Classical Liberal, Partly Paleo, No Solicitors. I write stuff.
Joined May 2009
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Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Visitor: Who shears all these?
Farmer: Lads from New Zealand. Every summer, since before I was born.
Visitor: Why not British lads?
Farmer: Two hundred sheep a day, bent double, for six weeks. We stopped raising boys who'd do it.
Visitor: So they fly in.
Farmer: They did. The Home Office turned them down this year.
Visitor: Why?
Farmer: Visas.
Visitor: So who shears them?
Farmer: Whoever's left.
Visitor: And if nobody's left?
Farmer: The flies.
Visitor: The flies shear them?
Farmer: Blowflies lay in the fleece. The maggots hatch and eat her alive from the skin in. That's what an unshorn ewe is by July.
Visitor: And if that happens?
Farmer: I'm prosecuted. Neglect. Same government.
Visitor: They stop the shearer and charge you for the sheep.
Farmer: And the lamb from his farm lands at Dover tariff-free under the trade deal. The New Zealand sheep's welcome. The New Zealand man who'd save mine from the maggots isn't.
Visitor: Who signed that?
Farmer: The same hand that'll sign my summons.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
You know why I hate early voting? Late breaking news. Suppose the guy I vote for three weeks early turned out to be a serial killer. I would be unable to change my vote. Except for out of state or physically unable to get to the polls absentee ballots, people should go to the polls on election day. And yes, I realize I'm yelling at clouds right now.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Robert Downey Jr. asked to spend time with Elon Musk before filming the first Iron Man movie because the director, Jon Favreau, had modeled Tony Stark partially on Elon. Downey wanted to understand the man he was playing. What he described seeing during those meetings says more about Elon than any biography.
Favreau has confirmed that Elon was one of the primary inspirations for the cinematic version of Tony Stark. Not the comic book version, which had been around since 1963, but the film version: the billionaire engineer who builds things with his own hands in his own workshop, whose personal relationships collapse under the weight of his obsession, and whose genius is inseparable from his self destruction.
Downey visited the SpaceX factory. He watched Elon walk the floor. He observed the way Elon interacted with engineers, not as a CEO delegating from above but as an engineer arguing about valve specifications and weld geometries from the middle of the room. Downey later described Elon's energy as "the most focused and simultaneously the most scattered person I've ever been around. The focus is total when it's on you. Then it leaves. And you realize you were one of 40 things being processed simultaneously."
The detail that Downey brought into the performance: the way Tony Stark interacts with objects rather than people. Picking things up. Manipulating screens. Building while talking. The physical restlessness that masks the emotional unavailability. Downey has said that observation came directly from watching Elon during those sessions. The man was never still. The hands were always doing something. The mouth was talking about something else. The brain was somewhere else entirely.
In exchange for the research access, Elon was given a cameo in Iron Man 2. He appears briefly at a party scene. The man who inspired the character appears inside the story the character inhabits. The fiction and the reality met on a film set in 2009 and neither has fully separated since.
Iron Man became the most popular superhero of the 21st century. The performance that launched a $30 billion franchise was built on observations made in a rocket factory by an actor watching a man who couldn't sit still, couldn't maintain eye contact for more than 8 seconds, and couldn't stop building long enough to have a conversation that wasn't about the thing he was building.
The character is fictional. The man who inspired it is not. And the thing that made Tony Stark believable to a global audience, the obsessive genius who cannot connect with the people around him, is the thing that every person in Elon's life has described as both his greatest asset and his deepest cost.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Surgeon: "Gallstones. Until we take it out, I want you on a low fat diet. Nothing fried, no cheese, no cream, skimmed milk."
Patient: "What does the gallbladder do?"
Surgeon: "Stores bile. Squirts it out to digest fat."
Patient: "When?"
Surgeon: "When fat arrives."
Patient: "And if no fat arrives?"
Surgeon: "It sits."
Patient: "Full of bile. Not emptying. For months."
Surgeon: "That's the idea. Rest it."
Patient: "What do stones form from?"
Surgeon: "Bile that sits too long and thickens."
Patient: "So the treatment for a bag that's gone solid from not emptying is to stop emptying it."
Surgeon: "The fat triggers the pain."
Patient: "The fat triggers the squeeze. The pain is the stone in the door."
Surgeon: "Which is why we're removing it."
Patient: "What was I eating when the stones formed?"
Surgeon: "I'd have to look."
Patient: "Low fat. Since 2019. The slimming club."
Surgeon: [does not look]
Patient: "I've been resting it for six years. It's the best rested organ I own."
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Seven people nobody will name… and that is the entire foundation of this story. Seven anonymous voices whispering to Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian at MS NOW, one week before Election Day, that some FBI agent somewhere might get handed a warrant and told to pick up a voting machine and actually look at it.
Think about what they are afraid of here. Not that the counts are wrong, not that a single vote got flipped, not that anybody broke the law… they are afraid somebody with a badge and a warrant signed by a federal judge might hold the evidence in their hands. If these machines are so clean, why does the idea of anyone opening one make these people break out in hives? Honest systems do not need a panic story on the front page the week of the vote.
Here is what the article actually says once you get past the headline. The FBI took ballots in Fulton County in January on a warrant. The FBI got electronic voting records and equipment out of the Maricopa review in March after grand jury subpoenas. Neither one has produced charges yet, and yet somehow the FBI is the scandal. A state attorney general, who would not even let them print which state, has already written to the federal judges asking for a chance to object before any warrant gets signed for ballots or machines. And so called advocates for free and fair elections are lining up ways to coach FBI agents on when to say no. Activists coaching federal agents on how to refuse a lawful warrant, and they wrote it up as the heroes of the story.
Then they quote a current FBI official who says they expect "at least one U.S. attorney and one FBI agent to be willing to sign on to such actions." Sign on to what… a warrant? Reviewed and approved by a judge? That is the nightmare they are selling you, an investigation that actually reaches the boxes.
I have been saying for years that these machines are a black box nobody is allowed to open, and the people who tried to look got raided, sued, and in Tina Peters' case locked in a cell. The same crowd that cheered when the FBI searched Tina's home over a forensic image now wants you terrified that the FBI might look at a machine. Funny how the rule only ever runs one direction, right?
Kash, Todd… the evidence is the machine. Get the warrants, follow the law, and do not let a story built on seven people who will not give their names scare you off the one thing that settles this for every American who votes next week.
Pray, Stand, Speak, ACT.
🚨🚨NEWWWWW --- @FBI agents are privately sharing a grave concern in recent days: that they'll be ordered to seize voting machines or take other legally questionable steps to disrupt the mid-term elections.
@KDilanianMSNOW & me
ms.now/news/white-house-acti…
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
this might be my last normal tweet before biotech goes vertical
i'm not a whistleblower. I don't work at Lilly, Novo or any of the big labs
but there is a massive shift happening in human biology right now.
it's sitting in press releases and almost nobody reads them
the last 6 months alone:
- a once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer (13.2 vs 6.6 months)
- a one-time gene editing infusion cut hereditary angioedema attacks 87%, and 62% of patients stayed attack-free and off all other prevention for 6 months
- a one-time gene edit for cholesterol dropped LDL up to 62%, and it held for over a year
- a personalized mrna vaccine beat keytruda alone in a 1,137 patient melanoma phase 3
- retatrutide hit ~28% weight loss in a phase 3
- an ai-designed drug entered phase 3
- a pill that regrows hair passed its second phase 3
- an immunotherapy that could let some rectal cancer patients skip surgery, chemo and radiation just got fda approved
- a man lived 271 days off dialysis on a pig kidney
- human cells were caught passing chromosome-sized chunks of DNA to their neighbors, and it changes how the neighbors behave
we are on the verge of an era where the human body is a software problem and the update cycle gets shorter everyday
stick around, it's going to get weird
bio/acc
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
In January 1961 Time put Ancel Keys on its cover, took its readers to dinner at his house, and let him tell America to cut its fat by almost two thirds before his own great study had produced a single result.
The dinner was the sales pitch. Brahms on the record player, candles on the table, a meal that could run two hours, martinis or negronis to start. Veal scallopine in Marsala with fresh green beans. A thousand calories, the magazine reported, and only 20% of them from fat.
That was how Keys wanted the country to eat. Fat down from about 40% of America's calories to 15%, and saturated fat from 17% to 4%. "Eat less fat meat, fewer eggs and dairy products," he said, and more fish, chicken, Canadian bacon, and Italian and Chinese food.
"People should know the facts," he told Time. "Then if they want to eat themselves to death, let them."
The facts that winter were thin. The study of seven countries that was meant to prove him right had only started its surveys in 1958 and had years left to run. What he had was a chart of six countries, picked from the 22 he could have used, and a seat on the American Heart Association committee that had just turned his idea into its first official advice on fat.
The cover did the rest. A physiologist's hunch went into American homes with a playlist and a cocktail menu attached, and it went in as settled science.
In 1965 his own equation for predicting blood cholesterol gained a term for the cholesterol in food. In 1968 the Heart Association told Americans to eat no more than three whole eggs a week. In 1984 Time ran another cover, two fried eggs and a rasher of bacon arranged into a frowning face. For decades American dietary advice held the country to 300mg of cholesterol a day, less than two eggs, until the government's advisers recommended dropping the limit in 2015.
In 1997, aged 93, Keys gave an interview to a food magazine.
"There's no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood," he said. "And we've known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn't matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit."
We've known that all along.
Thirty-six years earlier he had told Time to tell America to eat fewer eggs, by candlelight, with a negroni in reach.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
"Nationalize Starlink." Three words, 142K views. And the entire economic history of the 20th century screaming in the room.
Let me explain what would actually happen.
Start in 1920. Ludwig von Mises publishes an essay that will haunt every central planner: without private property, there are no market prices. Without prices, there is no way to calculate. A bureaucrat cannot know whether a ton of steel is more useful in a satellite or in a bridge. He guesses. He guesses wrong. And nobody pays when he's wrong.
In 1945, Hayek drives the point home. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in any single brain or any ministry. It's scattered across millions of people, and prices are the only mechanism that can aggregate it in real time. Centralize the decision and you destroy the information.
This isn't theory. Look at the numbers.
In the US, from 2000 to 2025, overall inflation was about +90%. Now look at the sectors where government subsidizes, regulates, and protects the most: hospital services +271%. College tuition +194%. Textbooks +181%. Childcare +152%. Medical care +144%.
And the sectors exposed to competition? TVs: -97%. Software, toys, cell phone plans: all down in nominal terms over 25 years.
The more the state is involved, the more expensive and scarce things get. The less it's involved, the more abundant they become.
Space is the perfect example. NASA's Space Shuttle cost about $54,500 per kilo to low Earth orbit. Falcon 9: about $2,700. Twenty times cheaper. That's not my number, that's NASA's own study. A private company did in fifteen years what a government agency couldn't do in forty.
Starlink is the logical next step. Thousands of satellites launched on reusable rockets. High-speed internet for a remote village, a ship in the middle of the Pacific, a soldier on the front line. No government built that.
So you nationalize it. What happens?
First, you have to pay. SpaceX is worth somewhere around $1.75 to $2 trillion, and seizing it requires just compensation. That's more than a full year of the US defense budget, to buy something that already works.
Then the machine changes its objective function. Today it optimizes for cost, speed, iteration. Tomorrow it optimizes for budgets, procurement cycles, and subcontractors spread across as many states as possible to lock in congressional votes. We know how that ends: look at SLS, years late and billions over budget. When Starship blows up in a test, SpaceX learns and flies again. When a government agency loses a rocket, you get a commission of inquiry and years of paralysis.
And the power? The argument is "no private individual should have this much power." But nationalization doesn't eliminate power. It hands it to whoever sits in the Oval Office. And one day, that will be the person you hate most.
Here's what I deeply believe: humanity is figuring it out. The 20th century tested the state as the engine of value creation. The result: waiting lines, rents, and debt. The model that works is entrepreneurs with the people. Create value, offer it to people who are free to say no. And tear down everything that protects incumbents: rents, regulations that work as moats, patents that freeze innovation instead of rewarding it.
Elon understood this before anyone else. Tesla opened up its patents in 2014. SpaceX broke ULA's near-monopoly (Boeing + Lockheed) on launches. Starlink is making decades of telecom rents obsolete.
He isn't competing with the old system. He's setting a new standard. And when the new standard is twenty times cheaper, the old system doesn't reform. It disappears.
That's exactly why some people want to nationalize it. When you can't compete, you confiscate.
Nationalizing Starlink isn't taking back control. It's handing the future back to the system that already missed it.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Republicans are learning that the law is a door that only swings in one direction. Democrats can do illegal and unconstitutional things — like enacting DACA, or putting noncitizens on voting rolls — but when Republicans try to undo these things, judges prevent them from doing so.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
BOOM: This is it—the “Democracy Files” top-level summary
If you’re wondering what all the buzz is about from @DataRepublican and @CynicalPublius, I walk you through it.
Sedition? Color Revolution? You decide.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Elon often says forgiveness is divine.
He's right. But forgiveness requires clarity first. You can't forgive what you refuse to understand.
So let's be precise about who we're talking about when we talk about the radical left. There are three kinds.
The naive.
They were sold a beautiful story and they bought it. Equality, justice, compassion. Who wouldn't? Then the story started failing, and instead of updating, they doubled down. It's a kind of Stockholm syndrome: defending the very ideology that hurts them. Most of the time it's not stupidity. It's context. Their friends, their job, their university, their whole social world depends on them not seeing it. Waking up would cost them everything. I understand that. I have real compassion for them.
The cynical opportunists.
They figured out that playing progressive was good for business. Good for their career, their brand, their access. They don't believe a word of it. In private they'll tell you that's just how the game works. They're not evil. They're cowards. They saw the truth and chose comfort.
The cynical corrupt.
These are the dangerous ones. The Soros. The Pigasse in France. They know exactly what this ideology produces. They've seen the results: broken cities, broken schools, broken families. They know it's a mess that only delivers misery. And they push it anyway, because it serves them. Not a trace of empathy for the people who pay the price.
Now here's the part that matters.
When this era ends, and it is ending, no one should be persecuted for their ideas. Not one person.
We'll need to move on fast. And the message to most people should simply be: you were wrong. Here's why.
It wasn't entirely your fault. Education was captured. For decades, institutions installed broken software in millions of minds. Young people, good people, curious people who didn't yet have the mental immune system to resist it. That's not a crime. That's a tragedy. And the answer to a tragedy is repair, not revenge.
But forgiveness is not amnesia.
Those who committed actual crimes must be held accountable. Fraud, corruption, abuse of power. Investigated, judged, punished. That's justice, and justice is non-negotiable.
But only them. Individuals, for what they did. Never groups, for what they thought.
The moment you start hunting people by category, you become the thing you fought against. We don't get to copy the witch hunt playbook and call it victory.
Judge actions, not labels. Punish crimes, not opinions. Forgive the rest.
That's how a civilization heals.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
There is absolutely no way this state is going to allow the largest wealth transfer in world history slip through their fingers. The wealth transfer is about to begin and they can smell the money slipping away. This state is Ground Zero -- all the baby boomers who moved to California in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, bought low, want their kids to inherit their homes and wealth over the next decade or so.
Don't you guys get it - its not about the billionaires. It's about the trillions in equity locked up in thousands of 1400 sq foot ranches and 2500 sq foot craftsmans and sprawling mansions.
They want it and they're coming for it and they're going to take it from the white boomers and redistribute it to their more favored clients.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
I think the thing that kills me the most about towns/cities permitting departments…is they make ‘doing it the right way’ so unbelievably difficult sometimes.
Example: I am trying to install new digital menu boards. Simply replacing the old static ones for new digital ones.
Town:
-oh we need to run all new light pollution studies then
-oh we’re gonna check all your parking lot lights while we’re at it
-oh we need to double check this doesn’t hinder a ladder truck from driving over your building
-oh we need to inspect the footers before you pour any concrete
-no you absolutely can not assign the permit to a new certified vendor doing the identical work
-how many seats did you say were in the dining room? Might need to add a sprinkler system
-we need to bring in the signage department now too because digital menu boards are now considered signage
-are you bricking up the base of the footers? It’s not required by code, but we’re requiring it 🤗
Could have just done the whole thing in an afternoon & never heard a peep.
Now this project is on month 13, with 4 different permit offices involved, 3 engineers, and no end in sight
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Elon Musk made a bunch of money the last few years and commie Bernie says "gee, I wonder why"
Um...Elon's landing rocket ships backwards and building flying cars, you stupid communist. I know you've never built anything, you've only ever worked for government, but Elon not only makes cool shit, he also directly employs over 160,000 people, and God knows how many people make a living using his work product. How many people have you employed in your life, Bernard? What have you built? You've never produced anything of value in your entire impotent life...gee, I wonder why?
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
"How have you got any energy if you haven't had breakfast?"
I've got about two months of fuel strapped round my middle. I'm just using a bit of it.
"I thought fat was hard to get at."
It is if you keep posting sugar through the letterbox every three hours. The body never has to go to the tank, so it forgets where the tank is.
"So you just don't eat at all?"
Not until I'm hungry. About one, two o'clock. Then I eat like it's about to be discontinued.
"Don't you get shaky?"
No. Shaky is what happens when you've had a bowl of cereal at seven and you're coming down off it by ten. I never went up, so there's nothing to come down from.
"What about your metabolism, though?"
It's a body, not a boiler. It doesn't go out because you missed the toast.
"It just sounds a bit disordered, if I'm honest."
You eat six times a day, you've got a biscuit drawer, there are cereal bars in your glovebox, and you panic if the eleven o'clock snack is late. Which one of us sounds like he's on a drip?
"My dietician says breakfast is the most important meal of the day."
Your dietician's quoting a cereal advert from 1917. I'm quoting a lion. The lion skipped breakfast and ate the dietician.
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
Me: I need to cancel my AT&T service.
AT&T: May I ask why?
Me: I’m moving.
AT&T: Where are you moving to?
Me: Somewhere else. Why do you need to know?
AT&T: It’s required for documentation purposes. It’s part of our cancellation process.
Me: Well, it’s not part of MY process. I’m asking you to cancel my service, not help me move.
AT&T: I’ll need your new address to proceed.
Me: You know what? Forget I said I was moving. I’m not moving anywhere. I simply want to cancel my service.
AT&T: Can you provide a reason for cancellation?
Me: Absolutely. Please document that AT&T is nosy, intrusive, unnecessarily complicated, and apparently believes canceling a service requires surrendering my future whereabouts.
AT&T: …
Me: …
AT&T: Okay, your service will be cancelled.
Me: So you CAN cancel it without knowing where I’m going?
AT&T: …
WHY DO COMPANIES MAKE IT SO DIFFICULT TO STOP PAYING THEM? 😭
Sometimes you just want to cancel a service without being interrogated like you’re applying for witness protection.
I don’t owe a company my life story just because I no longer want to be its customer. 😂
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
FIELDS MEDALIST TESTED IF HE'S OBSOLETE
timothy gowers took an open problem from a new paper on additive combinatorics and handed it to chatgpt 5.5 pro.
no fancy prompts. no setup. just the problem statement.
the model thought for 17 minutes. then wrote a complete latex preprint in two.
it took a bound that had been exponential for decades and brought it down to polynomial. the construction was something nobody had tried on this class of problems before.
gowers asked isaac rajagopal to review the work. rajagopal wrote the paper the model was improving on.
his verdict: the key idea is "completely original" and "quite ingenious." "the sort of idea i would be very proud to come up with after a week or two of pondering."
the model spent 17 minutes on it.
then gowers pushed further. gave it the harder generalized version. under an hour, a stronger result. exponential to polynomial again.
gowers on his own mathematical contribution to the whole thing: "zero. i didn't even do anything clever with the prompts."
the result is a solid chapter in a combinatorics phd. publishable mathematics that a graduate student would spend months producing.
a fields medalist. one of the best combinatorialists alive. sitting there copy-pasting prompts while a model does doctoral-level research in front of him.
his conclusion: "the lower bound for contributing to mathematics will now be to prove something that llms can't prove."
he gives the profession until 2029 before it's "transformed out of all recognition."
seventeen minutes. zero human math. a result that takes months by hand.
this was may 2026. five months ago. the model that did it is already outdated.
link to the paper in the comments
Not-So-OK Boomer retweeted
This post makes absolute sense if you change "But" to "So yeah." Ever since the DoEd was founded, reading and computing skills have gone down for every age cohort. Not just down but way down. So yeah, to improve education in this country, abolish the Department of Education.
