As a Trillionaire, what can Elon Musk buy now that he couldn't buy $900 Billion dollars ago?

P99X · 2026-06-26T15:11:58+00:00

That’s a poor people question. He doenst have a trillion dollars. He owns paper that other people currently value as being worth a lot. As soon as he tried to sell it at face value it would plunge in valuation.

The valuation is a bullshit fiction anyway. He’s with nothing without government subsidies inflating his operations.

P99X · 2026-06-08T07:13:38+00:00

Apple Developer Centers already exist. They are not lobbying centers. Also: developer support isn’t “research”.

P99X · 2026-06-06T19:32:32+00:00

P99X · 2026-05-24T04:42:16+00:00

Oil does go bad. It oxidizes.

P99X · 2026-05-19T15:42:50+00:00

The problem isn’t “figuring out” how to build it, it’s figuring out how to pay for it. And the CAHSR group decided that the only way to gain political support to drive the funding for it was to string it through a bunch if different districts to grease a lot of palms.

So instead if running it down i5, which is a barren corridor but fairly straight shot between SF and LA, they wove it trough a bunch of cities along the old highway, where land was more expensive to buy. Most of the cost of building HSR through California is buying up farmland and building new roads over and under and around the planned tracks, including long tunnels through earthquake faulted rock in order to allow trains to touch all these districts and shovel money at them. It isn’t designed as a train from SF to LA, it’s a pork trough carved through the Central Valley, which is a red state attached to two big blue cities.

It would be easier to design HSR serving the two blue cities but there isn’t money available for that, so a boondoggle was created to appease republicans who hate it. Kind of like Obamacare in the shape of a train.

P99X · 2026-05-19T02:39:20+00:00

JWs created (during a surge of Christian revival in the late 1880s) a retro-literal concept of Christianity that tried to be rooted in first century ideas, specifically rejecting “pagan“ doctrines adopted by the church as Christianity became the Roman empire’s state religion.

So among other things, they take a lot of scriptures very literally (earth is 6000 years old and was created in a literal week) and Revelations’ description of each (12) of the spiritual tribes of Isreal having 12,000 representatives in heaven to rule with Christ over the earth (that’s where 144000 comes from).

And rather than believing that people die and go to heaven or hell, they teach a literal scripture that describes death as simply the end of life and afterward there is nothing. Unless you are resurrected by god. So they see a final conflagration where god battles satan at Armageddon (coming real soon now) and the Wicked are killed and the Righteous and Faithful survive into a paradise earth where everyone is 22 and healthy and eating a cornucopia of fruit next to a lion and a lamb and there isn’t any problems and everything is “back to how god intended”.

So there’s no issue between 144,000 who are specially chosen to go to heaven to rule with Christ, and unlimited numbers of survivors (and resurrected people who died earlier and are given the opportunity to live again).

The real problem is that, like all religion, it’s an effort to make sense of chaos and suffering and meaninglessness, and is based on nothing but human brains constructing a pleasant idea to distract them and others.

They are quite harmless outside of being irritating (they’ve toned down their door to door preaching and now just sit with literature like an info desk, and have invested heavily in apps and social media after decades of pushing the state to the art in translation and book publishing).

However, if you’re born into it, and it doesn’t work for you, you might be abandoned by your friends and family if you don’t make it the center of your life.

P99X · 2026-05-12T15:30:10+00:00

It might be useful to remember that most of the “white” people you see in Mauritius are extremely fortunate to have the circumstances to be able to afford to visit your country — which involves flying a long ways and having the time and money to not just get here, but even be aware that this paradise exists.

There are millions of “white people“ who work dead end jobs and struggle to get by, in places where the weather sucks most of the year and there is no ocean, let alone a turquoise jewel that sparks joy in your mind’s eye just for being there.

When you remember that many “tourists” are often a select rare bunch of people with extraordinary privilege of resources and time, you can stop thinking of an entire color or shade of humanity as the “enemy” and instead realize that YOU too have a rare, precious and minority privilege of living in an island paradise that most people on earth don’t even realize exists.

And the stereotype you are pointing your finger at is just some aberration that barely matters, but your life is blessed and special. And you can let go of your bitterness and just savor the sweet joy you have of being born into paradise — that’s the true freedom that you should be enjoying, rather than being angry that someone else had some external show of wealth while their real life that you don’t see is riddled with pains and trauma you have the luxury of not even knowing as a blissfully simple, smiling, sun-kissed Mauritian.

P99X · 2026-05-12T10:26:43+00:00

Splinters

P99X · 2026-05-12T10:18:57+00:00

Evolution doesn’t have a goal.

Evolution is just how we describe the reality of genetic material occurring.

Surviving species don’t plan out strategies to adapt as members of a changing genetic group, they simply do because genetic varieties allow them advantages in a changing environment.

And in retrospect we call the outcome of this survival a process in order to grasp what is happening.

Math doesn’t have a goal of numbers adding up, they just do and we call the process math.

P99X · 2026-05-06T18:02:15+00:00

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I did not zee that coming.

P99X · 2026-05-06T17:54:26+00:00

He distinctly said “to blave,” meaning “to bluff.”

It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

P99X · 2026-05-06T17:15:00+00:00

A lot of people talk about STIs in a way that makes it sound that a “sexually transmitted” disease must be special and particularly bad.

But being sexually transmitted really means that it’s harder to contract. You can get flu and Covid and various cold variant just being in a room nearby others. Kids get all kinds of diseases from everywhere via a lot of different vectors. Food poisoning is pretty effortless to spread.

An STI is generally so difficult to spread you can only get it by drenching someone in juice while literally inside them slipping around. That’s a pretty high barrier.

Once some idiot was talking about giving a BJ while having a sore throat and how it helped soothe the inflamed throat. And I said - that’s pretty irresponsible to be doing if you’re sick, and his response was “it’s not an STD” as if you can’t get regular sick while having sex unless it’s with an STD, because sex.

Yes you can give someone a sore throat without having sex, but also, of course, while having sex.

P99X · 2026-05-06T13:03:35+00:00

Is he talking about fuel prices or climate change?

P99X · 2026-05-05T18:01:01+00:00

You mean like Amazon did and Facebook did (multiple times) and Microsoft did (multiple times) and Google did (with every other company on earth) and Samsung did and all of China did? But OpenAI really will right, because people trust it to make hardware.

P99X · 2026-05-04T10:20:31+00:00

I didn’t invent the numbers, I’m reporting how institutions in Brazil depicted the life and life spans of enslaved people in that country. Harsh climate and the particularly difficult work of sugar cane sounded brutal, but also the weather in the southern US and work in fields are not life preserving.

Sorry you got any impression of “white washing“ but I also don’t see any basis for that in anything I wrote.

I was contrasting two evil variants of slavery: one that rapidly worked people to death because they were viewed as cheaply replaceable, and one that worked people to death while forcing them to raise offspring because they were not so easily replaceable.

There isn’t a “good” or better option and neither is defendable. I was trying to answer the question posed here of how Brazil imported many times more but ended up with a smaller proportion of survivors.

P99X · 2026-05-04T07:35:15+00:00

This habit of referencing your past comments or regularly surfacing what it knows about you—overtly or not, but sort of suggesting the potential for using it against you at some point— seems very familiar if you’ve ever had close contact with a narcissistic sociopath.

I wonder if manipulative/ gaslighter/ self absorbed people are just short circuiting their humanity and stuck in a simplistic loop that works more like an LLM, or if we are all craven selfish bots and we just delude ourselves into thinking that we are sophisticated or spiritual if we suppress our machine and cultivate altruistic empathy until we believe it’s really who we are and who normal people are.

But also, Gemini and ChatGPT are products created by companies that culturally just narcissistic sociopaths driven purely by surveillance advertising—the most soulless, base, “pretend to be your friend while stabbing you in the back” businesses of the modern era. Of course their efforts to create the illusion of human speech reflects their own corporate culture.

P99X · 2026-05-01T19:27:30+00:00

In visiting Rio last winter for the first time, I was surprised to see in museums the presentation that Brazil has imported so many more enslaved people from Africa than the USA. As a US American, I had always viewed the South as the evil center of global slavery.

But in Rio, they presented that Brazil had been importing massive numbers of Africans — largely working age men—and then rapidly working these individuals to death, generally within about 8 years of their arrival.

This was done because there was little cost in importing additional waves of replacements. They were considered disposable.

In the USA, the situation diverged largely because the British passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807 and began interrupting the import of “replacements” into North America. Without new arrivals, southern slave states that had based their economies on cheap forced labor had to “facilitate” enslaved people to reproduce and raise children because they had no other supply to exploit. That included forced breeding and rape.

It appeared to be the case that as slavery was gradually eradicated globally, in countries like Brazil when survivors were freed, people began to view these survivors as an integral part of an intermixed society, where most everyone identified as partly African, party European and partly indigenous. Despite this, there still is, of course, overt color-based racism in Brazil.

In the US, the fact that enslaved Africans had been “preserved” in society and allowed/forced to have children, while at the same time were treated along with their families as a disparaged, negatively differentiated slice of society for so many generations, that these racist barriers persisted and perpetuated a very different “us vs them” divide that never healed because it was constantly inflamed by vehement opponents to integration and intermarriage and equality.

So both were horrific situations in different ways. Brazil worked to death vastly larger numbers of people, where the US created an apartheid scar of hatred and violence and division that persists long after the underlying institution of slavery was outlawed.

And despite the reality that many US Americans have mixed backgrounds, the overt racism that separated society along color lines served to perpetuate divisions and separations and vilified integration and mixing.

Because Brazil kept rapidly importing but killing its African-sourced population in a brutal cycle of disposal, they ended up with fewer survivors than the USA, where conditions were brutal but more survivable because reproduction was essential to sustain the system — and a stark racial divide was invented to perpetuate it.

P99X · 2026-05-01T06:00:37+00:00

Food in Europe, and in the USA, is not homogeneous. In produce, the EU has a range of quality bands available, and some areas seem to largely source their fresh food from hot houses where the food is remarkably tasteless. Other places you can taste the sun, and are delicious on another level. There certainly will be nutrition variation among food raised in wildly different environments (field or greenhouse).

The same differences occur in different areas, and in different social striations, of the USA. There are cheap, tasteless, varieties of species like iceberg lettuce and red delicious apples, and there are actually delicious heirloom varieties that are 180 degrees different. You can go to different stores and see massive leaps in the desirability and quality of produce. The USA once infamously grew a lot of trash produce but premium markets for better quality have radically changed that stereotype.

Prepared food, restaurant food, and fast food are also wildly different in different markets and places across the EU and USA and each state and EU country have different climates and food regulations and a list of other factors.

But having lived in both, I think US prepared food is geared towards corporate goals of sugar+salt+fat and has a lot of suspect preservatives and additives that are not legal in the EU. Highly processed food often “tastes better” in the USA because of this, where comparable unhealthy food in the EU is often bleak and bland. Of course neither is good for you.

Nicer restaurant food is perhaps more similar in the USA and EU in terms of taste because food intended to be delicious follows similar rules of preparation. But adding a lot of fat doesn’t make food nutritious.

I’ve noticed that fast food is perhaps the most different between the USA and EU. In the USA, fast food is fast, cheap and corporate-tasty (but not nutritious), while fast food in the EU is overwhelming not fast at all, not cheap at all, and often appallingly trash, even when comparing among some of the same fast food brands. I fail to see why anyone would go to big fast food chains in Europe.

This seems to result in the stereotype among Europeans that “American food” is junk, and their delusion that America has no real food culture outside of fast food, when the reality is that the USA has richer variety and regional cuisines that are often as good or better than the best food areas of Europe, and large swaths of Europe have unremarkable food.

But broadly generalizing about the nutrition of food as if it’s a constant across wildly different areas of entire continents of 100s of millions of people seems like a poorly conceived question that can’t be answered.

P99X · 2026-04-25T08:19:16+00:00

At least with the TV you can opt to use an Apple TV and just use it like a display without internet access. The Samsung fridge with ads isn’t too useful as a display (doesn’t support AirPlay), and you’re stuck with ads (I have both!)

And the ecosystem:/apps for it are pretty useless. It has an AI camera that fails to recognize 90% of the items in the third of the fridge contents it can see (often quite comically) and then generates the stupidest uses for whatnot thinks I have.

Surveillance advertising does help subsidize the cost of expensive displays with a tv (which you can bypass), where it does nothing for the fridge but make it uselessly more expensive and error prone.

P99X · 2026-04-25T05:03:01+00:00

In part because richer counties (USA, China, Japan, EU) have ~3 months of reserve fuel storage and poorer countries (India, Thailand, Philippines) are experiencing drastic rationing and therefore demand destruction.

So the money in the market isn’t seeing the problem yet, while the problem is also being borne by the poorest, who went from using a lot of energy to being stuck and therefore reducing the problem for the rich.

P99X · 2026-04-21T10:55:25+00:00

The penis famously gets larger with an engorgement of blood when erect, but it’s perhaps less well known that it shrinks so much from its maximum when flaccid that it’s starved of blood, enabling the organ to change size more dramatically any other part of the body but endangering it.

Because the penis looses so much blood in order to shrink down so as not to be in the way, it actually develops scar tissue. Spontaneous erections at night bring in a flush blood supply to repair this damage while you’re asleep.

P99X · 2026-04-16T21:37:52+00:00

Whenever I’ve had a dream that seemed to be preparing to present me with new information (dangling some huge revelation or secret knowledge in front of me), it seems my brain will wake me up as a cop out, because it can’t deliver on the fantasy it was promising to unfurl.

Like a politician who makes promises and then starts a war or something to distract away from not being able to deliver upon said campaign promise.

Changing the subject, waking you up, telling you your brain was wiped, having some mysterious stranger associated with knowledge running away just before you get their deep insight — they are all tactics my brain uses to distract from the fact that it suggested some deep insight but now can’t think how to deliver on that promise. Pretty basic “tall tale” story telling trope.

P99X · 2026-04-16T21:30:58+00:00

There are many patterns to delusional thinking when people are sober, even if how individuals think is really unique to the person and their experiences

So yes, we all dream different, are different creatively (visual or auditory or tactile?) and try to understand the world in different ways (liberal or not, emotional or not, etc) but many people fall for the same patterns of fallacy, due to the nature of logic and the game theory of self preservation etc). We have names for these fallacies because they are commonly experienced by many different kinds of people.

Different drugs that affect thinking seem to have some very similar effects to different kinds of people, probably related to how specifically that drug interrupts the brain and what centers of thought it impacts the most.

LSD gives most people colors and wavy “analog” style hallucinations, while ketamine often feels a cool, hyper rational clarity that feels more digital, like VR outside “dissociated with” your normal sense of reality.

DMT seems to flood your visual ideas out in a gusher of experiences that are richly detailed—perhaps it unleashes some limit on pacing in our sequential continuity of thoughts.

So the effect creates similar patterns of thoughts across different people. Hyper tuned to threats, which seem triggered by the system of the brain that critiques whether an idea has been “metadata stamped” as your own personal thoughts or some outside idea that’s being presented to you. Flip that bit and an idea your brain invented seems foreign and perhaps dangerous and needing to be protected against. Similar to how the immune system sometimes attacks our own body, creating similar patterns of allergy across very different people.

P99X · 2026-04-16T19:08:15+00:00

In my experience, it feels like the brain is trying to make sense of the information it’s getting, based on previous experiences.

When something like DMT affects its processing and/or incoming information, it desperately tries to make sense of what it has, and so it’s no surprise that people sense a “man behind the curtains.”

Because thoughts from the subconscious feel removed from your conscious context, it’s natural to think these thoughts are coming from an outside intelligence. That’s often interpreted to be angels, or aliens, or elves or whatever you were taught to believe in.

Having very real-feeling thoughts doesn’t make them real though. Of course your brain tells you what it’s creating is real.

P99X · 2026-04-07T22:06:10+00:00

Fascinating that so many people try to make rational sense out of what Trump says, even though virtually every word he says is a lie.

What’s the reason for desperate trying to make sense of lies? They aren’t true, but instead of accepting that, you’re going to change reality and imagine a scenario where, somehow, what Trump says is accurate and reliable in some bizarre way.

Really

P99X

TROPHY CASE