Balaji Profile picture
Sep 20, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
The state is blue. Image
The money is blue. Image
Journalism is blue.
bit.ly/3PKM792
Image
Many Republicans want to beat American Democrats in a fight for domestic control, and then beat Chinese Communists in a fight for global control.

But step one is to run the numbers to see what they actually run.

It's 22 state governments vs Dem 17. And the court. Not much else. Image
The greatest strength comes from understanding your own weakness.

The graphs above suggest that Republicans will find it incredibly difficult to win a national battle for control of the US in 2024. Because it's not just about the elections, it's about the institutions.

Moreover, even if a Republican *could* recapture the presidency, they'd be stuck with the flaming bag of dog poop that is DC's financial position — $33T+ of debt and counting[1]. And you actually don't want to be at the helm when this thing crashes.[2]

So, if Republicans were smart, they'd understand what areas they're strong on, and focus there, rather than putting all their hopes on Hail Mary passes for national control.

What are those areas?

1) State governments, esp FL and TX
2) The Supreme Court, for now
3) Twitter/X, because they can speak freely
4) Bitcoin, because it's stronger than the Fed
5) Exit, because it's still legal to move

So, let's suppose you're a Republican truly committed to the long-term turnaround of America, and you understand how bad the financial situation is.

You should move to a red state, buy Bitcoin and self-custody it, tweet to get others to move there with you, build a local community, and work with state-level Republican politicians to pass pro-speech, anti-CBDC, and anti-Bitcoin-seizure bills.

Also get together a state guard modeled after what DeSantis has done with the Florida State Guard[3], to preserve order if and when a 2008-level+ event occurs[4].

You're not going to suddenly turn things around in this cycle. And you don't even want responsibility for this mess right now. Just get back to basics, focusing on asset, family, and territory protection.

Then start the generational rebuild[5] after the crash.

[1]:
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More from @balajis

Sep 1
The dollar is losing reserve currency status. It’s down to 42% of global reserves, and gold is rapidly rising. Image
Digital gold is becoming the reserve currency of the individual.

Gold is returning as the reserve currency of the state.

Original post below.
Recall the Fed admitted that a “small number” of countries were switching to gold.

But that small number actually included Russia, India, and China: the RIC of BRICS.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 18
On many graphs of the physical world, China is in first place by a wide margin.

But if you look more closely, India is a distant but real runner up. Image
Image
The same pattern holds in nuclear.
China is #1 in reactors under construction.
But India is in second place. Image
Electricity generation is similar.

China’s recent increase is unparalleled in history. But India is increasing quickly, and will flip the EU soon. Image
Read 7 tweets
Aug 6
There are now two kinds of AI retards.

The first kind of retard uses AI everywhere, even where it shouldn’t be used.

The second kind of retard sees AI everywhere, even where it isn’t used.
Usually, it’s obvious what threads are and aren’t AI-written.

But some people can’t tell the difference between normal writing and AI writing. And because they can’t tell the difference, they’ll either overuse AI…or accuse others of using AI!

What we actually may need are built-in statistical AI detectors for every public text field. Paste in a URL into an archive.is-like interface and get back the probability that any div on the page is AI-generated.

In general my view is that AI text shouldn’t be used raw. It’s like a search engine result, it’s lorem ipsum. Useful for research but not final results. AI code is different, but even that requires review. AI visuals are different still, and you can sometimes use them directly.

We’re still developing these conventions, as the tech itself is of course a moving target. But it is interesting that even technologists (who see the huge time-savings that AI gives for, say, data analysis or vibe coding) are annoyed by AI slop. Imagine how much the people who don’t see the positive parts of AI may hate AI.

TLDR: slop is the new spam, and we’ll need new tools and conventions to defeat it.
I agree email spammers will keep adapting.

But I don’t know if a typical poster will keep morphing their content in such a way.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 25
JP Morgan is updating their p(doom), but for the dollar. Image
Just the fact that JPMC is now admitting this is a big step.

"De-dollarization has increasingly become a substantive topic of discussion among investors, corporates and market participants more broadly."

As the US deglobalizes, the globe dedollarizes.
jpmorgan.com/insights/globa…Image
Yes, but no manufacturing economy can be realistically stood up in time to replace the sheer consumption that money-printing enables.

Example: to make $1T, you can (a) print or (b) sell $1000 phones to 1B people. Obviously, the former is far easier.
Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 4
AI PROMPTING → AI VERIFYING

AI prompting scales, because prompting is just typing.

But AI verifying doesn’t scale, because verifying AI output involves much more than just typing.

Sometimes you can verify by eye, which is why AI is great for frontend, images, and video. But for anything subtle, you need to read the code or text deeply — and that means knowing the topic well enough to correct the AI.

Researchers are well aware of this, which is why there’s so much work on evals and hallucination.

However, the concept of verification as the bottleneck for AI users is under-discussed. Yes, you can try formal verification, or critic models where one AI checks another, or other techniques. But to even be aware of the issue as a first class problem is half the battle.

For users: AI verifying is as important as AI prompting.
I love everything @karpathy has done to popularize vibe coding.

But then after you prototype with vibe coding, you need to get to production with right coding.

And that means AI verifying, not just AI prompting. That’s easy when output is visual, much harder when it’s textual.
@karpathy The question when using AI is: how can I inexpensively verify the output of this AI model is correct?

We take for granted the human eye, which is amazing at finding errors in images, videos, and user interfaces.

But we need other kinds of verifiers for other domains.
Read 4 tweets
May 15
Democracy is creating startup cities.
Moving to Starbase was voting with feet.
Building up Starbase was voting with wallet.
And incorporating Starbase was voting with ballot.
This is the future of democracy.
Not a two-party system with the illusion of choice.
Instead, a 1000-city system with the reality of choice.Image
This thread from @dpoddolphinpro has details on the new city limits & vote results. Elon's side won 212-6.

This is 97% democracy, rather than the 51% democracy of the legacy system. Because everyone who moved to Starbase was already spiritually aligned.
@dpoddolphinpro Here's a video of Starbase, Texas.
Read 5 tweets

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