Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.
The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.
The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.
Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.
Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.
Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.
I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.
People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.
This conversation is always difficult because most people simply don’t understand market dynamics or incentives. In a free society, people act in their own self-interest. If you remove profit and reward dependency, productivity dies and the city with it.
If you think things are expensive now, just wait until they’re “free.”
DEMOCRATS ARE DESTROYING DEMOCRACY
The Democrat primary ended on June 8[1]. So why wasn’t Biden’s age openly contested?
It’s simple: Democrats are intentionally destroying democracy. They all knew Biden was infirm. But they waited till after the primary to acknowledge someone would need to succeed him. They waited till the people no longer had any say in who the Party would nominate. In other words, they waited till there wasn’t any shred of democracy involved in picking the leader of the Democrat Party.
What they want instead is a one-party state like California[2], where “elections” are held but a Party member always wins. They want intra-party selection, not competitive multiparty election. This is why Democrats seek to jail the opposition — so they can run without opposition. And this is also why they seek to control the Internet — so that the Internet doesn’t threaten their control.
All the Party really wants is to steal money and give it to their loyalists. That’s what the millions in student loans[3] and billions for nonfunctional trains[4] and trillions in printed bills[5] are all about — the greatest robbery in history. They just want the public's money, they don’t want the public to have any say over whether they're in power.
Unfortunately for them, the public Internet is outside their power.
Thus, social media circulated clips of Biden’s infirmity[6], even as regime media insisted he should be in charge of the country[7]. And prediction markets bet that Biden would be officially swapped out[8], even as officials tried to shut prediction markets down[9].
So, once again the Network triumphed over the State. Biden loyalists did their level best to control the debate in the smallest and largest senses of that term — by excluding RFK, excluding other outlets, muting Trump, “fact checking” one side, and attacking internet debate itself — but that faction within the regime just couldn’t hide the truth from Twitter.
THE PARTY DECIDES
Now everyone agrees that the hot swap is on. Because only Biden's faction wanted Biden to run.
Recall that after the Democrat primary ended on June 8, Obama very consciously put Biden on stage, let him stumble and mumble, and then held his hand[10] to usher him off stage.
That was the act of a savvy politician: Obama was ostensibly appearing with Biden to help him, but was really there to help finish him. He intentionally ushered the old man off in that way to visibly (but deniably) show the world how powerless the “most powerful man in the world” was.
That primed his team for an intra-party contest, and foreshadowed what just happened. The Party put Biden on stage for the debate, let him stumble and mumble, and is now very firmly ushering him off stage.
So, as often happens these days, internet “conspiracy theory” anticipated the regime’s now-consensus reality. Solzhenitsyn[11] put it well: we knew that they were lying, they knew that they were lying, they even knew that we knew they were lying…but they were still lying.
It suited the Democrat Party to lie, to keep an aged and infirm man as their nominal head, just as it suited the Communist Party to have Andropov and Chernenko[12] in nominal command towards the end of the Soviet era. With no one man in charge, each Party apparatchik can quietly loot the public blind, while letting the walking corpse take the public blame.
PRESIDENT NPC
Remember also: the nature of the NPC is that any one man is dispensable. The NPC’s role is to just repeat the party line, strengthening the Party in return for the support of the Party. The person is nothing, the Party is everything.
Biden simply took this principle to its absolute limit. With no onboard cognition whatsoever, he was the NPC President, and has been for years. A mindless mouthpiece for party propaganda, a hollow shell of a man, a Potemkin[13] president. He was nothing without the Party. And now, without the Party, he is nothing.
AMERICAN KREMLIN
So, what happens next? Well, in the late Soviet Union, there was a discipline called Kremlinology[14]. It was about inferring what that opaque and undemocratic system would do, about reading internal factional conflict from public hints.
Today the free world is online, while Washington itself is the Kremlin. So we do Kremlinology through digital prediction markets[15] that the state can't stop. There you will see the Obama faction, the Newsom faction, the Clinton faction, the Warren faction, and the likes of AOC and Bernie all viciously clash and contend for who will succeed President NPC.
Needless to say...there will be no democracy in those smoke-filled rooms. No public input into those Party struggles.
But there will be at the end. Because despite the Democrats’ best efforts to destroy democracy — despite all the show trials and Internet censorship and dissident prosecution — unlike the Soviet system, there does remain that extreme inconvenience of a presidential election.
So, it’s quite possible they pick Newsom. If the Party needs someone completely without conscience to succeed Biden and make centrist noises, he can do it.
Newsom is after all a 6’3” tall, handsome white guy with a beautiful wife and four children. Visually, he's a candidate from central casting. Sure, running him would be a completely unprincipled throwback for a Party that nominally opposes “white privilege” — but all that matters is that the Party retain control to loot the public, so they may get behind him regardless.
And what would Newsom do if he wins? Well, he was mayor of San Francisco and governor of California. So he will bring San Francisco- and California-quality governance to America — complete with dysfunctional million dollar toilets[16] and nonfunctional billion dollar trains[17].
Even more ominously, as you can see from the screenshot below and citations here[18-21] Newsom has already strongly committed in Chinese state media to be "China's long-term, stable, and strong partner". That's why Xinhua welcomes more Newsoms to come:
Moreover, as many in San Francisco saw to their dismay, Newsom personally welcomed Comrade Xi to California by escorting him from the plane, cleaning up the city, and (as you can see above) symbolically handing over the Golden State to Xi with a giant smile[22].
In short, Newsom has very publicly committed to reversing the last eight years of US resistance to China and completely conceding DC to Xi. If he is the candidate, that is the likely consequence.
FROM DEMOCRACY TO ONE-PARTY STATE
So as the journos keep saying, this election may in fact end America's democracy...but for reasons completely different from what has been publicly discussed. It's not the Republican who could end democracy, but the Democrat, in the sense of ending competitive multiparty elections and erecting a one-party state.
Newsom wouldn't acknowledge it, of course. His party will lie without apology just as they lied about Biden's senility. As Democrat Party leader he'd just maintain the pretense of democracy, just as the PRC calls themselves the "People's Republic" of China.
But in practice, as in his home state, and in many blue states, all multiparty elections will be replaced with de facto intra-party selections. They'll accomplish it through court-packing[23], gerrymandering[24], persecuting[25], and prosecuting[26] — as they've actually already done and promised to do!
So the threat to democracy is real. But it comes from the left. If Newsom wins, there is a real risk that he'll succeed in destroying democracy and replacing it with a one-party state.
As they've already done in California, and in China.
🚨 Mr Beast challenge 🚨
You have to stay here 50+ hours a week working on excel for your whole life BUT you get $3,200 every two weeks AND donuts every Friday morning
Are you man enough for the challenge?
Interesting that we still conduct a voluntary response census every 10 years to allocate funding considering the same demographic information is required when filing taxes yearly
Anyone can now train and run their own LLM chatbots on their own computers.
GPT4All-J is the first Apache-2 Licensed Chatbot that runs locally on your machine.
Completely open-sourced. Link in next tweet.
The MOVE Index is the bond market equivalent of the VIX Index. It measures the implied volatility of 1-month options from the 2-year note to the 30-year bond.
Today's closed was 153.9.
The shaded area is inside 2 standard deviations. So, 153.9 above the shaded area means it is one of the 5% highest readings in the 30+ year history of this series.
I'm sure it is nothing.
Seriously, what would be the interpretation of a VIX close today above 35 (>2 standard deviations) and near 40, not 19.08 as it actually did? It is likely a signal that the stock market is hyperventilating with concern.
Should the bond market version of the VIX closing this high be any different? I would argue no. The bond market IS hyperventilating with concern.
What does that say about other asset classes? Are they listening?
My wife isn’t wired to care as much about money (numbers on a screen in some invisible bank somewhere) as I am.
She could care less when I talk about the size of deals, profit, loss, risk, potential, etc.
She thinks and desires totally different things. She’s wired that way.
It must be freeing to live life not totally fixated on something that only matters up to a certain point (which we crossed a while back).
And here I am starting at a computer screen 30 hours a week working to grow those invisible numbers.
For what?
Ego? Status? Pride?
In a way it’s a blessing because I’ve been lucky enough that my addiction has set our family up pretty well.
But in other ways I see so many men totally ignore every other area of life in favor of growing those damn numbers.
Health. Kids. Spouses. Friends. Hobbies. Balance.
Maybe that’s why we’re such a good team.
She balances me. Puts my in my place when it gets out of hand.
Brings me out of the clouds when other things in life are more pressing than those dumb numbers.
It’s something I really appreciate about my wife.
Many of my friends aren’t so lucky.
Either their addiction hasn’t yet paid (and might not) or their spouses are wired just like them.
So there is no balance. And people miss out on so much.
That feeling watching your little kid learn. And grow. And explore.
Or that feeling of flushing a 6 iron to 3 feet from 175 with your three best friends watching.
Or that feeling of fitness and euphoria after a 100 mile bike ride.
Feeling accomplished and exhausted in a great way.
Or a feeling of having a cup of coffee with absolutely nothing you must do that day.
And nobody who can tell you what you have to do to get paid next Friday.
No customers or clients bullying you into working harder or turning it around faster.
You’re in control.
And not of some numbers in an account somewhere.
But of your physical world and body and mind.
Too many folks who are addicted to the numbers are totally out of control in so many other aspects of life.
And it’s sad.
The big problem:
Few people who are good at making money are good at other things.
They are insanely one-dimensional.
And guess what else?
The goal posts keep moving.
You make more money and get new friends.
Move to a nicer neighborhood.
Wind up in a group chat with better businessmen.
And you feel the same making $2MM a year as you did making $200k a year.
Going after that next milestone.
That next rush. That next big ego stroke.
Trying to keep up with the joneses.
And chasing after that goal that keeps moving further and further away.
I think I know why I keep at it.
It is ego. Status. Pride.
I can act like I don’t care what people think of me but it would be a lie.
I think it’s a primal desire of mine. For people to think highly of me.
It’s shameful when I think about it like this but it’s true.
Another deep fear of mine is failure. Inadequacy. Worthlessness.
And as an entrepreneur self-worth is often tied to those damn numbers.
If I try something else, like being a damn good dad or being really physically fit, or having great relationships - maybe I’ll fail at it.
But luckily for me I married someone who doesn’t give a shit about the money.
And she makes me a better version of myself in every other area of life.
The more important areas.
Today, I turn 38.
I've raised millions of dollars, married twice, had a kid, and recovered from devastating injury and depression.
Here's 38 lessons I'd tell my 18 year old self:
@balajis Somehow depositors bare the blame of bank failure? Bailout/backstop is a protection for depositors, not a guarantee of return for investors. Remember, banks are in the business of writing loans funded by depositors, this is their fundamental operation.
@POTUS Whoever the social media manager is deserves a Pulitzer Prize for matching speaking/writing style and staying wildly consistent with the baseless content.