Trump supporter. Married 54 years to Veronica. Classical Liberal. Vote Republican. Retired Software Engineer. Hayek was usually right. Ask 'And then what'?
"What is there about particular cultures that makes some of them more conducive to economic progress than others?"
Thomas Sowell drops truth: It's an uphill fight to admit internal cultural differences matter — not everything is "outside society's" fault.
Blaming the victim for what happened before you were born gets us nowhere.
🔥 Wisdom from 1998 still hits hard.
We reject the socialist vision of zero-sum economics. I’ll bring an industrial & manufacturing boom to Ohio that lifts businesses & workers together: high-paying jobs, strong apprenticeships, and a leader who puts Ohioans first. Good meeting with members of the Parkersburg-Marietta Building & Construction Trades Council today.
Germany, 1948. The Reichsmark is worthless. Cigarettes function as currency. Factory output sits at half its 1936 level, and the Allied occupation runs a price-control regime so absurd that farmers feed grain to livestock rather than sell it at the dictated price. Then Ludwig Erhard walks into a radio studio on June 20 and tells the German people the controls are gone. He did not ask the occupation authorities first. He told General Lucius Clay afterward that he hadn't altered the regulations, he had abolished them.
What followed embarrassed every Keynesian planner watching from Washington and London.
The Deutsche Mark replaced the Reichsmark at brutal terms: roughly 100 old marks for 6.5 new ones. Hard money, scarce by design. The black markets emptied overnight because goods reappeared in shop windows the moment prices could speak. Industrial production jumped over 50 percent in the second half of 1948 alone. And here is the part the textbooks bury: through the 1950s, as the economy grew at better than 8 percent a year, the cost of living stayed remarkably flat. Germans got richer while prices held or fell. Productivity outran the money supply, which is exactly what's supposed to happen when a central bank keeps its greedy paws to itself.
Falling prices alongside roaring growth, rising real wages, and a currency people actually wanted to hold rewarded Erhard's Germany. Deflation is not the disease. It is the natural reward for producing more than you did last year.
The Bundesbank inherited this discipline and guarded the Mark with a stinginess that drove politicians to fury for forty years. That stinginess built the strongest economy in Europe. Then the same political class buried the Mark under the euro in 2002 and handed monetary policy to people who consider 2 percent annual theft a "target."
Erhard proved sound money and free prices rebuild a bombed nation in a decade. Every finance minister since has worked very hard to forget it.
“El arte de la economía consiste en mirar no solo los efectos inmediatos de una política, sino también sus efectos a largo plazo; y no solo sobre un grupo, sino sobre todos los grupos”.
- Henry Hazlitt -
🇺🇸| ELON MUSK: “Compré Twitter porque pensé que estaba teniendo un efecto negativo en la civilización e impulsando ideas anticivilizatorias. Estaba en manos de la extrema izquierda. No era un buen foro para el debate. Suspendieron a mucha gente de la derecha, incluido el presidente en funciones”.
Richard Feynman on how do we look for a new law.
As reimagined by Grok @imagine.
With more thinking it could get very accurate. Is a big opportunity! Reconstructing the past! Imagine restoring all the old lectures!
@libsoftiktok I watched Ro Khanna debate Vivek Ramaswami in Manchester NH during the last presidential election campaign. Representative Khanna spewed a constant stream of hate and envy. Punish effort. Degrade success. Denigrated excellence. Celebrate mediocrity. Steal from the hard workers.
Ro Khanna is now freaking out and desperately trying to backtrack after Elon threatened to sue him for lying that DOGE is responsible for millions of deaths
“Debate me instead of threatening lawfare!”
He should’ve thought about that before demanding Elon be subpoenaed and investigated
All the sudden he’s against lawfare
Imagine that
In the 1960s, the problem looked industrial.
Car designers could sketch beautiful bodies. Sculptors could shape clay models. Engineers could build machines.
But between the designer’s smooth curve and the factory’s cutting tool, something kept getting lost.
A curve drawn by the human hand is continuous.
A machine needs instructions.
And the early computer systems of the time were not built to understand elegance. They needed numbers, coordinates, definitions, and control.
One of the engineers who saw this problem clearly was Pierre Bézier.
He worked at Renault, where the challenge was not abstract beauty. It was manufacturing: how to turn complex automobile shapes into mathematical descriptions precise enough for computer-aided design and production.
The old way was to describe curves by tracing points.
More points meant more detail.
But more points also meant more data, more calculation, and less intuitive control. A designer did not want to command a thousand coordinates just to adjust the sweep of a fender.
Bézier’s deeper insight was geometric.
You do not have to define every point of a curve directly.
You can define a small set of control points, and let the curve emerge from their relationship.
That is the power of what we now call a Bézier curve.
The curve begins at one point and ends at another. Other points do not necessarily sit on the curve. Instead, they pull on it. They shape its direction, its bend, its smoothness, and its flow.
In modern design software, these become the familiar handles of the pen tool.
Move the handle, and the curve changes.
Not as a jagged chain of disconnected coordinates, but as a smooth mathematical object.
This is the quiet genius of the idea.
A complex shape becomes controllable through a few invisible levers.
The history, however, needs care.
Bézier was not the only mind behind this revolution. Paul de Casteljau, working at Citroën, developed a related and highly important method earlier. The mathematical roots also go back to Bernstein polynomials from the early twentieth century.
But Bézier’s work at Renault helped bring these ideas into industrial design and computer-aided manufacturing. His UNISURF system made free-form curves and surfaces part of the practical language of engineering.
That is why his name traveled so far.
Bézier curves became central to computer graphics, vector drawing, digital typography, animation, industrial design, and CAD.
Every time a designer uses the pen tool, every time a font outline stays smooth at different sizes, every time a digital object needs a curve that can be shaped precisely without storing every point, the world is using an idea that Bézier helped make visible and usable.
The philosophical lesson is not that formulas are useless.
It is that control does not always come from tracking everything.
Sometimes the deeper intelligence is finding the few points that shape the whole system.
A curve is not controlled by micromanaging every location along its path.
It is controlled by understanding the hidden geometry that gives the path its form.
That is true in design.
It is true in engineering.
And often, it is true in life.
When a project becomes too complex, the answer is not always more coordinates, more metrics, more pressure, more tracking.
Sometimes the real question is:
Where are the control points?
Because if you find the right handles, you do not have to fight the entire curve.
You can change the shape of the problem itself.
🚨BREAKING: Antifa ringleader Benjamin Song has been sentenced to 100 years in prison for his role in the July 4th terrorist attack on the Prairieland ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas.
This was the first-ever federal Antifa terrorism trial in Texas. Eight of the ten convicted Antifa members were sentenced to at least 50 years in prison today. They fired explosives, vandalized federal vehicles, and shot at police officers — with one officer struck in the neck.
Finally, real consequences for domestic terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities.
🚨 HUGE NEWS: The US Postmaster General has just told Congress that the Post Office WILL NOT deliver mail-in ballots in the 2026 midterms to states who refuse to comply with President Trump's election integrity executive order
This order makes sure mail-in recipients are CITIZENS and are who they say they are — on top of making mail-in voting more secure
LFG!! Don't let the Dems defeat this in court! 🔥