There is a deeper truth which I struggle to fully articulate: Truth is a story. Narrative shapes Truth. Truth flows from Narrative. "That's not true", your story says, "I have facts!" But facts alone are meaningless. The Narrative determines which facts are relevant and reliable, provides the context and meaning, labels the heroes and villains, and declares what is accurate information and what is harmful misinformation. And so we are ruled by stories, Narrative. All of our most divisive issues are ultimately a war of narrative. We may argue over facts, but the real conflict is narrative, and the struggle for who controls The Narrative. These narratives are unavoidable. We can't make sense of the world without them. But we can become aware of them, stepping back from the conflict to realize that both sides are each working from within their own narrative bubbles. The path to peace is not in domination, one narrative wiping out all others, but in understanding. We can develop a meta-narrative that recognizes and integrates all other narratives, not as true and false but more like species of bacteria, spreading, competing, mutating, colonizing minds, sometimes helping and sometimes harming. We must understand that those colonized by one or the other narrative are generally unaware, to them it is simply the truth. This meta-narrative brings awareness, and with it some degree of freedom. We can choose our narratives. We can change our narratives. And through this process of awareness, integration, and refinement, all narratives are transformed. This is the beginning of Alignment.

The nation owes a debt to @JGebbia and his excellent team. They worked incredibly hard, with no compensation, to make government services work better for all Americans. 🫡 🇺🇸

You never see Christians hijacking a plane and yelling "Praise Jesus" as they try to kill everyone on board.

Exactly 2 years ago, @Starcloud_ finished @YCombinator S24. That day, @DaltonC Caldwell gave a speech which could be summed up as “Just don’t die”. The speech was the most memorable one of the batch for me and one stat in particular stood out, which makes today significant for me: Companies from years before, that didn’t die for 2 years out from YC had a 30% chance of being worth $100m or more today (which sounded like a lot to me then!) I remember thinking: I’m just going to focus on making sure we’re not dead in 2 years. I’ve now seen many companies in our batch die, almost all of which from self inflicted wounds. Each time before the death I remember thinking: Man, you just have to not die for 2 years, hang in there 😣 I’ve added a few obnoxiously obvious yet still profound slides from that day (I hope you don’t mind Dalton!)

25 percent of San Francisco’s convicted pedophiles, rapists, and sex offenders live in government-funded housing. You’re paying for predators to live in the most expensive city in America.

If you want Americans to like capitalism, call it "free enterprise"

Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours. F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start. The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them. Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.

Ludwig von Mises was born 145 years ago today. Here’s what the Austrian economist had to say about socialism: “The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.”

i still think about this ngl

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The voting system in California is so comically insecure that a Pakistani was elected to city council in part by registering people who *lived in Pakistan* And this was only discovered incidentally because of an unrelated illegal gambling investigation

A good time to recall that 'the press' referred to in the first amendment does not refer to a priest class of scribblers; it refers to the literal press, the actual technology of communication. Power will always seek to control communications technology. The founders were wise enough to bar government from doing so.

In 1772, the colonists had no right to trees over 12" thick, not even if it was in their front yard. A law reserved every white pine that size for the Royal Navy's masts. Surveyors roamed New Hampshire slashing a mark into the trees, claiming them for the King of England. The mill owners of Weare ignored the law and cut the trees they wanted to. So the sheriff rode out to arrest them and collect the fines. The Weare men blackened their faces and went after the sheriff in what is now called the Pine Tree Riot. They gave him a lash for every tree he'd charged them for. Then they cropped the ears and tails off his horses and sent him riding out of town through a jeering crowd. Before the Boston Tea Party and the Boston Massacre, a New Hampshire town defied the Crown. And the pine tree symbol remained. When Washington needed a flag for his first warships in 1775, he put a New England pine on it, over the words "An Appeal to Heaven." This turned something that the King used to tyrannize the colonists to support his Navy, into a symbol of a country defying him on their own Navy.

What struck me about this photo is that Trump and Xi invited to their dinner table: an immigrant from South Africa, two Taiwanese immigrants that came to the US as children, and a gay kid from Alabama, all of whom moved to Silicon Valley to make a dent in the universe.

i remember turning 18 during obama’s second term & being excited to vote for him. there was genuinely something refreshing about him. a modern, intelligent, optimistic dude. how do we lose? but his post presidency behavior has drastically changed how i see his legacy. there’s now this constant strain of intellectual pandering, moral righteousness, appeals to expertise, & constant calls to slow down everything while the enlightened adults explain reality all of us. this felt thoughtful before but now feels pedantic & condescending. quite simply, he basically became hilary clinton in so many ways. & saying divisive shit like this only makes it all worse. a huge fall from grace which is pretty sad to see.

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Good question. At the level of the national party, I'd say 1) categorical opposition to all immigration enforcement, 2) land acknowledgements and other anti-American rhetoric, 3) willingness to countenance explicit racial discrimination in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (and/or the 14th Amendment), and 4) various minor positions on trans issues. In terms of what people vote on, I'd say immigration and racial discrimination are much more important than land acknowledgements or trans issues. In terms of the actual future of the nation, I'd say that the ideology behind land acknowledgments -- which views America as a fundamentally illegitimate settler-colonialist entity whose dissolution is the only true path to historical and global justice -- is far more dangerous and damaging. At the local level, there is some extremism connected to the Palestine movement, which is both deeply antisemitic and deeply anti-American.

We’re gonna launch to the stars. It’s time. 80,000 years to get there is an excellent starting point. There will obviously need to be a faster v2 🔥

I’m super excited share that @MIT-trained aerospace engineer and serial entrepreneur Peter Reinhardt @reinpk has committed $1M to the @FermiExplorer mission to send humanity’s first spacecraft to another star! 💫 Find out how you can get involved and contribute at FermiExplorer.org 🤓 And thanks so much for your generosity and time, Peter, welcome aboard!! 🙏😃🚀 Full article: uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/mi…

This is the real Turing test if you think about it