Chris McKenzie

Agile developer and Objectivist living and working in downtown Seattle. I've been called the Marie Kondo of Software Engineering.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Let's add the part you deliberately left out, Senator since math is not your strong suit.

The cap is $184,500. Above it, the 12.4% stops, on both the worker and the employer. You want to "scrap" that and tax every dollar. So here's the math you skipped:

A two-income household, say a veteran engineer married to a pharmacist, or two experienced electricians running a small contracting business, pulling in $300,000 between them would pay 12.4% on the extra ~$115,000. That's about $14,000 more per year, every year, for life. Half lands on the employer, raising the cost to employ people, which holds wages down for everyone below.

Now the part that exposes the whole scam. Social Security has a benefit cap too. The most anyone collects retiring at full age in 2026 is $4,152/month, no matter how much they pay in. Earnings above the cap don't add a single dollar to your benefit.

So you're not asking them to "invest" more. You're forcing them to pay in thousands more and get nothing back. Money confiscated, never returned.

This was always a Ponzi scheme, not a retirement account. No invested savings, no return tied to what you paid. Just today's workers taxed to pay today's retirees, surviving only while each generation outnumbers the last.

You don't fix that fraud by enlarging it. You stop forcing people into it.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

@bkheywood Once the basic principles are understood, it could be condensed into "The Law," and taught as "Economics in One Lesson." Brilliant!!!

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

@JamesTate121 Join me in opposing all subsidies for any company for any reason.

[Connor Boyack 📚 @cboyack]

Subsidized industries get worse. Regulated industries get slower. Protected industries get lazier.

Then politicians demand more subsidies, regulations, and protections to fix the problems.

[Orcbrand's Kojimaic Matters @kojimaicmatters]

Believing that "people wouldn't do crimes if their basic needs were met" while also believing that "greedy rich people are stealing from everyone" never registers to the people who say this shit as inherently contradictory.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Socialists love the sound of spending but seem remarkably indifferent to results.

Imagine ordering a pizza, never receiving it, then being told the solution is to pay more for another promise.

That's how they evaluate government. The spending is the achievement. Delivery is optional.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

He uses language well, but he's a terrible writer.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

George R.R. Martin tracked 8 viewpoint characters in the first book. By the fifth he was tracking 31. The reason book six never ships is hiding in that jump.

Every POV is a piece of state that has to stay consistent: where the character is, what they know, what day it is, who they've crossed paths with. 8 characters give you 28 possible pairings to keep straight. 31 give you 465. The bookkeeping doesn't grow in a line. It grows with the square of the cast.

He hit the wall in 2005. What became A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons was one novel he had to split by geography, Westeros in one volume and Essos in the other, because he could no longer interleave the timelines into a single thread. That's sharding a story because the monolith stopped compiling.

Martin named the worst piece himself: the Meereenese knot. Several characters converging on one city, each arriving at a different time, each chapter depending on the order of the others. He worried at it for six years and finally cut it by adding a new viewpoint to cover the gaps. Untangling it only widened the surface he then had to resolve in the next book.

Now run the other side of the ledger. The show aired its ending in 2019, to a fan revolt. His net worth sits near $120M, with royalties and HBO money landing every year whether or not the book exists. Two spinoffs are filming right now and want his hours. Finishing carries one near-certain outcome: getting measured against a finale fans despised, on plot threads he's publicly said he can't untie. The wait since 2011 has already passed the 15 years it took to write the first five.

The sprawl of viewpoints is what made Westeros feel like a real place with no center. It's also the thing he now has to resolve by hand, at 77, for almost no money he doesn't already have. He calls the book the curse of his life. The curse was the architecture.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Notice how he doesn't explain a single problem.

He doesn't explain how anyone was harmed.

He doesn't explain how the wealth was acquired.

He doesn't explain why unequal outcomes are unjust.

He just points at success and hopes ignorance, resentment, and envy fill in the blanks.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

I didn't get poorer.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

The 500 richest people on the globe added $336 billion to their fortunes on Monday, bringing their collective net worth to a record $13.3 trillion.

Read that back.

Our problem isn’t an issue of resources.

Our problem is ever-expanding wealth inequality.

[Brian Heywood - That Damn Mormon @bkheywood]

Bob hates free speech
Warning TLDR

1) Woah shocker, the handpicked WA Supreme Court who has already shown a very loose at best affinity for the WA State or US constitution ruled in favor of the Governor who picked several of them

2) Classic case of virtue signaling pretending to protect free speech while actually imposing such heavy burdens on reporting that it (intentionally i believe) significantly restricts free speech

3) In case you haven’t followed this, Bob Ferguson as AG, implemented reporting requirements on political ads on Meta (and other Socials ). the requirements were both onerous and required Meta to divulge proprietary information. As a result Meta “voluntarily” began refusing all political advertising

4) this has the (again intended) result that new candidates with no name recognition have a much harder time getting their message out against incumbents who have both the power of office as well as the ability to shovel tax payer money to constituents - Oh you know things like sending out tuna checks with your name (looking at you oh virtuous and righteous Bob Ferguson) on the check or i don’t know, say sending out checks for utilities to offset the devastating affects of the CCA (looking at you Jay Inslee) right before an initiative to repeal the CCA and then telling voters that if they vote down the CCA there will be no more checks next year….

Bob’s actions and his brag post below perfectly demonstrate the perfidy of this union sock puppet weasel pretending to be a governor….

It also demonstrates why the 5 WA state Supreme Court justice races this year are so important… get informed and vote

[Sally Pipes @sallypipes]

Mark Cuban is right about one thing: Medicare for All falls apart the moment it leaves the spreadsheet.

As I wrote recently in @Forbes, government-run healthcare systems in Canada and the U.K. are plagued by rationing, shortages, and months-long waits for care. A healthcare system is successful when patients can actually get care. Medicare for All fails that test.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

@mcuban ntm if the govt pays then we've just moved the problem--now instead of the employer being the customer over the patient, the govt is the customer over the patient. This is not an improvement for the patient.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

@mcuban My take:
1. Give individuals better tax breaks than employers to pay for their own insurance.
2. Employers remit insurance spend as salary if the emp is carrying their own insurance.
3. Remove restrictions on carriers selling across state lines

Make the patient the customer.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

It's great at equitable distribution--you keep what you *earn.* It's also great a social cohesion--people work together *voluntarily*.

[EDOSE✨ @iam_biglad1]

Capitalism is good at creating material wealth , but pretty bad at equitable distribution. It is also bad at creating a system that creates social cohesion.

[Chris McKenzie @ISuperGeek]

@omgsidewalks But those mean the same thing.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

I appreciate the direct response, Congressman @RoKhanna. You've raised a real question, so let me answer it seriously.

You're partly right, and I'll grant it fully: the Founders who established a government to protect individual rights performed an achievement no inventor can match, because they built the precondition for every other achievement. Jefferson and the framers created the framework of liberty. Lincoln preserved it and extended its promise to those wrongly denied it. On that we agree. The statesman who secures freedom is a hero of the highest order.

But notice the distinction that matters. Those men are great precisely to the degree they protected liberty, not to the degree they exercised power. The Founders' greatness was in handing power back. Lincoln's was in ending a violation of rights, slavery, the gravest in our history.

That is why FDR doesn't belong with them. He did the opposite. He expanded the state at the expense of the freedom the Founders secured: seizing gold under threat of prison, attempting to pack the Court, building the apparatus that treats your earnings as the government's to allocate. He used power; he didn't restrain it.

And here is the deeper point. You frame it as Rockefeller and Musk versus the statesmen, as if they compete. They don't. The statesman's whole purpose is to protect the conditions, namely individual rights, in which the producer can create.

The Founders, along with Locke and Aristotle, built the house. Musk, Rockefeller, Bezos, and Vanderbilt are examples of what free men do inside it.

If you fully understood the principle of individual rights, you would be fighting against men and women like Warren, AOC, Sanders, and the rest of these collectivist statists in both parties, instead of advocating ideas that deprive individuals of the very rights you claim to honor.

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The socialist definition of fairness is fascinating:

Getting rich through voluntary trade is exploitation.

Taking from someone because they're rich is justice.

A philosophy that can't distinguish trade from theft has no business lecturing anyone about fairness.

[Austen Allred @Austen]

Somebody has to be the richest person on the planet.

The fact that it’s the guy who popularized electric cars, made rockets reusable, and is working on curing blindness and paraplegia as a side quest seems fair to me.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

Maybe the lesson here is not to study economics via a children’s board game.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.

SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.

Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.

The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.

Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.

Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.

Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.

Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.

We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.