Robert Maxwell

Lear 60s are a lot of plane to handle in a midsize airframe, but I'm not typed in it so there's nothing more for me to say as a pilot. But for those who fly private as passengers, here's a reminder to make this your rule for every crew member: if you scare me, you're fired.

The US government spends $8.3bn per year on the federal prison system — about $48,000 per year per inmate — and every first-time, non-violent, non-sex offender who has served a year should be sent home immediately. When you think of prison, what you're really thinking of is jail: small cells, shit food, restricted movements, violence, whatever. That is not prison. Yes, the food is shit, the facilities are hazardous, and there's a lot of fighting, but at lower-security institutions, what you (the taxpayer) are really paying for at $48k/year is for tens of thousands of people to get high on *every single drug* you can imagine, play mindlessly on a tablet, watch & bet on sports, and ... film videos like this. Use your imagination on the latter. It's one thing for the feds to waste billions and billions of your dollars — that happens everywhere, everyday — but you are literally paying for the worst of the worst kinds of people to get high on meth, cocaine, wax, synthetic THC & opioids, and beyond. Every single fucking day. You are not pissed off enough about this. And before you say "well they should just get the contraband out!" understand this: the people the Bureau of Prisons hires are the diametric opposites of people who give a single, solitary fuck about their jobs. Read into this as much as you'd like — they don't care and you won't change that. Because they're oftentimes just as "bad" as the inmates, they only care about their brand: money. Before anyone cries and says I'm being a snitch, this is all widely known, albeit amongst the least influential populations you could define. Nothing I'm saying here is breaking news. The BoP's stated mission is to "foster a humane and secure environment and ensure public safety by preparing individuals for successful reentry into our communities." So by their own words, they're trying to rehab criminals in prep for going back into the community. Cool. Unfortunately this is double-speak and just generally bullshit. They're not preparing anyone for anything. Case in point: when I started teaching GED classes, the pass rate was <10%. My first class was 100%. Am I some modern Confucius? What? Of course f not. I legitimately just did not know how to care as little as the BoP people did, and thus people started learning — and passing. So what should be done? You depopulate the prisons by 50% by substituting custodial (prison) sentences for home confinement with work release for every non-violent criminal on their first offense after they've served a year. You make the would-be inmates work their fucking asses off for duration of their sentence. You have their paychecks sent to a lockbox controlled by a probation officer. They earn rights back quarterly. Restitution & fines get paid more fully, and taxpayers save billions of dollars by not subsidizing shitheads eating, sleeping, fighting, and getting high. It's simple. The First Step Act & Second Chance Act brought in-prison times down to about 50% of the sentence already. Even less in white collar: 35-45%. This bill would just take it further. Every inmate needs to do a year away. Miss every holiday, every birthday, every anniversary. Sorry, you fucked that up for yourself and you need to feel every day once. But the marginal tradeoff beyond that is not only de minimus at best, but it's upside-down for most, which is why recidivism rates are astronomically high — 70 fucking percent — in the US. What are we even doing here? And if you blow it and come back to prison, you're taking the whole ride. If even one single district court judge went undercover for 30 days to any low-security prison, their entire sentencing paradigm would shift. Permanently. Simple arithmetic saves billions.

Maybe a hot take here, but this kind of canned political slop is why Rs are so f soft. What she said is obviously not illegal, so the System will do nothing, but they still get some cutesy tweet out there with enough semantic wordplay at the end to finesse their way out of punishing this twat. I'm tired, man. Conversely, if she was an R and said that to a D, you can bet your ass that Ds would crucify her from more dimensions than years she's been alive. She would simply never escape the consequences of her fantasies. Very few people should be remembered by the worst thing they ever did, but fetishizing a political assassination prob qualifies.

I've dated so profoundly out of my league for years so this made me laugh. You need to get past seeing the idea of the person, and see the person as a person. Sounds simple — and it is — but it's an important, intentional mental framing. Everybody is nuanced and quirky in their own way, and you discover this immediately. All it takes to get past the idea of someone — anyone — is to experience them personally for just a few candid moments. If they're spending time with you at that level, they're just as interested in what you've done in your life as you are in what they've done in theirs. Be legitimately interesting — good, bad, or otherwise, nobody is perfect, but you need to have taken real risks and have lived to talk about them. Be really good at something — where your 60% effort is the next person's 110%. Be comfortable — confidence easy to fake; comfort is not. Speak well and listen well-er. Enjoy the ride. Oh, and if they're genuinely world-class at whatever they do/have done, get ready because they're going to be fucking crazy. Nobody gets to the top of any generally-recognized field without a screw loose. The irony is I seemed to be really good at starting relationships and up until a year ago really bad at finishing them. Whatever — advice still holds 🙃

A good friend was having Easter lunch with Elon a few years ago and asked him who he looked up to and/or called for advice, given that pretty much everyone with access to him would answer that question with his name. He responded Larry Ellison. Immediately.

And the gap is widening. Relative to most government institutions, FDA actually does a very fine job. But not modernizing structural elements of the clinical trial system is a generational blunder. Setting aside all of the extraordinary acceleration in biotech and positive gamma therein, patients still can't even reliably find trials on their own without third-party help. It's sick. The best way to fix the problem is to bring in a Joe Gebbia with an equal amount of decision-making authority and operational latitude. Operation TrailBlazer was talked about for two years prior to launch and is — put nicely — not going to cut it.

Reading about the Getty Images Chapter 11. A few things come to mind having spent months working a big M&A deal in this space in summer 2023: First, Getty has the single largest commercial image library in the world at something like 600m assets. More importantly, it has one of the largest photographic archives, too, at about 150m photos. For scale, the AP has about 60m photos in its entire collection — so Getty's archive alone is 2.5x that. Under Craig Peters, Getty explicitly has not/does not/will not license out editorial content for AI training. I.e., their archive of politicians, celebrities, historical events, sports, and news photography is off-limits, even though their creative stock imagery is being licensed. True story. They're sitting on two billion-dollar businesses between 1) dramatically expanding their licensing of rights-cleared photography to Big AI, including commercializing the editorial archive for training; and 2) licensing both editorial and historical archives at scale for inference and retrieval — basically letting AI platforms display authentic imagery in responses. They do a little bit of both, including the small deal this summer with OpenAI and one with NVIDIA, but the scale of the opportunity relative to what they've actually monetized is absurd. Unlike stock photography (which is essentially dead), historically significant imagery is finite. AI can generate a billion pictures of anything it wants, but it can't recreate an actual photograph of something that happened in 1963. Getty, by virtue of controlling an enormous amount of that irreplaceable IP, owns that space many, many times over. So rather than fully exploit either opportunity, they go tits up (you are here), the Getty family + Kochs buy it back for dimes on the dollar, and sell it back to the market for that sweet, sweet 3x by the end of 2028. A tale as old as time.

Everyone is going to have a good reason to change their social security number in 90 days or less. No matter how many PHP-run sites are fixed today, an order of magnitude more sites are abandoned and won't be patched, thus leaving their DBs, etc., vulnerable. Au revoir.

Bring back vigilantes

The irony here is that this will ultimately expedite Martin's pardon -- an absolution he deserves as a matter of principle (10 ways to Sunday), and one he has independently earned through his own merits. Hoping they don't make this too painful in the interim.

Had he let it rip on "fat fuck," he'd have swung the midterms for the Republicans overnight

In 2019, I had a telemedicine company with a physician friend of mine where we sold compounded finasteride + vits & minerals. It was miraculous for hair, but we had to tell people upon prescribing that there was "a 3% chance they went from a lion to a pussy cat." Lesson there.

Into my veins, La Rochefoucauld

Ex-prosecutor, by the way. It smells like money laundering, but it'd have been closer to bribery should the transaction have happened. And no shade to Kim, either, because she's a lovely person, and this exact kind of gray area/soft influence peddling (bribery) happens daily.

Not ashamed to admit that this was a canon event for me. Last week I thought this whole thing was real. The guy, the dancing — all of it. And then I saw Joe Biden doing the same thing. Fooled. Bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Changed my neurochemistry forever.

"I would never in a million years hurt anyone!" Pause

Wait until they find out the G100 is an old IAI model. And then find out what IAI stands for.

A sobering reminder. cc @claudeai @ClaudeDevs

Someone told me recently they resented modern protestantism on the basis of it being tremendously performative. I'm a devout Christian and find myself moved by much of the "performance" nature, and as such reflexively dismiss the criticism. This, however, is disgusting to watch.