tekNico

Old human male, reluctant misanthrope, difformist, libertarian, agnostic, pronouns: fuck/off.
"Non ti curar di lor, ma blocca e passa." - Dante (more or less)

[tekNico @tekNico]

@freestatebabe Thank you for your service.

[Skscartoon @skscartoon]

No, Elon Musk and DOGE did not cause "millions of deaths of children."
Anthony Fauci, however, very much did.

[tekNico @tekNico]

https://t.co/HzgX2xHOAR

[Tom Woods @ThomasEWoods]

Of course you can "speak ill of the dead."

Sure, the gratuitous airing of a deceased man's peccadilloes is in poor taste and serves no good purpose, and in general we ought to avoid attacking people who cannot defend themselves.

But as historians we must render judgment on the actions of a consequential person who affected the course of history -- otherwise we would fall into the trap of failing to "learn from history," as the hackneyed maxim goes. After all, wrote Shakespeare, "The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones."

Now to our topic: Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve System, just died at age 100.

The general public wants to blame the United States president for the health of the U.S. economy, but the Fed chairman has much more influence over economic conditions.

Greenspan spent some time early in his career as an Ayn Rand acolyte, and in fact three chapters of Rand's book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, were written by the future Fed chairman.

(Ron Paul owned a copy of Ayn Rand's newsletter in which the Greenspan chapter "Gold and Economic Freedom" originally appeared, and even got it signed by the author.)

Greenspan's opponents on the left therefore interpreted his whole career through a Randian lens, which serves to remind us how stubbornly they refuse to understand the world.

Had Greenspan wanted to run the Federal Reserve in such a way as to approximate a gold standard as much as possible, he could certainly have done so. Instead, he used it as an instrument for central planning, with disastrous results.

Initially, Greenspan could do no wrong. He became known as "The Maestro," effortlessly conducting the economy through treacherous waters.

The New Republic ran a story co-authored by Stephen Glass about a Wall Street firm that had built a literal shrine to Greenspan, complete with dozens of news photographs and quotations from Greenspan's speeches, and a red leather chair cordoned off by blue velvet ropes, where Greenspan had allegedly sat in 1948.

Traders from the firm claimed they would sit in the chair for "inspiration" after losing money; brokers said they literally prayed to Greenspan and used a software program called "The Talmud of the Federal Reserve."

That was a fake story and there was no such firm (the Stephen Glass oeuvre of fake stories was eventually exposed, and in fact became the subject of the film Shattered Glass), but the fact that a story like that seemed plausible enough as to have aroused no suspicion tells us something.

Meanwhile, Greenspan's contempt for the public was legendary: he confessed to Lesley Stahl of CBS that before congressional committees he would speak gibberish -- a tactic he called "syntax destruction."

The next day the headlines would report two different things about what he had said, and for Greenspan that meant he had succeeded.

Greenspan's policy moves (like arranging for a bailout of Long Term Capital Management in 1998) gave rise to the belief in a "Greenspan put," according to which investors could be assured that the Fed chairman was prepared to use the tools at his disposal to backstop the market if it should ever fall below a certain level.

And of course his monetary stimulus after the dot-com bust in 2000-2001, which looked to some observers at the time as a brilliant move, only delayed the reckoning, and transformed that bust into a real estate bubble (and eventual bust).

When the lights of the economy should have turned red, Greenspan made them all green. That was the only recession on record in which housing starts rose rather than fell.

The Federal Reserve, like the government itself, has no real goods at its disposal, so while its various tricks can redistribute resources and simulate prosperity, it cannot generate real wealth. It simply arranges the economy into an unsustainable configuration that has to come apart.

Because of Greenspan's earlier association with Ayn Rand, and because the general public knows so little about the Fed, when the 2008 crash occurred, people generally went along with blaming "capitalism" -- even though the Federal Reserve is a non-market institution created by act of Congress and enjoying a government-granted monopoly, and even though Greenspan's manipulations overrode what the market was trying to say.

Greenspan's legacy is 2008, and the undeserved reputational damage that the market economy suffered as a result.

[tekNico @tekNico]

The highest treason. May he rot in hell, if there is one.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Well said. One addition. Greenspan was the Robert Stadler of our age: the brilliant man who knew the right principles and betrayed them, certain his own genius could control the evil he agreed to serve.

He was a member of Rand's inner circle. His essay "Gold and Economic Freedom" appeared in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. He argued, correctly, that the gold standard protected savers from confiscation, that statists hated gold because it blocked their deficits, and that abandoning it turned deficit spending into a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. He even understood that Social Security was a Ponzi fraud that would help bankrupt the nation. He knew all of it.

Then he took command of the Federal Reserve and did the opposite of everything he had written. The Greenspan put, rates held at one percent, the housing bubble, the very confiscation he had warned of, engineered by his own hand.

Here is the irony. Greenspan knew Atlas Shrugged intimately. He watched Rand create Stadler, the genius who lent his mind to the looters' Institute believing he could outwit them, and who lived to see his knowledge weaponized as Project X. Greenspan studied that warning at the source, from the author herself. He understood the character completely. Then he walked the identical road and became the man the novel was written to expose.

When the wreckage came in 2008, he told Congress he had found "a flaw" in his model. There was no flaw in the model. The flaw was in the choice to abandon what he knew.

Some men meet the virus and are consumed by it. Greenspan had the answer at forty and spent the next fifty years pretending he had forgotten. The savers he once vowed to protect paid for the performance.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Historian Bill Federer: "By 2030, there will be a majority Muslim population in Europe, and they will just flat out vote in Sharia law.

People forget Egypt was completely Christian for 6 centuries. It's not anymore. All of North Africa was completely Christian for 6 centuries. It is not anymore.

Constantinople was the largest Christian city in the world, and the largest Christian church in the world for hundreds of years was the Hagia Sophia. And it was turned into a mosque.

They want to do the same thing with the Vatican."

Pay attention to what he’s saying!

[tekNico @tekNico]

I didn't consent to this. I didn't sign shit.

Taxation is theft. We are all serfs.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just proved that ownership in America is a legal fiction.

Musk: “You get taxed on what you earn, you get taxed on what you buy, and you get taxed on what you own.”

Think about what property tax actually means.

You worked for decades. Paid it off in full. The deed is in your name.

Stop paying the government its annual fee. Watch them take it and sell it to someone who will.

You never owned that house. You were leasing it from an entity you never signed a contract with.

Income tax tells the same truth in softer packaging.

The government does not take a portion of your earnings. They decide how much of your own labor you are permitted to keep.

That is not semantics. It is a confession of who the system believes your time belongs to first.

Sales tax buries itself in the receipt. Two people exchange value voluntarily. A third party who contributed nothing takes a cut simply for allowing it to happen.

Now stack all three.

Taxed when you create. Taxed when you spend. Taxed when you hold. Taxed again when you die and try to pass it to your children.

At no point in that cycle does the system recognize your output as yours.

Because money is not an abstraction. It is crystallized human lifespan.

Every dollar taxed is an hour you already lived, already bled for, already gone.

The state is not managing an economy. It is claiming dominion over time you will never get back.

And spending it on systems you never asked for and actively oppose.

The institution extracting all of it faces zero obligation to perform. A contractor who delivers nothing gets fired. A bureaucracy that burns through trillions gets a budget increase the next fiscal year.

SpaceX pays taxes to the agencies that obstruct its launches. Tesla funds the regulators drafting rules to shield its competitors.

The builders are not subsidizing government. They are financing their own friction.

The tax code is 74,000 pages long. Not because the economy demands it. Because the extraction had to be buried in enough complexity that you would stop asking who it was designed to protect.

The past belonged to the people who taxed the world.

The future belongs to the people who build it.

[tekNico @tekNico]

"Commerce produced the technology of literacy, not the other way around."

[Handre @Handre]

Three thousand years ago, no king planned the Mediterranean economy. The Phoenicians built it anyway, one trading post at a time, from Tyre to Cádiz, without a central authority telling them where the cedar should go or what a measure of purple dye ought to cost.

You want to understand spontaneous order? Look at the network the Phoenicians strung along the coast between roughly 1200 and 800 BC. Byblos, Sidon, Tyre at home. Then Carthage in 814 BC, Gadir (modern Cádiz) past the Pillars of Hercules, Motya off Sicily, Utica on the African shore. Nobody sat in a planning ministry assigning these locations. Merchants found good harbors, fresh water, and locals willing to trade and set up shop. The ones who chose badly went broke and disappeared from the record. The ones who chose well became cities. Price signals and profit and loss did the sorting, not a committee.

Notice what they actually moved. Cedar from Lebanon to Egypt and Mesopotamia, where timber was scarce and pharaohs paid dearly. Silver and tin from Iberia, the tin essential for bronze and found almost nowhere convenient. Murex dye so expensive it later clothed Roman senators, produced by crushing thousands of sea snails per gram. Each good flowed from where it was cheap to where it was dear, and the Phoenicians captured the spread. The spread was the reward for solving the knowledge problem of who needs what, and where, across two thousand miles of open water.

They even handed us the alphabet as a byproduct. Twenty-two consonantal letters, far simpler than Egyptian hieroglyphs or cuneiform, because merchants needed fast records of who owed what, not priestly monuments. The Greeks borrowed it, added vowels, and you are reading the descendant of a Phoenician accounting tool right now. Commerce produced the technology of literacy, not the other way around.

No emperor commissioned this. No five-year plan drew the trade routes. A few thousand traders pursuing their own gain wove together civilizations that had never heard of one another, and they did it through voluntary exchange backed by weighed silver. Then Alexander besieged Tyre in 332 BC and burned it to the ground. Politics always shows up eventually to collect.

[tekNico @tekNico]

In the immortal words of Donald Fagen:

"What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free"

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

You might not have heard of Starfall.

Certainly there's more enthusiasm for arguing about AI data centers in space.

But this is more important.

This is the real game. The real game that starts when billionaires read Robert Heinlein, instead of the sports page.

It starts with asteroid mining.

Remember that all earthly mines for heavy elements are just ancient asteroid strikes. When you mine asteroids in space, you go from mining the tiny percentage that once hit Earth, to mining all of them.

The next step is space manufacturing.

If all the raw materials are in space, space is where you want to use them, because they are there already, and if you are close to the sun, power is free. No recurring costs.

The next step is space industrialization.

Most of the things humanity makes are things we make so we can make other things. If we can make those things in space, there's no reason to bring them to Earth. Just use them to make other things right where they are.

This means that your entire industrial infrastructure and toolchain lives outside the gravity well.

The last step is ruralization and suburbification of Earth.

Once heavy industry is cheaper in space, Earth can be reserved for what it is actually best at, which is growing things, and being a nice place to live.

With the entire toolchain in space, only the end results of that toolchain, the consumer products themselves, have to make it down from space. Everything else will only be needed on Earth in token amounts... enough to fix your truck, but not enough to run a uranium mine.

What this means is less pollution, cheaper land, cheaper food, cheaper consumer goods, cheaper everything and a higher standard of living for everyone.

Because you have all sorts of new ways to Have Nice Things.

You just need to get the Nice Things from space, where you built them, to Earth, where people want to enjoy them.

And you need a cheap way to do this at scale.

"Asteroid" means "like a star". That's that the Greeks thought they were, and they weren't entirely wrong. Because every atom of asteroid metal was forged in a supernova. That's what spacefaring species make their civilizations out of.

Fragments of ancient stars.

Brought to Earth.

Starfall.

[tekNico @tekNico]

Outlander - Diana Gabaldon

https://t.co/jbTKYaumLG

[tekNico @tekNico]

"There were moments, of course. Those small spaces of time, too soon gone, when everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point, like the moment of change between the dark and the light, when both and neither surround you." ❤️

[tekNico @tekNico]

@tepri_x @valigo How's the weather in Stockholm?

[John Carter @martianwyrdlord]

We're banning raves, because we don't want you having fun where we can't watch you. By the way let me tell you about Woodstock.

We're cracking down on underage drinking. It's bad for you. Yeah of course we hit up the pubs at your age it was great.

We're banning smoking, but just for you - the smoking age will go up one year every year. Oh yes of course, we used to be able to smoke inside everywhere, it was great really.

We're banning flavored vapes. We don't have any evidence they're bad for you, you just like them too much.

We're banning dodgeball during recess, someone might get hurt. Yeah we really enjoyed dodgeball too.

We're banning flirting, because it might make the girls uncomfortable.

We're locking you in your room for the next two years. Yes we know you're in no danger from the virus, but we're worried that you'll get us sick. By the way you have to take this needle if you want to leave your room again. Yes, twice. Well there will be boosters too. No, we aren't worried about side effects, that doesn't effect us at all.

We're closing the frat houses, because we don't want you having fun without our permission. Please join these officially sanctioned university clubs instead.

We're bringing in labor from the third world to work the service jobs, so you can't have a summer job.

You need to go to university to get a good job. By the way we're raising the price of tuition. Oh look we're raising it again. Don't worry there are loans. At interest.

Actually we're giving the good jobs to the foreigners we just imported, to make up for our racist past. We are very good people. No of course we aren't sacrificing anything. You just have to take one for the team.

Also, we're giving the foreigners the houses. We needed to increase real estate prices. For our pensions, you see. Sadly no, you'll probably never be able to afford one yourself. By the way don't forget to pay your taxes. Need to support those pensions somehow! Eh? No, we're giving ourselves tax breaks of course. Seniors discount you know.

Oh by the way, that one thing you still have, now that we've banned joy and kicked every ladder out from under you? That social media stuff you kids like? You guessed it! We're banning that too! Just for you though, we're still going to watch AI videos on Facebook. It's for your safety, you see. We've noticed that you're all getting rather irate, and we think it would be better for your mental health if you shut up for a while. Why don't you just go outside?

Eh? No of course we aren't going to stop Ahmed and his twelve illiterate cousins from raping your sister, that would be culturally insensitive, which would make us feel very bad, and we can't have that.

[tekNico @tekNico]

@Kahguia @Sentdex 5.2, not 2.5 .

[tekNico @tekNico]

Mala tempora currunt.

[Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen]

The French government wants to send this lady to prison for talking about how immigration makes women less safe.

The translation says that the prosecution is from the "anti-racist agency DILCRAH". But DILCRAH is a government body attached to the Prime Ministers office.

[tekNico @tekNico]

@TheAhmadOsman You seem to be implying something: more explicit is less annoying.

[tekNico @tekNico]

https://t.co/p8cz8kGEZT

[Skscartoon @skscartoon]

The left has done nothing but take from the people, all while projecting their own thievery onto the wealth creators they envy.
Their reaction to the SpaceX IPO and Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is all the proof you need

[tekNico @tekNico]

Let the goose lay eggs, idiots.

[Ozan Bellik @BellikOzan]

You could squeeze Elon for all he's worth today and you'll never see a trillion dollars out of it.

His "net worth" is based almost entirely on his partial ownership of companies whose valuations are inextricably tied to his control over them.

In other words, the goose does not have a trillion dollars worth of gold inside it. A trillion dollars is what people are willing to pay now for the right to get the golden eggs the goose is expected to lay in the future.

The only way to get a trillion dollars out of Elon is to let him cook / let the goose lay eggs.

[tekNico @tekNico]

@TheAhmadOsman @UnslothAI has it built-in.

[Taya Bass @travelingflying]

@elonmusk

[tekNico @tekNico]

What the heck? 😲

Roxanne - The Police (Morgan James Cover)
https://t.co/673hZ7uUwG

[tekNico @tekNico]

Am I in heaven? AM. I. IN. HEAVEN.

Dear Prudence by The Beatles (Morgan James & Haley Reinhart Cover)
https://t.co/efv60jaSxM

[tekNico @tekNico]

@jeremykauffman https://t.co/sMh5UpcqvO

[Ahmad @TheAhmadOsman]

https://t.co/riIctxjHoN