Michael Kawochka

Passions: music, travel, real estate, pharma, tech.

[Epic Clip Vault @EpicClipVault]

One of the greatest things the internet has ever produced.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Socialists imagine a class struggle. In their made-up fantasy the CEO is in competition with low level workers, the wealthy entrepreneur is stealing from the underpaid nurse.

In reality, workers do not compete vertically they compete horizontally.

Entrepreneurs compete with entrepreneurs. Investors outbid each other. CEOs are benchmarked against other CEOs. Nurses are hired from a pool of nurses. Etc.

The CEOs pay has no correlation to the entry level workers. The Football star on £300K a week isn’t linked to the person selling drinks in the stadium. A biotech entrepreneur raising VC capital isn’t paid relative to a cleaner.

What is linked is the demand and supply dynamic of each role.

If a company places an ad for a qualified truck driver and 150 people apply for the role, then the company knows it does not need to increase wages for that role. If the company has an open role for months, it is forced to look at the compensation package.

Same for a CEO. A board representing shareholders would like to hire a CEO for a lot less if they could. Their dream scenario would be to hire a CEO who brings in institutional investors, attracts top executives, drives innovation and growth, keeps margins steady and is a good public face for the business even under pressure. It turns out there aren’t a lot of these people looking for work and if you want one you have to pay more than other companies are offering.

The class struggle isn’t vertical it’s horizontal. CEOs are in competition with CEOs. Retail workers are in competition with retail workers. Demand and supply dynamics set the price.

Sure you can say that a CEO want’s profitability and would like wages to be lower BUT it’s not up to the CEO - demand and supply tension sets the price of workers. An Airline like RyanAir would like free pilots if they could get them but they can’t… so they pay the market rate.

The reason incomes are rising at the top and falling at the bottom is not class warfare. It’s technology and globalisation.

Technology makes basic jobs simple, remote or fully automated. At the same time tech makes executive roles more leveraged, more important and more valuable.

A CEO used to run a smaller organisation. Today a CEO who’s 2% better on a $5B company is generating $100M more. Seems sensible to try and pay a few million to get $100M.

Globalisation has put workers from all over the world in completion with each other - downward pressure on wages. Globalisation has given CEOs more market opportunities to explore - upside opportunity to unlock.

The rich are not very interested in buying houses that poor people own. The poor are not buying up the homes the rich want. They are separate groups living separate lives. Try finding the genuinely rich people whose strategy is to hoard normal residential homes - it barely exists as a thing. About 85% of landlords are people who own 1-4 properties. Super-landlords (100+ properties) are 0.2% of landlords and own a tiny fraction of the 30M homes in the UK… and they’re heavily taxed.

Class warfare isn’t real. It’s an imagined war in the minds of socialists.

Demand and supply dynamics are real. To the degree it is measured in class, it’s a horizontal competition not a vertical one.

[KNICKS BEAST @KnicksBeast]

Your daily reminder the Knicks are NBA Champions

(🎥 @KingBacca22x)

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Intonation changes meaning.

[Michael Kawochka @happymike]

https://t.co/2bTeCOwPl1

[Eric Alper 🎧 @ThatEricAlper]

On this day in 1982, The Human League's “Don't You Want Me” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Philip Oakey thought so little of the song, he almost left it off 'Dare' entirely, and it ended up becoming the band's biggest hit.

[Handre @Handre]

Every defender of money printing pictures himself holding the printer, never standing at the end of the line where the new money arrives worthless.

This is the same fantasy the socialist runs. He imagines himself the commissar deciding who eats, never the peasant waiting for bread that never comes.

You do this too if you cheer for the Fed. You imagine yourself the beneficiary.

The banks get them first. The Treasury gets them first. The hedge funds holding assets the central bank buys get them first. By the time the money reaches your wages, prices already climbed.

Richard Cantillon spelled this out in the 1730s. New money does not raise all prices at once. It enters at a point and spreads outward, enriching whoever spends it before the rise, robbing whoever holds it after.

The Fed expanded its balance sheet from $900 billion in 2008 to $8.9 trillion by 2022. Asset holders got richer. Wage earners watched grocery bills jump 11 percent in 2022 alone.

You were never the commissar. You were the peasant.

Jerome Powell never lost any sleep over your savings account. You do not control the printer, you are standing in the bread line. Stop defending the people who are stealing from you.

Stop imagining yourself next to the machine. You stand at the back of the line, and the line only gets longer.

[Handre @Handre]

Imagine a school district in Newark, New Jersey, where a teacher earns $85,000 a year, cannot teach, and cannot be fired. This is not a hypothetical. Between 2008 and 2012, Newark spent roughly $30 million paying tenured teachers pulled from classrooms because administrators judged them incompetent yet lacked the legal power to remove them. The state paid them to sit in rooms and do nothing. The bureaucrats called these places "rubber rooms." You might call it theft.

Tenure laws grant a government employee a property right in a job after a few years, usually three. Once vested, that right becomes nearly impossible to strip. In California, dismissing a single tenured teacher used to cost districts hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and stretch across years. So administrators stopped trying. Insane incentives produce rational responses.

Understand what a price actually does. In a free market, an employer weighs your output against your wage and adjusts. That feedback loop keeps talent flowing toward value. Tenure severs the loop. It replaces performance with seniority, and seniority rewards nothing but survival.

The victims are children who get one shot at fourth grade, and the good young teacher fired first during layoffs because "last in, first out" ignores merit entirely.

Defenders claim tenure protects academic freedom. For a ten-year-old learning long division? Please. It protects the mediocre from the consequences everyone else in the economy faces daily.

Abolish it. Let the market judge.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Very funny

[Scott Brooks @scotti_brooks]

A Yale scientist proved you can move almost anyone to yes in under 7 minutes by doing the opposite of convincing.

Here are 7 questions that do it:

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A physicist put 22 cars on a circular track and asked every driver to hold a steady 30 km/h, about 19 mph. No lights, no lanes, no obstacles. Within a minute the cars started bunching, and soon a full stop appeared out of nowhere, then drifted backward around the loop.

This was Yuki Sugiyama at Nagoya University in 2008. His team spaced the cars evenly on a 230-meter ring and filmed them from overhead. For a while the flow stayed smooth. Then the tiny differences no human can avoid, one driver a hair slower, the next a hair too close, began to feed on themselves.

One car eases off slightly. The driver behind sees the brake lights, reacts a fraction of a second late, and brakes a little harder to be safe. The next driver brakes harder still. A dozen cars back, someone is stopping dead. The squeeze rolls backward through the line like a compression running down a Slinky, and it keeps going long after the first driver has sped up again.

Car count was the tipping point. With fewer than 22 on that track, the bunching sorted itself out. At 22, a jam formed every time. Engineers call that a critical density, the point where a road holds just enough cars that one small tap can snowball into a standstill.

These waves are eerily consistent. Measured on highways around the world, the jam rolls backward against the traffic at roughly 20 km/h, and that speed barely shifts from one country to the next. Different drivers, different roads, same number.

The same setup later became the cure. In 2017, a US team rebuilt Sugiyama's ring with 22 cars and turned just one of them into a self-driving car running a program to smooth its own speed. That single car soaked up the small slowdowns instead of passing them back, and the waves died. Fuel use across every car fell by up to 40 percent. Fewer than 5 percent of the vehicles had to be automated to steady the whole group.

In 2022 the idea moved onto a live highway. Researchers ran 100 cars with cruise control guided by AI into the morning rush on Interstate 24 near Nashville, mixed into normal traffic. Early numbers pointed the same way: a small share of smoother-driving cars, up to 40 percent less fuel for everyone around them.

The jam you sat in this morning likely had no crash and no cause you could see. It was a few hundred drivers, each braking a moment too late.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Major cheat code in life: Listen to how someone describes every relationship that ended. If every ex was crazy, every boss was toxic, every friend betrayed them, the common thread is standing right in front of you. The story they tell about others is the story they'll tell about you.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Michael Kawochka @happymike]

Слава Україні!
Ukraine proves it can hit Russia almost anywhere https://t.co/ttljtqBrRT

[Jean @queens_parents]

Amazing how Rama Duwaji is able to stretch her $8K salary to travel to Mallorca and attend the World Cup with a prime seat at the midline. It’s so hard being Working Class™ these days, amirite?

[Handre @Handre]

Ayn Rand's most important lesson: Production comes before distribution. You cannot divide a pie nobody baked.

Every politician inverts that order. They argue over who gets what slice, how to tax the baker, how to redistribute the flour, as if the loaf simply materialized like manna. Rand called this out for what it is. Wealth is created by specific people doing specific things: Hank Rearden smelting metal, John Galt building a motor. Take those people away and you're left with committees drafting memos about fairness while the lights go dark.

The entrepreneur is not a parasite skimming off labor. He directs scarce resources toward their most urgent uses, and he eats the loss when he guesses wrong. No bureaucrat carries that risk. This is what Ludwig von Mises spent his career proving in denser prose.

Rand's villains aren't cartoon capitalists. They're the moochers who demand the moral sanction of their victims: the industrialist who lobbies for a subsidy, the intellectual who calls envy "social justice." She hated the crony as much as the commissar.

[Joseph Hernandez @hernandezforny]

Your ideology has failed everywhere it’s been tried, yet every time government fails, you blame capitalism.

New York’s grid isn’t struggling because of the free market. It’s struggling because politicians blocked pipelines, closed reliable power plants, delayed transmission upgrades, discouraged investment, and made it nearly impossible to build new infrastructure. That’s government failure, not market failure.

The fix is obvious: modernize the grid, expand transmission, keep reliable baseload power online, build next-generation nuclear, responsibly develop natural gas, and let private investment do what bureaucrats never can.

The invisible hand has created the most prosperous society in human history. Socialist central planning has produced shortages, rationing, blackouts, and economic decline, from the Soviet Union to Venezuela and beyond.

Stop using every crisis to recycle a failed ideology. History has already delivered its verdict, and it isn’t on your side.

[Michael Kawochka @happymike]

@MotivateInMind Buried lede: Dumb Human Drops Kid Into Monkey Cage.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

How to shoot high-end photography

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

Learn finger cobra to scare your friends