Alias

gm

[Freddie New @freddienew]

Once again, if you hold the entirely reasonable opinion that no government should have the right to spy on you via your phone, I implore you to look into @GrapheneOS . Some off the shelf examples below.

Please also check out the Privacy Toolkit in the thread.

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@freddienew @oldspeak_books I did not (my main focus was on Joseph Conrad). However, on the strength of this, I have ordered a copy. It's high time I introduced my 7 year-old to Rider Haggard. I will share his feedback...

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@freddienew @oldspeak_books Many words of my dissertation were spent on discussing King Solomon's Mines. Happy days

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

it’s actually insane to think how when elon was 31 he made $180 million from the sale of PayPal and he could have just bought a private island and spent the rest of his life in peace, without having to work another day

instead he sacrificed basically everything trying to build the future. failed multiple times, almost went completely broke, but he kept going, spending the last 20 years building reusable rockets, electric cars, global satellite internet, AI, brain interfaces. basically the whole infrastructure for the future of civilization

just to end up in a world where people are publicly calling for his execution, and getting applauded for it

you don’t even have to like him to realize how completely fucking backwards the world has become

[L0la L33tz @L0laL33tz]

Keonne found out that is grandmother died while he was cramped up in prison, stuck in a cell for 23h a day.

Please read his newest letter.

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@haugejostein Excellent community note

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@freddienew @BitcoinTaxUK Hang on...didn't they just announce that for houses that have been unoccupied for 6+ months?

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

The UK government has, since April, spent no less than £61 billion - that’s £61,000,000,000 - on debt interest payments.

That’s equivalent to our entire annual defence budget - on just half a year’s worth of debt service costs, not paying back a penny of our national debt.

For £61bn you could build 40 state-of-the-art hospitals.

Or employ 100,000 nurses for a decade

Or fund free-at-the-point-of-use social care, across the entire UK, for three years.

Watch this short “When The Facts Change” video for more on the UK’s soaring debt interest bill - the biggest national scandal our mainstream media continues to ignore.

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@PolitlcsUK It's always those anti-social young Japanese women, right?

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@DGreenbaum lol...

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@EricBalchunas Ser...

"Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink"

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@btcjvs Can't even use my FSD in UK/ Europe. Weak

[MAZE @mazemoore]

🤣😂🤪

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@prestonjbyrne WTF?! What happened to the hamsters?

[Everett Stern @EverettStern1]

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent,

My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov.

The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.

I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.

I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.

Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.

Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.

A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.

This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.

There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.

Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.

I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.

This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.

Three things would change the math overnight.

Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.

End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.

Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.

I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.

Respectfully,

Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@JoeNakamoto Shame 🤷‍♂️

[nic carter @nic_carter]

The WSJ starting to admit the obvious: Western democracy when combined with fiscally negative immigration and a generous welfare state, inexorably creates a solvency crisis. (they didn't mention the immigration part but it's an essential ingredient in the toxic mix)

their words are unusually stark:

> It’s also a litmus test of a pressing question facing the West: Is it possible for political leaders to rein in spending on ever expanding welfare states? So far, the answer seems to be no, increasing the chances that countries like Britain are inching toward a financial reckoning.

the welfare state + open borders model is a clear democracy failure mode and there's no obvious way out. no western European nation will reform pensions or entitlements. they are actually fundamentally incapable of doing what must be done. (the immigration aspect is virtual corollary to democracy because it creates incentives for the left to import reliable voters, so at least part of the time immigration is virtually unfettered.)

the UK, with maximum, unending immigration, an aging and shrinking workforce, a tiny and overexploited base of taxpayer paypigs, highly financialized service / financial industry, a legacy of welfare as political payoffs to disenfranchised groups, an inability to cut pensions, and a stagnant, is the poster child for this disease and the worst affected but by no means the only nation in this predicament.

the UK's grim fiscal state is the future of every western nation, unless something changes dramatically.

aging population + increasingly discouraged working-age adults + highly mobile capital & elites that simply leave under onerous tax regimes + mass and unending fiscally negative immigration + expensive decarbonization and deindustralization + a left wing that is totally committed to immigration, over all else + a total inability to cut entitlements = fiscal crisis and eventual default

in the end, the wealthy and the entrepreneur class that actually power growth will simply leave to escape the tightening tax noose. the government will become increasingly reliant on the middle/upper middle professional classes who lack the ability to leave, completely eliminating any motive to be entrepreneurial or take risks. the economy will become increasingly torpid as dynamism vanishes. the left will continue to gain power due to slow electoral build of immigration and will continue to honor their side of the deal, which is neverending handouts to fiscally useless electoral client groups.

case studies like south africa, venezuela and lebanon show us that life can get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse and worse. things getting extremely bad are not a guarantee that they won't continue to get worse. don't be fooled by anticipating a sudden realization among political elites that they have employed the wrong formula. things can just get steadily worse for decades and decades with no escaping the slide.

if I had to guess, I would venture that if no MAJOR (and I'm talking _major_) political reform occurs in western Europe, the continent will enter a sovereign debt crisis in the coming decade, standards of living will collapse, life expectancy will collapse, entitlements will be ravaged. I anticipate something akin to the effect that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on the local population, or worse. politics will be polarized between the ultraright and far left, each with their own radical solution to the problem (extirpating immigrants, versus actual socialism). I don't know which of the two will prevail. neither the right nor the left is willing to reform entitlements, which is the biggest problem, and so the market will do it for them. the US may escape their fate, but I am not particularly optimistic it will. our demographics and willingness to do hard things (on immigration, eg) are marginally better, but our spending and fraud-based entitlement economy is almost just as bad. no major party will even contemplate uttering that boomer luxury communism must end eventually. it's not even a topic in the midterms nor will it be in '28.

the productivity boost from AI might grant European nations a slight reprieve in the medium term, but it wont salvage their bleak fiscal situation in the end. this is because almost no European nation controls the industrial inputs to AI (beyond ASML), so their gain is limited to the productivity uplift from deployment of the technology, while they remain vassals to the nations which actually control the deeper stack. moreover, a GDP and tax revenue boost from AI can easily be outspent. these nations have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. they can always dream up utterly farcical new handout schemes, like the UK's "motability". additionally, while AI creates a legion of highly productive entrepreneurs, they will all tax optimize and the benefits of new firms will largely not be captured by their respective governments. capital and startups are more portable than they have ever been. AI simply accelerates the pareto-ization of the economy whereby a shrinking minority of founders produces more value whilst more and more are idle and depend on handouts from the productive few. however, capital and human capital mobility destroys this fragile arrangement and strips the idle many of their benefactors. AI buys Western Europe at most a few years of delay to the inevitable crisis.

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@benjamincowen I think it depends on how they express that opinion.

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@narindertweets This is exactly the right take! Agree

[Alias @InSeedTime]

@HesterPeirce You will be greatly missed