Photographer | Singer-Songwriter | Former IT Guy Images are my own except RT Landscape-Nature-Wildlife-Macro #NFTphotography
Wellington, KS
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Good morning! A big news story this week has been wildfires in Oklahoma and Kansas, with one burning about 300,000 acres and the towns of Englewood and Ashland being evacuated in Kansas. This picture is taken in Big Basin Prairie Preserve looking south into the area where this fire took place. The far horizon is about 8-10 miles away and Englewood about 5 miles past that.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
This is not even real… a group of retired admirals, ex-USAID bureaucrats and professional protest organizers got caught on their own recordings working out the conditions under which they get to declare the government of the United States illegitimate, and somehow we are supposed to believe they are the ones protecting democracy.
Here is what @DataRepublican put out in Part 2 of the Democracy Files. The videos come from a group called Renew to Thrive, with Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz in key roles, and it sits inside a much bigger umbrella called the United Democracy Alliance, which she describes as the hush-hush control room for groups like 50501 and Indivisible, deciding when protests get deployed, the timelines and how to respond. National Security Leaders for America, 1,600 former military, intelligence and diplomatic officials led by retired Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith, is credited with operationalizing the whole thing. On tape they lay out a list of "redlines," and invoking the Insurrection Act against "peaceful" protesters is one of the most discussed… and as she lays it out, they shopped the idea around to governors who don't even have to sign anything, all a governor has to do is refuse federal troops and let the network do the rest.
Make no mistake about who Mike Smith is. His own organization's bio says he founded and led National Security Leaders for Biden, more than 1,100 members with an endorsement letter signed by 780 of them, and now he runs a "non partisan" group that just cares so deeply about the oath. But hey… I am sure it is totally nonpartisan this time.
And the very same morning the Washington Post runs a story about a small group of current and former Defense Department officials quietly advising governors, election officials and lawmakers in 10 states on how to prepare for the Trump administration "interfering" in the midterms, rehearsing what to do if a federal agent asks for access to ballots or machines. Different names, same message… the elected federal government is the threat, and the people who run the elections are the ones who need protecting from it.
Let me put it to you like this. They are building the excuse before the event even happens. They coordinate the protests, they decide in advance which government response crosses their line, and then they hold that response up as proof the whole government is illegitimate and the governors should take over. How exactly is that defending the Constitution? If a room full of retired conservative officers got caught on tape role playing how to declare a Democrat president illegitimate, the FBI would be knocking on doors before the coffee got cold and every network in the country would run it wall to wall.
I am angry about this, and I think most of you are not angry enough. These people swore an oath to the Constitution, not to a party, and they are treating the legitimacy of an elected government like a privilege they get to revoke the minute the voters pick somebody they don't like. As DataRepublican puts it, almost any effective pushback against their NGOs counts as illegitimate in their book. Where is the outrage from the people who spent five years lecturing you about threats to democracy?
Admiral Smith, Ms. Reiff, Dr. Zeitz… release every recording in full and explain to the American people, under oath, exactly what you were planning for the day after.
🚨🚨THE DEMOCRACY FILES, PART 2: WHEN AND HOW TO DECLARE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ILLEGITIMATE 🚨
Some questioned whether a group of 200 ex-USAID officials could actually pull off their ambitions to rewrite the Constitution.
Here, they describe exactly how it works. They aren't working alone.
The videos all come from Renew to Thrive (R2T) group and associates. Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz play key roles within R2T.
R2T sits inside a much, much larger umbrella called United Democracy Alliance (UDA), which is an extremely hush-hush control plane of leaders from major "blocking" NGOs such as 50501 and Indivisible fulfilling various functions. UDA decides when protests get deployed, timelines, how to respond, all that.
R2T's role within UDA is concerned with "the day after tomorrow" - in other words, their function is to conceive what a rewritten American government will look like after the rest of UDA fulfills its purpose. As will be shown, Erica Chenoworth is credited with conceiving UDA in the first place under the Horizons "Big Tent" initiative.
Note here that National Security Leaders for America (NSL4A) is credited for operationalizing UDA. NSL4A is a group of 1,600 ex-military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials. They are led by Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith (Ret). NSL4A also played a key role in the "illegal orders" messaging which targeted Pete Hegseth. Zeitz is also a member of NSL4A.
It must be emphasized that the choice of a military-oriented organization to coordinate NGOs across domestic protests is an interesting one all in itself - especially in an umbrella conceived by a regime change expert like Chenoworth.
You will have a hard time finding any mentions of UDA in the public. They are extremely hush-hush and selective who they talk to.
Mike Smith himself makes a personal appearance in other calls, coordinating Insurrection Act exercises and roleplaying with R2G as one of the participants.
As the audio transcript shows, they have outlined a sequence of "redlines" in which case the federal government should be declared illegitimate. Invoking the Insurrection Act against "peaceful" protesters is one of the most discussed redlines. I will post the illegitimate criteria below, but basically, almost any effective pushback against NGOs is a measure of illegitimacy according to them.
Important to understand:
The audio shows they shopped this idea around governors, but the reality is that governors do not have to explicitly sign on to the pact to play their role in the coup. All they have to do is refuse troops in their state and let UDA / R2G do the work of dissolving the federal government.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
Let's talk about Bill Gates, because his life is the clearest illustration of the spectrum I described: builders versus players.
Start with the builder. In 1980, IBM needed an operating system. Gates didn't have one, so he bought one from a small Seattle company, adapted it, and licensed it to IBM while keeping the right to sell it to everyone else. That move created the PC industry. "A computer on every desk and in every home" sounded absurd. He made it real.
Was it clean? No. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer into Windows to strangle Netscape, and a US federal court found it had illegally maintained its monopoly. Gates was ruthless. But it was still building. Ruthless in service of a product hundreds of millions of people chose to use. Reality was the judge.
Then he left that game for philanthropy. And I think the philanthropy playbook slowly ate his soul.
Because at that scale, philanthropy isn't building. Your product is no longer software. Your product is influence over how billions of people should live.
And this is where the worldview matters.
Elon and Gates disagree on the most fundamental question there is: are there too many humans, or too few?
Elon thinks the planet is underpopulated, that collapsing birth rates are one of the greatest risks to civilization, and that humanity should expand, all the way to other planets.
Gates has spent years worrying about population growth, emissions, resources. Humanity as a load on the system. Something to be managed, optimized, reduced in its footprint.
Elon has a word for where that worldview leads when you push it to the end: extinctionist. The belief, spoken or not, that humanity itself is the problem.
I want to be precise here. I don't think Gates wakes up wanting humanity to disappear. It's quite possible he sincerely believes he's saving the world. That's exactly what I said about Macron, and it's what makes it dangerous.
Look at the pattern. Population, emissions, what people should eat, how farmland should be used, how children should be taught, how global health should be organized. Gates sees the world as a system to be optimized from above, by experts, with enough money and enough data.
That's not Marxism in economics. Gates is the archetypal capitalist. But it rhymes with Marx on the deepest level: the planner's arrogance. The conviction that a small, enlightened group can understand society well enough to steer it. The same false axioms I described about Macron: humanity as variables in a model, not as billions of free people making their own choices.
Now multiply that by money.
When a regular person has wrong ideas, they mostly harm themselves. When a politician has wrong ideas, elections can eventually stop him. When a company has wrong ideas, customers walk away and competitors win.
A billionaire philanthropist with wrong ideas has none of those brakes. No voters. No customers. No competitors. He defines the problem, funds the solution, and grades his own work. And he can pour hundreds of billions into it over decades.
Good intentions, plus false axioms, plus near-unlimited money, plus zero feedback. That's the most dangerous combination I know.
And look at the two visions side by side.
The builder bets that humanity is precious and should grow. More people, more minds, more creativity, more of the universe made conscious.
The planner bets that humanity is a problem to be managed. Fewer emissions, smaller footprints, tighter control, decided from above.
One is a philosophy of abundance. The other is a philosophy of scarcity dressed up as compassion.
The most dangerous man in the world isn't the cartoon villain. It's the sincere planner with infinite money and no feedback loop.
Don't manage humanity. Build for it.
I love watching the world and connecting the dots. And if there's one thing that has always bothered me in how people talk about billionaires, it's the box. The group.
On one side: "Eat the rich. Every billionaire is a policy failure." On the other: "Every billionaire is a genius who earned it all." Same mistake, opposite directions. Both throw a few thousand very different human beings into a single box and stop thinking.
Billionaires aren't a category. They're a spectrum.
I've been writing about the Dark Triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy. And about my theory that these traits are essentially a toolkit for power games, which are zero-sum, a pure social construction. Building is the opposite. It's a game against reality, and it's positive-sum.
So here's how I see the billionaire spectrum. Not good versus evil. Players versus builders.
At one end, the purest player: George Soros.
Look at the founding act. In 1992, he bet massively against the British pound, forced it out of the European exchange rate mechanism, and made around a billion dollars in a day. Nothing was built. No product, no factory, no new technology. A bet on the weakness of an institution, won against an entire country.
Then look at what the money was used for. For decades, his fortune has been poured into reshaping politics and societies: networks of NGOs, campaigns, causes, candidates, in dozens of countries. His family is still one of the largest political donors in the United States. Every dollar points at the same target: not reality, but power over the rules of the game.
And here's the twist that connects to what I wrote about Macron. I don't think Soros is a cartoon villain. I think he sincerely believes in his vision of an "open society." That's exactly what makes the model so powerful. A sincere ideologue with nearly unlimited resources, playing the long game with institutions, convinced he's on the right side of history. It's Macron with a checkbook.
At the other end of the spectrum: Elon Musk.
Almost every dollar he's made has been thrown back into reality. Rockets, electric cars, batteries, satellites, tunnels, brain interfaces, AI. Bets that most experts said were impossible, many of which nearly killed him financially. When Tesla and SpaceX were both close to bankruptcy, he put in his last money rather than pull it out.
His fortune isn't a lever on other people's decisions. It's a lever on physics.
He's not a saint either. He's stepped into the political arena, spent heavily, and taken the hits that come with it. Even the purest builder gets pulled toward the power game. But his center of gravity is clear: what he cares about is whether the rocket lands.
And in between? Almost everyone.
That's the part that matters most, and that the box hides completely. Most billionaires aren't bad guys. They built something real, often something extraordinary. Then wealth pulls them, slowly, toward the left side of the spectrum. Media, foundations, policy influence, global agendas. The game shifts from "build something people want" to "shape what people are allowed to want."
And yet many of them redeem themselves on specific things. Bill Gates built one of the most important companies in history, and his foundation's work on malaria and polio has saved an enormous number of lives, even if it later drifted toward steering global policy. Jeff Bezos built a logistics machine nobody thought possible, and keeps pouring billions into space. Mark Zuckerberg made his share of mistakes, and then open-sourced some of the most powerful AI models in the world.
Nobody is fully on one side. Every billionaire is a mix of builder and player. The question is never "is he good or evil?" The question is: where does the money go? Into reality, or into power?
Here's why this matters for you, even if you'll never be a billionaire.
That spectrum doesn't only exist at the top. It runs through every company, every team, every career. Every single day, you choose where your energy goes. Into the work itself, or into the politics around the work. Into the product, or into the meeting about who gets credit for the product. Into building, or into positioning.
The player's game is seductive. It gives quick wins, status, influence. But it creates nothing. At the end of a lifetime of power games, the world has been rearranged, not enriched.
The builder's game is harder. Reality says no all the time. Rockets explode. Products fail. Customers leave. But every time you win against reality, you leave the world with something that didn't exist before.
The richest man in the world got there by building things. The most influential players got there by moving things around.
Choose your side of the spectrum. Stop playing. Start building.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger.
Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I'll sell Tesla stock on the spot.
The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn't a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over.
A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.
"Reality of goodness over perception of goodness."
That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work?
Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone's happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty.
So what actually works?
It's been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash.
The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing.
Why? Because you didn't give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump.
And that's where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world's poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it's dead capital. You can't borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren't, no amount of aid will ever be enough.
Now reread Elon's post.
"Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many."
That's not a meal. That's not a handout. That's a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids.
A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he'll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state.
Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership.
The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it's absolutely brilliant.
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
WE ARE BEING POISONED.
Make smart choices.
DON'T EAT GARBAGE FOOD.
(There is no playing with your health.)
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
I’ve spent a few days thinking about the Tesla Roadster reveal and landed somewhere I haven’t seen much discussion. I’m neither a Tesla fanboy nor a Tesla hater. And I couldn’t care less whether what we saw technically qualifies as a flying car. Three takeaways: (1) The risk of that live demonstration going horribly wrong was real. Almost no CEO would willingly expose their company to that kind of public humiliation for a product with so little financial upside. Elon did. (2) That willingness to attempt the seemingly impossible is what makes Tesla special. It’s also arguably Elon’s greatest contribution to America. He’s helped bring back something we’ve lost. The American spirit of chasing big scary ideas that most people think are impossible. That mindset is spreading across a new generation of founders and its long term impact on America’s future could dwarf anything Tesla ever sells. I think this is deeply underappreciated. (3) Can we just acknowledge how insanely cool that moment was? We’ve reached a strange place culturally where even extraordinary feats of human ingenuity immediately become arguments about why they don’t count. Not everything needs to be a debate. Sometimes we should just be able to stand back together and marvel at what humans are capable of. I’ve been both bullish and critical of Tesla’s ambitions over the years. But watching Elon and his team push the boundaries of what’s possible reminds me why I’m glad we have him. Whether the Roadster ever makes Tesla a dollar or impacts $TSLA stock price is almost beside the point. We need more people willing to risk failure in pursuit of things the rest of us think are impossible. Because when they succeed we all win.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
There is no other material on earth that can do what a fleece does, and it grows on an animal that eats grass.
It keeps a sheep alive on a Welsh hill in February, in sleet, with no shelter.
It keeps a Bedouin cool in the Sahara in August.
It keeps a person warm when it is soaked through, which is why mountaineers wore it to the top of Everest.
It will not burn. Put a match to it and it chars and goes out, which is why it lines aircraft seats and theatre curtains.
It absorbs a third of its weight in sweat and gives off heat while it does it.
It blocks the sun. A wool shirt has the ultraviolet rating of a decent sunscreen.
It does not smell. The surface stays too dry for the bacteria that make a shirt stink.
It stretches a third of its length and springs back, so a sock holds its shape for years.
It stops sound. Recording studios and classrooms line the walls with it.
It stops cold in a loft as well as fibreglass does, without the itch.
It soaks up oil, which is why the mats laid on spills are made of it.
It dyes deeper than anything, which is why a Persian rug is still red after 300 years.
It felts into a tent that a Mongolian family lives in through a minus 40 winter.
And when it finally wears out, it rots into fertiliser, and the next sheep eats the grass it grew.
Every one of those jobs now has a synthetic doing it worse.
The sheep had all of them covered before the chemist was born, and it does it again every spring for nothing.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
Habits that slow aging:
1. Maintain optimal vitamin D levels
2. Exercise regularly
3. Avoid seed oils
4. Avoid sugar
5. Avoid modified food starches
6. Cook with parsley, thyme, oregano, and basil
7. Practice intermittent fasting
8. Foster social connections
9. Eat fermented foods
10. Drink lemon water daily
11. Take post-meal walks
12. Get 7–9 hours of sleep every night
Dr. Eric Berg, DC, not MD; information only
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
I make more than $20,000 a month from X and Kindle now.
And if someone asks me how to grow on X, the first thing I tell them is surprisingly simple:
Stop writing a diary.
Completely.
This is also the hardest advice for almost everyone to accept.
People naturally think:
I have experience.
I have knowledge.
I have an interesting life.
I have something important to say.
So why isn't anyone listening?
Because none of that matters to the reader.
Imagine you're sitting on a train.
A stranger sits nearby and suddenly starts talking loudly about himself.
His career.
His opinions.
His achievements.
His problems.
His childhood.
His plans.
Maybe he's an extraordinary person.
But you don't know him.
Why would you care?
You'd probably move to another car.
X is basically one enormous train full of people doing exactly that.
"Here's what I did today."
"Here's what I think."
"Here's what happened to me."
"Here's what I accomplished."
"Here's my story."
And then they wonder why nobody stops scrolling.
Because the reader didn't open X to care about you.
The reader opened X thinking about himself.
His family.
His job.
His money.
His country.
His memories.
His frustrations.
His fears.
The things that make him laugh.
The things he misses.
The things he loves.
So stop asking:
"What do I want to write?"
Ask:
"What does the reader want to read?"
That's the entire shift.
I don't begin with myself and figure out how to make my story interesting to readers.
I begin with the reader.
What will make him laugh?
What will make him angry?
What will make him remember his father?
What will make him think about his childhood?
What will make him send this to an old friend?
What will make him stop for ten seconds and think:
"That's exactly how I feel."
Then I write THAT.
My own life is irrelevant unless it helps me create that reaction.
My experiences are not the subject.
I am not the subject.
The reader is the subject.
This sounds simple.
It isn't.
Because the human instinct is incredibly strong:
"I want to tell my story."
And that's why 99 percent of people go right back to writing diaries.
They want the audience to become interested in them.
I do the opposite.
I become interested in the audience.
When one of my posts goes viral, I don't think:
"Wow, people loved my story."
I think:
"I found something that already existed inside a lot of people."
That's the difference.
Don't write something and then ask how to make people care about it.
Start with what people already care about.
Then write for them.
Not about yourself.
Not to express yourself.
Not to prove your value.
For them.
The reader is not visiting your world.
You are visiting theirs.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
Oh! You think it’s all authentic?
Ah. Let me explain the game again.
I’m forced to call attention to what I have done. Then an enormous network of accounts that no one individually cares about explode in ridicule. Why? So the USG can continue to use academics to cover its statecraft.
You see, I am fighting for academic freedom to go back to kicking ass.
I am fighting the U.S. Govenrment’s right to direct and pressure science and academe to falsify the scientific and academic record. I have an amazing record on this. But I am forced to call attention to it. This allows a largely inauthentic bot network to rise up against me as if I am Satan or a Buffon. They can’t figure out which story to pursue. Witness:
I wasn’t supposed to observe that Biden wasn’t president during “his presidency”. Geriatric neurologists were supposed to do that. But they were silent.
I wasn’t supposed to observe that something is trying to hold back mathematics and physics before the Fields medalist letter and the @pmarca @bhorowitz revelations. Physicists and mathematician Professors were supposed to do that. But they were silent.
I’m not supposed to have point out a Lagrangian/Action or equations at the top of my feed when @seanmcarroll lied that I have “none of that”. My colleagues are supposed to do that. But they are mostly silent.
I wasn’t supposed to have co-authored the first article on Mortgage Backed Securities danger in 2001 while everyone was celebrating Greenspan and the Great Moderation. Economists and finance professors were supposed to do that. But they were silent.
I wasnt supposed to call out Dale Jorgenson as chair of @HarvardEcon for trying to steal $ 1trillion at the direction of Senators Packwood and Moynihan while the Boskin Commision was sheepskin washing the crime. My colleagues in that department owed me that. But they were silent.
I wasnt supposed to trace the H1B visa to a secret 1986 @NSF PRA program involving Myles Boylan, Peter House and Erich Bloch to destroy American Scientists bargaining position. The law was supposed to find this. It did not.
I wasn’t supposed to have to point out that the 77 Nobel Laureates backing Daszak and the EcoHealth NGO cutout was cover for Bio Weapons research gone horribly wrong. That was the responsibility of biologists, virologists, epidemiologists and Ralph Baric. But they fell silent,
I’m not supposed to point out that Peer Review in science really dates to 1975 and not Nov 1662, because Merton appears to have falsified the history…presumably to allow for journals to control the flow of science. Historians of science are supposed to be screaming this. But they refuse.
Etc.
And I’m not supposed to point out that Geometric Unity is our leading candidate for a “Theory of Everything.” And has been since I brought it to Harvard over 40 years ago. Because @seanmcarroll is willing to lie about it and the community is silent.
This goes on like this…
The world is stupid weak and crazy on every one of the above. Not by accident and in exactly the same way.
Academe has been captured. And I have the most complete track record on this. By far.
That’s why.
It’s about a falsified institutional narrative being protected by a bot network and some very nasty accounts.
Look at the modal account making the nasty comments. 300 followers not followed by anyone you follow. A bot.
That’s how the game is played. And for some reason @elonmusk won’t put a stop to it yet on this platform. But I bet he will one day. Before @YouTube and @Reddit. And then the hate will dry up except for islamists, communists and a few other misguided souls.
Now you know. 🤷♀️
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
I need to make a very PUBLIC announcement on behalf of younger GenXers and older Millennials.
If you see someone in their 40s or 50s who seems a little boring now, I need you to understand something...
We already got it in.
Like...GOT. IT. IN.
We are not sitting home on a Friday night because we never knew how to have fun.
We are sitting home on a Friday night because we have seen enough.
We went to parties in houses that should have been condemned and were almost certainly owned by the local drug dealer.
We saw police lights and RAN and not across a nice, flat field.
INTO THE WOODS.
Do you understand the athleticism required to hurdle uprooted tree roots in platform shoes while simultaneously trying to keep your low-rise jeans from sliding completely off your ass?
And somehow...we never spilled the Zima. We never spilled the Boone’s Farm.
That was TALENT.
We slept on floors in strange houses because the designated driver either never showed up or, in a shocking turn of events, was drunker than everybody else.
There was no Uber, Life360 or Find My Friends.
There was just somebody named Mike saying, “I know a shortcut.”
And we FOLLOWED MIKE.
We closed down bars and then decided the night was still young, so we drove to Atlantic City, where we somehow managed to get drunk, sober up, get drunk again, sober up again and then get drunk a THIRD TIME before breakfast.
And according to our parents? We were at Michelle’s house.
Eating pizza and watching movies.
Michelle’s mother unknowingly covered for approximately 17 people every weekend. If there even was a Michelle.
We drank things called Purple Passion, Mad Dog 20/20 and whatever somebody mixed inside a giant plastic garbage can. Nobody asked what was in it. You grabbed a red Solo cup and trusted the process.
We went to clubs until the lights came on. Do you know the psychological damage of seeing a nightclub with the LIGHTS ON? Nothing good happens after those lights come on.
We danced for four straight hours in shoes that permanently altered the structure of our feet.
We made entire plans without cell phones...no texts, dropped pins or group chats...just an extremely questionable sense of direction.
We rode in cars with 11 people when the vehicle legally seated five. Someone was always sitting on someone. Someone was always in the hatchback.
And there was always one friend yelling, “DUCK!” when we passed a cop.
So yes...now we like being home.
We like sweatpants.
We like cancelling plans.
We like saying, “That sounds fun!” with absolutely no intention of attending.
We like restaurants at 5:30 because we can get a good table.
We like being home by 8:17.
And if someone texts at 9:30 PM and says, “What are you doing?”
Sleeping...we are sleeping.
Because this is not boring my friends...this is retirement.
We already played, partied and danced on the bar.
We already ran from the cops through a wooded area dressed like a Spice Girl.
We have stories that cannot be posted because there are still people with careers, marriages and reputations to protect. And thank GOD there were no camera phones.
So kids, when you look at your Gen X and older Millennial parents sitting peacefully on the couch watching Dateline at 8 PM and think:
“God, you guys are boring.”
Sweetheart...oh sweetheart.
You are looking at retired legends.
Put some respect on our names. We're probably the reason Life360 was invented.
xoxoxo (posted from someone else on FakeBook) 🤣 #genx #oldandtired
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
I’m good at data. I’m not nearly as good at UX. @watilo and I got acquainted shortly after the contested 2020 election, and we’ve just meshed together since. This is a preview of the mobile-first v2.0 he’s cooking up. Give him a follow!
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
Sometimes the best plan is no plan at all. Pick a road, turn up the music, and see where the journey takes you.
Show a picture of your road trip
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Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible
Today’s For You release is in the open-source repo.
Notable updates:
• How ranking weights actually work
• A new filter required for Brazil’s 2026 election
All the details: github.com/xai-org/x-algorit…
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
The Flint Hills of Kansas.
12,000 acres of native prairie that has never been plowed.
Topsoil is maybe 2 inches deep. Limestone right below the surface. You can't stick a plow in it.
So for over 100 years, ranchers have worked WITH this land instead of against it.
Every spring, they burn 70-80% of this country on purpose.
Prescribed fire clears old growth, forces fresh native grass, and cattle gain an extra 0.2 to 0.4 pounds per day on burned ground.
At $3-4/lb, that's real money per head.
Ferguson Ranch has been running cattle here since 1919.
300 fall-calving cows. 300-350 spring-calving cows. Mostly black Angus.
About 30 days a year, 80% of all the cattle in the Flint Hills get shipped out.
Then there's not a hoof on this country until next May.
The last unplowed native tallgrass prairie in North America stays that way because ranchers burn it and graze it on a cycle that's been proven for over a century.
@SuperiorAuction
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Dennis Schrader retweeted
I've received a lot of DMs asking about beef pricing and I'm putting the explanation here so I can reference the post in future responses:
Why rancher-finished beef costs $6 a pound hanging weight when you can buy cheaper elsewhere. (Hanging weight is 70-75% of take home weight, putting final cost between $10-$11 take home weight per lb.)
It's a fair question especially from those who haven't been around cattle or ranching. The answer comes down to what "finished" means and how the animal got there.
Finishing is the last stretch of a beef animal's life, the final four to six months, when it puts on the fat that gives beef its marbling, tenderness, and flavor. An unfinished animal is leaner, tougher, and blander. Some folks sell cattle that never went through a real finishing phase; less time and less feed, and you can taste it the first time you cook a steak. It takes like deer meat (to me anyway).
Our cattle finish on open pasture with free-choice feed available whenever they want it. They graze grass, supplement themselves at the feeder, and take the time they need. They have fresh water, shade, room to roam, and frolic. No growth hormone implants and no confinement or restricted movement. Our finishing steers on a cool morning will run, buck, and play right up to harvest weight. An animal finished this way typically takes 24 to 30 months from birth to harvest, and it lives well the whole way.
Grocery store beef comes out of feedlots where thousands of head stand in manure filled dirt pens, no grass, no shade, eating a formulated high-grain ration, with hormone implants boosting weight gain 10 to 20 percent. All is designed to get to slaughter weight faster and cheaper. A feedlot animal is often done at 14 to 18 months. They rarely move, and that's intentional. By the end, they can at most barely waddle from the feed bunk to the water tank. That kind of scale is exactly how the price gets driven down, and it comes at a cost the label doesn't show. Cheap beef requires crowding, confinement, and treating animals as production units, "Quality" is whatever survives the process. Then it all gets pooled. The beef in the grocery case is blended from countless animals, often including imported beef from overseas. Nobody can tell you what ranch it came from, because it is a mix of beef from across the globe. It's why one beef recall affects hundreds of thousands of people-- nobody knows what cow the diseased meat came from or what it was mixed with.
The $6 a pound at our place goes to raising the animal, meaning two-plus years of grass, hay, and feed for one animal rather than 14 months of commodity ration split across ten thousand head. It covers land, water, and vet care, with no implants doing part of the work for free. Processing runs another $1.05 a pound hanging weight, paid to a small family run processor that cares and hangs and ages your beef for two to three weeks instead of rushing it from kill floor to cryovac.
Nobody's getting rich at $6: we turn a modest profit only because we own the land. A rancher paying to lease or buy ground doesn't break even at $6 a pound hanging. That's the real cost of raising beef right at small scale, and it's why the price can't go lower without changing how the animal is raised. When you buy from a ranch, you're paying what the beef actually costs to produce, not what an industrial system can squeeze it down to.
Cheaper beef is cheaper because somebody cut corners. Around here, nobody does.
All life costs life and to believe otherwise disrespects that which sustains us. Our philosophy is to respect every animal that sustains us and our customers, giving each the best life possible. That is the real cost of doing business this way,
and it's worth it.
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