RT @JessicaBRiedl: Because I've been cursed to argue about this forever, here's my 2024 report listing all the reasons eliminating the FICA…

This is simply gross.

BREAKING: President Trump says he will issue a $5,000 "dividend" to every adult citizen in the US if the Republicans win the midterm elections. There are currently ~245 million US citizens age 18+, meaning this dividend would cost ~$1.2 trillion. This would mark the biggest economic stimulus payment since the pandemic.

The older I get the more I realize that one of the largest red flags for a person is disdain for youth.

Not while I'm alive. Hopefully enough other Americans feel the same way. As an American living right now, it's your responsibility to preserve what you were handed by others, for future generations. You have the ball; don't fumble.

Just dropped my daughter off at work and was amused that not long ago, I used to pay others to take her for a while 😅

What you do in private always shows in public. Reading shows in conversations. Your workouts show in your physique. Your diet shows in your energy. Your discipline shows in your confidence. Your focus shows in your results. You are what you cultivate when no one is watching.

A hilariously bad metaphor, if you know how collectivist heating worked in the USSR. In Soviet Moscow, they had a centralized heating system for the whole city. Heat was centrally generated and then distributed through a network of pipes to houses and other buildings. The service was very, very cheap to the end users. Hooray! Workers of the world, unite! But people got what they paid for. A thermostat in your house would be too individualist, so they didn't exist. The level of heat was set collectively by government administrators. They had to base their decisions on weather forecasts because it would take about 12 hours for a temperature change to work its way through the system. So when the forecasts were wrong (which was often), the heat level was wrong too. On top of that, every building is different. So no matter what heat level the government chose, some people would be too cold and others would be too warm (except for the times when the heat ran out due to shortages, then everyone was cold). People in buildings that were too hot would open the windows, even in the middle of winter, wasting heat that could have been used by others. And because there were no price signals, they hardly faced any costs when they did so. The heating system didn't even have meters for individuals to measure their usage. Officials in post-Soviet Moscow estimated that the whole system used about as much natural gas per year as all of France. The collectively owned underground pipes that carried the heat suffered from the classic problem: If everyone owns them, then nobody does. The pipes fell into disrepair and would be replaced by above-ground temporary pipes (which could go anywhere since nobody owned the land either). And they would stay that way for years. That is, if you were one of the lucky ones who got temporary pipes in the first place. Others were just left out in the cold. So yeah, if I was trying to promote collectivism, I probably wouldn't use a heat metaphor in winter. There are a lot of people who lived in collectivist countries who would dispute its association with warmth.

Imagine a doctor saying "I was going to do heart surgery but following the approved procedure made me feel like a robot so I decided to do something worse"

A school that refuses to fail students has already failed them; it just prefers to let real life deliver the F instead of the report card.

We are stuck with two parties whose only ideas are giving away money.

Education is such a mess, because the actual practitioners of education don’t understand that basically the entire point of education is to widen gaps. That’s literally what education is. You take a mixed group of people who can only get so far on their own and then you give them all the tools they need to excel and the smartest and most capable people in the group are going to use those tools to pull away from everybody else. That’s literally what education is.

Better not! Hate speech is protected by the First Amendment!

Pam Bondi needs to go. Her statements on “hate speech” are utterly disqualifying.

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

Exactly. Inheritance is earned by the parents/ancestors. Welfare is forcibly taken and redistributed to those no more deserving.

Simple explanations for complex phenomena can be seductive & dangerous. But 40 years of falling interest rates (1982-2022) led to 40 years of rising asset prices (equities and real estate) is pretty compelling.

A major cheat code in life: Being a pleasure to deal with. Kind when others aren’t. Calm when things go sideways. Reliable under pressure. Intelligence alone is overrated. Be someone who lightens the load for folks around them. People value people who make their lives easier.