"Capital allocation follows expected returns. Burden those returns with decade-long permitting, arbitrary environmental reviews, and litigation risk from NGOs with legal standing but no skin in the game, and capital retreats. Scarcity follows. Your cost of living rises. The regulators collect their salaries regardless and keep on adding new regulations to make it even harder for producers."

https://fixupx.com/Handre/status/2110665484215677406

From Bivael Le Pogam@X:

This morning, I was discussing with someone who told me that the concentration of power in Elon Musk's hands is dangerous.

It's a real question. But it's poorly framed.

Look at who was at the very top of the ladder over the last 30 years. The people who shaped the world we live in. For many, frankly borderline profiles. And no one ever held them accountable with the same intensity.

Bill Gates, for example. His worldview is deeply Malthusian: humanity as a problem to manage, a variable to reduce, a population to steer. What Musk calls extinctionism.

And that's where it gets serious.

We're living through a civilizational turning point. AI, robotics, energy, space. The world of 2040 will have nothing in common with that of 2020.

And this turning point won't emerge from a consensus. No major historical shift ever has. They're always driven by a handful of people with a vision, and the means to execute it.

So the real question isn't "should someone have that much power." Someone will. The question is: who, and what will they do with it.

Today, at the top, there are two visions.

The first is collectivist on the surface, but ultra-centralized in reality. A few mega-corporations, all-powerful leaders who have nothing left to prove, and below them an infinite lower class, on life support, managed, soothed, rendered useless. Read Sam Altman's blueprint, Moore's Law for Everything. Follow Gates's plan. That's exactly where we're headed.

The second is Elon Musk's. Expansion. More humans, not fewer. More energy, more planets, more consciousness in the universe. Advancing civilization rather than protecting a hyperclass.

And what's fascinating is that even in Silicon Valley, even among people who don't like him, the majority end up saying the same thing in private: if there's anyone to trust in all this mess, it's him.

Is it healthy to have a single human point of failure at the scale of a civilization? No. It's dangerous. Obviously.

In the next 10 to 20 years, a form of council will need to emerge, a generation of builder entrepreneurs in that lineage, so that the future doesn't rest on one man alone.

But today, when you look at his projects, his trajectory, and his worldview, the choice is pretty simple.

Bill Gates and Soros want to maximize the interests of their class.

Elon Musk wants to maximize the interests of humanity.

The best civilizational bet is him.

https://fixupx.com/brivael/status/2110737874723234247

From Bivael Le Pogam@X:

If you're a young American, or a Democrat who's a little confused about where all this is going, read this. It's long. It's worth it.

Start with misery.

For almost all of human history, misery wasn't a crisis. It was the default. Your ancestors were born poor, lived poor, buried half their children, and died poor. Around 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 humans lived in what we'd now call extreme poverty. Even kings lived worse than you: no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no light after sunset.

Today it's around 1 in 10.

That didn't happen because someone finally designed the perfect system. It happened because, in a few corners of the world, people were left free enough to trade, try, fail, and try again. Property rights. Prices. Contracts. Rule of law. Boring words. They built everything you have.

Now meet Friedrich Hayek.

An Austrian economist who watched his continent fall to two ideologies that both promised to organize society from the top. In 1944 he wrote The Road to Serfdom. A year later he wrote a short essay that should be required reading in every high school: The Use of Knowledge in Society.

His insight is simple and devastating. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows flour just got expensive, the nurse who knows which shift is understaffed, the farmer who knows his soil. No committee, no ministry, no genius can gather it all. Prices are the miracle that lets all that knowledge talk to itself without anyone being in charge.

When you replace prices with plans, you don't get a smarter economy. You get a blind one.

His friend Karl Popper made the same point about history itself in The Poverty of Historicism, a book dedicated to the countless people who died because someone believed history had a destination and that he alone knew the way.

Then the 20th century ran the experiment. Not once. Everywhere.

The Soviet Union was planned from Moscow. It collapsed in 1991, after famines, gulags, and bread lines in a country with some of the best farmland on earth.

Mao's China gave us the Great Leap Forward and tens of millions dead of hunger. Then Deng opened markets in 1978, and roughly 800 million people escaped extreme poverty. Same people. Same culture. Different rules.

Korea: same peninsula, same language, same ancestors. Look at a satellite photo at night. One half is lit. The other is dark.

Germany: one nation split in two. The side that called itself the workers' paradise had to build a wall to stop its workers from leaving.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people have fled it.

Cambodia lost about a quarter of its population in the name of starting over from year zero.

Every time. Different continents, different cultures, different leaders, same ending. At some point it's not bad luck. It's the design.

"But I mean Denmark." Fair. But Denmark isn't socialist. Its own prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordics are free-market countries that chose to fund a big welfare state with the wealth markets created. That's a debate worth having. It's not the same debate.

Now let me tell you about my country.

France is the closest thing the developed world has to a live test of "the state will take care of it." Public spending is around 57% of GDP, among the highest on earth. Public debt is above 110% of GDP. The national education system employs over a million people, one of the biggest employers in the world.

And right now, French high school students are blockading hundreds of schools. Their complaints: not enough teachers, crumbling buildings, overloaded schedules. On October 1st, the entrance hall of a high school in Nantes was destroyed by a deliberate fire during a blockade.

Read that again. In the country that spends more than almost anyone and centralizes more than almost anyone, kids are in the street because the system can't give them a teacher and a building that works.

And the demand you hear most? More funding. More state. More of what built the problem.

I'm French. I get the anger. The anger is legitimate. The diagnosis is backwards.

One ministry in Paris trying to run thousands of schools is Hayek's problem in miniature. The principal knows which teacher is missing. The parents know which roof leaks. The ministry knows a spreadsheet.

So here's what I want to say to every young person, in France or in America, who's tempted by the idea that the system just needs more power to finally get it right:

You're allowed to want it. That's your right. But you don't have to guess. You have something no generation before you had: the full archive. Every experiment has been run, documented, photographed, counted. The famines have numbers. The walls have dates. The boat people have names. The night photo of Korea is one click away.

Your ancestors paid for that knowledge. Some with their savings, some with their freedom, many with their lives. They left you the results.

Respect your ancestors. Read what they left you.

Read Hayek. Read Popper. Read Solzhenitsyn. Read Orwell, who was a socialist and still told the truth about totalitarianism.

And then build. Because the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things.

That's you. That's the job.

https://fixupx.com/brivael/status/2111105992091967561

In response to Elizabeth Warren => https://fixupx.com/brivael/status/2111192997811388668

_The Loma Prieta Earthquake—October 17, 1989_

On that day (back in 1989,) I was at home--in Largo, FL--watching the World Series between the Oakland A's and the SF Giants--because of course I was, being a native, and longtime resident, of Oakland. I'll never forget the creeping realization, as I watched events unfold on my television, that "the Big One" had finally struck.

"Grain builds a state. It feeds millions, it stores, it can be counted and taxed, and it produces a great many small, tired people who stay where they are put.

A herd builds the person. Fewer of them, bigger, stronger, on horseback, and impossible to tax because the wealth walks.

The empires knew which diet won a fight. They wrote it down in their own treasury accounts.

Then they went home and fed their own people the grain."

Full essay => https://fixupx.com/SamaHoole/status/2111155445985427574

"This month alone I've logged a CIA officer admitting he gave away a secret source. Germany arrested its own former spy chief. China is investigating the men who used to run its anti-corruption machine. Saudi Arabia arrests its own officials every month. Now Brazil has arrested a former police chief.

It's the same move every time. First they find the money. Then they shut down the businesses moving it. Then they go after the people who were protecting it.

But look at it from 40,000 feet. In the U.S., China, Germany, Saudi Arabia and now Brazil, rival governments that agree on almost nothing are all doing the same thing at the same time: cleaning out their own house.

Timelines. Patterns. Their words, not mine. All I did was read the receipts."

Full essay => https://fixupx.com/TheDebriefing17/status/2111044640560324894

Shame is a device of external control that results in inauthentic behavior so as to create conformity. In contrast, guilt is a modality of authentic governance derived from one's own genuine, organic conscience.

Shame motivates 'virtue signaling.' Guilt motivates either organic good behavior, or at least genuine remorse.

Grok's analysis => https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_7e8045a2-706a-4b2b-9f4e-2e358cff6587

The idea that just taking other-sex hormones is 'safe and effective' is a great example of what I call 'reductionism ad absurdum': It reduces a complex system of mutually-interacting elements into just ONE of the elements, instead of holistically comprehending the phenomena as a complete, dynamic system.

Grok's analysis => https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_fb3646b8-758b-4dc1-8937-895591fc178a

"You should not look a gift horse in the mouth."

"But what if the 'gift horse' is actually stuffed with soldiers?"

"Take a single mother in Houston. She earns $22,000 annually and qualifies for $35,000 in combined federal and state benefits. She gets a raise to $25,000. That $3,000 in new wages costs her $18,000 in benefits. Her employer rewarded her productivity; the state punished her for it. No rational actor climbs that wall."

https://fixupx.com/Handre/status/2111462088925155514

From Brivael Le Pogam@X:

My dear American friends, I've shown you where the disease came from and who sells it. Now I want you to look at this email.

January 5, 2020, 2:44 in the morning. Peter Thiel writes to Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen. It became public years later, in a lawsuit between the state of Tennessee and Meta. The subject line is one word: Millennials.

Thiel starts from a number: 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist.

Read that again. Seven out of ten young adults in the richest, freest, most innovative country in human history say they want the system that ruined every country that tried it.

And Thiel, one of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley, says something important. Don't just dismiss them as stupid or brainwashed. Understand why. His answer: when you're crushed by student debt and housing is unaffordable, you have no capital and no way to build any. And if you have no stake in capitalism, you turn against it.

He's right. But follow the thread one step further, because that's where it gets interesting.

Who made college unaffordable? Washington flooded universities with easy federal loans, and universities raised their prices year after year, because they could. The same universities that then taught those students, for four years, that capitalism is the problem.

Who made housing unaffordable? Zoning rules, permits, environmental reviews, endless regulation that makes it nearly illegal to build. Remember Piketty's famous rise of capital? It was mostly housing. Scarcity created by the state.

So here's the full picture. The state creates the scarcity. The universities teach that capitalism caused it. The politicians sell socialism as the cure. The arsonist is selling fire insurance.

That's why 70% is not a natural opinion. No generation wakes up one morning wanting central planning. It takes decades of teaching, a captured culture, and an economy rigged to give young people no stake in it. In a healthy country, that number would trigger a serious public investigation into what American universities have been teaching for fifty years. This is not a debate. It's the result of a long, patient operation, exactly the war of position Gramsci described from his prison cell.

Now let me tell you what history says happens when an ideology captures a generation and turns it against everything that came before.

China, 1966. Mao unleashes the Cultural Revolution and hands it to the youth. Students become Red Guards. Their mission: destroy the "Four Olds," old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Temples, books, art, centuries of history, smashed.

In August 1966, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. She was one of the first. Teachers across the country were humiliated, tortured, killed by the children they had taught.

In 1970, a 16-year-old boy named Zhang Hongbing denounced his own mother for criticizing Mao. She was executed. He spent the rest of his life trying to apologize for it.

Children were taught that loyalty to the Party came before loyalty to their parents. Historians estimate the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people.

The Soviet Union did it first. It turned a boy named Pavlik Morozov into a national hero for denouncing his father. Generations of Soviet children were raised on his story.

Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge declare Year Zero. Teenagers with rifles empty the cities. Wearing glasses was enough to mark you as an intellectual. In four years, roughly a quarter of the population was dead.

Every time, the same pattern. Take the young. Teach them that the past is guilty. Teach them that their parents, their teachers, their history are the enemy. Then give them power.

So when you see statues pulled down, words banned, books rewritten, and parents treated as obstacles in their own children's schools, understand what you're looking at. It's not the end of the story. It's the opening act. It always starts with the young, and it always starts with good intentions.

If the West ever gets its Marxist youth revolution, it won't end in Scandinavia. It will end the way it has ended every single time it was tried for real. And we will have learned nothing.

Thiel saw the number. I'm telling you where it leads.

The answer is not to hate the young. It's to give them back a stake in the system. Let them build. Let them buy a home. Make college worth its price or skip it. Let them start companies instead of drowning in debt. A generation that owns something defends it. A generation that owns nothing will burn it down.

I come from your future. Don't let your children write the next chapter of this story.

Full essay, with photo of Peter Thiel's e-mail: https://fixupx.com/brivael/status/2110849691298541835

From Brivael Le Pogam@X:

My dear American friends, yesterday I showed you an email. Today I want to show you what comes after, because history has already written this chapter many times, and every time in blood.

Every Marxist revolution goes after the same first target. Not the army, and not the rich. It goes after the people who think.

Lenin understood it early. In 1922 he put Russia's leading philosophers, scientists and writers on ships and expelled them. Many of those who stayed were shot or sent to the camps. In 1940, in the forest of Katyn, Stalin's secret police executed around 22,000 Polish prisoners: officers, but also doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and priests. A nation's educated class was killed one by one, each with a bullet in the back of the head.

Mao perfected the method.

In 1956 he launched the Hundred Flowers campaign. "Let a hundred flowers bloom." He invited China's intellectuals to speak freely and to criticize the Party. They believed him, and they spoke. A year later the trap closed. The Anti-Rightist Campaign branded more than half a million people as enemies. Professors, writers, engineers and doctors lost their careers and their families, and many were sent to labor camps they never left.

Mao was proud of it. In 1958 he compared himself to the First Emperor of China, who was infamous for burying 460 scholars alive. Mao boasted that the Communists had buried 46,000.

His masterpiece came in 1966, with the Cultural Revolution. This time he didn't need the police. He used children.

Schools were closed and students became Red Guards. Their teachers were dragged onto stages for "struggle sessions." Their heads were shaved, placards were hung around their necks, and they were forced to kneel while crowds beat and spat on them. In August 1966 Lao She, one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature, was beaten by Red Guards. The next day he was found drowned in a lake in Beijing. That same month, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal Bian Zhongyun to death.

Then the revolution entered the home. Children learned a slogan: "Father and mother are dear, but not as dear as Chairman Mao." Sons denounced fathers and daughters denounced mothers. Zhang Hongbing was 16 when he reported his own mother, and she was executed. A child turning on his parents was celebrated as the highest form of virtue.

Once the Red Guards had done the dirty work, Mao discarded them too. From 1968 on, around 17 million young people were sent to the countryside to "learn from the peasants." A whole generation lost its education, its youth and often its sanity. The revolution devours its own children, every single time.

Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in days. Glasses, soft hands, speaking French: any of these could mark you as an intellectual, and being an intellectual could get you killed. In four years roughly a quarter of the population was dead.

Look at the pattern, because it never changes. First, convince the young that the world is rotten and the old are guilty. Second, silence or destroy the people who could contradict the story. Third, break the family so that the only loyalty left is to the cause. Fourth, give the young power. Fifth, when they've finished the dirty work, throw them away.

I am not telling you America is China in 1966. I'm telling you the first steps look familiar. Careers are destroyed over a single opinion. Professors sign ideological pledges just to get hired. Children are taught to see their parents as bigots and their country's history as nothing but a list of crimes. Political violence is excused online, and sometimes even celebrated. Every year it gets a little more radical, and every year the people who warn about it are called alarmists.

This is not a left versus right debate. Reasonable people can disagree about tax rates, healthcare or trade, and that's politics. What I'm describing is something else. It's an ideology that has killed tens of millions of people in the last century, and it always starts by promising justice to the young. We should call it what it is: evil.

You fight evil by refusing to become it. Teach real history. Defend free speech, especially for the people you disagree with. Protect the teachers and parents who refuse to bow. Above all, give young people something to own, build and defend, so that no one can sell them the fire.

I come from a continent that has already lived this story. Please don't let your children write the next chapter.

https://fixupx.com/brivael/status/2111127201139634431