Fully agreed. I'm a designer, urbanist, building ecologies of architecture. I have changed my goals and trajectory to now explore how I can help X-Musk build future cities.
Ecology is a biological life-support system unique to Earth so far as we know. I'm betting there is value in bringing it with us on our multi-planetary journey.
The Cash for Clunkers program, which Congress passed in June 2009 and burned through its $3 billion budget in under two months, destroyed functional wealth on a national scale, and somehow they called it "stimulus."
The mechanics were simple: trade in a working car, receive up to $4,500 toward a new one, and watch government employees pour sodium silicate into the old engine to make it seize permanently. Around 700,000 vehicles got crushed. These were not rusted-out death traps. The eligibility rules required the trade-in to be drivable and insured. You were watching the state systematically annihilate usable capital because Keynesian demand theory told it that destruction generates recovery. Frederic Bastiat explained why this is wrong in 1850, in an essay short enough to read on your lunch break. Congress ignored it.
The ripple effect hit people the government never mentioned in its press releases. Mechanics lost repair work. Used-car dealers watched their inventory evaporate. Low-income buyers who depend on the sub-$5,000 market faced prices that jumped roughly 10% in the years after the program. Free market economists call this "seen versus unseen." Politicians only showed you the gleaming new Chevy Malibu driving off the lot. They never showed you the single mother in Akron who needed a $3,000 Corolla and found nothing affordable left on the lot.
Even the environmental justification collapsed under basic scrutiny. A 2009 study by Resources for the Future calculated that the program cost between $237 and $365 per ton of carbon dioxide reduced. The voluntary carbon credit market at the time priced a ton around $10 to $20. The government spent up to thirty times the market rate to achieve an environmental outcome the market was already pricing far more efficiently.
This is what central planning always does. It takes your money, destroys real assets, and transfers wealth from the poor to auto manufacturers and their financiers. The program's designers received awards. The Akron mother paid higher prices. The engines sat crushed in junkyards. Nobody in Washington answered for any of it.
Milei choque le monde avec une première mondiale!
Désormais, si l'Etat entre en déficit et que ce déficit n'est pas résolu en quelques semaines, alors ne seront plus payés les salaires:
- du président
- des ministres
- des principaux fonctionnaires du pays
- des députés
- des sénateurs
Et toutes les dépenses non-essentielles de l'Etat seront purement et simplement gelées.
Une mesure forte, brutale mais tellement logique.
Avec ce système, les dirigeants et les bureaucrates n'auront plus le choix que de maintenir un budget à l'équilibre.
Il est temps qu'ils arrêtent de jouer avec notre argent et notre futur en nous endettant sans limites.
They are referendums. The people decide.
In Switzerland, I believe any citizen can put forward a petition for a referendum.
So maybe a certain number of public signatures? But thats not really the point.
Current system doesn't work. Has not worked for decades. NZ is cooked if it can't change.
CO₂'s fundamental chemistry underpins every multicellular organism on Earth.
Plants, algae and ancient cyanobacteria capture sunlight to convert CO₂ and water into glucose, releasing oxygen as a byproduct. That simple reaction forms the carbon backbone of every strand of DNA, every animal, every breath you take.
The global warming campaign has too often ignored this natural majesty — focusing instead on fear and hyperbole, while overlooking the greening planet NASA satellites have documented from space.
Earth is greening dramatically — CO₂ fertilisation has added biomass equivalent to two continents of new forest in recent decades, boosting crop yields and ecosystems alike. Oceans, holding around 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, continue their ancient dance of absorption, circulation and outgassing under Henry’s Law.
CO₂ even provided the raw material for the iron and steel that built modern civilisation. Billions of years ago, vast mats of cyanobacteria in the primordial oceans produced so much oxygen it triggered the Great Oxidation Event. As oxygen reacted with dissolved iron in the seas, it precipitated to form the massive banded iron formations we still mine today for steel.
CO₂ doesn't just enable life — it powers the entire food web and reshapes Earth’s atmosphere and geology. Without it, our planet would most likely be toxic and largely lifeless.
The miracle of life unfolded in nature, without our help.
Without CO₂, there would be no photosynthesis, no free oxygen, no food chains — and no us.
Ok I’m interested in this. Go with me, I’m having an opinion …
On one hand you have the guardian seemingly supporting the free speech of a barrister and on the other you have a broken UK.
See I think this is the real issue, we can’t fix this, it’s too late, think about it….
Our common law jury system can ONLY survive if jurors have an allegiance to UK law. And that must come BEFORE their politics, religion, ideology or tribe.
That shared social common ground, where we all have stuff in common, is being steadily eroded by mass migration, progressive activism and a new culture that teaches people to identify with ‘groups’ not the country and its laws! (That’s now far right nationalism.)
So jurors have maybe begun voting according to “their side” rather than the evidence and the law. So decisions are based on feelings and ‘sides’ instead. (Terrifying)
Which is why judges think they need to restrict what barristers say. Hmm … worrying for fair trials.
So, weirdly, the loss of common culture doesn’t produce more freedom, instead It has to produce more control.
Fascinating.
Love the energy! Hyde Park has seen huge crowds (4/20 draws 50k–100k chilling), but a proper blanket-filled, agenda-free optimistic picnic with zero doom? This has real shot at being the biggest *vibes* picnic ever.
Let's pack it out Sept 5 — bring food, friends, and future optimism. Who's in? 🧺🚀
Hier quelqu’un m’a sorti que l’AfD c’était le diable incarné.
Du coup j’ai passé une heure avec Grok à lire leur programme (Grundsatzprogramm 2016 + Wahlprogramm 2025 « Zeit für Deutschland »).
Voilà ce que j’ai trouvé, point par point :
- Référendums d’initiative populaire à la suisse + limitation des mandats des professionnels de la politique
- Europe des nations souveraines (ou sortie si impossible), fin de l’euro comme monnaie unique
- Contrôle total des frontières, procédures d’asile hors Allemagne, prestations en nature uniquement, remigration massive des personnes sans droit de séjour et des criminels
- Baisse massive des impôts, suppression du Soli, family splitting, simplification fiscale
- Fin de l’Energiewende : retour au nucléaire, maintien du charbon, réparation de Nord Stream, suppression de la taxe CO₂ et des interdictions de moteurs thermiques
- Famille traditionnelle (père-mère-enfant) encouragée par des aides natalistes fortes
- Deutsche Leitkultur, langue allemande protégée, « l’islam n’appartient pas à l’Allemagne » s’il refuse l’ordre juridique
- Renforcement de la police, tolérance zéro sur la criminalité étrangère et les clans
- Liberté d’expression maximale et réforme des médias publics
C’est le programme officiel, pas des rumeurs.
Maintenant, question simple et sincère :
Quelqu’un peut m’expliquer concrètement en quoi ce programme fait de l’AfD le nouveau parti nazi ?
DoC leaving a 1080 poison trail of destruction 🤬
5 dead oystercatchers & lots of dead crabs on Motueka Sandspit this evening.
Downstream from Kahurangi 1080 poison drop....
We’ve asked DOC & MPI to test them for 1080 but so far no indication they have.
@FreedomDotKiwi#nzpol
It’s weird how the founding stories of western civilisation belong to everyone in the world, while the stories of other cultures are their particular possession.
En fait, vous n’avez toujours rien compris.
Ce n’est pas
« Nicolas qui paie » contre « Nicolas qui reçoit ».
C’est le problème de l’allocation du capital.
Chaque fois qu’on prend de force dans une poche pour mettre dans l’autre, on passe par des mains qui décident à la place des gens.
Les vôtres.
Celles des politiques et de la bureaucratie.
Et vous êtes catastrophiquement mauvais à ce jeu.
Vous créez des systèmes monstrueusement inefficaces où le capitalisme de connivence et la corruption poussent comme de la moisissure sur un plat avarié.
Vous prenez dans la poche de ceux qui produisent, vous gardez une grosse partie au passage pour financer votre propre machine et votre niveau de vie, et vous redistribuez le reste avec des pertes colossales et des incitations tordues.
Ce n’est pas de la solidarité. C’est du parasitisme institutionnalisé.
Arrêtez cette rhétorique de la redistribution magique. Le vrai enjeu n’est pas « qui a combien », mais qui alloue le mieux les ressources rares pour créer de la valeur. Les entrepreneurs risquent leur peau et leur argent tous les jours. Vous, vous risquez l’argent des autres.
Les mauvaises idées ne sont pas des mauvaises personnes. Mais elles tuent d’abord ceux qui y croient, et ensuite toute une société.
On ne veut plus que vous soyez les redistributeurs obligatoires.
Parce que vous échouez systématiquement. L’avenir appartient à ceux qui construisent, pas à ceux qui gèrent la redistribution.
Et au travail.
The impulse to change Bitcoin’s rules merely to prevent others from using Bitcoin in ways you disapprove of is statist and alien to a community rooted in liberty, property rights, free markets, natural law, and Austrian economics. BIP 110 would impose monetary purity by fiat.
HDPA said on ZB that nobody will buy our stuff if we leave the Paris accord, nobody will buy our stuff, because we will be seen as “dirty
Nonsense.
It’s up to our marketing and politicians to show the world we can still be clean and green without paying for magic climate beans.
The elite’s long war on Norwegian identity failed.
They told us we had no culture. That anyone with a passport is Norwegian. That Viking history is something to be ashamed of.
Then the national team embraced the Vikings, and Norway woke up.
Welcome to the most unifying force in modern Norway.
Every person living in a western nation needs to listen to every word of this
Katherine Berbalsingh went to the University of Oxford and is Headmaster at Michaela Community School in London, UK
She PERFECTLY explains the mass indoctrination into the narrative of oppressor and oppressed, and of hating White People
I will write only some of this out because it’s very important, however you should listen to it so you can hear the passion:
“The culture shift comes from what children learn at school and online. Ask any young person what history they learned at school, and they’ll tell you, Hitler. Ask them what else? Slavery. Ask them what else? American civil rights.
In fact, what little they know of history will be all about Black and brown people fighting for equality against the white man, women fighting men for the vote, gay and trans people fighting for various rights. Our young people have been taught that history is simply one long story about various groups struggling under the oppressive dead white man.
— History is taught through an oppressor lens. The triangular slave trade, white men held the power. What about Britain ending the slave trade? More than a quick mention, if at all? Mm, no.
What of the Arab slave trade that lasted 3 times as long as the triangular slave trade? Mm, no.
Okay, so GCSE history in Britain is often taught as migration through time, so the idea that Britain has always been a land of immigrants is embedded in our children’s heads. Most schools would prefer to concentrate learning about the tiny number of Black people who existed in Tudor England over a thorough analysis of England’s break from Rome.
— Not to mention weeks on King Mansa Musa of Mali because he was a Black Muslim. His bearing on British institutions, laws, and faith is nonexistent. And the fact that he is said to have been the richest man in history, thanks in part to his massive slave-owning society, is a detail somehow that teachers rarely ever teach.
But it isn’t just our schools. It’s our general culture too. Take your kids to a museum or an art gallery in any Western country, and you’ll find the same narrative.
As an example, when learning about aviation in London’s Science Museum and the extraordinary feat that is man making massive machines move in the sky, a write-up on the wall explains that women and Black people were historically barred from aviation schools and the military. Similarly, James Watt, the man who invented the steam engine and is considered the founder of the Industrial Revolution, has a write-up on the wall explaining that his early career involved slave trafficking, with a bonus analysis of the whole of Britain’s complicity in the slave trade.
They flatten the entire human story and all of its complexities into the narrative of oppressor and oppressed, leaving young people unable to see the world in any other terms.”
We have to end the mass indoctrination