Nick Knipe

Developer. Recovering lawyer. Civility and curiousity should be more popular.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@AverageMov37978 @zriboua Ok Michael 😂

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@HateSmell @mindingmyps @StevenGlinert These ppl are not serious don’t waste your time.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@TheSlutBuster @balajis @romanhelmetguy yeah, jfc this guy has lost it. it's a failure unless the us literally sends in the marines and they piss down the throat of the ayatollah. no sense of strategic trade offs and/or objectives.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

https://t.co/HibhsivykS

[Hayden Field @haydenfield]

this metaphor in Musk v. Altman closing statements is SENDING me

[Pacific Legal 🗡⚖️ @PacificLegal]

BREAKING: The California Coastal Commission told a Dana Point couple they could rebuild their aging home — but only if they agreed to demolish it whenever the government says so. We filed suit to stop this unconstitutional shakedown.

[max tempers @maxtempers]

The largest supermarket in Britain, that operates on razor-thin margins, is about to be crushed for the crime of paying different jobs different salaries, while our legislature shrugs.

How dare they suggest that “so-called market rates” can exist in Soviet Britain.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@RoKhanna Minimum wage serves to mollify the masses. Increase fast food wages, it gets paid by people who buy fast food. Does that seem like the wealth transfer you were looking for?

This freakonomics episode fairly dissects the debate: https://t.co/6VBKnckczT

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@Sean90884195 @AXELKAISER Here is the prior mayor's response to that claim: https://t.co/d6vJi28qie

[Eric Adams @ericadamsfornyc]

Let me get this straight. The Adams administration earned top bond ratings, left the incoming mayor a record $8B in reserves, navigated the city through COVID, absorbed a $9B migrant crisis, and survived. And now the new administration is complaining? The fastest way to balance a budget is to admit that “free” comes with a price tag.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@KevinDoll11 @jarvis_best Exactly why lawyers don't tell you this.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@adamcarolla Went out to eat and sent his kids to school

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@Mistrbrojangles @romanhelmetguy @ShawnRyan762 you'd still have to deal with the ballistic missiles and drones that would have been animated in response to the blockade. but in your scenario, USA wud not have chance to disable as many systems as we could in a surprise attack. do you see why that bad?

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@adamcarolla Exactly. Exhibit 2: Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor
https://t.co/4hISq23nL8

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

Dissent in Grant’s Pass omits drugs abuse as a cause of homelessness, but at least remembered to cite climate change as a viable cause.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@Eta_Miraklo @PacificLegal CCC staff is the issue. The commissioners are just figureheads who rubber stamp anything advanced by the Commission's bureaucracy.

[Terence Shen @Terenceshen]

In a previous tweet, I pointed out that China will have a harder time catching up with the United States. China’s GDP was about 78% of the U.S. level in 2021, but by 2024 that share had fallen to roughly 64%.

Some argued this was simply an exchange-rate effect, while others questioned the metric itself and suggested that purchasing-power parity, or PPP, tells a different story.

It is true that the renminbi has weakened from around 6.3 to roughly 7.2 per dollar, a depreciation of about 13%. That does reduce China’s GDP in dollar terms. But the divergence between China and the United States is visible in underlying growth.

In nominal terms, the U.S. economy has expanded more rapidly. American GDP rose from about 23 trillion dollars in 2021 to roughly 28 to 29 trillion in 2024, an increase of around 25%. China’s grew from approximately 114 trillion yuan to around 130 trillion yuan, closer to 15%. Even allowing for differences in measurement, the gap is widening, not narrowing.

The same pattern appears in capital markets. U.S. equities, represented by the S&P 500, increased from roughly $45 trillion in 2021 to around $55–60 trillion more recently. Chinese markets have moved in the opposite direction. Indices such as the CSI 300 and the Hang Seng have seen their combined market value fall from around $13 trillion at their peak to closer to $10 trillion. If this were primarily a currency story, it would be difficult to explain why U.S. markets have surged while China’s have contracted in absolute terms.

This points to a deeper structural shift. China’s growth model, long driven by investment, construction and credit expansion, is running into constraints, including diminishing returns and rising debt burdens. The United States, by contrast, continues to benefit from stronger consumption and more resilient capital markets.

There is also a historical lesson. During the Cold War, Nobel economist Paul Samuelson projected that the Soviet economy would eventually catch up with or even surpass that of the United States in late 20 century . Those forecasts extrapolated from USSR’s strong growth trends but underestimated geopolitical realities.

As for PPP, it serves a specific purpose but has clear limitations. It is useful for comparing domestic purchasing power, yet far less informative when assessing global economic weight, financial influence or technological leadership.

For instance, India’s economy already appears significantly larger than Japan’s. Few would argue that India offers a higher level of development.

Finally, headline GDP figures themselves have limits. Investment can boost output and employment in the short term while generating little long-term return, especially when financed by rising debt. This concern has long been raised in discussions of China’s infrastructure and construction-led model. Questions around data transparency add another layer of uncertainty.

For policymakers, the implication is straightforward. Treating this as a currency-driven fluctuation, or relying on PPP-based comparisons, risks misreading China’s trajectory. The evidence points to a more durable divergence, shaped by structural factors rather than short-term financial movements. This is not simply a cyclical slowdown. It marks a shift in relative economic momentum.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@jenvanlaar https://t.co/QegTS43JEr

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

Fun fact: this bureaucracy is designed to make politically-animated decisions. The Coastal Comm is made up of appointed "volunteers". They are paid nothing, except a tiny stipend of $12/hr for some prep they might do for the monthly hearings addressing the 1000s of pages of material prepped by a well-paid enforcement staff. Imagine what kind of "justice" people in such position dole out. Not only is the crop made up of a certain politically-motivated crowd (who else would do such a thankless side job?), but this structure ensures that they can never be adequately prepared and never motivated to make unpopular-but-correct decisions (ie, justice). Court review is extremely limited; grand deference is given to their decisions, no matter how many ludicrous things the commissions might say to shed light on their motivations. Exactly what the government wants.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

Is there confirmation of this? I've heard accounts of supposed innuendo, and I've always been curious how people like Will Smith seem to have been granted a permit for what looks like a fucking LAKE in supposedly sensitive habitat. But never heard of confirmed cases of raw corruption.

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

oh, I'm very much for change: subject the centers of accumulated power to ravenous competition and revising the tax code so the employees and builders can better share in the risk (and thus success) without penalty.

apologies if this does not align with the single direction of change you understand possible

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

Hayek expressed this better in Road to Serfdom. To the gentle socialists who want big gov b/c they hate the sociopaths running big corporations, just wait until you centralize the power into a single source. You'll be shocked to discover who gravitates there and ends up on top.

[Kirk Lubimov @KirkLubimov]

This is the best part from Pierre Poilievre appearance on the Diary of a CEO podcast;

"Those who push a socialist ideology have a gross contradiction in their view of human nature.
They say that human beings are wretched, self-interested, greedy when they’re in the private voluntary economy, but they’re angels when they’re in the governmental economy.

They argue that the government should just control everything because then we have all these angels that will decide for us."
🎯

[Nick Knipe @kniborg]

@0xrwu same