SMiller

Independent, data-driven, puzzler - No Dms.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@ConceptualJames "Socialism paves the way to totalitarianism."
https://t.co/d1OQA4GHQw

[F. A. Hayek Quotes @FAHayekSays]

Milton Friedman brilliantly sums up Hayek’s book “The Road to Serfdom”

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@RandPaul That gap is also why government should not be "trusted" with our tax dollars.

As government serves the people, it should require maximum transparency and continuous audit. The people deserve to know how its money is spent and what impacts are produced.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@RaminNasibov "Leather and Lace" by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

Give yourself a treat. Please take a minute to read the heartwarming tale of the book lady.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

There is a diner in the Tennessee mountains where a little girl showed me a book.

She could not have been six. She held it the way grown men hold the deed to a house.

A thin paperback. The cover soft and bent from love. A cartoon bear.

I asked her, to be kind, if it was a good book.

She said, "The Book Lady sent it. She sends me one every month. She knows my name."

Then she went back to her pancakes, as if she had not just described something impossible.

I could not let it go.

All through breakfast I turned it over. A woman who knows the names of small children, sends them books, and asks for nothing. In my country she would have a shrine. Incense. One clean day a year when the town remembers her.

I decided the Book Lady must be a gentle fiction. A story mothers invent, the way we tell children the old mountain is watching, so they behave.

I was wrong.

The Book Lady is real. She is the most famous woman in the state. Her name is Dolly.

I made errors. In a hardware store I called her "your empress." The man thought about it honestly and said, "Close enough."

I asked a waitress if Dolly was still living. She set down the coffee pot with great care. "Honey, Dolly will outlive us all, and then she will send flowers to the funerals."

Then they told me the thing, all of them, in the flat voice this country keeps for facts too large to raise the voice for.

Dolly grew up one of twelve children, in a one-room cabin, in these same mountains. Her father could not read a word his whole life.

So she built the thing that sends the books. Not the clever children. Not the deserving ones. Every child who signs up, from birth until they start school, free, their own name on the cover, whether the family has money or nothing at all.

The children do not know she is famous. They know only the Book Lady. Some will grow old and never learn it was her.

Two hundred million books, a man told me at a gas pump. Then, seeing the number had defeated me, he made it smaller and heavier at once.

"She did it for her daddy," he said. "He never got to read. So she made sure every child after him would."

I would like to tell you what happened in my chest when he said that. I do not have the words, and I distrust any man who claims he does.

I come from eight hundred years of men who wrote everything down. We cut our names into stone so the centuries could not misplace us.

My father was the last of that line before me. A silent man. For forty years I believed his silence was the only thing he ever gave me.

In that diner, I remembered something I had put away as nothing.

When I was a boy, my father worked among machines loud enough to take a man's hearing, and in time they took most of his. He came home each night with nothing left to say. But there was one year, when I was learning to read and ashamed of how badly it went, that every night, however late he came in, he sat beside me while I read one page aloud.

He never said a word. I thought he was only checking that I had done the work.

It took me forty years and a stranger's diner to understand.

He could not hear me. By then he could barely hear anything. He was not listening to the words. He could not have caught one of them.

He was only sitting where a small boy could look up and see that his father had stayed.

I carried that year my whole life as proof my father was cold.

It was the warmest thing anyone has ever done for me. I just never had the book to prove it, so I let myself forget.

There is a bookshop two doors from that diner. I have just bought a thin paperback with a soft-looking bear on the cover. I am mailing it tonight to my father in Japan. He is eighty-one. He still cannot hear.

He will not need to.

Inside the cover I wrote one line, large enough that he can read it without his glasses:

"I finished the page. I always finished the page. Thank you for staying."

The Book Lady learned it from her father, who could not read.

I learned it from mine, who could not hear.

And somewhere in the mountains between us, those two old men would have understood each other completely, and said nothing at all, which is the loudest thing men like them have ever known how to say.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@RaminNasibov Sophia Loren
Galileo
Sinner
Tomba
Marcus Aurelius

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@cremieuxrecueil It is an interesting result, but not conclusive evidence. This is not a particularly random sample - it is possible that some trait drives people to become renters in Victoria, Australia.

It's hard to control for potential confounding factors.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

China is not putting moratoriums on data centers. The race for super intelligence needs to be won by the USA or our country and democracy will be at risk.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BREAKING: The Senate is holding an anti-taxpayer fraud meeting right now with Nick Shirley and James O'Keefe...

...and stunning new footage shows EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT SEAT is *empty*

100% of Democrats on the committee were invited, 0% SHOWED UP.

The Party of Fraud. They know about the fraud and are complicit!

FOX: "We have a shot of the empty seats, all the way to the right. Empty seats where DEMOCRATS would be sitting. Dems don't care about defrauding the American people?!" 🤯

@RandPaul @nickshirleyy @JamesOKeefeIII

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@brivael Transparency is one of the most effective methods to enable monitoring - supporting private/market monitors (e.g., investigative journalists, consumers, etc).

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@TheAliceSmith Individual liberty is preferable to government tyranny.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@elonmusk Not "we" have chosen... "they" have chosen the most foolish and destructive option.

What incentives do "they" have that led them to this decision, despite all logic & the will of the people?

How can we align government incentives with the people they are meant to serve?

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

🤔"why did these other people just fabricate what they wanted to say so that they could essentially assassinate his character?”

[Overton @overton_news]

This is one of the most important moments ever aired on CNBC.

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya says the media lied to millions of Americans about President Trump, and that after going back to the original source material, he realized he had been completely misled about Trump’s character.

PALIHAPITIYA: “The reality is that most of us were lied to by the media about President Trump.”

“And if you just go back to the source material, you should take away two things.”

“One, he didn’t say half the things he said, and two, why did these other people just fabricate what they wanted to say so that they could essentially assassinate his character?”

“I think that that second thing is completely unacceptable in America, and there’s still been no repercussions, really.”

“I took the time to learn about it. I admitted where…you know, the way that I met him was, I admitted on the pod, which, you know, has millions of viewers.”

“And I said, I got it totally wrong because I went and I watched Charlottesville.”

“And, you know, the first person to call me? President Trump.”

“And I got to know him and I put the phone down, I called my wife, and I said, we got it TOTALLY, totally wrong. We were lied to.”

“And then I got to know him and he is fantastic!”

@chamath

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@KonstantinKisin @DanielJHannan 🤔Are you suggesting that no action that limits a government’s ability to entrench itself will ever be implemented?

While I acknowledge your position is consistent with their incentives, it seems too absolute.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@elonmusk @Teslaconomics Please give us a clear, defined scope of data retention that:
1) meets your needs for debugging
2) limits your ability to retain our data

I’d likely support that option due to trust in you and your mission.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

An impassioned argument for free speech.

[Meghan Murphy @MeghanEMurphy]

"Only two kinds of people oppose free speech: snowflakes and totalitarians"

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

Every time someone calls me a "climate denier," I have to ask:

How exactly do you deny a noun?

Can you deny baseball? Can you deny grass? Can you deny mountains? Climate exists.

And if you're asking whether I deny climate change, then you've clearly never listened to anything I've said.

How can I simultaneously "deny climate change" while constantly talking about past climate changes, ice ages, warm periods, droughts, floods, and the natural variability recorded throughout Earth's history?

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@brivael Milton Friedman: "The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests."
The lack of incentive alignment between politicians and the people they are meant to serve (i.e., the agency problem of government) is one of western society's biggest challenges.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

"how can you be genuinely curious if you're not humble?"
🎯

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

JD Vance names the trait he says is at the root of what's wrong with American elites.

MIKE ROWE: "Curiosity or humility? The greater virtue."

VANCE: "Humility.

"I think that it's extremely important not to assume you know more than other people."

VANCE: "So many of the problems that I see, especially among American elites, comes from a certain arrogance. An arrogance that I know better than somebody else. I know how to do this better than you do. I know what's better for your life than you do. That arrogance is the source of a lot of what's wrong.

"I love curious people, curiosity is very important. But how can you be genuinely curious if you're not humble?"

Hard to argue with that.

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

One time in history a single country had the ability to literally seize the entire world.

Instead it rebuilt its enemies and gave them freedom.

America is built different 🫡

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

True. Your analysis of what is, compared to what was, is accurate. What you miss is what would have been if action had not been taken to curtail Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Risk lingers, but is greatly reduced from the risks of a nuclear Iran.

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@S7Dsn Correct. The NHL version of Haaland is Ovechkin.

https://t.co/dCQqOENMXa

[SMiller @Steven_Miller]

@_The_Prophet__ He's the ultimate sniper.

Better NHL analogy is Ovechkin (not Gretzky). Ovechkin is pure scorer. Gretzky was more of a playmaker, closer to Messi.

All are amazing for their skill.