A trolley is about to hit 5 people laying on the track
You can redirect the car, but the other track has not yet reached regulatory approval or completed its 1 year environmental testing period, so operating a train car on it is a violation of transit regulations
What do you do?
Bill Maher: “We bombed Iran, and it’s going on now. If you expected me to say I hate it, I don’t. Sorry.”
“You cannot name one horrible thing that has happened in the Middle East in the last 50 years and not connect it to this fascist theocracy.”
Every member in the U.S. Senate agrees we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
I’m baffled why so many are unwilling to support the only action to achieve that.
Empty sloganeering vs. commitment to global security — which is it?
I dunno man seems like wars are super easy when the objective is to win and not launder a trillion dollars to your friends in the DC-VA-MD area for decades
Epstein was desperately spamming invites, trying to get Elon to the island, using every connection he had
Elon had to blocklist him at the SERVER LEVEL 🚫
That's how badly Elon wanted zero contact with Epstein - completely blacklisted from SpaceX
Imagine this: you get to keep your ENTIRE paycheck. No withholding. No quarterly estimates. No begging the government to give you back YOUR OWN MONEY as a "refund" like they did you some favor.
Every. Single. Penny. Goes straight into YOUR pocket.
That is the FairTax, and it is the single most revolutionary tax reform proposal in American history. Here is why I am absolutely obsessed with this idea.
Right now, I bring home a teacher's salary supporting a family of six. Between federal income tax and payroll tax, the government takes about 20% before I ever see it. Then my employer pays ANOTHER 7.65% in payroll taxes that would otherwise be part of my compensation package. So roughly 28% of what I SHOULD be earning vanishes before I can make a single decision about how to spend it.
Meanwhile, the drug dealer down the street? Pays NOTHING. The illegal immigrant working off the books? NOTHING. The wealthy guy with expensive accountants who structures everything through legal loopholes? Barely anything compared to what he SHOULD pay.
The FairTax changes EVERYTHING. It abolishes the income tax, payroll tax, corporate tax, estate tax, capital gains tax - ALL OF IT - and replaces it with a simple consumption tax at the retail level. Buy something new? Pay the tax. That is it.
Here is what makes this absolutely brilliant:
EVERYONE PAYS. The illegal immigrant buying groceries? Pays federal tax. The drug dealer buying a car? Pays federal tax. The wealthy person buying their third vacation home? Pays MASSIVE federal tax because luxury consumption gets expensive. Foreign tourists visiting America? They pay too.
Nobody escapes. No loopholes. No special deals. No armies of accountants finding ways to dodge your obligation.
But here is the part that really gets me fired up: if you are self-sufficient, you pay almost NOTHING.
Grow your own food? No tax. Raise your own livestock? No tax. Generate your own power? No tax. Build your own furniture? No tax. Trade your carpentry skills for your neighbor's plumbing work? NO TAX.
The FairTax would create a MASSIVE incentive for Americans to become self-reliant again, to develop local trade networks, to stop being dependent on corporate supply chains and government handouts. Want to avoid the FairTax? Produce what you consume. Revolutionary concept, right?
And before anyone screams "but the poor will pay more!" - WRONG. Every household gets a monthly "prebate" equal to the FairTax on spending up to poverty level. A family of four gets about $10,800 per year. That means low-income families pay ZERO federal tax on necessities. The system is actually MORE progressive than what we have now.
I ran the numbers for my own family. Under the current system, between income tax and payroll tax (including the employer portion that reduces my potential wages), my family's federal tax burden is roughly $12,000 annually. Under the FairTax, even if we spent every penny we earn, we would pay about $4,000 after the prebate. That is a 67% tax cut while keeping the same lifestyle.
But here is what really matters to me as someone who values liberty: the FairTax restores PRIVACY. The government has absolutely no business knowing what I earn, where I work, how I invest, or what business expenses I claim. That is MY information, not theirs.
Under the FairTax, my financial life becomes MY business again. No more documenting everything for the IRS. No more living in fear of an audit. No more assuming I am guilty until I prove my innocence every April 15th.
I keep my entire paycheck. I decide when to pay federal taxes by deciding when to consume. And if I want to reduce my tax burden, I can become more self-sufficient, develop skills, trade with neighbors, and build resilient local communities.
THAT is freedom. THAT is what the Founders envisioned - limited government that does not intrude into every aspect of your financial life.
The FairTax taxes everyone fairly based on consumption, rewards productivity instead of punishing it, incentivizes self-sufficiency, and treats Americans like free people rather than subjects who must justify their existence to government bureaucrats every year.
So yes, I support the FairTax. I support keeping my entire paycheck. I support making illegal immigrants and drug dealers finally pay their share. I support a system that rewards me for being self-sufficient rather than punishing me for being productive. I support restoring privacy and treating Americans with dignity.
The current system punishes work, rewards consumption over savings, enables massive tax evasion by those operating in the shadows, and grows more complex every year. It assumes you are guilty and demands you prove your innocence.
The FairTax would change all of that. Keep your entire paycheck. Pay taxes only when you choose to consume. No more IRS audits. No more April 15th panic. No more begging for your own money back.
Just simple, transparent, fair taxation that treats everyone the same and finally makes the people who currently pay NOTHING start contributing when they participate in the economy.
But what do I know, I am just a teacher who thinks keeping my entire paycheck and making everyone pay their fair share through consumption is a better system than the current mess that punishes productivity while letting tax cheats get away with paying nothing.
The European Union currently has an operating budget of ~€1.2 Trillion.
Don't ask what the EU would do with half of Elon's capital. Ask what the EU is currently doing with twice his capital.
MORE than three million pages from the Epstein files are now public.
Cannibalism. Rape. Murder. Pedophilia.
Not a single arrest. Not a single investigation.
Z.E.R.O
Sean McDermott's goal was to get this team to the Super Bowl and in that he failed. But McDermott embraced Buffalo like he was born and raised there.
He coached his players with high expectations, but also showed care and compassion for them as people.
While Josh Allen is the Bills shining star, I always felt Sean McDermott was its soul. That will be hard to replace
Whatever you think of MTG, her trajectory as a member of Congress is far closer to the Founders' vision -- an ordinary apolitical person gets inspired to run, avoids being a creature of DC, stays a few years and returns to normal life -- than the cadre of career professional politicians who do nothing but spend their lives running for office and always plotting how to move up and living almost entirely in DC, far from their "constituents."
Voluntarily relinquishing office is far more noble than spending decades desperately and permanently clinging to power and position even when you're so old you don't know your name or where are you.
Dark Factories? Of course you thought there wasn't anyone on the floor. They were hiding in the offices while management pretended to turn the lights on for you.
Let me guess -- you just finished the McKinsey Quarterly deck on lights out factories, and now you think humans are going away because you saw a couple Fanucs feeding pallets into CNC mills while management waxed poetic about the future of manufacturing.
You're going to believe that right up until your first ECN comes through and you have to scrap fifteen hundred fixtures because a twenty three year old design engineer in San Jose wasn't taught in their overpriced engineering university that hard internal corners are stress risers and cause parts to fail in cyclic loading. Then it'll become your problem.
While you're dealing with that, you'll look around and notice that the lights in your "Dark Factory" have been on a lot dealing with these issues. You've had to hire more people than you thought for machine maintenance, and you don't even want to think about the very well lit shipping department in the back. Surprise -- another issue, the well staffed and well paid QC department is saying that half of your parts and assemblies are either OOS or failing ORT. You turn the lights back on.
Then you'll finally open up ASME Y14.5 and really read it this time, and not just skim over it again to figure out why an angularity tolerance isn't measured in degrees and see that the cause of your process capability going to crap was because a process two vendors upstream was slowly coming out of spec.
After that, you'll think you've figured things out and crack open Shigley's to read about Hertzian contact stress and realize that the super hard and expensive unobtanium carbide lathe tooling you forced down your vendor's throat was going to end up adhesive wearing away anyways despite the softer aluminum parts they were cutting because it didn't matter what your hardness differential was. Daddy Bharat Bhushan was always going to get you. You then implement a tool change schedule and then it hits you.
Dark factories aren't happening because dark factories aren't a robotics problem. They aren't even just a manufacturing problem. They're an operational, finance, and everything under the sun problem.
Recursive feedback mechanisms? Sure, pal. The only thing here recursive is this story. If I had a dollar every time I heard it, well, I guess I could afford an actual factory.
We really got 58mil people (pop of England), in basically a straight line, created the most economically powerful and important sub-region in the world, and then said its infrastructure network shouldnt progress beyond 1980
There are only two options: conversation or violence. You must pick one.
There are people on the political left who choose conversation and there are people on the political left who choose violence.
The same is true of people on the political right.
This isn't both sides-ism, it is fact.
I choose conversation and I stand with anyone on either side of the aisle who does the same.