BΞN / Ben Narasin

“Solitude is dangerous. It is addictive. Once you realize how much peace it brings, you no longer want to deal with people.” — Carl Gustav Jung

“Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.” — Benjamin Franklin

"Nothing kills human soul like the wrong place and the wrong people." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You can’t reform any institution from inside because people don’t act against their own interest. The only way you reform institutions is by competition from the outside.” — Milton Friedman

Barack Obama ranks as the worst American president in the history of the United States. - Thomas Sowell

All this hand-wringing over capex from Facebook, Microsoft, Google and other new entrants is unnecessary. When products are this good and improving this fast, we won't overbuild; if anything, we'll be constrained by physics and regulation. And these machines will last a decade, as software gets relentlessly more efficient and we find creative uses for older clusters. Earnings will be absurd in the next five years, as companies like Microsoft, Uber, Tesla, Robinhood, and Meta have revenue per employee DOUBLE every 3-4 years. Pay attention to revenue and earnings per employee.

I had previously had a good experience with @AskAmex so them sending me a picture of a letter was really shocking. That’s a super high level of incompetence

Between 1820 and 1900, real GDP per capita in the United States grew eightfold. No welfare state. No central bank. No income tax. The federal government consumed less than 3% of GDP for most of that period, and the results speak for themselves. Secure property rights, contract enforcement, and a commodity-backed dollar created the conditions where capital formation exploded. Entrepreneurs knew that what they built, they kept. John D. Rockefeller drove kerosene prices from 58 cents per gallon in 1865 to under 8 cents by 1885, delivering affordable light to millions of ordinary households, not through government mandate but through relentless productive competition. Real wages for manufacturing workers doubled between 1860 and 1890. Immigration surged because workers across Europe calculated, correctly, that their labor earned more in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh than anywhere in the old world. Markets made that signal clear. Critics point to inequality, child labor, and dangerous working conditions, ignoring that mass poverty preceded industrial capitalism. Andrew Carnegie's Pittsburgh was brutal, but it was also dramatically better than the subsistence farming the workers' grandparents had endured. The railroad network grew from 9,000 miles in 1850 to over 160,000 miles by 1890, financed almost entirely by private capital once you exclude the genuinely corrupt land-grant subsidies, which free market thinkers condemned at the time. State intervention produced scandals; private lines produced the freight. Minimal government produced the fastest sustained material improvement in recorded human history to that point.

A year ago I rented car with @SixtUSA. A year after the rental they contacted me claiming it was damaged. A fucking year. So I filed a claim with @AskAmex assuming it would go away. Amex emails me a fucking image of a letter asking for more documents. Only a image WTF?

Most investment dollars go to zero Most founder equity goes to zero America produces the most important companies because of this awesome risk-taking — this is why we win! This is obvious and well known by all parties involved, and it’s called the power law And 99% of the time, VC-backed founders never put any personal capital at risk — just their time and typically a more modest salary (but in a hot market founders sometimes go for higher pay, and boards will approve) No story here, just nonsense

Power is becoming a line item investors will price, not a footnote. Lead times on gas turbines and large transformers now set build schedules. Whoever already has equipment slots and interconnection has a real edge.

This also means that AI spending will continue to boost the economy and the market

One of my first jobs was at Jamba juice. I made around $7 an hour. I just opened a bank account. That feeling of a first check is something else.

Idiotic fight? Let them put a datacenter in your backyard. You can subsidize the electric and water. It's offensive to say people who fight for their neighborhoods and states is idiotic. @BeckyQuick wish you had asked him to address that.