Neekmeister

I like to eat and sleep.

[Hernan Cortes @CyberPunkCortes]

The most expensive piece of ass since Helen of Troy.

[Special Situations 🌐 Research Newsletter (Jay) @SpecialSitsNews]

The $NVDA memes keep getting better

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

The “jokes” about Charlie Kirk are heinous for reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that I agree with his politics. There is just something especially callous and soulless about gloating over a brutal, bloody murder we all saw with our own eyes. He was a young man and father of young children. We saw him get shot in the neck. The blood pour out. The natural human reaction when seeing something so violent, bloody, and shocking is to be moved and shaken by it. If instead you’re gloating and joking, it shows that this human part of you is dead. You truly are a soulless goblin in a way that’s only vaguely distinguishable from the guy who actually committed the murder. That’s what makes your callousness so disturbing for those of us who still have souls. We’re human and you no longer are. And that makes you a monstrosity to us. We’re not “offended” so much as revolted by the sight of you. You’ve become the spiritual equivalent of a maggot eaten corpse. You are a grotesquery, a morally disfigured beast.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Canada’s job market is stalling—employment flat, unemployment up to 6.7%—with private-sector losses of 53,000 more than wiping out a 50,000 public-sector rebound in health, education, and government. Hiking into the twin negative growth shocks of energy prices and U.S. tariffs was already a policy mistake. And yet Bay Street still demands more.

[@jason @Jason]

Catchy 🎶

[Michael Sikand @michaelsikand]

This is a classic rotation out of AI into obesity.

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

if this isn’t personal superintelligence i don’t know what is

[Neekmeister @ThaEskimoBro]

@DrJStrategy Insane

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Observation of the day.

Bank of Canada hikes into a weak economy.

The next day, employment data comes out.

Close to 50K in job losses and the previously reported number revised from 26k to -16K

Canadian MSM ignoring this. No one is reporting it. As well as the BOC acolytes on Bay St.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.

And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.

A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.

Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.

At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.

At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.

Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.

At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.

B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.

When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.

In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.

The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.

C. Suffering demands a culprit.

A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.

But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.

And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?

D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.

Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.

Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?

No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.

E. One lens, a thousand causes.

And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.

F. The perfect inversion.

Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.

It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.

G. The ballot box confirms it.

In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.

In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.

H. The way out.

These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.

The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.

That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Democrats discovered billionaires in politics were a threat to democracy the exact day one stopped writing them checks.

When Michael Bloomberg spent around $1 billion of his own money in the 2020 primary, then another $100M to help Biden in Florida, nobody called it an attack on democracy.

When George Soros put $125M into a single Democratic super PAC and became the largest political donor of the 2022 cycle, it was "civic engagement."

When Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, JB Pritzker and Tom Steyer wrote eight- and nine-figure checks cycle after cycle, it was "saving democracy." When Bill Gates reportedly gave around $50M to a pro-Harris group in 2024, silence.

In 2020, dark money groups spent over $500M backing Democrats, more than double what went to Republicans. In 2024, Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion in under three months. Democrats outspent Republicans and lost.

So the problem was never billionaires in politics. The problem is a billionaire who doesn't fund your side.

And here's what nobody in DC wants to say out loud: old billionaire money is quiet money. It funds the foundations, NGOs, think tanks and consultants that make up the permanent establishment. It doesn't challenge the system. It is the system. It freezes the picture: same insiders, same incumbents, same experts, every single cycle.

You can like or hate Musk's spending, but at least it's out in the open. If you really want money out of politics, start with your own party's donor list.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

“One company just grabbed a monopoly on flying cars…”

[Smoke-away @SmokeAwayyy]

Look at those thrusters go.

[Derek Nee @DerekNee]

Traffic is a bit heavy in the Z-axis today.

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

liz warren: we’re gonna stop the mayonnaise company from buying a hot sauce company

elon musk:

[Robin @xdNiBoR]

"Sir, license and registrat..."

[‏️ٓ‏️ @CocoExiliado]

Mi primer día con el Tesla https://t.co/7Z4Is0FjNl

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Capitalism vs. Socialism

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@MKBHD I’m not. Will use SpaceX cold gas thruster system with ultra high pressure air in a composite over-wrapped pressure vessel in place of the 2 rear seats.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."

It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.

First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.

So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"

And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.

Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.

Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.

Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.

Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?

The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?

A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.

Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.

The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.

The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."

Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.

Government is the fourth box. By design.

Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.

And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.

The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.

Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.

So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.

China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.

India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.

South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.

Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.

Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.

No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.

And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.

Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.

Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.

A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.

Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.

One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.

Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.

If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.

It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.

And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.

You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.

Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.

The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.

Choose.