Mitch Healy

My opinions are by default, yours

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

2025-2030 Doom and Gloom Bingo

[Jarvis @jarvis_best]

LA is wild because the election will be between a Cuban trained Marxist guerrilla fighter and a woman running to her left.

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

@aelfred_D Yes thank you. I understand it's Catholic news, but the context is actually beneficial

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

@GrayConnolly @TimWilsonMP That entire section between 2:30 and 3mins is very eye opening. That isn't a journalist seeking truth. That's someone trying to find a gotcha.
I don't watch ABC that clip makes me want to watch it less

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

@RitaPanahi I would be very worried if I was Poland

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

@clairlemon Someone tearing their hammy midway through is unfortunately not surprising

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

@AvidCommentator This will crash harder than what people thought One Nation would

[Handre @Handre]

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output.

This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest.

Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose.

You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes.

Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning.

Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

[Bridget Phetasy @BridgetPhetasy]

I would say these younger generations are cooked but they can’t even do that apparently.

[DannytheDegen @Dannythe_Degen]

The Australian government is going to take 47% of my income and my capital gains and give it to someone who doesn’t want to work. And this will make it easier for me to buy a house.

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

there have been more dangerous times. there have been bleaker times, times of less hope and times of far more sorrow. there have been poorer times, and darker times. but there has never been a time in history more retarded than today.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early.

The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record.

The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold.

The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up.

That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax.

In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.

[Lexer @LexerLux]

someone tweeted about struggling to learn arabic (a notoriously difficult language) & when i asked for an update she said she became fluent after being kidnapped by Hezbollah and given nothing but Arabic to read.
is this the new language learning meta?

[NASA @NASA]

Hello, Moon. It’s great to be back.

Here’s a taste of what the Artemis II astronauts photographed during their flight around the Moon. Check out more photos from the mission: https://t.co/rzM1P0QbOl

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

Astronaut Victor Glover delivers beautiful Easter message from space, praises God’s creation.

“When I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us…”

“You're on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”

“In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe, you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together…”

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Christ is risen from the dead, and with him, we too rise to new life! This Easter proclamation embraces the mystery of our lives and the destiny of history, reaching us even in the depths of death. #Easter

[Talk Church @churchtalkative]

Jesus never made mistakes!!

[James Clark 📈📉¯\_(ツ)_/¯ @mr_james_c]

The battery capacity to provide Britain with 2 weeks of electricity during winter would cost more than £2tn. Which is 20x the cost of building enough nuclear power stations to provide all the UK's electricity needs.

[Mitch Healy @RePolaGa]

@AvidCommentator We never hear the lhorrihle stories that come from the Himalayas. Truely the peak of untold stories

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

For those wondering, it has nothing to do with the nuclear plant. Being French is enough.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

One thing you notice when you read pretty much anything written more than 100 years ago is just how impoverished and bland and limited our language has become. People spoke and wrote in a kind of effortlessly rich and descriptive way that almost no one does today. On this site a lot of people write almost exclusively in cliches and internet lingo. A lot of people speak like that too. The language contracts, our conversational vocabulary shrinks more and more over time. And the more limited we become in our language, the more limited we are in our thinking.