Lance Barnett

#Jacksonville • #Realtor • @LibertyU • Opinions my own.

[Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre]

A lot of people after the Lindsay Clancy trial

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

On radically different incomes life in America can be surprisingly similar.

Imagine three single mothers, each raising a ten-year-old boy. One is a public-school teacher in Tampa earning $50,000 a year. Another is a lawyer in Atlanta earning $200,000. The third is a venture-capital partner in Chicago earning $1 million.

On paper, they inhabit three different Americas. One earns twenty times more than another. One is 25th percentile im wealth the other 84th the last one top 1%. They describe inequality in the USA.

Now look at their sons.

All three wake up with electricity, running water, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning. They eat plenty of food, ride in safe modern cars, wear sneakers, watch YouTube, play the same video games, use similar phones and tablets and have access to vaccines, antibiotics, dentists and modern medicine.

One goes to public school, another to private school, the third perhaps to an elite private school. One flies economy once a year, another travels frequently, the third may occasionally fly private. Their houses, neighborhoods and vacations are different.

But their actual daily lives are far less different than their mothers’ incomes suggest.

The socialist argument has always been about equality of outcomes.

Well, look around. In much of ordinary material life, capitalism has already produced something remarkably close to it.

The millionaire’s refrigerator does not keep milk twenty times fresher. Her son’s iPhone does not make YouTube twenty times more entertaining. He cannot eat twenty breakfasts, sleep twenty hours at once or enjoy a video game twenty times more because his mother earns twenty times as much.

For several hours every day, these three boys may be doing almost exactly the same thing.

This would have been unimaginable two centuries ago. The child of a rich family and the child of a laborer often lived in genuinely different physical worlds. One had plentiful food, warmth, books, servants, doctors and transportation. The other might lack adequate calories or clean water.

Industrial capitalism destroyed much of that inequality by doing something socialism never managed very well: making formerly scarce things cheap enough for almost everyone.

Cars, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning, computers and smartphones began as luxuries and became mass-market goods. The entrepreneur became rich precisely by making what the rich had available to everybody else.

And that may explain one of the great ironies of the new American enthusiasm for socialism. Capitalism’s victories are now so complete that nobody notices them.

Clean water is not considered wealth. Neither is electricity. Nor refrigeration. Nor an air-conditioned bedroom, instant global communication, unlimited music, thousands of films or a computer in your pocket more powerful than anything that existed when many of today’s billionaires were children.

Those things have become invisible because almost everyone has them.

What remains visible are the inequalities capitalism has not eliminated: the mansion, the private school, the beachfront house, the prestigious university, the best neighborhood.

But if the political demand is that ordinary people should be able to enjoy many of the same basic experiences as the rich, something extraordinary has already happened.

Put these families on a chart and the inequality looks enormous.

Put their ten-year-old boys on three sofas at eight o’clock at night, eating pizza in sweatpants and staring at nearly identical screens, and the difference becomes surprisingly hard to see.

Equality of income? Obviously not.

Equality of many of the outcomes that actually fill a human day?

Far more than we admit.

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @BarnabyHistory]

🇺🇸 25 Heroes of 9/11 You Don’t Know: #15 Christopher Amoroso

He was 29. A Port Authority police officer. Badge 2002. Assigned to the Tactical Response Bureau. He had been on the job less than two years.

Christopher Charles Amoroso grew up in North Bergen, New Jersey. He lived in Huguenot on Staten Island with his wife, Jamie, and their 19-month-old daughter, Sophia Rose. He was a Yankees fan. He loved the History Channel. He failed the police test four times and passed on the fifth. He waited more than five years for an academy seat.

On September 11 he was working a rotation at the World Trade Center.

After the planes hit, he started pulling people out of the lower levels. Debris bloodied his face.

A photographer caught him holding up a woman who could not breathe. Her name was Suman Dhamija. She had severe asthma. She had come out of the South Tower. He told her, “Ma’am, relax. We are here to help.” He got her clear.

A volunteer EMT told him he was hurt and should get help. Amoroso said, “I’m going back in.”

He collected oxygen packs and hard hats. Then he turned around and went back toward the towers.

When the South Tower came down, Christopher Amoroso went with it. His body was recovered in early December.

He left behind Jamie and Sophia Rose. He had written his daughter a letter when she was ten weeks old.“If anything were to happen to me, I could honestly say I’ve known true love and happiness in my life. I’ve known that because of your mother and now you.”

He is memorialized at the South Pool on Panel S-28.

Never forget Christopher Amoroso.

[Robert Irwin @RobertIrwin]

Your legacy is forever.

[HT @HunterTreacy]

It’s difficult to understate how generous this gift by Michael and Susan Dell is.

In real terms, their $6.25B commitment is more than 5x larger than either Andrew Mellon’s gift of the National Gallery of Art or John D. Rockefeller’s gift of tens of thousands of acres to the National Park Service. Only Andrew Carnegie rivals this degree of generosity.

Michael Dell is the epitome of the American Dream. Like Carnegie, statues of him should be erected across our nation.

[Jason Brodeur @jasonbrodeur]

Six years ago, I put my personal phone number on television.

The calls never stopped. They come in at dinner, on Saturday mornings, in the car on the way to church. A neighbor whose insurance premium jumped again with no explanation anybody can follow. A retiree comparing prescription prices at two different pharmacies. A young couple who just found out what it costs to insure one car in Florida right now.

I pick up the same way every time: "Brodeur here."

This phone is how I know exactly what issues are affecting Central Florida families – I don’t need a pollster, because you can tell me yourself.

Here is the first television ad of our campaign, narrated by Christy. Watch the new ad!

[Jeff Brandes @JeffreyBrandes]

St. Pete approved a $12 million subsidy for 24 “affordable” townhomes…$500,000 per home. The project’s estimated construction cost: $19.1 million, or nearly $800,000 per unit. The homes are expected to sell for roughly half that.

That’s government math.

You don’t solve affordable housing by subsidizing extraordinarily expensive housing. You solve it with policy.

Fix zoning. Allow density. Smaller lots, Cut parking mandates, fees and permitting delays. Make housing cheaper to build.

But fixing broken local policies is hard work.

Writing a giant taxpayer check instead is easy.

And stupid.

[Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD @drhoeflinger]

I’m a retired brain surgeon and I wanna tell you why you feel like life is passing by. I just need one minute to explain this to you so hang in there.

Repetitive daily routines stop the brain from recording clear detailed memories. When every day looks the same, your brain does not track time the same as a clock does. It tracks change. If nothing new happens then days, months, and years start to blur together.

This is know as Time compression. When life lacks variety, your brain compresses past days together, making it feel like time is sped up.

To stop feeling like life is passing you by, add new experiences to your life. Break routine habits, like changing your daily home routine, taking a different route to work, or trying a new hobby.

Schedule small trips or plan new adventures so your days do not blend together.

Practice mindfulness by staying fully focused on what you are doing right now and not trying to race off to the next task.

Keep a journal and write down happy memories or memorable parts of the day before you go to sleep.

Take deep, calm breaths when you feel anxious or rushed to return your focus to the moment.

You can and you will retrain your brain to not feel like life is passing you by by following these few simple measures.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

@nicksortor There is literally NOTHING AT ALL to discuss.

She systematically strangled her children to death, one by one, with exercise bands.

She should be executed as fast as possible and it would take all of 10 seconds to come to this decision.

What are they doing????????

[Paulo Spitzbarth 🇧🇷🇩🇪🇮🇱 @PauloSpitzbarth]

🚨🇺🇸 CAR@LHO, QUE LAPADA! 🔥🔥🔥

CNN: “Este é um imigrante sem documentos...”

Miller: “Eles estavam aqui ILEGALMENTE?”

CNN: “Quero que esta seja uma discussão de boa-fé...”

Miller: “Quando você usa uma linguagem feita para ocultar a verdade, isso NÃO é boa-fé. Um ESTRANGEIRO ILEGAL é um ESTRANGEIRO ILEGAL. Eles não são ‘imigrantes sem documentos’.”

CNN: “Stephen, estamos tentando humanizar o debate...”

Miller: “Humanizar? Então vamos humanizar o Código Penal também. O assaltante de banco passa a ser ‘especialista em retirada sem agendamento prévio’. O estelionatário vira ‘empreendedor de narrativas financeiras alternativas’. O cara que entra na sua casa sem convite é só um ‘visitante com documentação pendente’. Que tal?”

CNN: “Isso é uma analogia grosseira.”

Miller: “Grosseira é fingir que a lei federal some porque a redação da CNN inventou um eufemismo mais fofo. ‘Sem documentos’ soa como alguém que esqueceu a carteira no Uber. Não. É alguém que cruzou a fronteira sem autorização, ficou, e agora a imprensa trata o estatuto jurídico como se fosse uma questão de estilo de escrita.”

CNN: “Mas muitos contribuem para a economia...”

Miller: “Ah, o argumento clássico: o crime deixa de ser crime se a pessoa lava prato ou constrói telhado. Pelo mesmo critério, o contrabandista de cigarro também ‘contribui’, gera emprego no transporte. Quer que a gente chame ele de ‘empreendedor logístico informal’? A CNN topa?”

CNN: “Você está polarizando.”

Miller: “Não. Eu estou recusando o dicionário de marketing. Vocês mudam a palavra, depois acusam quem usa o termo legal de ser ‘desumano’. É o truque mais velho do livro: primeiro suaviza o vocabulário, depois declara vitória moral. Os Estados Unidos já cansaram desse teatro. Chamem o que é. Ou admitam que o objetivo nunca foi clareza — foi controle da narrativa.”

[Sweep @0xSweep]

>be John Ternus
>2001
>26 years old
>nobody at Apple
>flown to a factory in Asia to check screws
>spec says 25 grooves
>supplier made 35
>no human being will ever see this
>lose your mind at them anyway
>win
>spend 25 years doing exactly that
>403 patents
>rip Intel out of every Mac
>build a phone 5.6mm thick
>watch the finance guys take over design
>watch every great designer quit
>watch Apple ship the same watch nine years straight
>watch $3499 ski goggles flop
>watch OpenAI walk off with 400 of your engineers
>September 1 2026
>they hand you the whole company
>kill Vision Pro 2 by lunch
>sue OpenAI by dinner
>mfw you inherit a $4 trillion machine and spend day one deleting your predecessor's legacy

[Lance Barnett @lancito10]

@adamblake Paging @MatthewChang

[Lee Kuan Yimby @LeeKuanYimby]

Last month I said the new hire at WSJ would save us. And she will.

[Matt Swaim @mattswaim]

I can understand how some people who went to Catholic schools no longer believe in the Church

I myself went to public school and no longer believe in the state

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🚨WOW, they weren't kidding... A 300-pound lioness and her cub really are on the loose in Indiana

The lioness was wearing a BLUE HARNESS.

Nobody reported a missing lion. No sanctuary is short a lion.

No permits exist to own a lion in that county.

Somebody in Indiana has an illegal lion and suddenly REAL quiet🤣

Source: NYP, G101-3 on FB / Writer: Daniel

[Golf on CBS ⛳ @GolfonCBS]

Scottie caps off his year with a come-from-behind win for the FedExCup Trophy.

He joins @Amanda_Balionis after an incredible performance.

[Jason Howerton @jason_howerton]

When I first read the Gospel, and it got to the part where a crowd is asked who should be set free: Jesus or Barabbas — what happened was baffling to me.

Jesus was guilty of no crime. Barabbas was a murderer.

The crowd chose Barabbas.

“How could they do that?!” I’d wonder.

I no longer wonder. The Bible doesn’t just tell us what happened, it also tells us what ALWAYS happens.

Lord Jesus, come soon.

[Matthew Chang @MatthewChang]

Actual picture of a construction barge crane moving into position to begin constructing the US Space Academy in Jacksonville. This is going to turn out really nice.

[The Last Homely House @AHomelyHouse]

Everyone has tablets.
We've defeated the Persians again, but still wind up paying them tribute.
Shield-walls are forming against waves of migrants from the sea in Iberia.
A priestess presides over the religious hierarchy in Britain.
Israelites continue to pillage and burn the crops and countryside around Tyre and Gaza.
The most popular tale everyone is talking about is the Odyssey.

It's been quite a year so far.

[Logan Hall @loganclarkhall]

Our country rules.