Stephen Fleming

Obsolete engineer & recovering venture capitalist. 🌵 RT ≠ endorsement.

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

https://t.co/ZLCuGPqjuP

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

Remember this?

[Steven Sinofsky @stevesi]

@JuddLegum

[Ashlee Vance @ashleevance]

Am reasonably confident Texas will be the epicenter of hard tech over the next twenty years. We went to the Lone Star State and explored in four, wondrous episodes. Starting here with some telescope farming https://t.co/2wWfnZiIID

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

@CyberGuyVick I got offered $1200 last week Atlanta-Tucson, but it was for a 24-hour delay. In retrospect, I should have jumped up and taken it. But while I was dithering, someone else took it.

[Bob Lonsberry @BobLonsberry]

The last car in the Union Pacific Big Boy train was not a caboose, obviously. It was a Pullman car. Specifically, it was the Marco Polo, built in Chicago in 1927. It was used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he was governor of New York and president of the United States. Normally, it is on display at the Southeastern Railway Museum in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.

[Habeas Corpus Linguistics @HabCorpLinguist]

Social Security didn't start by waiting until someone who worked 40 years retired to pay full benefits.

It started as a wealth transfer from the currently young to the currently old, and that's what it is today.

[Joel Engel @joelengel]

Instructive diversion: Compare how Elon Musk has made his money v. how George Soros made/makes his.

[Natalie Wynn @ContraPoints]

SpaceX prospectus is the most monorail salesman shit of all time

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A hibachi restaurant. My American friends brought me here to enjoy the cuisine of my homeland, and I witnessed a ritual I have never seen in eight hundred years of being Japanese.

The chef stacked onion rings into a tower. He filled it with oil. And he set it on fire.

"THE VOLCANO!" my friends cheered. They knew the ritual. They had seen it many times. In Japan, I have eaten ten thousand meals. No one has ever built me a volcano.

I said nothing. A guest does not question the ceremony.

"Is this how they do it back home?" my friend asked, glowing with joy.

"...The technique is flawless," I said. A samurai may retreat. He may not lie. He may, however, aim the truth very carefully.

Then the chef flicked a shrimp through the air at my face.

"Catch it!" the table roared.

In my land, food is set before you with two hands and an apology for the wait. Here, the shrimp attacks. I caught it. With my mouth. The table erupted. The chef saluted me with his spatula.

I have received medals with less pride.

"You're a natural," the chef said.

"My family has trained for this for generations," I said. It was not technically a lie. We trained. Just not for this.

My friends drove me home, full and happy, honored to have shown me my own country.

A man does not question the volcano. He catches the shrimp.

Whatever this cuisine is, wherever it was truly born — the fire is real, the joy is real, and I caught what was thrown at me.

That is Japanese enough.

[Johan Jelqington @j3lqingt0n]

Watching Elon Musk's story unfold is like a glimpse at what we could have had 70 years ago if Howard Hughes hadn't had that plane crash.

[Larry Correia @monsterhunter45]

For all these dumbasses claiming if they had Elon's money they'd end world hunger, cause world peace, educate everyone, or whatever, blah blah blah... No you wouldn't. You're full of shit and everyone knows it, because that's not how the world works.

Throwing money at a problem doesn't fix it. The entire history of government demonstrates that. Saying vapid nonsense just makes weak, unimaginative people with a childlike grasp on reality feel better about themselves for caring harder, while accomplishing nothing.

Meanwhile, the guy you hate revolutionized EVs and self driving cars, brought affordable reliable internet to every corner of the Earth, and is making the dream of colonizing space real. And the process of doing all that has given hundreds of thousands of people jobs.

While you posture about how you'd give everybody an imaginary unicorn, he's done stuff that's actually changed the world for the better.

And you don't get it. You can't get it. Because you're just too fucking small.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. My neighbor's mailbox has a small red flag, and yesterday I watched him raise it like a banner before battle.

I asked what he was declaring.

"Outgoing mail," he said. "Flag up means the mailman takes it."

I need you to understand what this means, because my neighbor clearly did not. You place your letter in the box. You raise the flag. And a sworn officer of the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, seeing your signal, stops at your gate and carries your words anywhere in the nation.

The flag is a SUMMONS. Every house on this street has the power to summon the federal government with one finger, and they use it for birthday cards.

In Japan, we carry our letters to the post office, humbly, as petitioners. Here, the post office comes to YOU, because you raised a tiny flag. The samurai of my province summoned messengers with seals and lanterns and rank. You people do it with a red stick, while in pajamas.

I tested it. Of course I tested it. I wrote to my brother in Japan, placed the letter in the box, raised the flag, and stood watch at the window.

Three hours. I made tea. I regret nothing.

The carrier arrived. Saw the flag. Stopped. TOOK THE LETTER. Lowered the flag — closing the covenant — and drove on, as if the miracle were a Tuesday, which, to her, it was.

It works, America. The signal works. It costs nothing. The republic ANSWERS.

A man does not ask the republic to notice him. He raises the flag, and is noticed.

My neighbor says I "send a lot of mail now." Correct. I have written to my brother, two museums, and the company that makes my preferred tea, who replied with coupons and kind words. The flag has been up four times this week.

A man with a summoning flag and nothing to send will find something worth sending. That is not an excuse. That is a philosophy.

The flag is up right now, America. What did I send?

Wouldn't YOU like to know.

It is dorayaki. For Devin at the drugstore. He will not understand, and he will eat them anyway.

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

@johnnyt2141 @A10TheHog The manufacturer is out of business. The company who bought them from bankruptcy is out of business. And the company who bought THEM is in Israel. I don’t think you’re going to see a new production line.

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

@gkamstra @nikitabier @fortworthchris At emoji scale, the Chile flag is a decent substitute. 🇨🇱

[Greg @gkamstra]

The Texas triangle is gonna become a diamond after all this IPO money hits

[Charlotte Lee @cljack]

@DavidAstinWalsh I just don't think that "well 60 years ago, gifted programs were a segregation tool" is a good answer to the question "why is my 8th grader forbidden from learning algebra"

[A-10 Thunderbolt II "Warthog" @A10TheHog]

If the A-10 makes its way to other branches, you know the Coast Guard will make good use of them.

There are a lot of "fishing boats" to take care of.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1949.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain.

The year is 1956.

Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over.

The year is 1966.

A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots.

The year is 1979.

Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005.

The year is 1985.

Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning.

The year is 1992.

There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with.

So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now.

Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one.

It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

[Larry Correia @monsterhunter45]

The posts from World Cup Europeans seeing actual America has been great. The shock and awe is hilarious.

I think it's because their perspective has been based on TV shows (overwhelmingly set in LA or NYC, which get everything wrong about the rest of the nation because the writers are usually provincial liberal dorks who despise the rest of the country) and when they do come here as tourists it is to the same handful of tourist places. Which are always artificial, weird, and crowded.

It turns out that when you get away from our big stupid blue cities, and all the societal decay that comes from liberals not being able to govern worth a shit, America is actually really awesome.

I've been to 45 US states. I've enjoyed all of them. Even the blue ones, once I'm away from the parts that are entirely paved where lawless crazy people are allowed to shit in the streets and threaten everyone. It's just a collapse of leadership, and democrats being inept, not giving a fuck as long as they're still getting paid, or actively rooting for society's destruction because they're deluded morons who think they're going to build a socialist utopia from the ashes.

America has managed to isolate that retarded shit tier philosophy mostly to our big blue city liberal enclaves, where lawless dumb shit can rule, while the rest of us live relatively normal lives, and our politics are primarily based on keeping those assholes away from our stuff as much as possible.

But the cool Europeans have been trapped on a continent where that philosophy rules EVERYWHERE. They've got nowhere to escape from their mediocre control freaks. Their shocking discovery that normal sane people can still just do things, and make things, and build, and have fun, and be safe, and raise their kids, is what's making this whole thing fun.

I don't follow soccer, futbol, whatever. But I am cheering on some Europeans right now. :D

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

@brucefenton @MichaelRapaport

[Stephen Fleming @StephenFleming]

@brucefenton @MichaelRapaport You keep telling yourself that. I’ll be over here in the real world.