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Patrick Atwater

@patwater

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Patrick Atwater pfp
Patrick Atwater
@patwater
“*We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. All you have is what you are, and what you give.*“ ~ Ursula LeGuin
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Wow the 19th century was weirder and wilder then one could possibly imagine From 1848 revolutions to US Reconstruction!!!!! """ Carl Schurz captured the venom that suffused American social relations in the conquered South in an incident that took place in a Savannah hotel. Schurz was a German émigré and refugee from the failed European revolutions of 1848. He had settled in Missouri and become a general in the Union army. He knew what it meant to lose a revolution, and he knew that defeat did not necessarily change minds. He was in 1865 a Radical, sent to the South by the president to report on conditions there.
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Where is the cozy Web protocol so that one can easily update different groups of friends and family about life stuff
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Hey, my silly blog made marginal revolution today! https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/an-open-letter-to-lin-manuel-miranda-on-the-last,-best-hope-to-save-the-republic
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
💯 "The field for inspiring visions for America and the world is wide open." 1.42 decades ago I quit my stable public finance analyst excel monkey gig and launched an indie zine via an essay contest on pioneering digitally native government operations. Results here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxXlPjHg1R6ieEt1STdYWW5Zbm8/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-89xg_AYcqJAuGRSUHrwtqg A v2.0 feels timely
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
What are the categories of apps where web3 is / will 10x better than normal web in short order? - stuff where resilience to national censorship is key aka farcaster et all - stablecoins seem to be a thing? iunno that's what old school econ folks on MR say - games? I feel like there's gotta be some sorta unlock for a meta-game with stuff unlocked across many specific games. open world rpg mechanics - are communities like cabin dao actually working? I've poked my head in there every now and then and curious to see if artists and writers and actual creatives are making use of that. - what are the areas where the eth vision of a world computer really comes into play? Basically looking for stuff where tech is a means rather than an end https://dwr.email/where-are-the-apps
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-claims-bidens-pardons-jan-6-committee-void/story?id=119877843
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
I had a little fun this morning developing* a list of questions for CA’s 2026 gubernatorial hopefuls. https://jotpy.notion.site/CA-gubernatorial-questions-1bad44b8cdc8807fa4cdc7721249bfe0?pvs=4
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Getting Av s right is are less like going to the moon and more like building Irvine
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
"Today, the Salton Sea is an eerie place. Its mirror-like surface belies the toxic stew within. Fish skeletons line its shores and the ruins of a once thriving vacation playground is a reminder of better days. But long before agricultural runoff bespoiled the Salton Sea, the lakebed it now occupies was home to a much larger body of water known as Lake Cahuilla. The lake was six times the area of the Salton Sea and once covered much of Mexicali, Imperial and Coachella valleys."
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
"After the great crash of 2008, Americans awoke and saw their country the way anti-Americans have always seen it: spendthrift, decadent, and corrupt. The city on a hill had become a mismanaged empire; the land of self-reliance was buried in debt. Our political class had run up enormous deficits at home and entangled us in never-ending military operations overseas. Our financial elites had been exposed as reckless, self-deluded speculators who had gambled away the country’s economic future and then gone begging for a bailout. And the whole mess had been made possible by middle America’s relentless appetite—for bigger houses, bigger portfolios, bigger government programs, bigger everything, and damn the long-term cost."
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Whoa https://unofficialnetworks.com/2025/03/13/skiers-jump-over-chairlift-mammoth-mountain-ski-resort/
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Feels sorta obvious that smartphones are on the way out Not sure if glasses will be what's next https://glassalmanac.com/after-announcing-the-end-of-smartphones-mark-zuckerberg-is-ramping-up-the-development-of-their-replacements/
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
What on earth So bad So dumb https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/14/elon-musk-hitler-federal-workers/82402023007/
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Where is the foundational Web3 effort to transform how cities operate? Seems like a glaringly obvious opportunity, particularly as anchor orgs like Code for America focus more on dedicated verticals like benefits programs run through the states. Slides from here: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/cfa-web-deck-5803846/5803846#4 Timely to refactor and rekindle this pioneering spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR5Zsc-YEq4
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
Are there any SOP folks here working on fire resiliency? I vaguely remember a SOP grant last year going to that space. It might have been more in the preventative burn space. This morning I caught up with a remote sensing colleague (ex NASA, ESA etc) who was personally affected by the fires. She wrote an impactful blog post about the lack of availability of remote sensing data products to see if her house was still standing during the Palisades Fire. Today we were chatting about the need for a better operationalizing existing disaster response remote sensing data protocols so that mission critical information can enable a common operational picture.
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
In my first job job in downtown LA I remember there'd be the sandwich board style crazies offering religious proclamations about how the end is nigh because of all sorts of things like practicing the sabbath on the wrong day. A few times I'd engage those folks in conversation and curiousity to understand their worldview Now it feels like those folks have all the world as their stage
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
What's the proper response to someone who says "I'm been doomscrolling" in light banter? Hmmm Maybe greetings fellow member of the near a·poc·a·lypse Or is there something wittier that riffs on various doomsday types
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Patrick Atwater
@patwater
The shock and awe approach to DOGE reminds me of similar tactics deployed in opening up Russia after the fall of the USSR and also Iraq post-Saddam """ In some ways Gorbachev’s undermining of the party, and Yeltin’s subsequent banning of it, is akin to the disastrous de-Ba’athification process the United States pursued in Iraq from 2003-2004. Rather than harness the partocrats, Gorbachev and Yeltsin set them loose, and they stole the state. Much as defenestrated Ba’athist members—including the entirety of the army, police, and intelligence services—engaged in all manner of deleterious actions, not least of which was forming armed insurgencies like ISIS.[124](https://www.cogitations.co/p/from-reform-to-ruin-in-the-ussr?r=1fn2p&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true#footnote-124-154994363) https://www.cogitations.co/p/from-reform-to-ruin-in-the-ussr?utm_medium=ios
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