine that you are not fit to drive. The vehicle will remain in a Park state and will not allow the shifter to transition into the Drive state.
👂 Ad Spying – using acoustic waves to read your lips and display monitored conversations to you in order to serve you targeted ads for maximum monetization.
🚔 Law Enforcement: The live feeds in the footages "by Ford" are not encrypted and thus can be used for Law Enforcement Integration. Ford's own patent language for this feature describes the live feeds as "potentially useful for police".
This isn't "coming soon" - it's already here.
• Smart Eye monitoring software is already in use in over 4 million vehicles worldwide.
• To comply with EU regulations such as the Future Truck 2025 concept, GSR, drowsiness system will be a mandatory feature on board.
• Ford currently offers live in-cabin Ford Pro Telematics feeds to its fleet manager customers.
The future is looking more like a world where you pay for your name and reputation , but everyone else profits off of your private information and influence.
Surveillance society: It’s not just the new spying tech that’s the problem - it’s that all older vehicles are being gradually driven off the road and taken out of commission through legislation and a parts shortage, leaving drivers with a hollow choice.
All is not lost. But we’re not just losing privacy. We’re losing the concept of an exit ramp.
How long do you plan to keep your "analog" car on the road?
AI KYC is here.
New claude subscribers asked for gov ID & photo.
Not even a regulatory requirement - Anthropic just doing it because they want to.
But regulatory is coming
Next up will be laws:
No AI without gov-issued ID
All AI use tracked to individual - no private AI
So, basically, if Anthropic was not a US company, we’d be facing zero days with multiple unknown points of attack on virtually all of our systems to an adversary who developed this capacity before us.
my redemption arc is completed when the majority of bitcoin maxis on my timeline petition their govs to ban blockchain privacy because the price of zcash has risen too violently
.@dwarkesh_sp: By 2030, it will be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in America than it is to remodel the White House.
“Mass surveillance is, at least in certain forms, already legal. It has just been impractical to enforce so far.
Under current law, you have no Fourth Amendment protection against any data you share with a third party. That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider.
The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant.
What’s been missing is the ability to actually do anything with all of this data — no agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera, read every single message, and cross-reference every single transaction. However, that bottleneck goes away with AI.
There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America. You can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every ten seconds, and each frame is 1,000 tokens, then for 30 billion dollars, you can process every single camera in America.
And remember that a given level of AI ability gets 10x cheaper every single year - so a year from now it’ll cost 3 billion, and then a year after 300 million, and by 2030, it’ll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House.
Once the technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing standing between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation that this is not something we do here.”
Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking?
The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).
China looked at the lessons of 20th century great power conflict and drew the conclusion that military power alone doesn't determine outcomes, upstream industrial capacity does.
The Allies won because of overwhelming industrial might. Japan and Germany lost because they lacked critical industrial inputs. Starved of oil, they were forced into gambles that cost them the war…Japan attacking Pearl Harbor to seize the oil in the Dutch East Indies, Germany marching to the Caucasus to take the Baku oil fields. Input scarcity doesn't just weaken you. It steers your decisions. It pulls decisions away from the optimal plan and toward the necessary plan.
China learned this lesson and decided to be the one holding the chokepoints. By embedding itself so deeply into the upstream supply chains that feed American military production, a conflict would trigger Western industrial paralysis and neuter its ability to fight a long war.
But the chokehold only works if the West doesn't rectify its supply chain vulnerabilities before China is ready to move on Taiwan. So China's central strategic requirement was to delay Western recognition of the threat for as long as possible.
Thus, China's entire foreign policy posture becomes oriented around appearing non-threatening. And it works because it aligns with the economic incentives of Western elites who benefit from cheap inputs and profitable trade. The cost of denial is kept artificially low. Raising the alarm looks like paranoia or protectionism when cheap goods keep flowing and no shots are being fired.
The administration is now racing to unwind its supply chain vulnerability before the conflict window opens. But that takes years, and they face significant inertia, both domestically and among allies who remain naively blind to the risk.
China knows this. So their strategy is to keep the West sleepwalking. Which means they can’t show their hand. If China comes into direct military conflict with the US in order to defend a proxy, the West wakes up. The inertia collapses. The reshoring and remilitarization that China spent decades trying to prevent happens on an emergency timeline.
But the US finally realized it could use this against them.
Since China can’t show its hand until it's ready to move on Taiwan, the US realized that it can turn China's greatest strategic asset, the pacifist disguise, into a structural trap.
They cannot take overtly aggressive action without triggering the Western industrial mobilization their entire strategy depends on preventing.
So the US can eliminate their proxies and China can’t respond without destroying the disguise.
Maduro removed. Cuba strangled. Now Iran.
Beijing must decide if defending the proxy is worth waking the West up? And the answer keeps being no.
Until China’s window to move on Taiwan opens, the pacifist posture that enabled its chokeholds constrains their response to US actions.
Everything the US is doing right now is a race to be ready before that moment arrives. Clear the proxies. Arm the allies. Break the chokeholds. And build new ones of its own.
This represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.
Thiel always says don’t trust an expert’s take on another field they’re not expert of
Two Thiel fellows quarreling, except Sigil is deep into AI products and executes with high-agency whereas Vitalik is years deep into long-timelines crypto research
I'm siding with Sigil