David Galbraith Profile picture
Sep 30, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Presidential debates don't matter. They are obsolete, game-show era media invented in their current format for TV, which isn't really a thing anymore.
Attachment to them is cultural in the US. European countries like France and the UK have only recently started copying them, ironically just as the world is about to move on.
There were other ways of doing this before. In the US, in the Lincoln era, debates were face to face with no moderator (game shows hadn't been invented). In the UK they were out in the streets on soap boxes.
And there are new ways of doing things. There's no debate at all in China, obviously, so it's more like an Apple style keynote. And in the West, 'debate' has moved online. Trump has more followers than the most watched presidential debate in history had viewers.
Anyone shocked by a debate last night that didn't follow the rules and etiquette of the 1950s is not living in the Internet age. The TV age is over, and we have dangerous populists talking straight at the people through social media.
Unless the Democrats and their supporters realize this, the US is in danger. The world has moved on from an era where telling the president to shut up on air is shocking, while the web is talking about a video of him being urinated on by sex workers.
Trump is able to dog whistle over the head of the debate moderator, directly at the militias. And so while Biden's cool might have objectively won the day a decade ago, today it's irrelevant. That calm and coolness needs to be communicated online...
But, sadly, Biden has 70 million less followers here.

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More from @daveg

Apr 24
Everyone who has tried vibe coding knows that you can get 99% of the way there then hit a 'whac-a-mole' wall of introducing three new bugs for every one fixed. At which point manual coding is easier. Here is a work around.
1. Use reasoning models like o3 to create better one shot prompts to start with.
2. Include a test harness in the prompt structure so you can lock down things into unit tests.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 29
This is the simplest diagram I could do to explain what is happening in the world and why China has already won. Image
Before this, there was the mantra that 'software is eating the world'. It was true and the US beat Europe which failed to enter the digital era and build any dominant internet platforms. This was the best diagram that explained this. Image
But as the commanding heights of the new economy change from internal combustion engines to EVs, batteries, chips etc. China owns a majority of the manufacturing of everything. Image
Read 10 tweets
Mar 28
Ok, now I understand what's going through Vance's mind. It's nuts, but this is what's happening:
Their view is that Europe is 'pathetic' and that US is sick of picking up tab for Pax Americana in Europe.
In Ukraine they flouted the idea of mineral rights to subsidise support and get a sort of instant belt and road style access to rare earths etc. for repatriated manufacturing in the US, via tariff threats.
In other words it's a half baked plan to copy China (domestic manufacturing with control of supply chains) in a rushed fashion and through protection racket style coercion. Protection racket is actually unfair as the threat is genuinely from Russia not from US.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 27
AI creates network effects in production (software application production costs go to zero, running costs increase) - ultimately this means, infrastructure and energy, and we will need more.
But just like the telco/dotcom bust masked continued secular growth in the internet, there could be a dotcom style implosion of AI infrastructure (and this could be the first tremor).
Infrastructure overspend would be when new alliances form leaving redundancy, winners emerge driving consolidation or new more efficient architectures such as DeepSeek hinted at are released.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 21, 2024
What is wrong with our world, in one tweet.
1. The structural change that created the Reformation (bypassing churches control of books) was replacing one (scribe/priest) to many (congregation) with more (mass duplicated printed book) to many (congregation).
2. The structural changes of the internet are larger:
few (publishers, TV channels, newspapers) to many (nations) replaced with many (everyone has a channel on the internet) to many (everyone, regardless of borders).
3. Play this simple game (30 minutes and it will explain network theory without any jargon or tech knowledge requirements) and it will show that until the network (our world post internet) settles into a small world one (largely siloed communities where people can belong to more than one, connected by just a few individuals i.e. not like twitter, where everyone is connected to everyone), there will be instability as lies will propagate more than truth.ncase.me/crowds/
Read 5 tweets
Sep 7, 2024
As if it wasn’t clear already VW illustrates the giant, ticking time-bomb at the heart of Europe’s economic model.

The European economy is based on two things, industrial production and selling the past.
Selling the past includes tourism, where nice places have a history and the story increases the margins. Selling the past also includes things like fashion, perfume and luxury goods where the brand associations with history, also increases margins.
Industrial production is obviously about making things. But it is no longer about making industrial era things. Cars are a great example here. as although EVs look the same as the type of cars that Germany produces, the way they are produced and their business model and margins are totally different.
Read 12 tweets

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