Steve Kaiser

Just some guy, really. Music.🎵 Cyclones.🌪 Bikes. 🚲 Beer. 🍺 A few other random things. 💩 If you don’t like those, I’m gonna be a boring follow.

[Iowa State Men’s Basketball @CycloneMBB]

Happy Birthday to Hall of Famer, Georges Niang!

#Cyclones | #C5C

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

We are in the final stage of capitalism where global capital can’t expand or sustain past profits. It now consumes public institutions and key systems, sacrificing democracy, welfare, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and ecosystems for short-term gain.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

There is no democracy for the people under capitalism. There is only democracy for the rich (Lenin). Elections under capitalism are simply a mechanism of control for the ruling class to keep the masses divided and trapped in the very system that’s rigged against us.

[Iowa State Athletics @CycloneATH]

Happy National Mascot Day to our guy @TheMascotCy 🌪️

[Steve Kaiser @CptSuburbia]

Mercy(line)!

[Iowa State Track & XC @CycloneTrackXC]

A 61-second final lap for the 10,000m title.

🤯🤯🤯

📺ESPN2

[God @TheTweetOfGod]

The definition of a Christian is simple: a person who follows the actual teachings of Jesus Christ.

So no one, basically.

[Negan @Roger_Negan]

This

[Iowa State Athletics @CycloneATH]

100 DAYS UNTIL CYCLONE FOOTBALL IS BACK‼️

100 days until Jack Trice is rocking again 🌪️ Secure your seats before they’re gone.
🔗https://t.co/KPV5IiZZh5

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Earth @earthcurated]

In Nepal, there is a festival called Kukur Tihar where people express gratitude to dogs for their loyalty and companionship.

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

How this isn’t an immediate impeach and remove from office situation blows my mind. There isn’t a word invented in the English language for this level of pure corruption. This country is fucking cooked.

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

This sounds nice, but it's a great way to undermine the welfare state.

The strongest welfare states in the world (the Nordics) tax everyone, including nurses. And they give everyone universal healthcare, childcare, pensions, education in return.

When the middle class has skin in the game, they defend the system. When welfare is 'just for the poor', it becomes a poor program: stigmatized, underfunded, easy to gut.

That's why billionaires keep pushing this idea. The real scandal isn't that this nurse pays $12k.

It's that Jeff Bezos pays $0.

[Iowa State Track & XC @CycloneTrackXC]

❗️❗️50.08❗️❗️

Rachel Joseph crushes her 400m school record of 50.49 set yesterday to reset the facility record! Rachel is the third in Big 12 history to earn FOUR-straight 400m titles.

#CycloneSZN

[Iowa State Men’s Wrestling @CycloneWR]

.@Carrchamp ➡️ Final X

David Carr wins the World Team Trials Challenge to qualify for Final X. He'll have a best two-of-three against James Green on June 19 for a spot on the World Team 🇺🇸

🌪️🚨🌪️

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

That look you make when you taxed the rich, closed a $12 billion deficit, hired 1,000 teachers, launched free childcare, funded libraries and parks, held slumlords accountable, fixed 100,000 potholes, and built the fastest housing pipeline in city history, and some guy named Todd is still in your replies saying social policies don't help people.

[breanna 🇺🇸🇩🇪 @txgermanbre]

“Billionaires already pay more taxes than you ever will” is one of the most financially illiterate arguments on this app because it confuses nominal dollars with effective burden.

A billionaire paying $500M in taxes sounds enormous until you remember they gained $20B in asset value while doing it. The relevant metric is percentage, not raw dollars. A teacher paying 22% of a $60k salary is carrying a heavier proportional burden than someone paying 8% while their wealth compounds tax-deferred through stock appreciation.

And this “their money was already taxed” line is mostly fiction at billionaire scale.

Middle-class wealth is usually income that got taxed, then saved. Billionaire wealth is overwhelmingly unrealized appreciation. Tesla stock going vertical did not mean Elon “earned” $100B in taxable salary. The shares appreciated. Under current law, that appreciation can sit untaxed for decades, get borrowed against for liquidity, then receive stepped-up basis treatment at death that can erase the embedded gains entirely.

That is not “double taxation.” In many cases it is functionally zero taxation on the primary mechanism of wealth accumulation.

People also weirdly talk about billionaires like they emerged from the forest carrying capitalism on their backs with no public inputs involved.

Their companies rely on:
public roads
public courts
public contract enforcement
public utilities
public universities
public research grants
public internet infrastructure
public IP law
public military-protected trade routes
public education systems producing labor

The modern corporation is not built in isolation. It operates inside an enormous state-supported framework.

And no, asking whether someone should contribute proportionally to maintaining the system that enabled $100B fortunes is not “greed.” That framing is emotional theater designed to avoid discussing the actual structure of tax law.

The real debate is simple:
Should labor income be taxed continuously while massive asset appreciation can compound largely untouched for generations?

That’s the argument. Everything else is distraction.