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Science and Technology are going to be the engines that bring us out of this.
And common sense.

[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.

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@JassilJamal Culturally we are hard wired to avoid confrontation. Can’t do much about it other than take the feedback later and improve.

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@aflyingfrog @Curse0fMedusa That is a political non starter.

[Ron Varghese @Curse0fMedusa]

Let me explain the Kashmir conflict using a direct American parallel:

Imagine if, after the Civil War, the US permanently split into 2 nations: the progressive, secular Union in the North (India), and a regressive, hostile society of slave owners in the South (Pakistan). (1/8)

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Let me tell you about the most extraordinary act of patient agency I've ever encountered.
In 2024, a tech founder named Sid Sijbrandij was told by his oncologists that they had nothing left. His osteosarcoma — an aggressive bone cancer in his spine — had returned after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy so brutal he needed four blood transfusions to survive it. He'd exhausted every standard treatment. He wouldn't qualify for clinical trials. The implicit message: good luck.
Most people accept that verdict. Sijbrandij — co-founder of GitLab, a company worth $6.4 billion built on the principle that information should be open and transparent — decided to treat his cancer the way he'd built his company.
He went founder mode.
He quit his day job. Assembled a dream team. Hired a geneticist named Jacob Stern, formerly of 10x Genomics. And then he did something no cancer patient has ever done at this scale.
He generated 25 terabytes of his own medical data.
Whole genome sequencing. Whole exome sequencing. Bulk RNA-seq. Single-cell RNA-seq across multiple timepoints. Full-body PET/CT scans. Organoid models grown from his own tumor tissue. Immunohistochemistry. Spatial transcriptomics. Every diagnostic modality that exists — run on his specific cancer, at his specific stage, from his specific body.
Then Jacob Stern fed it all to ChatGPT

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@howardlutnick I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@dieworkwear I like to mix it up with business colours and sports textures

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@bscholl @ATabarrok That would be an expensive table!

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

I disagree with this. MTM is often the worst of all possible options.

Why?

First, it helps to know some basic terms.

— Ready-to-wear refers to the clothes you can touch and feel on a rack.

— Bespoke refers to a process where a tailor makes you a custom garment from scratch. This typically means drafting a totally new pattern using your measurements and then perfecting the garment through a series of three iterative fittings. Before the advent of ready-to-wear, this is how most men's clothes were made.

— Made-to-measure refers to a process of making custom clothes that emerged after the invention of ready-to-wear. In this process, the company makes your pattern by adjusting a pre-made block. The garment is made straight to finish, typically in a factory, and then delivered to you for a single fitting. At this single and only fitting, the company will make some adjustments, but what they can do is limited because the buttonholes have already been cut.

Why is made-to-measure often a bad idea?

Well, first, you have to know the difference between how bespoke and MTM companies are structured. In a bespoke business, there's typically a cutter on-site who can see you at your fittings. The cutter is the technical mind behind a garment. They can figure out how to get things to fit right. Changing one area of a garment may cause problems in other areas. Solutions are not always simple or obvious.

In an MTM business, there's typically not a cutter present. In fact, there may not be any technical minds in the business at all. It's not uncommon for an MTM business to be owned and operated by businesspeople whose strengths may include marketing and logistics, but who know little about pattern drafting or sewing.

Instead, these companies typically partner with an overseas factory. Upon taking your measurements, they send the numbers, along with your cloth choice and style details, to a factory. Someone at that factory adjusts a pre-made block pattern and produces a garment straight to finish. The garment is shipped to a fitter who puts it on you. This person may not know much about tailoring, and their incentive is to get you out the door. "Look at the beautiful lining!" they'll say, ignoring that the back balance doesn't work or the legs are too slim.

In fact, when you look at all the ugly suits today, often in Washington, you are often looking at made-to-measure suits. USA flag lining! Contrast buttonhole! Powerful monogram! The suit doesn't fit the wearer, but the customer doesn't know any better.

This does not mean that all MTM operations are bad. There are some run by genuine people who love clothes. But their numbers are dwarfed by the numbers of bad MTM businesses out there run by shouty blowhards who excel only in marketing.

Worse still, many of these businesspeople have more love for money than tailoring, so they build trends into their block patterns. Hence, the number of men in MTM suits with short jackets, low-rise pants, skinny legs, buckling lapels, collar gaps, etc. Trendy pattern means more customers, even if that block pattern derives from designer runway collections built for stick thing figures.

I always recommend that men start with ready-to-wear first. This is because custom is hardly a guarantee of quality tailoring. Even if the tailor is good, you may have chosen an ugly fabric or style details — a lot can go wrong. With ready-to-wear, you can put things back on the rack if you don't like them. If you get a crappy MTM suit, you are stuck with it.

Ultimately, you may need a custom garment for whatever reason. But it's always better to start with ready-to-wear, so you can at least identify what kind of style details you like (e.g., hard vs soft shoulder, draped or clean chest, closed or open quarters, etc). You will need to know these thing anyway when choosing a tailor. IMO, this more thoughtful approach to building a wardrobe will increase your chance of success.

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@thewirepak Interesting no cost option for you. You can keep your airspace and we will keep our water until you come up with a better deal.

[Howard Luks MD @hjluks]

Don’t let your life 'narrow'.

I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The thing I watch happen to people — more than any injury or surgery — is what I call the narrowing.

Most of my patients have no idea it’s happening. They think it’s just aging. It’s not...

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security. https://t.co/DgkM9RegJ7

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@sabeer You’ve got the symptoms right but the cause wrong. The primary reason for this is lack of an effective judiciary.

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@karthik2k2 Did he have a drink or was he drunk? Feel free to provide a proper calibration as well.
First, do no harm.

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@deepakshenoy Cynical take?

[Galacton @Galacton2]

Future of antimatter production, storage, control, and annihilation applications in propulsion technologies
Magnetic Shovel
-it can capture the antiparticles occurring in the Van Allen’s belt (or Jupiter?)
#antimatter #Propulsion #VanAllen #MirrorMatter

https://t.co/ojPcgNbBVp

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@warDaniel47 Does this apply to his and their commander in chief as well?

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@Shrimp4_dinner @Austen Agree

[Evaluator Speculator @MarwarWarrior]

@Shrimp4_dinner @Austen Can you think of no useful applications for this? I get you dislike the hype.

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

For four thousand years, the Indian subcontinent was the centre of world trade. Sumerian tablets record Indian ships reaching Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Rome ran a permanent trade deficit with India. By 1600, Surat was the richest port on earth.

Then, within a single lifetime, India lost its maritime supremacy almost entirely.

The conventional explanation is that Europe arrived with superior ships and weapons. It is a comforting story and it is largely wrong. The deeper cause was internal.

Indian commerce was extraordinarily sophisticated. Surat's leading merchant, the Jain financier Virji Vora, was reputedly the richest man in the world; the East India Company borrowed from him. Merchants of every religion and origin traded together because the system rested on two foundations: religious toleration, established by Akbar, and predictable, low-tariffs. Customs duties were around five per cent. Contracts were honoured. Trust was the real currency.

There was one structural weakness. In Venice, Amsterdam and London, the state and the merchant class shared an interest in trade and invested in it together. In Mughal India, the ruling elite was indifferent to commerce. Merchants financed the state; the state never encouraged merchants.

When Aurangzeb became hostile, merchants had no protection. Religious toleration was abandoned. Temples were destroyed, punitive taxes on non-Muslims reimposed, the Sikh Guru executed. Forty years of war followed. East India Company imports from India fell ninety per cent in seven years. Eight thousand merchants abandoned Surat in a single exodus.

They relocated, many of them to an insignificant island Britain had received as a royal wedding dowry, because it offered the security and toleration the Mughal state had destroyed. It also offered English Common Law. Within a generation Bombay was the commercial capital of India. The Wadia family built the Royal Navy's finest ships there. The Tata dynasty traces its origins to this migration.

Europe did not defeat Indian commerce. It inherited it, by providing the conditions Indian merchants needed and their own rulers had thrown away.

This is not an argument about colonialism. It is an argument about something more fundamental, and it is the thread running through all three of my books on maritime trade. The second ‘The Millennium Maritime Trade Revolution’ is subtitled ‘How Asia Lost Maritime Supremacy.’ It is hardly ever lost to a stronger rival but when a society stops valuing the openness, toleration and commercial purpose that made it great. Portugal did it. The Dutch Republic did it. Britain, in the 20th century, did it too.

The conditions of prosperity are always a choice. And they can be unmade by a single generation that comes to value something else more.

Link to the full Substack essay with sources is below.