If the private economy operated this way, the most unprofitable companies would receive more capital precisely because they failed, while productive firms would be starved for funding for “not needing

In that environment the purpose of spending quietly flips. Allocating money replaces achieving the intended result. Officials come to believe they have succeeded because they followed the political logic,

The deeper problem is not cartoonish corruption but incentive failure caused by political capture. When one-party dominance lasts long enough, success inside the system stops being measured by outcomes

Spending more than $17 billion to deliver a single mile of track is a concrete example. To a reasonable citizen this understandably feels like theft, even if it meets every formal rule

This observation helps explain how California ends up squandering huge amounts of public money. It isn’t “theft” in the narrow legal sense—no one is stuffing cash into duffel bags—but when taxpayers are

Agreed

Assuming neither side is more right than the other, debate quality and student outcomes at more ideologically balanced schools would likely be meaningfully better

Institutions that decline federal (taxpayer) funding could continue under their own rules.

A provocative proposal: federal funding for universities would be conditioned on faculty ideological balance staying within ±20%

Yeah, it really is – takes some serious effort to shift perspectives these days

an interesting update: the team is starting to move away from AI coding completely (devin/claude/etc) because it's so much harder to review the AI code than writing things themselves

It is being used to methodically replace legacy systems from the Software Industrial Complex with purpose-built custom software at a fraction of the cost.

Organizations in these fields can't tolerate vibe coding; their software must be precise, reliable, maintainable, and highly available.

Since launching earlier this year, Software Factory has been adopted across demanding sectors — healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, insurance, financial services, and energy.

Software Factory embodies that approach: collaborative, opinionated, methodical, disciplined, and detail-focused.

2026 will be a turning point as more organizations demand a collaborative, opinionated, and structured way to develop software.

Precision means moving deliberately at the start to get intent and details right, which enables velocity in the middle and at the end. Prioritizing speed upfront leads to many suboptimal choices, janky

Building with precision versus building for "speed".