TheDude

Bowling, part of the San Francisco Seven, White Russians, Pursuer of Truth, wondering what the White Russian equivalent is for NHI…

[Ali Ahmadi @AliR_Ahmadi]

This is not a retaliation about a helicopter. The US is settling into a long-term war of attrition over the Strait of Hormuz.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@Underwood_szn Bust until he proves otherwise.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@rizvismmnr @policytensor They said they needed to get 500 U.S. troops for true deterrence... They haven't even come close to that. They took this ceasefire like idiots.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@MichiganNation2 @araghchi A ceasefire would have been nice if it was in good faith...but anyone who thought it was...SMH

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@WeTheBrandon If never stopped. Iran just made the mistake to ceasefire which has been used 3747394848 times now to rearm and refill target banks, Intelligence, and restart on favorable terms.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@StatsObsessed @Tj_Ronin @YouTube @johndadamo @TheVOCFB No

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@Buckeye_GDG Disappointed. Valenti has a good underwood take even if he defaults to trashing Michigan any chance he gets

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@adkeys22 Remember how translucent was killed…

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@graemerendall66 Right, but sometimes people struggle to draw something and then they find someone else can help them/there is a better picture.

[Jeremy @Jeremybtc]

A man with no working truck convinced Wall Street he had built the next Tesla. His company hit $30 BILLION. All he did was push it down a hill with no engine.

> Trevor Milton founded Nikola in 2014, named after the same inventor as Tesla.

> The goal was to build hydrogen powered trucks that would make diesel obsolete. He had no trucks.

> In 2018 he released a promotional video called Nikola One In Motion. It showed a sleek semi truck accelerating smoothly down an open highway.
Investors went wild.

> What nobody knew was that the truck had no engine, no fuel cell, and no propulsion system of any kind.

> Milton's team towed it to the top of a hill, tilted the camera to hide the slope, and let it roll.

> He spent the next four years doing the same thing with words. On podcasts, television and social media.

> Investors were told Nikola could produce its own hydrogen. It could not. They were told the trucks were ready for production. They were not. They were told orders were flooding in. They weren't.

> In June 2020 Nikola went public. Within days the company was worth $30 BILLION, more than Ford.

> Milton's personal stake hit $7.3 BILLION overnight.

> A $32.5 MILLION ranch in Utah followed. A record for the state at the time.

> In September 2020 Hindenburg Research published a report calling Nikola "an intricate fraud" built on "an ocean of lies." Milton resigned within ten days.

> A federal jury convicted him of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022. Sentenced to four years in prison the following year.

> He never went. He was free on $100 MILLION bail pending appeal.

> He and his wife donated $3.2 MILLION to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

> In March 2025 Trump gave him a full pardon. The pardon erased $168 MILLION in restitution to defrauded shareholders.

> Nikola filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving thousands of investors with nothing.

The company never had a product. The only thing that was real was the $30 BILLION valuation, the $7 BILLION that landed in his pocket and the pardon that made sure none of it had to be returned.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@ArmchairW Here’s the worse part. Legends did all the f-ing work and they just didn’t want to pay people that had helped develop it… idiotic.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@EndGameWW3 If they were rescued, where are they?

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@ChrisUKSharp Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi gushed on how we'd have the most transparent and accountable administration under Trump.

It's so transparent it's cracking down on WB even more and spreading as much psyop slop as possible.

Love the clown show.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@authoradambray @ChrisUKSharp Walter doesn't like to be questioned. He has a platform so he can pretend to be some "people's man" asking the questions while being a part of elitist circles what...his entire life?

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@BranderYuri @FirstSquawk Correct

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

Death spiral… don’t know how a culture survives without a collectivist approach that distributes basic means.

[Yasir Ai @AiwithYasir]

🚨BREAKING: Two researchers from UPenn and Boston University just published a paper that should be uncomfortable reading for every CEO automating their workforce right now.

The argument is straightforward. Every company replacing workers with AI is also eliminating its own future customers. Laid off workers stop spending. Enough of them stop spending and nobody can afford to buy anything. The companies that fired everyone end up selling into an economy with no purchasing power left.

Every executive can see this. The math is not complicated. But here is why nobody stops.

If you do not automate, your competitor does. They cut costs, lower prices, take your market share, and you collapse anyway. So every company automates knowing it is collectively destructive because the alternative is dying alone while everyone else survives. The researchers proved this is a Prisoner's Dilemma playing out in real time.

The numbers are already moving. Block cut nearly half its 10,000 employees this year. Jack Dorsey said AI made those roles unnecessary and that within the next year the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion. Salesforce replaced 4,000 customer support agents with AI. Goldman Sachs deployed a coding tool that lets one engineer do the work of five. Over 100,000 tech workers were laid off in 2025 and AI was cited as the primary driver in more than half those cases. 80% of US workers hold jobs with tasks susceptible to AI automation.

The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income does not change a single company's incentive to automate. Capital income taxes adjust profit levels but not the per-task decision to replace a human. Collective bargaining cannot hold because automating is always the dominant strategy.

They also identified what they call a Red Queen effect. Better AI does not solve the problem, it accelerates it. Every company chases faster automation to gain market share over rivals but at the end everyone has automated equally, the gains cancel out, and the only thing left is more destroyed demand.

The one thing the math says could work is a Pigouvian automation tax. A per-task charge that forces companies to account for the demand they destroy each time they replace a worker.

The conclusion is that this is not a transfer of wealth from workers to owners. Both sides lose. Workers lose income. Companies lose customers. It is a deadweight loss with no market mechanism to stop it on its own.

(Link in the comment)

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

Yup, it’s all contingency planning to blame things on a “third-party” bad actor for the masses in which instance Netanyahu can take the fall and everyone will pretend like things are then different…when they won’t be. Much like how Bush and neocons were blamed and then efforts continued with a different spin and salesman.

The Schtick is getting old.

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@MichiganNation2 @McdonaldRivet Almost like we have a bunch of anti-war, America First Dems…

[TheDude @MattKinMI]

@RobertJMolnar Where are the pilots?