foxotcw

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@japan_nobunaga Fractional inches are ideal for the trades or most carpentry. A "hundredth" (0.001") is the smallest length that matters for most precision machining. Much easier to deal with than fractional millimeters.
Metric units are always either too short or too long.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@aspenpeenoisfox "Fig. 5: an expie searching for fentanyl"
???
Disney cartoon fox enters the scene.
This is really going to confuse future scholars.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

When I was a kid, the Bronx was burning. My dad was a fireman who happened to be an Ivy League graduate.

He told me it wasn’t the crackheads torching the city, whatever the news said. It was fraud.

Let me explain how it worked…. John Doe buys a rundown apartment building for $100k. He pockets the redevelopment tax break, then sells it to Joe Doe for $250k. Joe pockets the tax break, then sells it to Jerry Doe for $500k. Rinse and repeat until the building is worth $5 million.

The tax breaks are real. The money is not.

Because the buyers are all family, the cash flows out of Swiss bank account 27852 and right back into 27852 after every sale. There’s a transaction cost, sure, but the tax breaks more than cover it.

Then comes the payoff: they insure the building for $5 million and burn it down.

The name for this was “Jewish Lightning.” The phrase stuck around not because the landlords were all Jewish, but because the stereotype hit a nerve in a city run by Jewish mayors from 1974 to 1989, the peak of the burning. Fair or not, the term stuck.

So why was none of this investigated? NGO funding, of course.

The NYPD union was powerful, and NYC detectives had sweeping investigative authority over almost everything. Except arson. Arson belonged to FDNY detectives. NGOs, routing money through union donations, stoked the rivalry between cops and firemen.

Long story short, arson investigators got no funding and zero cooperation from the NYPD.

No money for investigations means no arrests.

Eventually the Bronx ran out of buildings to burn, and Giuliani drove the final nail into arson fraud’s coffin.

But the lesson survived, and it’s the foundation of today’s fraud. The lesson was this: the actual value of the asset doesn’t matter.

👉What matters is the movement of money.

Destruction is still very profitable. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the cleanup and rebuild were estimated at $1.7 billion, with the bridge reopening in 2028. The cost has since ballooned to $5.2 billion, and the wreckage still isn’t fully cleared.

Money pours into demolition,, engineering, environmental review, project management, waste removal.

But if the work doesn’t actually get done, the real expenses stay low. The money moves; the bridge doesn’t.

And here’s the leap: you don’t have to destroy anything at all. You just have to not build it.

Democrats allocate money to a government body, which hands it to a project manager, who hires consultants, who hire subcontractors, who hire more subcontractors, who funnel it back to Democrats, who allocate more money.

The fewer the actual costs (labor, materials, equipment) the more of the flow you can capture.

And if a taxpayer complains, you hire a PR firm and a few consultants to explain why costs keep exploding while nothing gets built. The easiest thing to blame is red tape.

So why does red tape exist?

Because destroying valuable property, while profitable, is too obviously unethical.

Burning buildings gets you arrested, eventually. Not building gets you a ribbon-cutting and a press release.

Here’s the deeper trap. Because our most valuable assets are fixed (houses, cars, index funds) we think of money as static. You have what you have. It grows over time, but it doesn’t flow.

That’s exactly where the fraud lives: in the flow.

The light bulb moment was realizing you don’t need to destroy physical property. You only need to destroy productivity.

If labor and materials are never purchased while money pours in, the fraud works.

You don’t have to build or destroy anything of value, just productivity. You just announce a project and start writing checks while throwing up enough red tape to block any real spending on labor and materials.

This is basically why Congress handed @PeteButtigieg $1.2 trillion and our roads and bridges still suck five years later. They put up signs, traffic cones, and red tape, and little else.

But there are a few residual problems. 1/2

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@boredjew @ChrisValence @jollier_raptor College-educated social workers, police, or clinic workers would not see themselves as sharing the same class with those abused girls.
The middle/professional classes probably have the most intense bigotry against the working/low-class Britons.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@Tlynn56184402 @ThomBrady5 It's more that they haven't learned nor forgotten anything since the 1960's.
The ones I know spend all their time with other white liberal boomers. They don't experience the horror of most white minority areas and institutions, and assume white men are somehow always advantaged.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@Tlynn56184402 @ThomBrady5 I remember liberal Boomers eating that up.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@Hemuchang Wholesome twink activities.

[Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke]

The story behind the New York Times’ 1903 claim that human flight was between one and ten million years away is even worse than it looks.

Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.

The New York Times did not dismiss the possibility of powered flight at random. There was a very specific reason behind it. At the time, America’s most prominent scientific authority, Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley, had been showered with large amounts of taxpayer funding to build an aircraft, the Langley Aerodrome. Despite all the money, institutional backing, and elite prestige, Langley and his team could not get it to fly, culminating in a series of very public failures, the last on December 8, 1903.

So when the New York Times declared that flight was millions of years away, what it was really saying was that if the most credentialed and well-funded “experts” cannot do it, then it cannot be done.

A mere nine days later, the elites’ proclamation of impossibility lay in ruins. Two totally unknown bicycle mechanics from Ohio achieved the first powered flight using improvised parts, a few hundred dollars of their own money, and sheer persistence.

The story of flight is, at its core, a story of the triumph of American individualism over elite credentialism. The fact that it was the New York Times that inadvertently delivered the proof is the most fitting conclusion imaginable.

[Bennett's Phylactery @extradeadjcb]

It goes way beyond gender discourse, this is the whole engine of liberalism

>identify a human relationship under tension
>offer a commodified, legible, transactional version of that relationship to the weaker party
>pay for it by coercing the more powerful party
>win a client, neutralize a rival power structure

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@MAWKVLT I think AI has accelerated the inevitable turn away from overworked and increasingly soulless digital illustrations.

AI slop has only increased my attraction to works in natural media, comics, and sketchy drawing styles that convey intention and personality.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@BasedMikeLee Mormons aren't Christian. It's nothing personal; they just aren't.
Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox can all agree on that.

[𝑪𝑨𝑼𝑫𝑰𝑳𝑯𝑶 ᛟ @criollospirit]

What most foreigners don’t know is that in 1988, Brazil established the most progressive constitution in world history.

They think Brazil became a narco-state because crime simply overpowered the state—being stronger and controlling more regions or people by thriving financially.

Which is a huge lie. The police can easily enter any favela and arrest any criminal. The real key issue stopping Brazil from becoming safe is the Justice system. Once a criminal is jailed, they are granted all kinds of protections and aid through international NGOs and their lobby with the Brazilian left and the judiciary.

Today's Brazil faces problems deeply correlated with the exact same ones affecting Europe and North America.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

You’ll notice there is no look-back celebration or remembrance of this or virtually any of the other great moral victories from that era. It’s all been memory holed, a will-o'-the-wisp dimming out in the far distance.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@aspenpeenoisfox Very good proportions, heads and upper body. I’d give more attention to the leg muscles. They need toes and ankle joints!

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@TheProtestFilms @ThatPolishGuy84 @DiscussingFilm Prince Adam (his real identity) intentionally acted like an ineffectual, clueless goof so no one would get suspicious about why he 'disappeared' every time there was a crisis and He-Man showed up.

Same as Clark Kent/Superman.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@avidseries Why is the concept of a 'nation' with stable boundaries and some degree of mutual respect and fellow-feeling between citizens so difficult for you to understand?

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@TruueDiscipline They aren't eating random dirt. The only kind they mention specifically is clay.

Very fine clays like bentonite were once commonly used as thickeners for ice cream.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@owenbroadcast They didn't have overdriven tube amplifiers back then.
You need all those harmonics to make parallel fifths sound good.

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

“The policies that you – the UK, the USA, and the UN – are forcing upon us will mean chaos, bloodshed, civil war and starvation – even if you paper over the cracks for a while with grants in aid."

-Angus Graham, 7th Duke of Montrose and member of the Ian Smith Rhodesian Front government, describing what would happen if the West and the communists succeeded in destroying Rhodesia

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@MahoundParadise @Steve_Sailer @michaelshermer Hispanic, Asian, and even Anglo cultures more often associate wisdom with gravity and fewer, well-chosen words.
Being a public intellectual today overlaps too much with being a clown or performance artist to attract Hispanic men in particular.

[foxotcw @kettupoika]

@MahoundParadise @Steve_Sailer @michaelshermer More than any other groups I can think of, both blacks and Jews celebrate verbal extroversion and love to hear themselves talk.