J @djrotcod

To the Americans: I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States. And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness: You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence. This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns. Success is equated with exploitation. Ambition is looked upon with contempt. This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom. But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated. This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet. And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America: Thank God for the United States. Thank God for the wisdom of its founders. Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man. Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners. Long may your admirable country dominate the world. Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states. May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning. Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill. Thank God for the USA. Happy 250th. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Spanberger, who previously declared Governors shouldn’t interfere with the governance of universities, just fired the most beloved Rector in Va Tech history, John Rocovich.  The man who was the force behind recruiting James Franklin to save the football program, who has served twice before as Rector, who has given decades of his life to his beloved alma matter was fired without explanation.  This is a shameful act to appease her leftwing base & proves once again she is Governor Bait & Switch.

My intermediate and high school coaches kept two sets of old boxing gloves on a peg in the boy’s locker room. If two guys were getting into it during basketball practice, the coach would pull them aside and ask if they wanted to go handle it in the locker room. Often they did. Two guys would go back and beat the hell out of each other. They would come back out with a busted lip and a shiner and it was done. They would usually be pals after that. Today if a coach did that at Botetourt Intermediate or Lord Botetourt he would probably be fired. Why? Because the school system has become feminized and no longer knows how to deal with normal masculine behavior. The school administration is overwhelmingly female. Normal male behavior is considered dangerous and aggressive. My oldest son got into a fight with a guy that was picking on him on his football team, in the locker room. A bunch of bystanders filmed it. Word got out and the school conducted an enormous investigation. They brought me and Laila in and showed us the video. My response was “and? Why am I here? It looks to me like they handled it.” But no it wasn’t done. Both boys expelled for a number of days. Bystanders disciplined. Counseling sessions. Etc etc. Which did nothing but waste resources and extend a conflict that would have otherwise concluded. Insisting that all boys conform to the female behavior standard in schools is unrealistic, it’s dangerous, and it will ultimately result in even more aggressive and explosive situations. Bring back the boxing gloves.

When we first moved to Virginia 10 years ago, a lot of people warned me about how we'd be treated if we lived 'south of the river.' At the time, I didn't get it (and you know me, I didn't really care), but with this redistricting bit, I'm finally seeing it. There is absolutely a divide in Virginia. There is the heart and soul of the state, the people who have lived here for generations. And then there are the people who moved here after ruining their own states with their blue policies. And now, those same people are trying to destroy what's left of the Commonwealth, while insisting rural Virginia is out of luck. 'LAND DOESN'T VOTE,' they declare. They're fine with handing the Commonwealth over to politicians in D.C. like Hakeem Jeffries, because Virginia is not their home. They have no loyalty to this amazing state, where our country began. And it shows. So, it's up to us rednecks in rural Virginia to save her. I believe we can do it... I just need you to believe we can. Show up. Please. Vote NO.

Virginia Tech's Diggeridoos Tunnel Digging Team are world champions! They won first place at the Not-a-Boring Competition, run by Elon Musk's The Boring Company. Over 8 days, their tunnel boring machine dug further than any other into wet Texas clay, in a downpour, against 7 university teams from 3 countries. This win has been years in the making. They took the fastest launch design award in 2021 and climbed from there: top 5, then 2nd, then the Innovation Award and 2nd again last year. Each time refining and improving on a shoestring against better-funded international teams. This year, in the worst conditions the competition’s ever seen, they brought the title home to Blacksburg. I'll keep saying it: I don't care what grade you made in Differential Equations. I care about what you did on a team like this. These students poured hundreds of hours into this because they wanted to help crack one of modern engineering’s hardest problems. The bigger picture is why this competition matters so much. @elonmusk started The Boring Company after one too many “soul-destroying” LA traffic jams. He argues cities have maxed out their surface space and the only direction left is down. His vision is for vast underground networks that move people and freight around at superfast speeds, and reclaim the surface space back from cars and trucks. But current tunnelling machines are notoriously slow and expensive, often moving slower than a garden snail once you factor in setup, maintenance, and muck removal (the competition is branded as "Beating the Snail”). The student challenge exists to crowdsource the breakthroughs that will finally make tunneling 10x faster and cheaper, finding the next-generation of engineers who’ll crack it. The Diggeridoos are those engineers. My company @totalshield_llc sponsors this amazing team. If you run a technical company and haven't looked at the competition teams at your local university, you're missing one of the best hiring pipelines in the country. Career fairs don't show you who performs under pressure, but this sure does. Congratulations, Diggeridoos. Go @virginia_tech Hokies!

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Jack Hughes on his way to the closing ceremony with his new wooden teeth.

Calling on all Virginians to vote NO on gerrymandering. No matter what your political affiliation. This is a turning point in the Commonwealth. If this happens, every election going forward will be considered illegitimate...endless acrimony, massive capital flight.

No Gerrymandering Virginia @nogerryva

6 months ago

Virginia, we have a problem — and it's going to take all of us to fix it. This isn't a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. It's a Virginia issue. Stand with us. Share this page. And mark April 21 on your calendar — because they're counting on you to stay home. 📷

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The Patriots had no business taking the spot of a 4-loss SEC team in this game. We need to change the playoff format ASAP!

Trump could do a great deal to save Virginia by following through on a threat he has repeatedly made and scattering the various federal offices currently located in NoVa to the four winds, diminishing the power of that stronghold considerably Investigating lobbyists, reworking non-profit status for political 501(c)(3) organizations to make their DC real estate and lavish parties untenable, etc. would do a great deal more Virginia is a winnable state, but the cancer in NoVa must be dealt with

Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens

6 months ago

Democrats in Virginia just released their 10-1 congressional gerrymander. As expected, they drew 5 districts that snaked into Northern Virginia and swallowed the entirety of Central VA and the Shenandoah Valley. Based on the maps they've provided, this is what it looks like. A

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In 2014, the CBO projected that federal student loans issued between 2015 and 2024 would save taxpayers $135B. By 2024, the same loans are now projected to cost taxpayers $205B. Gov involvement in a market always results in higher cost, less efficiency, taxpayers holding bag.

The average temperature in the U.S. right now is 19.2°F (-7.1°C). Nearly 50 million people are in subzero conditions. It’s thanks to coal, natural gas and nuclear that you’re not freezing to death tonight.

I am not moving my family and businesses from Virginia. But something sinister just happened here and I need to take action. I have lived here since I was 6 years old. I have done my share to help build this state up. I have owned a business here since I was 24 years old. I have employed thousands of Virginians. I have invested millions in plant and equipment. I have coached sports, been a leader in scouts, run internship programs, and participated in local philanthropy. I am a political independent. I am for whomever gives me less government. I didn’t get that in the last election. The Virginia Democratic Party has come into power with proposals that seem to be almost comically evil. Massive, business-killing tax hikes. Dramatic increase in regulatory scope. Socialist policies around things like rent control, entitlement spending exploding. Sweeping limits on law enforcement and a reduction in crime consequences that make us less safe. We have went from a Top-5 business friendly state to a place where many of the people in my business community are discussing relocating their business out of the state. I watched this happen in Maryland. I can’t let it happen here. I hate politics. Hate it. I don’t want to run for political office. I have never given money to a state politician. I don’t try to influence policy. I try not to talk about politics too much on X. It’s a boring argument. I also think arguments about R vs D are boring. I have known plenty of moderate Democrats in Virginia that I felt were good public servants. However, the Democrat majority that was recently sworn in is like nothing we have ever seen here. These people are not centrists, and they represent a fringe view that is far to the left of the majority of Virginians. I am now compelled to get much more involved with the political process here in Virginia. We have to grab the wheel before we drive off the cliff. Who should I talk to about becoming more involved in organizing opposition to the current proposals? Who can I support to challenge them in court? Who should I talk to about supporting candidates for future elections that will bring us back to the policies that have made Virginia so prosperous in the past? Looking for specific people I should link up with. That could be Republicans or Democrats or Independents. I know there are many other Virginians from across the political spectrum that feel the way I do. Virginia is worth fighting for.

@rossiadam I'm with you Adam. The closest thing to a centrist on the D side was Chap Petersen and they drove him out of politics after he voted to end lockdowns/masking. It may be worth reaching out to him.

I’m in total agreement with John on this one. The rocket analogy is dead on. There’s a specific disease in engineering where we treat the last sliver of efficiency like it’s sacred, and we treat time like it’s free. Then we act shocked when the result is a bespoke artifact with a multi year lead time. There's often an alternate universe where one could increase the absolute output by 10x and simply eat the losses. It still nets out positive. I always think about the area under the curve of engineer-hours. All the effort that goes into these grotesquely beautiful optimized structures. At some point you have to ask the annoying question. Would it have been faster and cheaper to accept lower performance and build a system that scales. Starship is basically that argument made out of steel. Transformer discourse feels similar. Losses are real heat. Lead time is also real money. If the project misses the window, the most efficient transformer on Earth is functionally useless. I once waited 11 months to get upgraded from a 200A service to 800A, and by the time it was ready I’d already moved out. The killer is that tightening constraints doesn’t scale linearly. It explodes complexity. Make losses smaller sounds like one knob, but it drags in core steel, lamination process, stacking quality, insulation system, cooling margins, QA, testing, and sometimes an entire supply chain that only a couple plants can do. This is the part people miss. When margins get thin, everything couples. A slightly bigger fastener costs cents. A design that can’t tolerate inefficiency forces you to pay for world class structures, thermal, manufacturing, and quality, just to qualify a rivet or bolted joint. Not being able to run inefficiently ripples out into third and fourth order consequences and balloons cost. My mind always anchors back to ASME pressure vessel code. It’s a cheat code for civilization. Someone did the hard work once, baked conservative rules into a standard, and now thousands of teams don’t have to re-derive fracture mechanics for every tank they want to weld. It’s rated for pressure and temperature. Follow the rules and you don’t have to think about it. That’s the beauty of abstraction. You see that beauty everywhere once you notice it. In any commercial building you’re surrounded by standard conduit sizes, wire gauges, NEMA enclosures, schedule 40 pipe, flange patterns, breaker panels, UL listings. The same handful of materials and geometries repeating. It’s not that no one could optimize each one. It’s that society decided the target was throughput, safety, and repeatability, not heroics. I think parts of the grid need more of that mindset. Not be sloppy. Not ignore heat. Just stop worshipping the last nine when it creates a one-off supply chain. Sometimes the economically correct transformer is the one that’s slightly worse on paper and available this year. It blows my mind what we obsess over and what we shrug at. We treat time like it’s infinite and efficiency like it’s sacred. It isn’t. The real scarce resource is years. The thought that I might only see a few dozen big transformer cycles left in my whole career is equal parts terrifying and motivating. Anyway, the point is, ASME vessel code is awesome.

John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack

8 months ago

I have always struggled to appreciate why the big transformers take multiple years to source, and this article didn’t really clear it up. I wonder if there is a hangup on absolute efficiency akin to the US ISP fixation with rocket engines, and trading off a little bit of

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Anyone who claims a product or service is a “right” is saying something far darker than they admit. If you have a right to a doctor’s time, a farmer’s crops, a builder’s labor, or a programmer’s work, then by consequence the people who produce those things exist to serve you. Their effort becomes an obligation. Their time becomes a duty. Their life becomes a means to your ends. You cannot have a “right” to something that must be created by someone else unless you believe the creator belongs to you. Rights protect freedom. They don’t impose labor. The moment you declare another person’s work to be your entitlement, you have already crossed the line. You have said, whether you realize it or not, that the producer is your property.

Pramila Jayapal @PramilaJayapal

8 months ago

Health care is a human right.

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The "Stick It In" chant makes a return. The James Franklin effect. #Hokies

🚨Virginia AG candidate Jason Miyares EXPOSES Jay Jones’ soft-on-crime record: “Jay Jones is a criminal first, victim last politician. We know it from his own voting record.”

Now that @BarackObama has endorsed the white woman over the black woman, I can't help but think about when he was stumping for Kamala Harris and shaming black men for not supporting her more. Did he decide that 'lived experience' is no longer necessary in a candidate?

All 50 states would block @elonmusk from teaching a high-school physics class because he doesn’t have an arbitrary government-issued "teaching certificate." We’ve got professionals and retirees in all 50 states—engineers who built bridges, pilots who’ve flown across the world, and doctors and nurses who’ve saved lives—who would love to volunteer to teach. Yet they can’t because teachers unions have lobbied to create barriers. State governors should tear down these barriers and invite professionals and retirees into our schools to teach and inspire young Americans.

🚨 HOLY CRAP! BRUTAL exchange as Virginia governor candidate Abigail Spanberger is grilled on if she STILL endorses Jay Jones for attorney general, after he called for the death of Republicans and their children. This is BAD. MODERATOR: "I didn't hear an answer on [whether you still endorse] Jay Jones." SPANBERGER: "In fact, it appears that it was the, uh, those who released the text messages and held them for years so the public was unaware who had knowledge of these text messages." SEARS: "When did you KNOW, and what did you DO about it?!" SPANBERGER: "I learned of these text messages the day that they came out and I denounced them as soon as I learned of them." SEARS: "Oh, she denounces M*RDER!" SPANBERGER: "And importantly, um, at this point as we move forward, the voters now have this information, information that was withheld for them, presumably for political reasons." "But the voters now have the information and it is up to voter to make an individual choice based on this information." MODERATOR: "Do you still continue to endorse Jay Jones? 15 seconds, yes or no." SPANBERGER: "We are all running our individual races. I believe my opponent has said that about her lieutenant governor nominee." SEARS: "Third time's a charm, Abigail!" SPANBERGER: "It's up to every person to make their own decision. I am running my race to serve Virginia, and that is what I intend to do." MODERATOR: "We just want to clarify, what you're saying is that as of now, you still endorse Jay Jones as attorney general?" SPANBERGER: "I'm saying as of now, it's up to every voter to make their own individual decision." SEARS: "She STILL endorses him!"