Ryan Vagle

Programmer, stats geek, Wild hockey fanatic. #Skol

[nic carter @nic_carter]

after a century of uninterrupted growth, for 15 years, between 2005 and 2020, America did not grow electrical generation. we completely forgot what it meant to grow industrial capacity. politicians constantly talked about "reindustrializing" and "bringing back high-paying blue collar jobs".

then AI actually did it. for the first time in 20 years we started reindustrializing America's heartland. creating a massive boom of skilled, high-paying blue collar labor. an enormous construction boom. a new industry emerged to finance the expansion of our aging grid. a grid that needed to grow anyway, if we were going to become a modern, highly electrified economy. and all of a sudden the tech companies and hyperscalers showed up with wads of cash, completely willing to pay for a massive grid expansion.

and all the politicians that talked so tough about "bringing back industry and blue collar jobs" panicked when the rubber hit the road. because the NIMBYists had become used to stagnation and freaked out when it came time to build a couple transmission lines. all that tough talk down the drain, because some boomers have AI anxiety and think a warehouse full of computers is unsightly next to a mattress warehouse and a vape shop. probably the most pathetic political episode I've ever witnessed.

the only question that really matters is: is it still possible to build anything at all in this country? or have we completely lost the political will?

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Crazy to think the entire West is literally leaning on one single guy to do things at the same level China does

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

And how much value, in the form of jobs and wages and productivity, did Brin create with Google? Not to mention, he and his family fled to the US from the USSR, where we learned quite enough about what redistribution really means: shared repression and immiseration.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

At the end of the day, Communism and all other totalitarian systems are not economic, social, or political theories. In a way, they're all idolatrous false religions, but at their roots are incorrect theories of human nature.

To be clear, Communism is at its foundation an incorrect theory of human nature.

It will therefore never work and will always kill and destroy.

It shares in common with Fascism, other forms of socialism, Nazism, and lots of mondialist and New Age ideologies (think United Nations here) a simple incorrect foundation for human reality.

These all assume humanity is a single organism (or "meta-organism") rather than a ln ecosystem of interacting individuals. All collectivism suffers this fundamental and basic error, so it will all always fail, no matter how it expresses itself (including in theocracies like Islam or Christian tyrannies).

The idea is expressed most clearly in the "corporatism" of Fascism, per Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, posting that the whole society is a single body ("corpus," hence "corporatism"). The institutions are like organs, the individuals like cells, and the state and Party like the central nervous system. Everything works together for a common goal.

Communists see this same model in "the people," who experience "inter-being" or "interdependence," which is the new mondialist and New Age way of putting it, but it's the same thing. We're all cells in a single body run by the state, all working harmoniously for everyone's success.

Weirdo New Age mondialists at the UN like Robert Muller called not just humanity but the entire ecosystem of earth a "meta-organism" whose central nervous system is the UN itself. The UN's purpose as "World Brain," in Muller's vision, is to take control of the future evolution of man and the Earth.

Marx called this "humanization" of man and Nature. The Fascists and Nazis embraced the same project to advance humanity to its next levels of human organization. It's all basically the same. It's also all wrong in basically the same way.

Humanity, and human societies, are not like organisms. They are like ecosystems. The difference is that in a body, all the parts and cells work together by design to support the flourishing of the organism. In an ecosystem, individual entities and parts might cooperate, act symbiotically, compete, or predate.

Dragonflies don't cooperate with mosquitoes; they eat them. And they don't cooperate with bats to eat more mosquitoes more efficiently; they compete in conditions that eventually reach carrying capacities and therefore scarcity.

Your liver, heart, and kidneys do not do this. They serve specialized functions in a single interdependent organism. The fact that ecosystems thrive (or don't) is not the result of organic coordination but a property that emerges (or fails) because of individuals filling various niches, mostly opportunistically.

Collectivist ideologies not only get this wrong but adopt the murderous belief that the people who aren't getting it wrong are the problem. Those people must be bent, broken, or destroyed until they believe or at least stop not believing.

Of course, human beings have a high capacity for collaboration and intentional cooperation, to our mutual benefit, but that doesn't change the basic fact that societies are ecosystem-like. It just explains how we fill our niches. And it doesn't change.

Collectivist ideologies like Communism are therefore wrong theories of human nature, doomed to fail, kill and destroy.

It will not work this time.

You and yours cannot make it work. You cannot crack the code. There's no code to crack, and trying just turns into cracking skulls in pursuit of total failure.

[Carolyn D. Gorman @CarolynGorman_]

Ivy League schools have the highest rates of disabilities and community colleges have the lowest.

The percentage of students with disabilities is inversely related to how elite the higher education setting is.

Obviously something is wrong with what’s happening here.

[10,000 Takes @10k_Takes]

Matt Boldy using his gold medal as a ball marker 😂🇺🇸

🎥: @unrlco

[david friedberg @friedberg]

if @elonmusk paid 100% of his net worth ($1.4 trillion) as a tax it would only cover federal government spending for 77 days. this isn’t a tax problem…

[mert @mert]

"ive been in office for 13 years and our yearly budget is 7 trillion but we can't help children unless we steal from the guy doing spaceflight"

[Alex @ajak1033]

The Spurs know how to TAKE the lead, they just don't know how to HOLD the lead. And that's really the most important part of the lead: the holding

[Ryan Vagle @ryanvagle]

@Gaardsy Flopping really is the worst. These guys are the best athletes in the world and then you're watching them fall on the ground and whining to the refs to get a call. It's just embarassing.

[pagliacci the hated 🌝 @Slatzism]

A Canadian doctor met a mentally ill guy with bowel problems at a Tim Hortons, told him the best treatment option for him was to die, and then drove him to the hospital to be euthanized.

Not even memes can capture the level of retardation Canada has achieved in real life

[CNBC @CNBC]

Jeff Bezos says taxes for lower salary workers are too high: "It's kind of absurd that we're doing this ... We shouldn't be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington."

[Mike Kelly @MikeKellyNHL]

Heck of a sequence by Brett Kulak in overtime last night. Defense leads to offense...

[Ryan Vagle @ryanvagle]

Faber Hughes and Wallstadt did everything they could…

[Ryan Vagle @ryanvagle]

The Wild made no attempt to score all period. 3 goals isn’t good enough against this Colorado team.

[Avi Roy @agingroy]

7,000 false positives per square millimeter. The culprit was the lab gloves.

University of Michigan researchers just upended a core assumption in microplastics science. Latex and nitrile gloves, worn by the scientists doing the measuring, shed stearate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene. Standard infrared and Raman instruments can't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic.

Seven glove types tested. All contaminated. The cheapest fix: switch to cleanroom gloves, which dropped false positives to around 100 per mm² vs. 7,000.

The "credit card per week" headline (5 grams, WWF/Newcastle 2019) has separate problems. A 2022 re-analysis found severe methodological errors in the original estimate. Actual measured intake is likely 100x lower.

None of this means microplastics are harmless. Last month's data on brain accumulation still stands. But the numbers driving the panic may have been measuring the scientists, not the environment.

Science catching its own errors is exactly how it's supposed to work.

[Hoops @Hoopss]

Churro Cheesecake Donuts

[Ryan Vagle @ryanvagle]

Boldy needs to get one. #Wild

[Ryan Vagle @ryanvagle]

Wall of St Paul. #Wild

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Probably the funniest graph ever published by the FT: our 3 possible futures are either 1) infinite wealth and abundance, 2) human extinction or 3) 0.2% faster GDP growth 🤣