As we watch STR stocks tank, it’s important to understand much is due to misrepresentation. $Vacasa and $Sonder are in the hospitality industry. They aren’t tech companies any more than $WeWork tried to say they were. I’m building a true service company and proud of that!
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.
@SelinaBliss The thousands of responsible local operators represented by AZRT are ready to work with you to find win/win solutions. I’d love this next year to be the year we truly work together to find sustainable solutions.
Include the operators in the conversation and we can get there!
NAILED IT: Jeff Bezos: “A nurse in Queens who makes $75K a year pays more than $12K a year in taxes. Does that really make sense?”
“So people talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens NOT pay taxes? At all!”
“Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75K a year paying more than $1K a month in taxes?”
“That’s $1K a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything.”
“And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes. It’s only 3%.”
“We can find 3%. So we don’t have... it’s a small amount of money for the government. You know that. And the more I thought about it, to me, it’s kind of absurd that we’re doing this.”
“We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington — they should be sending her an apology. It really makes no sense.”
Exactly!
Life is like a guitar. @ericchurch offers a brillianct commencement address (and guitar lesson) at his alma mater, UNC, that belongs in the pantheon of addresses of this sort with those of Steve Jobs (Stanford) and David Foster Wallace (Kenyon College).
This is the tweet. Elites can do charity “their way” (lining their pockets and getting credit at lavish fundraisers)
Peasants simply cannot participate.
It would both solve the problem and take away the cherished spotlight elites demand.
Years ago I tried to start a non-profit that delivered tampons and sanitary pads to homeless women (these supplies are often overlooked) anyway we had everything lined up, companies were going to donate the supplies, we would package and distribute.
LA shut us down because we couldn’t guarantee how they would be disposed of. In fact the city fought us on it and called it an environmental hazard. Why are diapers any different? They aren’t, we just didn’t have the elite on our side.
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
@SenWarren The government trying to build “millions of homes”
Works great on spreadsheets. Would be a disaster in real life.
Reduce government involvement in building, and you’ll see a housing boom. Increase it, and we’ll have DMV style project management and inefficiency.
@WhiteHouse Was ICE aware of this individual? If the goal was to get the bad guys, why did they take so many without records but miss this guy who was evading criminal court? Genuinely curious.
I’ve been saying this for years. No company or organization would be existent with the dismal record TSA has. I don’t need a DMV visit every time I go somewhere. Make it go away.
The TSA has a 95% failure rate. Not 80%. Ninety-five.
In 2015, DHS sent 70 undercover agents through TSA checkpoints with fake bombs and weapons. 67 got through. That's a 95% failure rate.
One agent set off the metal detector, got the enhanced pat-down, and still had a fake explosive taped to his back that screeners missed. The TSA's response was to classify the test results so the public couldn't see them.
In 24 years, the TSA has not foiled a single terrorist plot or caught a single terrorist. Not one. Its $1 billion behavioral detection program identified exactly one person resembling a terrorist in two decades.
This agency costs $11.5 billion a year. It was created in response to 9/11, but 9/11 was not a failure of airport security. What actually made flying safe was reinforced cockpit doors and passengers who will no longer sit passively during a hijacking. Not the liquid ban. Not the shoe removal.
80% of European airports use private screening. Israel hasn't had a hijacking since 1968. 22 US airports already use private contractors and outperform TSA-screened airports.
Abolish the TSA. Replace it with the model that 80% of the developed world already uses.
Time spent in Federal Government roles…
George Washington: 8 years
Thomas Jefferson: 10 years
John Adams: 12 years
Nancy Pelosi: 39 years
Mitch McConnell: 41 years
Chuck Schumer: 45 years
This explains everything.
Founders vs Grifters