Heather🐉

Independent. Free. Ungovernable. Disruptive. Stormborn. Mother of dragons & wild ideas. Bitcoiner ‘til the last block. 🔥🐉⚡️₿ - Co-Creator of

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

I feel like should have earned a degree in history and economics just by reading this.
This comment took me to school!

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

Absolutely amazing research.

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

Friedberg: New study shows enzyme reverses skin age from 70+ years to 31

Chamath: That’s a $2T market.

Did Scientists Just Discover How to Reverse Skin Aging!?

“CML is kind of the predominant molecule that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging, and nothing breaks it down.

So these scientists set out to try and create an enzyme, an enzyme is a protein that breaks something down, that can break down CML.

And so these guys kind of went out and they took the target, which is CML, and tried to figure out, ‘Okay, how do we actually degrade CML, clear that extracellular matrix, and reverse aging?’

They started to test it on the proteins that we would find in our body, casein, collagen, retinal proteins, which are in your eye, hemoglobin, and they were able to get rid of 52 to 97% of the CML, just degrade it away.

And then they found several sites where they were able to degrade over 90%.

And then they took actual human skin from elderly patients that had donated their skin, and they put this enzyme onto that skin, and they were able to eliminate 55% of the CML on the skin, basically reverse the skin's age down to the age of a 31-year-old, this is from greater than 70-year-old patients, just by putting this enzyme on the skin.

And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of AlphaFold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high throughput screening, and ultimately make a novel protein that doesn't exist in nature today that can do something pretty profound for human health.”

Chamath:

“It will be a trillion-dollar market. If you can create a cream…”

Friedberg:

“I mean, dude, if you could put this enzyme literally on your skin and have it absorb in…”

Chamath:

“Game over. That alone is $2 trillion.”

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@realmatt_re Bullshit rage bait

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@deemat727 @TrumpTruthOnX Not really, not against Klobuchar. He won’t win. When is the last time a republican won in Minnesota? Republicans have to put up someone better than that circus clown, if they want to have a chance. It’s just facts.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

In case anyone else had doubts about whether OpenAI was shady AF, read this.
If they’re stealing Apple’s data, what makes you think they won’t steal yours?
#DeleteChatGPT

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Apple just sued OpenAI, and the wildest part is how they got caught: one candidate screenshotted confidential Apple files on his Apple work laptop hours before his OpenAI interview. Apple reads its own server logs. The recruiting pipeline generated its own evidence trail.

The complaint says OpenAI's hardware chief Tang Tan, a 24-year Apple veteran, directed candidates still employed at Apple to bring "actual parts" (batteries, logic boards) to interviews for show and tell sessions. One candidate was surprised, saying he didn't even know you could take those out of the office.

Apple also alleges Tan circulated an internal Apple offboarding document to coach new hires on dodging exit security checks, and that a departing engineer kept his Apple laptop, found a bug that still gave him access to Apple's cloud storage, and downloaded dozens of confidential hardware files after joining OpenAI.

Then the supplier: OpenAI allegedly got one of Apple's manufacturing partners to demonstrate a proprietary metal finishing technique by letting the partner believe Apple had approved it.

Over 400 former Apple employees now work at OpenAI. Apple says it flagged all of this to OpenAI in February and never got a response. Five months later, it filed.

The ask reveals the strategy. Apple wants an injunction barring OpenAI from using the secrets, the return of every file, and full discovery into io, right as OpenAI preps its first device launch and an IPO. If a judge grants it, OpenAI may have to prove the device was built clean, component by component, before it ships.

The device was supposed to run on the world's best hardware talent. Now its bill of materials is evidence.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@warlock_trading

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@RedWavePress Not terrifying. Laughable. It’ll never happen.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@Teslaconomics How is this possible? I can’t even look down at the screen to change the music on Spotify or adjust the temperature without it telling me to pay attention to the road.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

Trump needs to allow Bitcoin deposits into those Trump accounts for kids!

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@mr_vignesh_19 AI garbage. That’s not her ring.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@BRICSinfo Yes, because he isn’t even alive.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@dahl_bibi @michellesrazor @earthing5000 @grok Wow! Is this you? You’re so pretty!

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

This isn’t just a warning, it’s an alarm bell.

[Hon. Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC]

My official statement on the budget, as read in chambers this evening, before I was muted:

"I’ve been a member of this city council going on five years now. And I’ve voted yes on the budget every year so far. All of them had problems. All of them contained things I didn’t like or agree with. But I’m not here to demand perfection, I’m here to work with what we have — within reason.

Unfortunately, this year is very different. And I must vote no.

Even in the context of our dysfunctional city government, this year’s budget represents a complete departure from reality, spending more money than we’ve ever spent — precisely when we can least afford it.

We have never seen a larger single-year increase in spending in the history of this city. Requiring not only new taxes from Albany, but pension deferrals and an eight billion dollar bailout from the Governor. And even still, the revenue projections are optimistic at best.

This isn’t a ‘balanced budget’ — it’s budget by bailout. A ticking time bomb.

And it’s the beginning of a fiscal death spiral that our current leadership will not be able to pull us out of, because they lack both the experience and the seriousness to do so.

What will we do next year? And the year after?

The only responsible way for our city to spend more is to grow the economy. New businesses, new private economic development, major investment. That’s how you grow an economy, and get more money into the city budget.

But we’re doing the opposite. Deliberately chasing away everything our city needs to sustain our spending with childish political attacks on very people we need most.

Our tax base is isn’t growing. It’s leaving.

The middle class, the financial sector, and businesses of all sizes are choosing to go elsewhere. And they’re being replaced with low-income foreigners and transplants who require significant subsidies just to survive here.

We’re trading investment banks and small businesses for delivery app drivers on welfare, and nonprofit workers whose paychecks ultimately come from government spending. That isn’t growth.

And when ordinary New Yorkers complain, they’re told to shut up and leave if they don’t like it. And that’s exactly what many are doing.

This is obviously unsustainable. But nobody in this chamber really seems to care.

And what are we getting for our money? We already spend more in real dollars AND per capita on everything from schools to housing to healthcare than anyone else in the country.

We can’t even build a public bathroom for less than three million dollars.

Why would anyone believe that shoveling even MORE money into this broken system will improve anything?

It won’t. I guarantee that we’ll all be sitting here again a year from now, with the exact same problems, listening to the exact same lectures about how the city needs even MORE money, AGAIN.

At what point do we, as a City Council, start to demand results before we allow more spending? When do we demand accountability?

The answer seems to be never. Because this spending isn’t really meant to fix anything. It’s meant to keep the machine going, keep the money flowing into the special interests and nonprofits and the political allies of the Mayor, with no real consideration for anything else.

I realize a lot of people don’t want to hear this, but we are a municipal government, not a sociology experiment or a political slush fund or the United Nations.

We are here keep the lights on, keep the water running, pave the roads, and put criminals in jail. That’s it. And we would be very well advised to get back to basics. Because we’re failing on nearly every count, other than our peerless ability to hand out free money.

Shame on this Council for pretending this budget is anything other than a disaster. I know that my single vote ultimately doesn’t matter here, but nonetheless I won’t put my name on it. I respectfully vote no."

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@hannahapexfit The only one I’ve failed at, is not yet being able to do unassisted pull ups.
Everything else, I pass.

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@HorrificFable @BitcoinRebel Love this. 🙏🏽

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@earthing5000 @grok Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.
It’s a wonderful movie!

[Heather🐉 @StormBornH7]

@j_grieshaber @XMoney I’ve just checked with Grok and as much as I wanted this to be a possibility, it is not.