Jess

Just here to smh. Likes =\= endorsement of the writer.

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

My entire life reduced to a 3-second clip.

[Spill The Memes @SpillTheMemes]

Become Ungovernable 😂

[Sean W. Malone | That’s just, like, your opinion. @CitizenAmedia]

"Ask what barriers are preventing competition" is a piece of advice I have for literally everyone who ever wants to understand any economic issue. Particularly when you look at something and can't make sense of it at all.

I've been working with and telling stories about entrepreneurs and economic concepts for a long, long time now, and the most consistent thing I've found is that whenever somebody does something that seems crazy and you go "Why does [business] operate this way?", you need to immediately check to see what laws and policies are compelling that action.

An obvious example is health insurance that's tied to employment.

It doesn't make much sense, people complain about how it traps people in jobs they might want to leave, and thus hurts labor competition and probably contributes to lower direct wages in favor of higher "benefits".

But if you actually look into why the system works the way it does, it's not really something a business would obviously choose absent any other limitations (eg. surely an insurance company would prefer their customers to stay with them for life instead of constantly jumping from company to company whenever they change jobs).

Whenever I've investigated these kinds of situations, I have yet to find a single instance where the state didn't manipulate the market in some specific way that led to the poor outcome.

With health insurance, what happened was that in 1944 (iirc), the Office of Price Administration set wage caps and wouldn't allow companies to legally give employees raises... but the wage controls did not prevent companies from giving employees non-wage benefits like health insurance.

So for 6 years during the Great Depression and WWII, health insurance as an employment benefit just became more and more common as companies competed for workers (something anti-capitalists will falsely tell you doesn't happen). Over time, that became the norm and was eventually codified in tax laws that allow companies to write off health care coverage as a non-taxable business expense, while individuals have to buy health insurance plans with post-tax dollars (which is way, way more expensive in real terms).

These incentives have continued to apply to businesses for the last 80 years, and that bad policy led to more and more bad policies stacked on top of each other -- all of which ensconced employer-based health insurance and made the overall cost of insurance more expensive while putting an extra burden on sole-proprietor businesses and contractors while making changing jobs a more risky proposition for people at the margin.

I promise you though, the next time you find some economic issue that doesn't make sense to you, do a little digging and you'll almost certainly discover a law or rule that caused the stupid outcome.

[Eli Lake @EliLake]

Important thread on why Angela Davis is a fraud. She is the founder of the movement in America to abolish prisoners. But when real political prisoners from the Soviet Union, east Germany and Czechoslovakia asked for her help, she ignored them.

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

@ricwe123 Saying dumb sht for engagement bait.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

It's the 5th stage of protectionist grief.
1) Denial: Tariffs don't raise prices!
2) Anger: How dare these Unpatriotic & Greedy Corporations raise prices!
3) Bargaining: The tariffs helped us negotiate lower prices!
4) Depression: Maybe prices will fall once new domestic production arrives.
5) Acceptance: Actually, high prices are Good.

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

The first 250 years of the American story have given us many free speech heroes, but none are more important than Frederick Douglass.

Born into slavery, Douglass knew that free speech is essential for those without power. When enslaved people could not speak, he spoke for them.

[Sean Paroski @seanparoski]

I love the idea of people posting on social media platforms asking who benefits from data centers. My man, how do you think your words appear on Twitter dot com in the first place?

[clara the urbanist @SlopHq]

every data center story says it uses "as much power as 100,000 homes" like that's a scandal. an aluminum smelter pulls five times that and it's why airplanes are cheap. measuring industry in homes is how you train a country to believe building things is a crime

[Kangaroobixcube @kangaroobixcube]

@LeeKuanYimby Don't make me tap the sign...

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

We still have no idea which anonymous masked agent in an unmarked car decided to shoot and kill this man who had lived peacefully in this country for ~4 decades and was traveling to work to support his US citizen family and serve his US citizen customers.

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

@RaymondBar26974 @tarenfeist @weather_mannp Nope. Minimum wage was not about “living wages”, and historically it was not even close to that.
Minimum wage was created expressly to price “undesirables” out of the job market. You know, like women and nonwhite people.
Minimum wage: racist, sexist, ageist.

[Taren Feist @tarenfeist]

Imagine you own a local restaurant with 10 employees, each working 40 hours a week.

At $16.80/hour, your weekly payroll is about $6,720.

At $25/hour, that same weekly payroll jumps to $10,000.

That’s an extra $3,280 every week—or more than $170,000 a year, before payroll taxes and benefits.

Now you have to make difficult choices:
• Raise menu prices
• Cut employee hours
• Hire fewer people
• Replace jobs with kiosks and automation
• Close your doors altogether

That’s the reality many small businesses would face, @RonWyden.

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

@senatorshoshana Looking forward to our solarpunk future 😎

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

@GreenPlusAnE https://t.co/pvO0T3asuG

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

Corn-derived ethanol is the undisputed king of greenwashing.
We could just eliminate it completely, ditch the subsidies, and lower petroleum consumption.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

In other words, why the founders wanted a representative republic as opposed to pure democracy

[Mora @MoraLomonte]

Your toilet today will use 60+ times more water than data centers need to power your entire year of compute, streaming, and AI queries.

The real question is why are they pushing this narrative?

[Patrick Hedger @pat_hedger]

There are rigorous parental controls at literally every level of the stack. Platforms, app stores, browsers, devices, and the ISPs.

“Barely any infrastructure” is a *wild* claim.

[Kane 謝凱堯 @kane]

Rep @RoKhanna has been playing populist w performative policies like banning Waymo.

Instead of Congress's electronic financial disclosures, he hand-files papers that are not searchable.

I burned some tokens and OCR's all >1000 pages and >$300M of his finances! Site shortly.

[Chase Oliver @ChaseForLiberty]

So @GovKemp

How many more times do we need to see officers abusing Flock cameras before you get them out of Georgia?

Its almost daily now we see a report of law enforcement abuse.

These cameras violate privacy, and the actions of these officers erodes the publicist trust.

[Jess @JoyfullyJessica]

@leavingcelestia @billybinion Knock-on effect: there would be an incentive for lawmakers to raise the retirement age.

[Cathy Young 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 @CathyYoung63]

Unlike "defund the police," I don't think that "Abolish ICE" is a particularly radical slogan.
https://t.co/Avxy2IuRra
It's become a cesspit of lawlessness & authoritarianism, & it's hardly the only tool for enforcing immigration law. It didn't exist until 2003.