"If all else fails, I will retreat up the valley of Virginia, plant my flag on the Blue Ridge, rally around the Scotch-Irish of that region and make my last stand for liberty amongst a people who will never submit to tyranny whilst there is a man left to draw a trigger." -GW
Everyone should, at some time in their life, have to clean out the house of an elderly parent or relative. You will realize that most of your possessions are waste. The things you buy at Walmart or Amazon aren't even worth pennies on the dollar.
Big biz lobbies government to pass rules that hurt smaller competitors. It's always been that way.
100 years ago, Heinz found a way to make ketchup without a preservative. Then it pushed government to kill off its competitors by banning that preservative.
The sleaze continues:
So 2024.
What both parties miss is that AI can be a great government vs business equalizer.
If government hires people willing and able to learn how to use the same AI available to everyone, from any number of domestic model makers, it has the opportunity to serve Americans, adequately at worst, more productively and effectively , if done well and transparently
The more efficient government is, the harder companies have to work to outperform it.
That makes for more opportunity.
What both parties have to realize is that the problem that will accelerate in this new world is crony capitalism. Both parties excel at giving our taxpayer money to their friends. Like all new technologies, AI will create new pockets of wealth that will try to buy our politicians. From both parties.
The more transparency we require in government, the more we respect the right of the people to challenge that largesse, the more we restrict the ability of politicians to receive dark money , and reward their friends, the better the quality of life will be across the country.
Whether you like it or not, AI has changed everything, except , our government , our politics and our politicians. Which have not changed at all.
So here we are. Talking about parties and politicians that are thinking in the past. Like it’s still 2024.
That’s a problem for all of us.
The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.
And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.
One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.
Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.
If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.
Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.
Alternatively
There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.
To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.
It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)
Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.
Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up
But
They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks
Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.
It is criminal that our government enabled a bat virus to infect and spread between humans. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a bigger betrayal of our species.
It is equally troubling that the mad scientists who did this then gaslit all the people of the world about it, including those who CORRECTLY interpreted the evidence.
Then, of course, the very same monsters amped up fear of the Covid frankenvirus and steered the panicked public away from safe medicines, and toward an obviously dangerous gene-therapy which they falsely called a vaccine in order to lure us into acceptance.
These are among the greatest crimes EVER committed against humanity. We now have persuasive evidence of everything I have said above.
If we don't correct the record and hold the perpetrators to account, this pattern will happen again, and again, and again--shortening our life expectancy, and degrading our quality of life each time that it does.
This is our Nuremberg moment. We can not simply move on from this ghastly chapter of history. We must finish it.
@brownstoneinst
This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. What a GREAT perspecitve..👍🏽
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us!
I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we've become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don't give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, "An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity."
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I've ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let's just say I didn't have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they've never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn't live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn't see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don't know what it's like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don't have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it's spreading like a plague."
Elections should be
-in person
-one day only
with exceptions for disabilities, military or travel.
-Photo IDs should be mandatory and available at no cost at any federal government office. example Social Security, VA, USPO, Selective Service or DMV.
"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large, there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad."
— Alexis de Tocqueville
If a man with Platner’s background applied to be a teacher, they wouldn’t give him the job. He’s on an app that targets teens.
If he applied to be a cop, they wouldn’t give him the job. He’s not stable.
If he wanted a job with a security clearance, he would t get it. He’s a communist.
I guess he figures Congress is the only job he can get.
Don’t let him in.
Activist: "Animals shouldn't have to die for food."
Farmer: "What did you have for lunch?"
Activist: "A salad. No animals."
Farmer: "The wheat in your croutons came off a field where the combine killed forty mice, six rabbits, and a fawn. The lettuce had a hare in it the harvester turned to mulch. The chickpeas were sprayed twice in May and the bees never made it back to the hive."
Activist: "But I didn't kill them."
Farmer: "You ordered them killed. You just didn't watch. The man on the combine watched. He's the one who cleans the blade."
Activist: "It was an accident."
Farmer: "An accident that happens every harvest, on every field, in every country that grows food. You've redefined a body count as a clerical error."
Activist: "..."
Farmer: "Your salad has more bodies on it than my steak. You just couldn't see them. They didn't have eyelashes."
Credit: @SamaHoole