stuart brainerd

IT consulting, father, dog owner, investor, lover of poetry and Qawwali, dilettante in economic, energy and political issues, free speech advocate, objectivist

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@lifieldgg @PaulEDawson Try making a wind turbine without fossil fuels, or solar panels. Can’t do it. Steel is derived from coal, plastic is derived from fossil fuels. Nitrogen fertilizers are derived from natural gas. Our entire lifestyle requires energy. You want to revert back 150 years?

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Today I'm going to explain why socialism can never work, even if you're 8 years old.

Not with statistics. Not with the body count, even though it runs into the tens of millions. With a school playground and a bag of marbles.

By the end, you'll understand what Mises, Hayek and the whole Austrian School proved more than a hundred years ago, and what the Soviet Union then spent seventy years confirming.

Picture a schoolyard. Thirty kids. Marbles.

There are clay marbles, glass marbles, agates, big shooters, and a few cat's eyes that everybody fights over.

Nobody ever decided what a shooter is worth. And yet every kid knows: a shooter is worth about five glass marbles. An agate, three. A clay marble, almost nothing.

Who set those prices? Nobody. They appeared on their own, through trading. Every trade is a kid saying: "I want that thing more than what I've got in my hand." Thousands of little trades like that end up creating a "marble exchange rate" that everyone knows, even though nobody ever wrote it down anywhere.

And that rate is alive. A new kid shows up in September and he's crazy about agates? The price of agates goes up. The other kids notice, and that night they dig through their drawers at home to bring more in. Nobody asked them to. The price told them.

Keep that in mind. That's the whole story.

Now a new teacher arrives. She's kind. She means well. And she finds it deeply unfair that Kevin has 200 marbles while Lily has 3.

So she collects every marble in the playground and announces: "From now on, I manage the marbles. I'll distribute them fairly, for the good of everyone."

On paper, it's beautiful. Watch what happens.

First problem: she doesn't know who wants what.

Lily loves blue marbles. Tom doesn't care about marbles at all, he just wants to play soccer. Emma has collected cat's eyes since kindergarten. None of this is written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of thirty kids, and often the kids themselves only discover it at the moment someone offers them a trade.

So the teacher distributes "fairly." And everyone ends up with marbles they don't want.

Second problem: nobody knows what anything is worth anymore.

Before, the exchange rate would have told her that cat's eyes were rare and precious. Now that trading is banned, there is no rate. She's blind. How many agates should she order for next year? How many shooters? No idea. She guesses. She guesses wrong. Next year there are crates of clay marbles nobody wants and not a single cat's eye.

Third problem: nobody makes an effort anymore.

Why bring marbles from home if they end up in the big common bag? Why take care of them if they're not really yours? After a month, there are fewer marbles in the playground than on day one.

Fourth problem, the most important one: the kids start trading again. In secret. Behind the gym.

Because Lily still wants her blue marbles, and Tom would happily hand his over for half a cookie. Trading is natural. You can ban it, but you can't stop people from wanting things.

So the teacher has to choose. Either she lets it happen and her system collapses. Or she starts watching. She searches pockets. She hands out punishments. She appoints "monitors" whose job is to report anyone caught trading.

She hasn't turned evil. She simply has no choice anymore. The plan cannot survive without coercion.

And guess who ends up with the nicest marbles? Not Lily. Not Emma. The monitors. The kids who are close to the teacher.

That's it. You now understand socialism.

Now replace the playground with a country. The thirty kids with hundreds of millions of people. The marbles with millions of different products: steel, wheat, bolts, medicine, size 10 shoes. And the teacher with a planning bureau in Moscow.

That is exactly what the Soviet Union was. The bureau was called Gosplan.

What I just told you isn't a hunch. It's a handful of the strongest arguments in the history of economic thought.

Carl Menger, 1871, founder of the Austrian School: value isn't in the object. It's in the head of the person who wants it. A shooter has no "objective" value. It's worth whatever a kid is willing to give up to get it. Sounds obvious, but it undercuts the foundation of Marxism, which claims value comes from the amount of labor that went into something. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, another Austrian, took Marx apart on exactly this point back in 1896.

Ludwig von Mises, 1920: that's the second problem, calculation. In an essay called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he shows that if the state owns all the means of production, there's no market for factories, machines or raw materials. So no prices for them. So no way to know whether it's smarter to put that steel into railroads, tractors or bridges. Without prices, the planner isn't evil. He's blind. Mises wrote this just three years after the Russian Revolution.

Friedrich Hayek, 1945: that's the first problem, knowledge. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he explains that the information that runs an economy doesn't exist in any one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows his oven runs cold, the farmer who can feel the rain coming, the truck driver who knows the shortcut. No bureau can collect all of that.

His example is brilliant. A source of tin dries up somewhere in the world. The price of tin rises. And everywhere, millions of people start using less tin, without knowing why, without anyone explaining anything to them. The price carried the information to the entire planet. Hayek compares the price system to a telecommunications system. The price is the marble exchange rate.

Hayek again, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom": that's the fourth problem, coercion. A central plan requires the plans of millions of people to be subordinated to a single one. And since people don't go along willingly, they have to be forced. One chapter of the book is titled "Why the Worst Get on Top": in a system where power decides everything, the people who love power most end up winning. The playground monitors.

Which is exactly what Solzhenitsyn said: socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. It's not an accident along the way. It's mechanical. It's not that bad people took over a good system. It's that the system needs force to hold together.

The Soviets themselves joked about it. An old joke goes like this: a nail factory is given a quota in number of nails, so it produces millions of tiny, useless nails. Gosplan switches the quota to weight, and the factory produces a single one-ton nail. It's a joke, but it's also the calculation problem summed up in two sentences.

Now you're going to tell me: "Sure, but it's 2026. We have AI. A supercomputer can do the teacher's job."

That's the fashionable argument, and it misses the point entirely. The problem was never computing power. The problem is that the information doesn't exist before the trade. Lily herself didn't know how much she cared about blue marbles until someone offered to swap. Preferences change every day. People lie to the planner to get more. And above all, no algorithm can plan for what hasn't been invented yet. Gosplan would never have ordered the iPhone.

And no, Sweden and Denmark are not counterexamples. They're market economies, with private property, free prices and companies that go bankrupt, plus a big welfare state on top. You can debate the right level of taxes. But that's not the socialism Mises and Hayek were talking about: the state owning and planning production.

So, for the 8-year-old, here's the summary.

Nobody knows better than you what you want. Prices are how millions of people talk to each other without ever meeting. Get rid of prices and everyone goes deaf and blind. And when people refuse to follow the plan, there's only one option left: force them.

And for the 80-year-old grandpa who remembers the Berlin Wall, I don't even need to explain. He saw both sides.

Socialism doesn't fail because it was badly implemented. It fails because it asks one brain to do the work of millions of brains. And when it fails, all it has left is force.

[Michael Tracey @mtracey]

You couldn't even parody this

[Swaroop Nagaraj @SwaroopNeo]

Historically, this has always ended in two ways, and neither involves women keeping their delusion of autonomy.

One: The state inevitably bankrupts itself trying to subsidize dependency, comfort collapses and the masculine structures that built civilization get brutally reinstated out of sheer necessity. Civilization survives, but it would take generations to regain its former peak.

Two: If the native men remain emasculated and the gates open, the invaders pour in. This is when women realize their fatal error, as traditional roles are forced upon them by the invaders, the native men are marginalized, and the civilization disappears into a footnote in history.

This is nature's way of reimposing the 'survival of the fittest,' as both ways inevitably end up restoring patriarchy.

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@RoizMichael83 Rbe1 and the black bishop is now tied up guarding the knight

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@davidllada nice puzzle, very elegant

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@subsix848 Great to see Paglia videos getting a new lease on life. She is a wise woman.

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@SusanPolgar Nc7+, Kb8, Na6+, Kc8, Qc6+ mate

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@ImShahinyan Kb1

[Nick Gillespie @nickgillespie]

In case anyone was wondering just how much more fucked-up Los Angeles can get under incompetent leadership driven by the outer edges of limousine progressivism, well, we're all about to find out. https://t.co/n4PEP3vGuT

[Suffragent @Suffragent_]

The eternally-validated Camille Paglia on the Cornell case.

"The sexual revolution must be undone because middle-class women can't handle it. They cannot take responsibility for their own actions."

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je ne sais pas si vous mesurez ce qui est en train de se passer.

Alex Karp, le patron de Palantir, ne va plus chercher ses talents à Harvard. Il les forme lui-même. Des jeunes de 18 ans, sans diplôme, choisis sur leur seul talent, qui codent sur de vrais projets et lisent de la philosophie politique entre deux sprints. Il appelle ça « le diplôme Palantir ». Et aujourd'hui le New York Post titre que les boîtes tech lancent leurs propres programmes parce qu'elles ne peuvent plus compter sur l'Ivy League.

Ce n'est pas une anecdote RH. C'est un basculement de civilisation.

Pendant des décennies, les entrepreneurs ont confié à l'université la mission la plus sacrée qui soit : former les esprits. Ils comprennent aujourd'hui que cette mission a été trahie. Les institutions censées produire des penseurs libres produisent des conformistes. Le mérite a été remplacé par des critères opaques. L'enseignement est devenu catéchisme. Paul Graham l'avait vu avant tout le monde.

Alors ils font ce que font les bâtisseurs quand un système les trahit. Ils ne le réforment pas. Ils en construisent un autre, à côté.

Elon n'a pas attendu que la NASA se réveille, il a fait SpaceX. Il n'a pas réformé les médias, il a racheté la place publique. Les entrepreneurs ne cherchent plus à convaincre l'État. Ils font l'État, partout où l'État a abdiqué.

Relisez La Grève d'Ayn Rand. Nous y sommes. Les bureaucrates gardent les titres, les budgets, les bâtiments. Mais ils perdent la seule chose qui compte : la confiance. Aux États-Unis, à peine 28 % des gens font encore confiance aux médias. Un plus bas historique. Plus personne ne croit ceux qui prétendent nous dire quoi penser.

On entend partout que l'école est finie. Je pense exactement l'inverse.

Ce n'est pas l'école qui est morte. Ce sont les institutions qui l'ont confisquée. L'école, la vraie, celle de l'Académie d'Athènes, des ateliers de la Renaissance, du maître et de l'apprenti, va renaître. Plus exigeante. Plus juste. Sans dette, sans dogme, sans diplôme comme rente à vie.

Une école qui ne fabriquera plus des diplômés, mais des polymathes. Des esprits libres, capables de coder, de penser, de construire et de douter. Ce sont eux qui créeront la valeur des cinquante prochaines années.

J'ai appris à coder seul à 12 ans. Aucun amphi ne m'a appris ce que j'ai appris en construisant. Je sais ce que devient un talent quand on le laisse respirer.

L'université a eu des siècles pour former les meilleurs esprits. Les entrepreneurs vont le faire en une décennie.

La grande reconstruction a commencé.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

@ChrisExpTheNews There are two kinds of Americans:

Those who don’t know about Wickard v. Filburn and those who are outraged by it

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

High-trust societies are not created by government legislation.

They are created over time by shared values and identity.

In fact, societies saturated by laws are a symptom of low-trust.

[Carlos @txiokatu]

What’s Sydney Sweeney have to do to get the approval of white women? Strangle three kids?

[stuart brainerd @stuartbrainerd]

@SethDillon Hilarious. And apparently iOS 27.0 brings no serious improvement so far

[Seth Dillon @SethDillon]

If they really wanted to slow AI’s development, they’d be asking Apple how they did it with Siri.

[stepfanie tyler @stepfanie]

Sydney Sweeney is the funniest stress test feminism has ever encountered bc I was taught that tHE PaTriArChY reduces women to their bodies, denies them individual agency and imposes rules on female sexuality based on what everyone else thinks women ought to be. Meanwhile Sydney is independently wealthy, produces her own projects, owns businesses, chooses to monetize her own sexuality, gains power from doing it and appears completely uninterested in anyone’s permission. And somehow the feminist response is thousands of women materializing to explain that her body is AcksHuAllY a collective political resource and she has a responsibility to use it in ways they approve of bc otherwise she’s “setting women back 100 years” (fucking LOL)

So congratulations ladies! You defeated the patriarchy by becoming an enormous decentralized committee of women policing another woman’s sexuality, scolding her for appealing to men and reminding her that her individual choices must remain subordinate to what is best for Women As A Class.

Perhaps the funniest part is that the men supposedly enforcing this grand patriarchal system are mostly standing off to the side like “Sydney seems great, let her cook” while the Feminist Liberation Committee is furiously drafting new regulations for what she’s allowed to do with her own gigantic knockers.

Incredible operation. You guys are fucking killing it. Extremely boss babe. Very liberation. No notes.

[Shyam Sankar @ssankar]

There is an unseen hand pushing AI safety as a political ideology.

Effective Altruists believe a tiny group of technocrats should decide how much technological progress the rest of us are allowed to have…. and how many shrimp your life is worth.

You are witnessing their attempted coup.

https://t.co/8Bi4Dvjklh

[Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist @DeAngelisCorey]

Why did you delete this post, @uarizona?

[Parker Thayer @ParkerThayer]

This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.

2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.

According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.

The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.

Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.

What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?

3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.

It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.

4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.” Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do? And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?