Dubz

[Syd Steyerhart @SydSteyerhart]

Everyone tells me that Elon Musk is a fascist because he could "solve world hunger" for a mere 3 billion dollars, but MacKenzie Bezos has burned through 26 billion dollars of her ex husband's money and accomplished absolutely nothing of note.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

The fact that orbital compute is (soon) the most efficient way to build datacenters says a lot about how much excessive regulation has harmed progress on earth.

It’s more efficient to fly to outer space than to try and build on land.

Freedom is always on the frontier.

The U.S. constitution was a breakthrough in that it protected citizens from tyrannical government. What it missed, and what we should try to integrate into the next constitution (on Mars, special economic zones, etc), is restraint against unchecked growth of regulation and government spending.

I’ve been slowly collecting proposals for how that could work. Might do a post on it at some point.

[🕊️ @lichthauch]

God honors his favorites by crushing them, drops the whole insufferable wretched weight of purpose on their spines until they either snap into shape or snap entirely. the unburdened, those buoyant grinning vapid little phantoms drifting through their own lives without a single crushing thing to carry, they are forgotten

[LayoffHedge @LayoffAI]

THE U.S. HAS 3X MORE IMMIGRANTS THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON EARTH.

1 of 6 immigrants on the planet live here. No other major developed nation comes close.

The outcome is clear: the U.S. absorbs a disproportionate share of global migration & ~9/10 new jobs go to them right now.

[Patrick Byrne @PatrickByrne]

Assume Pratt's support in that precinct = 1%.

Odds of going Z ballots with no Pratt vote:

Z =
1: 99%
2: 99%^2 = 98.01%
3: 99%^3 = 97.03%
4: 99%^4 = 96.05%
.
.
.
24,000: 99%^24,000 = 1.75659 × 10⁻¹⁰⁵

= .[105 zeros followed by] 17%

"So you're saying there's a chance?"😂🤣

[🇯🇵SAIGOU🇯🇵郷田剛士🇯🇵 @oidonhagouda]

Bro, let’s stop pretending.

Muslims make up about 25% of the entire world’s population — over 2 billion people across 50+ countries.

Japanese people? About 1.4% of the world. One single country.

Shinto exists only in Japan.

So when people say “Japan should prioritize minorities and be more accommodating to Islam,” who exactly are we talking about?

The global majority is coming to one of the world’s smallest ethnic and religious groups and demanding that Japan change its culture, food, and traditions for them.

That’s not “protecting minorities.” That’s the majority trying to colonize a tiny minority.

Japan has every right to protect its own people and culture first.

If Muslims want to live under Islamic rules, they already have dozens of countries where they can do that. They don’t need to come to Japan and turn it into another one.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America, a stranger will rename you in a single breath, and you are simply expected to come when called.

I went to eat at a busy restaurant. A young man at the front asked for my name, to mark my place in line. I gave it the weight it has carried for eight hundred years.

"Nobunaga."

He smiled, nodded, and wrote it down with great confidence. Then he read it back to me, to be sure he had honored it correctly.

"Perfect. Banana, party of one."

Banana. He had heard my name, held it a moment, and returned to me something rounder and more cheerful. To refuse the name a host gives is to refuse his welcome. I bowed. I was Banana now.

Then he handed me a small black disc, said it would "light up and buzz" when my table was ready, and turned to the next guest as though he had not just placed a living thing in my hands.

I held it in both palms, the way one holds a small sleeping beast that may wake. I found a place to stand. I waited, ready.

It woke.

It screamed. It flashed red. It leapt and shook in my hands like a captured spirit demanding release. A lesser man would have dropped it. I did not. I gripped it, steady, looked into its blinking lights, and told it, in a low voice, that its time had come. Then I carried it back to the host with both hands, the way one returns a hawk to its master.

He took it without looking and shouted across the entire room.

"BANANA! Party of one, your table's ready!"

A hundred strangers turned. I rose. I crossed that floor as Banana, spine straight, chin level, a man answering to his name. A child pointed at me. I gave the child a small bow. He had recognized me.

All through the meal they kept me. "How's it tasting, Banana?" "More water, Banana?" The check, when it came, said Banana, and thanked me for visiting. By the end the whole staff knew me. They waved as I left. "Night, Banana!"

So tell me honestly.

For eight hundred years my clan answered to one name. Tonight I answered to a fruit, calmed a screaming relic in my bare hands, and ate among people who were glad I came.

When the little disc lights up, is the table truly mine, or am I only keeping it warm for the next Banana?

Because I have already decided to return on Friday, and to ask, very humbly, for the same disc.

[Milton Friedman Quotes @MiltonFriedmanW]

Milton Friedman: “Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax.”

“If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or borrowing.”

[Dubz @GoDubz]

If he doesn’t win, I don’t know if it will be possible for any conservatives to win there.

This is the best possible campaign anyone can run.

[LiquidZulu, most consistent mofo you know @liquid2ulu]

Anyone remember that time that Bernie tried debating a libertarian?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Your cows are putting carbon into the atmosphere."

Farmer: "Where did they get it?"

Activist: "What?"

Farmer: "The carbon. Where did the cow get it before it put it anywhere."

Activist: "From... eating?"

Farmer: "From eating grass. And where did the grass get it."

Activist: "The soil?"

Farmer: "The air. The grass pulled it out of the air last spring. The cow ate the grass. The cow breathed some of it back out. It went back into the air it came from."

Activist: "But it's still going into the atmosphere."

Farmer: "It's going back. There's a difference between a thing going somewhere and a thing going back. You've described a circle and you're frightened of it."

Activist: "Then just don't have the cow."

Farmer: "The grass still dies in autumn. It rots where it falls. The carbon goes back into the air either way, just without anyone getting fed in the middle."

Activist: "It's not that simple."

Farmer: "It's grass, cow, breath, grass. Or it's grass, rot, air, grass. Same circle, fewer dinners. If that's complicated for you I'd stay away from the water cycle. That one's got clouds in it."

[Dubz @GoDubz]

@ASaunders_PGH Other Zoos in the league felt the trade was unfair and vetoed in before bitching about it in the league chat

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Americans need to contend with how poorly liberalism is designed to handle this.

Libs simply cannot bring themselves to admit that the relationship between a Chinese citizen (or diaspora) and the Chinese Communist Party is not the same as the relationship between an American citizen and the US government.

There is no wall. There is no Constitution telling the state it cannot compel the individual.

In China the individual exists to serve the Party. We wrote the opposite into our founding document. Government cannot force your speech, your allegiance, or your silence.

But liberalism’s one non-negotiable commandment is: Thou shalt not notice cultural or political differences

Especially if noticing them might make you sound mean and do mean things such as pass an exclusionary law.

So we’re told we must pretend every Chinese immigrant or student carries the exact same relationship to their government that Americans do. We must also somehow ignore the United Front Work Department’s explicit doctrine of using overseas Chinese as instruments of influence. We must treat espionage, propaganda, and infiltration as isolated “bad apples” instead of state policy.

You realize that China doesn’t have to beat us in a fair fight? It simply has to walk through the door that’s propped open with our own suicidal ideology.

Every time another Wang or Fang or CCP-linked “community leader” gets caught, the libs and progressives will shrug and do nothing. They refuse to even acknowledge the asymmetry.

Which is exactly how Beijing turns American values and systems into fatal vulnerabilities.

[Insider Wire @InsiderWire]

#BREAKING: California mayor Eileen Wang charged as an illegal Chinese agent; set to plead guilty.

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

On this day in 1794 the French Republic guillotined Antoine Lavoisier. He had named oxygen, formulated the law of conservation of mass and founded modern chemistry.

Appeals were rejected with the line "the Republic has no need of scientists."

The next day Lagrange said: "It took only a moment to cause this head to fall, and a hundred years will not suffice to produce its like."

[Dubz @GoDubz]

Perfect reframing by Balaji

[Balaji @balajis]

The US federal budget is $7 trillion.
There are 535 in the Senate and Congress.
They collectively allocate that money.
Specifically: 7000/535 = 13 billion per official.
Which means AOC is a political billionaire.
She allocates far more than any market billionaire.
Indeed she allocates ten billion liquid, per year.
A market billionaire has one billion, illiquid, per life.
So: AOC spends 10-100X what a market billionaire has.
It's not even close.
She's right about one thing, though.
AOC didn't earn the tens of billions she spends.
The state taxed that money, by force.

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

[John Tillman @JohnMTillman]

Watching @ZohranKMamdani's oafish, unprovoked attack on Ken Griffin blow up in his face in real time tells us so much about how contemporary leftism has been reconfigured by its elite practitioners.

Firstly, Mamdani is not a "have-not." He is a Bowdoin graduate, the son of a Columbia professor and an internationally celebrated filmmaker, whose path to a New York City mayoralty ran through exactly the credentialed-creative pipeline that produces most of his voters.

His base is not the working class. It is the downwardly mobile but college-educated, who were promised a particular kind of life by their degrees and are furious it didn't arrive, and who have decided the people standing between them and that life are not the radicalized professors who sold them seductive fictions or the ideologically captured universities that took their money, but a hedge fund manager in Miami.

This is what I'd call Privilege Populism. The aesthetics of class struggle, performed by people whose parents or grandparents technically already won the class struggle, but with the appropriated symbolism recast in the direction of people who won it slightly more.

It is war between the "haves" versus "have-mores," as some others have put it.

The Mamdani's inciting video, gleeful in its innumeracy about about whether a $500 million pied-à-terre tax can actually fund anything it claims to, defiant in its ignorance about the dynamic effects of such taxation on human behavior and wealth outmigration, is the genre's mature form.

Griffin's response is the part worth watching. He didn't argue or issue a statement offering a philosophical defense of capitalism. He simply pointed to his Miami construction project and said: this is the way.

Then he said the part that should make every blue-state mayor uncomfortable: that what's happening in New York is "triggering the trauma I went through in Chicago."

I watched that trauma play out for twenty years. Progressive politicians perform to excite the grievances and resentments of credentialed creatives, the productive class that subsidizes the city quietly relocates, the tax base hollows out, and the people who stay behind look at the resulting societal decline around them and misinterpret it as proof that they must vote even further to the left than before in order to improve things.

In a warped but unignorable way, liberal mismanagement of states like Illinois and New York helped nurse the conservative governance triumphs of Florida and Texas.

The Privilege Populists never figure this out, because the point is never truly to improve the lives of the "have-nots." It's to *perform* therapeutic acts of Resistance for them, on camera, against "villains" who can afford to leave and do.

[Max @minordissent]

This question misunderstand the situation. SP500 is basically just M2. maybe 2%, max 3%, of real growth. The rest is just the devaluation of dollars. There is no “exit liquidity”, the price of everything just goes up in perpetuity as more dollars added to the system chase the same amount of goods and services.