Bill Reid

Dad to three kids, Seahawks fan, Software Builder, Bourbon fan, Football coach, Devoted husband and Co-Founder at @SkillshubA.

[Handre @Handre]

Hasan set up his tent beside a Colorado creek, sixty miles from the nearest cell tower, wearing a T-shirt that read "Tax The Rich" and cradling a copy of Bernie Sanders' 2024 autobiography.

The fire crackled. The sky went fully dark. Then he saw them: a clean, silent string of Starlink satellites arcing overhead, forty of them in formation, each one a moving point of light that engineers had designed, built, and launched on rockets that landed themselves back on drone ships.

Hasan pulled out his Starlink terminal. He had a blog post to finish.

The connection loaded in four seconds. Upload: 23 Mbps. Download: 187 Mbps. Sixty miles from civilization, in a canyon, surrounded by elk.

He opened a Google Doc and began typing his argument: broadband internet is a public good, government must fund rural access, private companies exploit the underserved, Bernie was right about all of it. He submitted the post through a privately built satellite network, over a private server, funded entirely by voluntary capital markets.

Hasan genuinely believes the federal government would have delivered this infrastructure faster and cheaper. Seemingly unaware that the government spent $400 billion on the F-35 program without producing a functional fleet. It took eleven years to renovate a single train station in Washington. The government pays $800 for a toilet seat.

SpaceX launched its first Starlink constellation in 2019. The FCC broadband expansion program, funded by Congress the same year at a cost of $42b, still had not reached half its target households by 2026.

The satellites moved silently overhead. Hasan posted his article, banked the fire, softly whispered "Fuck Elon", and dreamed of a workers' paradise that would have gotten around to all this eventually.

[lubricant @darren_lubedude]

Canada is having a difficult conversation with itself about its economic relationship with the United States.

Much of the current Canadian political narrative treats access to the American market almost as an acquired right. When an American administration talks about reshoring manufacturing, imposing tariffs or favouring American production, Canadians often frame the issue as an affront to Canadian sovereignty.

I think that fundamentally misunderstands how our industrial economy developed.

For much of the post-war period, Canada prospered by becoming an extraordinarily effective extension of the American industrial economy.

Southern Ontario did not independently develop an automotive ecosystem disconnected from Detroit. Windsor, Oshawa, Oakville, St. Thomas and communities throughout Southwestern Ontario became deeply integrated into an industrial machine whose centre of gravity was across the border in Michigan, Ohio and the broader American Midwest.

American manufacturers established Canadian factories and supply chains for many reasons: access to the Canadian market, tariff and content rules, exchange rates, labour economics, geographic proximity and, eventually, increasingly integrated North American trade.

Canada became exceptionally good at this.

We built cars, stamped metal, machined components, produced chemicals, assembled machinery and supplied American factories. Canadian companies also became enormously successful suppliers to that system. Magna is perhaps the greatest example of what could be built from Canada's position inside the North American automotive supply chain.

The 1965 Auto Pact accelerated that integration. Free trade in 1989 and NAFTA in 1994 took it much further.

But then something else happened.

Beginning in the late twentieth century and accelerating dramatically after 2000, North American manufacturing capacity increasingly moved offshore. China became a manufacturing superpower. Global supply chains replaced many domestic ones. American industrial communities lost factories and employment, while corporations discovered that enormous amounts of production could be sourced from lower-cost jurisdictions.

For decades, Canada operated within that globalization model while retaining extraordinarily favourable access to the world's largest consumer economy.

Now the United States is reconsidering the model.

Washington increasingly views industrial capacity as more than an economic issue. Semiconductors, steel, aluminum, automobiles, energy, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and critical minerals are being treated as matters of national security and strategic resilience.

That creates an uncomfortable question for Canada:

If the United States wants its industrial production back, on what basis does Canada believe that production belongs to us?

Imagine a manufacturer that has outsourced substantial production to a subcontractor for decades. The subcontractor builds its business around that work, invests in equipment, hires employees and becomes highly successful.

Then circumstances change. The manufacturer's own facilities have unused capacity and its own employees need work.

The subcontractor may understandably be unhappy when the manufacturer brings some of that production home. But the subcontractor cannot reasonably argue that decades of receiving the work created a permanent entitlement to it.

That, in simplified form, is the uncomfortable position Canada now faces.

This does not mean Canada lacks sovereignty. Quite the opposite. Canada is completely sovereign and has every right to establish whatever trade, industrial, environmental and foreign policies Canadians choose.

But sovereignty works both ways.

Canada has the sovereign right to determine its economic policy. The United States has the sovereign right to determine how much access foreign producers receive to the American market.

Those are two different questions.

Canada has also spent decades diversifying its trading relationships, including developing a substantial economic relationship with China. There are legitimate American concerns about transshipment, rules of origin, Chinese overcapacity and goods entering the United States through third countries. Canada should take those concerns seriously rather than simply assuming that our historical relationship exempts us from American scrutiny.

That does not mean every American tariff is justified, nor does it mean Canada should simply accept whatever Washington demands.

It means Canada needs to understand the leverage in the relationship.

Nearly 40 million Canadians live beside an economy of roughly 350 million people. Geography gave us extraordinary access to that market. Generations of Canadian workers and entrepreneurs then turned that geographical advantage into one of the world's most integrated cross-border industrial relationships.

But proximity is not ownership.

Our automotive plants, stamping companies, machine shops and parts manufacturers have succeeded because they are very good at what they do. They should compete aggressively to retain that business. Canada should make itself the most compelling place in North America to manufacture.

What we should not do is confuse historical integration with entitlement.

Instead of asking, "How can the Americans do this to us?" Canada should be asking a much harder question:

Why should an American manufacturer choose to put its next factory in Ontario rather than Michigan, Ohio, Indiana or Tennessee?

If our answer is productivity, engineering talent, energy, logistics, taxation, regulatory efficiency, currency advantage and a highly capable workforce, then Canada has a compelling case.

If our answer is simply that American companies have manufactured here for the last 70 years and therefore should continue doing so, we have a problem.

The old Canadian model depended heavily on being an exceptionally attractive extension of American industrial capacity.

America is now rebuilding that capacity at home.

Canada's challenge is not to demand that history stand still.

It is to make ourselves indispensable enough that, even when America has the choice to bring the work home, American companies still choose Canada.

@ronmortgageguy @StephenPunwasi @FoodProfessor

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Carney’s Big Gamble: State-Led Adjustment Without U.S. Market Access

At the G20, two competing economic visions are emerging. One is built on private-sector investment, entrepreneurship, competition, and growth. The other relies on governments directing capital, selecting strategic industries, and using state-to-state deals to organize economic activity. Carney’s direction is increasingly clear: more government-led agreements, more industrial planning, and a larger state role in allocating capital.

That approach ignores the central reality of Canada’s position. This is not a symmetrical trade war. The U.S. buys roughly two-thirds of Canada’s exports, making access to its market vital to Canadian industry, investment, and long-term prosperity. Canada can impose costs on selected American sectors, but it cannot replace the U.S. market.

The objective should be to secure durable access to the U.S. market while undertaking the structural adjustment Canada’s economy requires, led by private investment, competition, entrepreneurship, and productivity growth, not by government-directed deals, politically chosen industries, and an expanding state role in capital allocation. Carney high risk manoeuvre assumes the US shift to Hamiltonian Economics is fleeting. I’m not so sure.

Canada should not confuse retaliation with a strategy. Counter-tariffs may signal resolve, but they do little to change the economic balance of power or secure the market access Canada needs. The objective should be a negotiated settlement that protects Canadian production, investment, and access to its largest customer, not escalation for its own sake.

Nor is a pivot to China a logical substitute. China’s entry into the WTO coincided with the hollowing-out of Canadian manufacturing, as domestic producers faced low-cost and often state-supported competition. Deeper dependence on China is not a credible answer to diminished access to the United States.

Carney big gamble assumes the US will revert back to its old ways. What did Carney proclaim, nostalgia is not a strategy. The irony is missed by many.

[Eva Chipiuk, BSc, LLB, LLM @echipiuk]

Canada’s greatest weakness may be its arrogance, the belief that we remain a global example simply because we keep telling ourselves we are.

We boast about our healthcare, institutions, economy and moral leadership while ignoring the dysfunction, declining services and falling standard of living right in front of us.

Patriotism is not pretending everything is fine. It is caring enough about your country to confront reality, demand better and do the hard work required to rebuild it.

Canada’s reputation cannot survive indefinitely on nostalgia and self-congratulation.

A country that believes it is above criticism will soon find itself beneath the standards it once claimed to represent.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Canada Needs an Economic Overton Window Reset

Canada’s economic debate has become strangely moralized. Raise a conventional question about investment, productivity, manufacturing, energy, deficits, or trade, and the response is too often not an argument but an accusation: un-Canadian, Trumpian, MAGA, anti-worker, anti-public service.

That is how the Overton Window closes.

The Overton Window describes the range of ideas considered respectable in public debate. In Canada, it increasingly excludes economic realism, not because the evidence is absent, but because the language of patriotism has been captured by the assumption that more government spending is synonymous with national strength.

It is not.

The private sector creates the wealth that finances the public sector. Businesses invest, hire, export, innovate, and pay the taxes that sustain health care, pensions, infrastructure, defence, and social programs. Government has an indispensable role, but it cannot indefinitely distribute wealth that the economy has failed to produce.
It is politically expedient to blame Canada’s current economic predicament on Donald Trump. Tariffs, trade threats, and American protectionism create real risks and deserve a serious response.

But Trump did not create the Canadian industrial-policy failures that weakened our competitive advantage. He did not create years of weak business investment, slow permitting, costly regulation, inadequate infrastructure, unaffordable housing, poor productivity growth, or the habit of responding to every structural weakness with another subsidy.

Nor did Trump hollow out Canadian manufacturing on his own. China’s entry into the World Trade
Organization reshaped global trade, and Canadian industry absorbed a significant adjustment shock. Research has found that rising Chinese import competition was associated with substantial Canadian manufacturing job losses between 2001 and 2011. Recognizing that fact is neither extremist nor xenophobic. It is an economic observation. The irony is missed by the economic elite in Canada!

The United States is confronting two long-running vulnerabilities: its massive debt burden and the erosion of parts of its manufacturing base. That is what lies behind the renewed American emphasis on tariffs, procurement rules, reshoring incentives, subsidies, strategic supply chains, and national-security industrial policy. Canada may object to particular measures and should defend its interests firmly. But retaliation against this modern Hamiltonian turn is not a long-term dominant strategy.

The United States retains the world’s deepest capital markets, the reserve currency, enormous energy resources, global technology leaders, a vast domestic market, and military power.

Betting Canada’s economic strategy on Trump losing the Mid-terms is wishful thinking. This is a generational economic pivot.

Canada needs a modern Hamiltonian agenda of its own: not blanket protectionism, but national capacity.

That means competitive taxes, faster permits, reliable energy, infrastructure that gets products to markets, deeper capital markets, selective strategic procurement, and a country open to productive foreign investment.

Economic sovereignty is not achieved by announcing more programs in Ottawa. It is achieved when Canada can attract capital, build things, develop its advantages, and finance its own ambitions.

Our relationship with the United States remains central. Canada should not seek economic detachment from its largest market; it should seek to become indispensable to North America, as a supplier of energy, critical minerals, food, electricity, advanced manufacturing, and trusted technology.

Calling these arguments un-Canadian is not a rebuttal. It is an attempt to place them outside the Overton Window before Canadians can judge them on their merits.

[HydroGraph Clean Power Inc. @HydroGraphInc]

How do you improve seal durability under extreme pressure and thermal cycling?

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[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

David Friedberg: Government Spending is Making Everything More Expensive… and Driving America Toward Socialism

@friedberg:

“California's got tens of billions of dollars it spent on this stupid f**king railway that goes nowhere, where there's no f**king tracks…”

@DavidSacks:

“And there's no political will to even stop that. It'd be the easiest cut in the world.”

Friedberg:

“Just think about the idiocy. Like, no one is saying we shouldn't do this. Why is no one saying we shouldn't do this?

A quarter trillion dollars for a train from San Francisco to Fresno that costs more than an airline ticket is so idiotic. It's like the movie ‘Don't Look Up’. Like, look up. It tells you everything you need to know.

Across the board, these government programs cause more harm than good.

When the government intervenes in underwriting student loans, and gives everyone a loan, administrative costs went up by 6x and tuition skyrocketed 8% a year, compounding for 30 years, because the government said, ‘We'll underwrite any student loan.’

The same with housing, and now no young people can afford a house.

The same with healthcare, where they said, ‘We'll pay people to stay home and not work to take care of people, and we won't check on whether or not they're actually taking care of people,’ and the cost of healthcare skyrocketed.

You go across every one of these government programs, and every one of them has the adverse effect of driving up costs and inflating everything.

And the core root of inflation in this country is government spending.

And the reason we are going to end up becoming a socialist country is because we aren't reining in government spending and looking it in the mirror and saying, ‘Guys, this is idiotic. What are we doing?’”

[Bill Reid @Blitzed_Coach]

https://t.co/vLtB3vZ612

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this is actually insane
the entire purpose of academia is the pursuit of truth.
nothing should supersede truth. otherwise it's literally indoctrination

yet only 43% of female psychology professors said truth should come first. even among men, barely two thirds did. these people should genuinely be barred from ever teaching students

once "equity" becomes a reason to lie, academia has already failed at the one thing it exists to do

[Handre @Handre]

The technology sector delivered forty consecutive years of price deflation without a single government price-control board, without a central planner in sight, and the economists at the Federal Reserve still cannot explain why their inflation models keep breaking around it.

Consider what you actually witnessed. A 1984 Apple Macintosh cost $2,495. By 2005, that money bought you a machine roughly one thousand times more powerful. Gordon Moore's observation about transistor density held because engineers at Intel, AMD, and TSMC competed ferociously to outperform each other. No bureaucrat scheduled the doubling cycle.

Free market thinkers predicted exactly this. Capital accumulation, voluntary exchange, and the price system coordinate resources toward consumer wants with a precision no committee replicates.

Sectors where government intervenes heavily, healthcare and education, produce relentless price inflation alongside stagnating quality. The technology sector, comparatively free of price regulation, handed you a supercomputer in your pocket for $999.

Voluntary exchange rewards the right people for the right discoveries at the right time. Central planning cannot do this.

[Handre @Handre]

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.

No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.

Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.

What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.

The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Canada’s Trade-War Denial

Canada does not need “time to adjust.” It needs a political class willing to stop confusing indignation with economic policy. And it needs access to the US market.

President Trump is focused on economic sovereignty, this is not personal this is business.

I assumed Mark Carney understood that. He has spent enough time around markets and capital to know that a country cannot posture its way out of a competitiveness crisis. Yet Ottawa’s turn toward symbolism and performative retaliation suggests that faith was misplaced.

Canada does not need another era of Pierre Elliott Trudeau-style progressive theatre: moral signalling, state direction, and lofty ambition detached from the hard work of building productive capacity. It needs an adult willing to confront vested interests, make trade-offs, and put economic strength ahead of political performance. The last adult, it seems, has just left the room.

The elbows-up strategy is embarrassing and hurts Canada long term, like a teenager emotional response to the reality of the world. Carney’s use of it helps neither negotiation nor leverage, and it wounds Canada more than the U.S.

The central strategic objective is obvious: preserve access to the United States, the world’s largest and most dynamic market, Canada’s neighbour, and the foundation of its export economy. That access is not a talking point. It supports Canadian jobs, investment, supply chains, and growth.

Canada focus on China is an own goal. China cannot replace it. China is distant, strategically uncertain, and separated from Canada by geography, institutions, and infrastructure. It cannot reproduce continental integration: shared energy systems, cross-border capital, integrated factories, common standards, and decades of commercial interdependence.
Canada does not get to trade on sentiment while depending on geography.

Nor can it “win” a trade war with its largest customer. Ottawa can impose targeted costs where it has genuine leverage. It can negotiate firmly. But broad retaliation is not a strategy. It is emotional performance masquerading as economic policy.

Too many in the political and economic elite appear to believe retaliation can force the structural adjustment Canada has avoided for years. It cannot. Tariffs do not raise productivity. They do not attract investment, reduce regulatory costs, or make Canadian businesses more competitive. They raise prices for households, increase costs for manufacturers, and encourage mobile capital to locate elsewhere.
Retaliation for its own sake is an expensive expression of national frustration. Canadians pay the bill.

The deeper problem is not merely American pressure. It is Canadian failure: weak business investment, poor productivity growth, regulatory paralysis, provincial trade barriers, slow approvals, inadequate infrastructure, and a subsidy culture that protects incumbents rather than rewards builders.

Canada is rich in assets and poor in execution. It has energy, minerals, capital, skilled people, and privileged proximity to America. Yet it has made investment too slow, too risky, and too expensive.

The answer is not submission. It is reform: deregulate, accelerate approvals, remove barriers to capital and internal trade, and lower the cost of building.

Canada may need time to adjust. But first it needs to end its denial.

[Kevin Bambrough @BambroughKevin]

I’m thinking it’s going to be very interesting to see the kind of traction Kjirstin and Matt can get as they begin marketing $hg $hgraf at the Canaccord and Needham conferences.

Over the last year I’ve introduced a few institutions that invest longterm in small cap early stage companies. The sorts that are willing to keep an open mind and also understand the potential of graphene. But, last year it was a tough sell for institutionals. No permits, epa approval, short attacks even scare off buyers, and there wasn’t a clear picture of scalability.

It’s a completely different story now. Especially with this Western Gas deal… huge credibility now.

I think institutional investors are going to start to flock to the story because it’s clear that Western Gas and its parent companies Nippon and Mitsubishi Chemicals have signed on as partners. Last fund managers who wouldn’t bother taking a trip to Manhattan Kansas or chat with Dr Sorensen and Stephen Corkhill love to piggy back on major companies (like Japanese conglomerates) due diligence

An analyst or portfolio manager doesn’t have to stick their neck out risk looking stupid/wrong. Let’s face it.. for the after fund manager understanding how graphene forms in Hyperion and how turbostratic fractal graphene is far superior than any other graphene is a difficult leap of faith. They want to see big industry players getting involved before they do.

So, now we have half a dozen compounding partners. It seems like we will also get the big reveal / orders in the coming quarters as the top 10 automaker moves forward.

With Mitsubishi Chemicals being a supplier of all major Japanese Automakers I expect it will Hydrograph will win them all over in time. They have the data that proves they can improve and light weight all plastics in a car. That alone is massive. But it also provides uv protection. And of course it’s just one of the many areas of automotive sector that will use graphene. The entire car will have graphene in due course. Seats, batteries, electrical systems, insulation, paint, tires, on and on.

To say I’m excited about the future is an understatement. There’s still piles of people out there who think this is just some sort of promote. Well, they should do due diligence. Yes lots of people are becoming huge advocates…. And it’s becoming a cult. Something I predicted a year ago. That’s cause the science is solid, the data is there and turbostratic fractal graphene will touch everything humans produce. The nanocarbon material that hydrograph produces is plain and simply the core fundamental building block of our nanotech, nanomaterial and nanoengineering future.

From Ai data centers, to robots, the latest high tech all the way down to basic building materials. Deck boards, siding, concrete, insulation, paint, coatings, on and on.

It’s worth doing the due diligence and deciding for oneself… then position size accordingly.

Cheers… have a good weekend

[Gareth Roberts @OldRoberts953]

Here’s a radical idea.

Hold everybody to the same standards.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Reagan’s Bargain Still Points the Way on Canada.

The solution to today’s U.S.-Canada trade tensions is not hard to find. In fact, Ronald Reagan already sketched it out.

When Reagan entered into free trade with Canada, he did not do so out of sentimental continentalism. He did it because the deal served concrete American interests.

In 1987, Reagan said the agreement would remove Canadian tariffs, expand access to Canada’s market for U.S. manufacturing, agriculture, technology, and finance, and improve American security through additional access to Canadian energy supplies.

That was the original North American bargain: the United States got secure access to Canadian natural resources, and Canada got privileged access to the U.S. market.

That logic is even stronger today.

This is not cold fusion. Canada is not Mexico. Canada is not chiefly a low-cost labor platform or an export-processing zone. It is a resource power. It has the oil, gas, hydroelectricity, uranium, potash, and critical minerals the United States actually needs.

America, in turn, remains the most dynamic economy in the world and the market Canada must stay inside if it wants long-term growth and investment.

So the answer should be explicit: a continental energy and resource plan.

Under such a bargain, the United States would receive secure long-term access to Canadian energy, electricity, fertilizer inputs, and critical minerals at prices below global replacement cost. That discount would not be charity. It would be part of a broader security arrangement.

Canada benefits from the American defense umbrella, and if President Trump is serious about building systems like Golden Dome, then preferential resource pricing is one logical way for Canada to contribute to continental security.

In return, Canada would receive what it actually needs: dependable access to U.S. markets, preferential insider status in continental supply chains, and the ability to preserve key carve-outs in politically sensitive sectors.

Here is the rub: In my opinion, both the President and the Prime Minister know this.

Trump knows that secure Canadian resources at favorable prices are a win for American industry, consumers, and national security. Carney knows that Canada’s leverage lies in turning its natural endowment into permanent strategic relevance inside North America.

That is why, for all the noise, a deal will be made. CUSMA may have removed the old proportionality clause, but it did not remove the underlying logic. Reagan set the foundation. The answer is right there.

[🧢 Coach SCOTT ! 🏀💰👨🏻‍🦳 @NBAJazzChat1]

#HydroGraph | #HG

To the many who think graphene is only good for pencils and Pinewood Derby cars… you might want to look a little closer.

Once you understand better, you might also wonder who makes it. Then contemplate the effects financially as $HGRAF becomes mainstream. NFA

[HydroGraph Clean Power Inc. @HydroGraphInc]

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 "𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴" 𝗺𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗛𝘆𝗱𝗿𝗼𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆?

In our latest AMA, Tom Eldridge shares the realization that convinced him HydroGraph's technology could unlock new commercial opportunities.

[Handre @Handre]

Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence.

You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram.

The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will.

Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move.

The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.

[Arneri Design @ArneriDesign]

New peer-reviewed study just dropped: adding a tiny 4% dose of $HGRAF Fractal Graphene to ordinary activated carbon nearly QUADRUPLED a supercapacitor’s energy storage. Let me translate what that means for your daily life 🧵⚡ #graphene #EnergyStorage

(Thanks ���🏻 @thatkidbigmike)

[The Food Professor @FoodProfessor]

"Twenty-five years ago, I was virtually alone in Canada in advocating for supply management reform, particularly in the dairy sector. Today, a growing number of Canadians recognize that we can do better. We are losing dairy farms despite supply management, while global demand for Canadian food—and Canadian dairy proteins—continues to grow. We should be expanding our dairy sector, not managing its decline."