Contributing editor at Arena Magazine
San Clemente, CA
Joined May 2010
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Brian retweeted
NASA’s giant Echo satellites in the 1960s. Essentially enormous metallic balloons designed to reflect radio signals across the planet.
Brian retweeted
Bill Gates being the undisputed richest guy in the world and spending all his money on mosquito nets, versus Musk building starships and doing stuff like this pretty well sums up where we were in the first part of the century v. now.
Whitepill.
Harvard is sitting on close to $70B and for some reason never considers allowing more undergraduate students to attend. It only has ~6,600 undergraduates versus 17K at Oxford. They could double or even triple their enrollment and still retain their prestige.
We know from the Harvard admissions lawsuit that only ~30% of undergraduates are white in a country that is 60% white. And 43% of white admits were in one of four categories (athletes, legacies, donors’ children, or dean’s interest list). Maybe let more kids in based purely on merit? The university's endowment needs to be taxed punitively until they remember what their mission is supposed to be.
Harvard University’s endowment jumped to a record $68 billion bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Brian retweeted
TIL that CAD came out of the Cold War, via @bbalkus’s piece in @arenamag, “The Drawing Machine: How the United States Invented Industrial Software.”
The Soviets tested an atomic bomb in 1949, the Pentagon had no way to track their bombers in real time, and MIT’s answer (Lincoln Lab, SAGE, the TX-2 computer) eventually produced Sketchpad, the ancestor of every CAD program. War efforts have historically produced the tools the rest of society uses a generation later, the current defense and industrial buildout will be no different.
In 1972, Ben Rich, who would go on to run Lockheed’s Skunk Works (its advanced R&D group), wrote a memo calling computers a scourge of the industry because he thought they made engineers lazy and blunted expertise. A few years later one of his own engineers wrote a program called Echo 1 to predict radar cross-section, and Skunk Works used it to design the prototype for the F-117 stealth fighter.
Similar claims of builder laziness have followed agentic engineering tools as they’ve spread over the past few years. But the expertise moves with the tools rather than disappearing. People become experts at a task, encode that expertise in software, then move on to becoming experts at the next one, and the loop repeats.
Brian retweeted
The future belongs to whoever builds the machines that design machines.
In @arenamagdotcom, Fellow @bbalkus traces CAD from Cold War air defense to Bezos’s push for an “artificial general engineer," and outlines why China wants to get there first.
arenamag.com/articles/the-dr…
Brian retweeted
Does a nation, its laws, its institutions, its economy, its rulers… owe special favor to the well-being of its own people over that of the rest of the world?
Simplest test of political legitimacy imaginable. And yet many, even on the nominal right, can’t pass it.
Brian retweeted
Obviously true. I believe in Fullback Nationalism.
How Republicans decided it's okay to hate South Asians theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
Excited to see my latest article published in Arena today. Whoever can build the machines that can design machines stands a good chance of winning the future.
Despite its foundational role in modern manufacturing, the core mechanics of CAD have not fundamentally changed since 1988. That was the year the aptly named Parametric Technology Corporation released the first commercial CAD program featuring parametric modeling. Parametric modeling lets an engineer define the relationships between the parts of a design, so that changing one element automatically updates everything that depended on it. CAD systems remain stuck at the level of capturing geometric intent rather than functional design intent. They can generate a geometric model, but cannot reason about whether an engineering design is correct, optimal, or even physically coherent.
This stagnation matters because CAD sets the clock speed of all physical innovation downstream of it. Design iteration for advanced manufacturing is only as fast as an engineer can encode shapes, run them through multiple separate analysis tools, interpret the results, and manually re-encode.
@bbalkus's The Drawing Machine in Arena Issue 009: Hello, World
Brian retweeted
Just as all knowledge-making institutions are reaching historic nadirs of trustworthiness and competency, a technology arrives—virtually overnight—to completely usurp their authority and make them obsolete in almost every way.
You will appreciate the blessings of AI soon enough.
I was just thinking about this article. Nearly five years on, the bifurcation thesis still holds.
Ukraine-war commentary tends to break between those who see it as ruinous for Russia or Europe. This 2022 Palladium mag piece reminds us that it might be terrible for both. — Russia is weakened as a seller of energy & defence; & Europe is diminished as a buyer.
@palladiummag
Brian retweeted
Does anyone remember this amazing story? On July 2, 1982, a truck driver from California flew 16,000 feet into the sky in a lawn chair. Larry Walters, 33, from San Pedro, had dreamed of flying his whole life. He bought 42 eight-foot helium weather balloons, tied them to a regular Sears lawn chair, strapped on a parachute, packed a BB gun to pop balloons to descend, a CB radio, sandwiches, and a six-pack of beer.
He expected to float a few hundred feet above his backyard. He cut the rope and shot up like a rocket — to 16,000 feet. He drifted directly into the main approach path for LAX. Two airline pilots radioed the tower: they had just passed a man in a lawn chair holding a gun at 16,000 feet. For 45 minutes, he floated over Los Angeles, freezing cold, too scared to shoot balloons because he might fall. Finally, he started popping balloons one by one and slowly descended.
He landed tangled in power lines in Long Beach, California, causing a blackout. When police arrested him, they asked why he did it. He said, "A man can't just sit around." The FAA fined him $4,000. He became a national folk hero — Lawnchair Larry — and inspired the movie Up.
The Chinese are absolutely doing this.
“China launched an information operation known to researchers as Dragonbridge, which flooded social media platforms with posts raising environmental concerns about rare-earth mining and processing. In July 2022, the FBI issued warnings about Chinese influence operations aimed at tribal, business, and political leaders.”
palladiummag.com/2022/08/08/…
Brian retweeted
One of the coolest uses of a text effect that I’ve seen in a long while. Bravo @hermeuscorp!
Brian retweeted
We as a country should not allow Boeing to discontinue the 747. It is the most beautiful jetliner.
Brian retweeted
In his debut for the New Outlook, @Daniel_Bring writes on the permitting regime ended American energy dominance.
America produced 60% of the world's oil at the outset of WWII and supplied 85% of Allied wartime demand.
Then, in 1970, we decided the question was no longer where you can't build, but whether you can build at all.
Brian retweeted
Air Force opened its football practice with low passes from an F-16 flown by the team's former fullback Nate Walker, now a fighter pilot 🇺🇸
Brian retweeted
$200B/y or $2T/10y. Seemingly no segment of the Democratic coalition is seriously thinking through fiscal constraints and/or how their competing priorities interact with one another.
Brian retweeted
Samo Burja on why America should hand 50,000 green cards to Europe's best young engineers:
"What I would honestly do, and this is politically completely impossible, is run Operation Paperclip Maximizer. Give 50,000 green cards to German engineers and tell them, you can come work here for 150,000 euros, and that's big money in Germany, and extremely cheap here. Then those high-precision engineers could be employed at US companies that would scale."
"It's not gonna be in US-allied nations, because all of those companies are super old. The one exception is South Korea. Japanese companies are dominated by the old, German companies are dominated by the old. The CEO of Rheinmetall mocked drone production in Ukraine as if it's something housewives assemble in their spare time. That's not the kind of attitude where the young engineers get to do the cool stuff."
"If we let that talent from Europe, and frankly Japan, an immigration opportunity directly targeted at entire industrial verticals, to just take them en masse and bring them here, US companies would make very good use of them."
"We do have some US talent, but it takes players like Elon, and he'd have to prioritize. Tesla would need a capital injection and would need to prioritize its humanoid robots over its cars, and then I'd totally believe it could do that. But why do that when you can still make the cars even better, keep your share in China, and eat up the remainder of the legacy car companies here in the US?"
"I think every car in the US basically should be a Tesla based on fundamentals today. I think it should be the iPhone of cars."
@SamoBurja @bismarckanlys