whiteSquirrelFinance

"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason."

- Hayek, "The Road to Serdom"

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

Reminder that half of the country is Republican. The @AAUP operate at Universities that are state sponsored monopolies.

[Tyler Austin Harper @Tyler_A_Harper]

Very funny that a lot of folks spent weeks arguing that the professoriate isn’t a political monoculture only for the AAUP to say “yeah so we are doing this endorsement because our members are super liberal and we gotta represent their super liberal views which are a monoculture.”

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

Read this Fauci diary entry closely. Officials would not admit the vaccine was not stopping spread because it might weaken the legal case for mandates. That is not science. That is a cover-up to justify coercion.

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

Stupid. This applies to businesses as well. These organizations should strive to be apolitical.

[Josh Kalla @j_kalla]

I am not an AAUP member, but I think it is a really bad idea for the American Association of University Professors to be endorsing candidates, especially in a factional Democratic primary.

[Timur Kuran @timurkuran]

So terribly shortsighted, and so harmful to American universities. A commitment to neutrality would have barred AAUP from taking sides in Democratic Party primaries. Alas, AAUP’s current leadership insists on being a political player.

[Classical Liberal Caucus @LP_CLC]

at what percent of government seizing the means of production does communism start

[Dylan Allman @dylanmallman]

The IRS took $107,702 from a man for depositing his own money exactly the way a bank teller told him to.

Never charged him. Publicly admitted the seizure was wrong. Kept the cash anyway, for over a year.

Then his lawyer got a letter from the prosecutor warning that press coverage "ratchets up feelings within the agency."

His name is Lyndon McLellan. He sells $2.75 catfish sandwiches.

He bought L&M Convenience Mart in Fairmont, North Carolina in 2001, back when it was a couple of gas pumps and a refrigerator. 13 years of opening the place and closing it turned it into a store with a proper lunch counter. Median household income in Fairmont is $21,484. He built a real business in a town that poor and put $100,000 in the bank doing it.

The IRS emptied the account in July 2014.

His niece handled the deposits, and a teller told her that keeping them under $10,000 saved the bank paperwork. So she kept them under $10,000. The institution legally required to report him is the one that taught him how to trip the wire.

The Bank Secrecy Act is what orders your bank to report you to the government every time you move more than $10,000 in cash, and to file a suspicion report when your deposits sit near the line. Every seizure like this one starts with that report.

What his niece did is called structuring, a federal crime whether the money is clean or filthy, which means the government never has to allege you did anything else. They didn't. They just took it.

13 years to earn it. 13 seconds to lose it. His words.

They take the money first. Then you sue to get it back. The case gets filed against the cash itself, so there's no defendant to acquit and nothing for them to prove. You want your savings, you hire a lawyer and you wait.

And they knew. 3 months after they cleaned him out, the New York Times ran an investigation and the IRS announced it would stop seizing accounts in cases exactly like his. They kept his. That February the Commissioner of the IRS sat in front of Congress, apologized to the people this had been done to, pointed at McLellan's case by name, and admitted somebody wasn't following the policy. They kept his. In March the Justice Department announced its own version of the same reform. They kept his.

He got it back after more than a year. A judge had to order the government to cover his legal fees, which it fought, and it fought to keep the interest his own money earned sitting in their account. These are the people who will bill you for filing 3 days late.

What exactly did he do to get their attention? He deposited his register. Cash businesses land in that pattern constantly. Insurance won't cover more than $10,000 on hand. Tellers give that advice every day. People form habits. Nobody mails you a warning. You find out the rule exists after they've already taken everything.

And you don't need a store. Servers deposit tips. Contractors get paid in cash. Somebody sells a truck, works a booth, gets paid for a gig. The pattern doesn't care where the money came from.

Congress patched a piece of this in 2019, for the IRS only. Structuring is still 5 years in federal prison. Other agencies still seize on it. The statute never changed.

But the number did. The same law lets the Treasury redraw the threshold over any place it picks. It dropped the trigger to $1,000 along the southwest border, and its own guidance tells banks to file on customers who look like they're staying underneath it. Minneapolis sits at $3,000. One signature moves that line, and that line is what makes you a criminal.

Making a shape somebody in Washington finds interesting is enough to lose everything in your account.

Cato's @EconWithNick has been documenting this for years. Read him before it's your account.

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

Really solid political messaging

[Steve Hilton @SteveHiltonx]

Can you be anti-Trump, but still vote for me?

Take the test:

[Maarten Boudry @mboudry]

Every time you think academia has hit rock bottom, you read something like this, from the prestigious @Cambridge_Uni. If you'll excuse me now, I need to go pick my jaw up off the floor.

(Please bracket whatever you think about @nathancofnas and his views on IQ & race, which are irrelevant here).

https://t.co/GjI4LAqLbk

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Alex Epstein @AlexEpstein]

"Rich person" services that poor people can access now thanks to AI:

- Custom tutor
- Job training
- Legal advice
- Tax advice
- Financial planning
- Psychological counseling
- Concierge doctor
- Career coach
- Executive assistant
- Test prep

Oh and it's all vanishingly cheap.

[🔻agitprop + absurdity🔻 @agtprpnabsrdty]

A months-long Sky News investigation into the US double-tap strike on a Minab girls' school found the Pentagon had tracked the site by satellite since 1987 and could still count children's shadows in the courtyard before firing anyway.

What the evidence shows:

Three Tomahawk missiles fired from the USS Spruance, 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea, hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on Feb 28, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Witnesses described a second strike hitting the exact spot where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same site. Death tolls range from 156 to over 170, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, had its own website, and was geolocatable through open-source materials any analyst could have pulled in minutes.

Built to fail:

The Pentagon's own machinery for preventing exactly this outcome had already been dismantled. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by roughly 90 percent and cut CENTCOM's civilian casualty assessment team from ten people to one, months before the war started. A May Pentagon Inspector General report found the office had become a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then blamed for not warning anyone.

Accountability buried:

Four months on, CENTCOM's commander told reporters the investigation was near complete, yet nothing has been released. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question, adding that mistakes are made and war is nasty. The mistake was choosing not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one.

My take: A military that surveilled a schoolyard for four decades didn't fail to see the children, it decided in advance that seeing them wouldn't change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information.

[London River @LondonRiverSFW]

I think libertarians across the spectrum should talk more about solving social problems. Not just, “the government sucks at this,” but more, “here’s how market-based and/or community-based solutions would be better.”

[The Wolf Of All Streets @scottmelker]

JUST IN: WHITE HOUSE AGREES ON CLARITY ACT ETHICS PACKAGE, POTENTIALLY CLEARING THE WAY FOR UPDATED BILL TEXT

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

@LexCoryell @FrankLuntz @EDSecMcMahon Because they want predictable hours, like summers off, and enjoy teaching (it's called training outside of academia). I know plenty who would but can't because of regulations and mandatory education.

[Libertarian Party @LPNational]

It’s not freedom if you’re still trapped.

Time to unlock the cage.

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

@peruvian_bull Ben Bernake would call this the courage to act.

[Rasty Turek @synopsi]

I grew up in that.

When my parents first married, they were handed an apartment. But couldn’t afford any furniture, so they slept in bathtub and on the floor in comforter given to them by their parents.

We didn’t have to deal with health insurance. But when my mom was giving birth to me, they had no ultrasound available in the whole city, so I was breached and we both almost died.

We didn’t have to worry about food. There was mostly none. We spent many hours waiting with my mom in freezing cold for bread and milk.

Luxury was plastic hooks for curtains. My mom spent a year asking the store clerk if they had any. When she finally got them, she wouldn’t put them on for months, worrying they could break.

My parents didn’t have to worry about paying taxes. There were no private employers, only the state. Both being college educated engineers naturally earned less combined than my uncle, the blacksmith.

Life under communism is easy. You worry about basic survival so much that you don’t have time to worry about fancy things like vacations or inequality. All are equal. Equally poor.

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

“Around a third of liberal students think professors should be reported for saying that biological sex is a scientific fact, and that there are two sexes.”

https://t.co/mTTaEkcpI4

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

@FrankLuntz Remarkably short sighted. Open source, open weight models are the only path to freedom. Better = defined patent period on frontier model weights then mandatory publishing. This would make American AI the leader in both capability and freedom of use.

[whiteSquirrelFinance @decentralizeMi]

@LexCoryell @FrankLuntz @EDSecMcMahon First need to answer why an electrical engineer with 20 years of on the job experience isn't allowed to teach an engineering class.