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Tech Fixes Things I regret to inform you that the journos are at it again. And this time they threatened our vendors. Of course, it didn’t work, because their power has fallen off a cliff...but a journo tried it anyway, and I thought you should know about it. However, before we get into all that, let me give some context. I, along with thousands of other people around the world, am now building startup societies outside blue control. Why? I can explain with one picture: 👆This is what blue governance looks like. Five minutes away from where I once lived, a rampaging mob of hundreds of criminals lit stolen cars on fire for hours — and the police did nothing. The reason they did nothing is because Democrats like the oligarch Laurene Powell Jobs, owner of the Atlantic, helped abolish the police. Scenes like this are now common in Blue America. You can be stabbed on the street, set on fire, pushed in front of a train, or shot in the back...and it's just a commonplace occurrence. Indeed, if you bring this up, some will call you soft! They’ll say the toxic soot of burning cars, the feces, the syringes, the violent drug addicts, the filthy streets, the random assaults…the constant stress and all the health consequences that come with that...that’s just life in a big Democrat city. You just have to accept that tradeoff. OK. But suppose we chose a different tradeoff? Suppose we instead moved to an uninhabited location thousands of miles away, to fix it up and make it our own, with our own peaceful internet community? Suppose we used the Internet to reopen a fractal frontier, with pockets of freedom all around the world? Well, then some Democrats will attack you for opting out, because they fear anyone exiting their control. And that brings me to the present day. The Journo That Failed As I mentioned, we’re building a startup society in Southeast Asia, literally as far away from Blue America as is possible on the surface of the earth. Nevertheless, several months ago, a Democrat journo named Ali Breland was paid by the Democrat oligarch Laurene Powell Jobs to write a hit piece on us — because Democrats simply do not want anyone to entertain the idea of life outside blue control. Now, Ali’s normal MO is to accuse everyone from Elon to Telegram of secret bigotry. But he can’t easily do that to another brown guy like me. So instead he settled on spreading rumors about our facility being secretly unhealthy. Unfortunately for him, our members know journos are evil, so they told us what he was doing. And so we blew up his fake story on the tarmac with a professional opinion from a top Singapore-licensed firm who maintains the facilities of everyone from Amazon to Netflix to Singapore’s Ministry of Health itself. You can read the full details here. Now Ali had a problem, because he’d invested literally months of his life in a story he saw vaporized before his eyes. You see, the way journos write a story is like Mad Libs: 👆They pre-write who the villain is (namely you), and who the hero is (always them), and then they find other Democrats (because their sources are also all Democrats) to quote. But Ali wasn’t getting the quote he wanted. So he decided to force the issue. And that’s when he made the fateful decision to threaten our vendor: The overall narrative here is fake, as we'll see; Ali has never visited the campus, and neither has his Democrat "expert", so they have absolutely zero numerical data and are operating off complete hearsay. But note also the tone of the second email! This paid agent of the billionaire oligarch Laurene Powell Jobs is threatening a firm on the other side of the world with negative coverage unless they give him the fake quote he wants. But this kind of thing just doesn’t fly in Singapore. Remember, Lee Kuan Yew created one of the most based societies in the world, where they execute drug dealers, cane criminals, and prosecute Western media corporations for defamation. So, the Singaporean founder of the firm instead did a delightful video with me, which you'll see below in a second, and we prepared a rebuttal to Ali’s moronic narrative together. Before we get there though, let me establish one key point of context first: tech fixes things. Tech Fixes Things Tech fixes things, and journos destroy things. We can see this from Atlantic owner Laurene Powell Jobs' career, as her life's work involves destroying American cities: And we can also see this from Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg's career, as his life's work involves destroying foreign cities: Moreover, we can contrast what journalists do to what technologists do. Elon is the best of us, and his career is about going from scraps of rubble to the SpaceX chopsticks catch, from gas-powered autos to electric cars, and from Twitter censorship to X's freedom: In our own small way, that's our goal with startup societies too: to fix things. That's why every class of our recruits is sent the following email, which says in big letters FRONTIER, NOT FANCY: That is: we intentionally warned people off who wanted luxury, because we prize editability. Every single person who comes even signs a contract to this effect stating that they are well aware that what we're building together is frontier, not fancy. Because that's what a startup society is. Just like a startup company, or a startup currency, not every single thing will work on day one. Real estate development is like software development. If you're taking over an mostly uninhabited island, yes, at times it will be a bit of a fixer-upper. That is the point and that is what we enjoy doing! Tech fixes things. And that's what we did. We took over the property in late September 2024 and heard there was mildew in some rooms a few weeks later. We called in specialists and went room by room to fix it, and then installed IoT maintenance equipment to make sure it stayed fixed. Shown is the before-and-after of the absolute worst room, which was an abandoned service closet on the 12th floor of a multi-million square foot property. Anyone who has done real estate development will know that there are nooks and crannies of any large building that get gnarly; in any case, we'd only taken over the property weeks before, and we quickly fixed it once we saw it: Just to emphasize the point, here's a video with me and the vendor that Ali threatened walking into this exact closet: And, as mentioned, after fixing the issue six months ago, we instrumented every room across the property with air purifiers and dehumidifiers. That gives us a log of IoT measurements showing continuously high air quality: Now, that destroys most of Ali's fake narrative. In short: we heard about a maintenance issue a few weeks into occupying our property, we fixed it immediately after hearing about it, we fixed it many months ago, we added continuous air quality monitoring, and the vendor who literally maintains the facilities for Singapore's Ministry of Health even personally confirmed both on video and in writing that the property is fine. Oh, and we did close rooms for cleaning, but in the same way that a restroom is temporarily closed for cleaning: There is only one last bit to take care of, which is Ali's invocation of a remote Yale "expert." We can take care of that with one image: Basically: the Yale "expert" was never on site, Ali was never on site, the entire story is operating off complete hearsay rather than hard data, and (obviously!) New Haven itself is an absolutely filthy city relative to the Singapore-Johor Special Economic Zone. Do you think they might fix their own homeless encampments first before opining on Southeast Asia? Sidebar: "Expert" Means Democrat Just a sidebar, Ali's attempt to invoke an "expert" who didn't do so much as make a single on-site measurement is a common journo tactic, like the Mad Libs thing. To a first approximation: all journos are Democrats, and so are all professors, so expert means Democrat, and so it's Democrat quoting Democrat. To establish this, here's the graph of journo political contributions: And here's how professors line up: That's how you get ridiculous headlines like this, where Democrat "experts" quoted by Democrat journos say Mark Zuckerberg isn't an "expert" at business: And that's why technologists know that "experts" are actually crazy people, or Democrats, or (often) both: And, most importantly, that level of ideological conformity is why all the IQ has drained out of academia and into tech. A Yale "expert" in 2025 is just much less capable on average than a VC-backed biotech founder: I mean, just the fact that this Yale "expert" commented to this journo on something where he had literally zero sensor data is part of the reason academia has such a reproducibility crisis; it's just people citing each other on vibes without ever collecting any raw data. Moreover, if Ali asked his Democrat professor whether New Haven is “unsafe for people to be around”, or whether child castration and hormone treatments are “unsafe”, or whether it was “unsafe” for Democrats to burn down black businesses during the BLM riots, he’ll get a totally different (and Democrat-approved) answer. In other words, this whole charade has nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with ideology. In Summary, Try Me OK. Let's just summarize the situation: Ali has no background in molecular biology (unlike me, btw!) Ali has not observed anything in person His “experts” have also not observed anything in person His "sources" were asked to leave months ago Indeed, he has no numbers or current on-the-ground data whatsoever Meanwhile, we have the following: A signed opinion from the firm that helps maintain the Singapore’s Ministry of Health’s own facilities. Before-and-after photos and videos showing that we fixed the issues months ago, and as soon as it was brought to our attention. The fact that mildew is a routine maintenance issue in the humid climate of Southeast Asia, similar to frozen pipes in Canada or sand in Dubai. The fact that I and the team have skin in the game, because we’re here physically building the society we want to live in – which is as far away from Democrat control as humanly possible. And of course, the hard instrumental record of air quality measurements from dehumidifiers and air purifiers, which is the same tool Elon used to knock down the NYT’s similar fake news story on Teslas running out of charge. In other words: hard numbers > journo rumors. At this point, it’s worth reminding Ali that in Singapore the defamation courts are plaintiff-friendly, that libelous journalists lose cases routinely, and that his pathetic attempt at intimidating a Singapore firm will not endear him to the local judiciary. Given that the oligarch Laurene Powell Jobs stiffed the Atlantic Union on its pay raises till there was labor unrest, it’s not obvious that she’d go all out to defend a reckless minion like Ali from a Gawker-style judgment rather than simply firing him and replacing Ali with AI. Remember, Gawker's estate cut its journo loose and allowed him to just get personally bankrupted by a righteously angry Thiel: : Journos learned then that there was a cost for recklessly pursuing pageviews at all cost, and that cost was a $140M judgment and personal bankruptcy. That said, it's now been ten full years since Thiel’s smashing victory. So to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, the tree of liberty may need to be refreshed from time to time with the tears of journalists. So, in summary, try me. From an NS member who's seen what Yale "experts" turned New Haven into: 👇 https://t.co/1MysCmA0D7 From a current NS member, one of our young creators: https://t.co/AcopRhktOa From an NS member who can lift heavy weights: https://t.co/YuVWMxoGcJ From an NS member who has excellent posture and has IoT air quality data: https://t.co/efjvvRw9GY