Phil Geusz

Author and curmudgeon

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

Charles Barkley learned how finances work. I'm eternally stunned at how few people manage to figure it out no matter how long they live.

[katsu @katsuxbt]

Charles Barkley says a $300,000 Bentley car costs you way more than you think

"When I first got my money, I was an idi*t, I had like three or four cars. Dr. J asked me how many of those cars you got, you drive at the same time? I said, one. He said, well, why you got four?"

"This money's got to last you the rest of your life, don't waste all your money on cars, everybody know who you are, you pull up in a Kia, or a Mercedes-Benz or a Rolls-Royce, that's Charles Barkley"

"The problem isn't that you can't afford the car, it's that that $300,000 you spent on that Bentley, if you'd bought a cheaper car, you'd have had $200,000 more in the bank, and it would've been growing and growing"

"One year, three years, five years, twenty years… that $200,000 is gonna be worth a lot more"

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell: “Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like a national interest.”

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

"A Night at the Opera" was an excellent rock album. But few would call it "best of the decade". After all, it was a very, very good decade.

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@TKratman Because what that would imply-- that our basic system of representative government is unworkable at its very core-- is too terrible to face.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.

[Cav Senpai @cavannastan]

Again for those in the back, Elon once offered to cut a check for $6 BILLION to the WFB to "eliminate World hunger" as they said the money could. His one condition was that the accounting was public.

They did not accept.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1932 a wealthy American golfer named Eben Byers died, and they buried him in a coffin lined with lead.

The lead was not decorative. His bones had turned radioactive enough to be a hazard to anyone standing near them.

A few years earlier Byers had hurt his arm, and his doctor recommended a fashionable tonic called Radithor: radium dissolved in water, sold openly as a health drink, promising energy, vigour and a sunnier disposition. This was no backstreet con. Radium was the wonder of the age. It glowed. It was modern. Clinics offered radium cures, shops sold radium cosmetics, and the well-to-do drank it by the bottle because the advertising, and a good many physicians, swore it was marvellous for the constitution.

Byers believed them. He felt wonderful, which is exactly how these stories begin. He drank close to fourteen hundred bottles.

Then his jaw began to come away. Holes opened in his skull. The Wall Street Journal, with the bleak economy of a great headline, reported that the radium water had worked fine until his jaw came off.

Hold onto this part. Nobody forced it down him. He sought it out, paid a premium for it, and counted himself among the health-conscious. He did his best with the very best information money could buy. That is what killed him.

Byers was the careful one. The early adopter. The man who paid more and tried harder than everyone else to do right by his health. That is who this happens to.

We still buy vitality by the bottle. We still mistake confidence for evidence, and a glow for proof.

Go and look at the most confident health claim in your own kitchen. Byers found his every bit as convincing.

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell: “No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems.”

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@lordvictor Aborta

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

Congress and the taxpayers who vote for them make that choice. I'm not either agreeing or opposing. Just adding critical data as to why the decision was made. People rarely look at costs in matters like this. The choice wasn't either a P-51 or a P-47. It was more like, one Thunderbolt or two or three Mustangs.

I'll add as an aside that I'm a huge fan of the P-47. My fave airplane ever. The fact that I care enough to study it is also why I knew the reason it was retired.

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@Ruesavatar Is a degree of plot-required non-gratuitous violence okay? In that case, try CS Forrester's "Flying Colours", the first book of the long-beloved Horatio Hornblower series. Or, "Tunnel In The Sky," by Robert Heinlein.

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@mikemovies Major studios hadn't dealt with such serious themes before. It'd not been all that many years before that you couldn't say "pregnant" on TV, and the large-studio movies weren't much freer. Also, movies were mostly relatively shallow before "Graduate". Game-changer.

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell: “The political left has never understood that, if you give the government enough power to create ‘social justice,’ you have given it enough power to create despotism.”

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@JohnCornyn @LeaderJohnThune Republicans are hurting their own chances by not showing enough solidarity on a vital issue to change votes. I plan to vote Democrat if that's what it takes to remove RINO's who can't pass SAVE with a majority. You're collectively responsible for this dysfunction. Don't make us.

[Sowell Economics @sowelleconomics]

Thomas Sowell: "Discussing the war on poverty which began in the 1960s, you can see that dependency was going down, poverty was going down before this program was ever put in.

Within a few years, dependency on government shot up after this program was launched."

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

American law enforcement is hiding camera inside fake utility boxes

This box looks like an electric box. It even has an electric bolt symbol as a decoy. But it’s fake, inside is a camera that used by law enforcement to monitor the public

Law enforcement uses these decoy boxes attached to utility poles for surveillance

We are under unlawful surveillance and they courts when side with law enforcement over these cameras

In many US jurisdictions, long-term warrantless pole camera surveillance of public areas or homes from a distance has been upheld by courts

Insane

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@FrankBr05713205 Hopefully they'll go out of business as a result and therefore won't be doing it very long. I'd have simply driven off.

[Phil Geusz @Osteolith]

@LUFC1992_v2 Another Illinois city near there is named Oblong. One of the best headlines in American history was a wedding announcement from that part of the country. "Oblong Woman To Wed Normal Man".