A good example of unintended consequences is California's "mansion tax". Intended to increase revenues to subsidize affordable housing, it resulted in a 30-50% drop in real estate transactions (and beneficial Prop 13 real estate tax reassessments), 9,100 fewer homes, 16,650 lost construction jobs (as builders avoided areas where the tax applied), and hundreds of millions in economic costs. Paradoxically it reduced property tax revenues, and resulted in fewer multi-family housing units in districts where the tax applied. Reference: @grok What were some of the downsides of California's "mansion tax"?

this California wealth tax thing is just incredible. so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a retroactive tax if passed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time). polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it). there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate. supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right? well as it turns out, they did. a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative. proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave. just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues. but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion. so when you add it all up you get: + $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated) - $69b in present value of lost future income taxes = - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time. and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes. [1]: nber.org/system/files/workin…

French / European riots explained:

Great explanation of why California gas prices are higher than in other states, in the @sfchronicle of all places. 26¢/gallon goes to "cap-and-invest" which funds high-speed rail. sfchronicle.com/california/a…

Palmer Luckey says companies are exaggerating the cost of American manufacturing to justify staying in China: “They don’t want to admit that it is a choice.” 🇺🇸🇨🇳 “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who pretend that manufacturing in the U.S. is this impossible, order-of-magnitude problem. A lot of it is very self-serving. They want to justify why they’re in China. They want to justify why it’s OK for them to stay in China. They know that when sanctions hit as a result of a potential Taiwan conflict, they want to say, ‘Nobody could’ve predicted this, and I had no choice anyway.’ They don’t want to admit that it is a choice. If Chinese subsidized steel is a third of the price of American unsubsidized steel, a tariff isn’t going to work. But if the price difference really is 30%, then a tariff could bring the American steel industry back. It’s critically important to get this question right, and there aren’t enough people talking about it.”

My understanding of multidecadal natural internal variability was relatively naive in 2006. Since then I've done substantial research on this. Also the global hurricane data set isn't useful prior to 1980. @RyanWeather 's analysis on this is the best available IMO.

I didn’t chime in on this because a) I honestly didn’t care that much and b) there are usually two sides to these things. But the way this went, as best I can tell, is that Kelly Clarkson walked into this Brooklyn store, voluntarily looking a bit homeless, and inquired about a fake bird. In between helping a ton of other people, they told her the bird was not for sale but here is the artist’s info, he sells them for about $15,000. In the meantime, here is a $2,000 bird they DO offer. Which Clarkson took to mean, “You can’t afford our bougie bird that costs as much as a baby grand so here, take this pathetic $2,000 knock-off like good little poor.” (Which is a stupid interpretation all around because who but a rich person has $2k to drop on a fake bird? But okay.) Anyway, that was not the intended message, but she immediately walked out and put this little business on blast to her millions of followers who instantly swarmed like bees with zero additional information. I don’t give a crap whether Clarkson ends up with a fake bird or how much it costs. She can have a menagerie of $20,000 parakeets or she can whittle them herself out of sticks from her backyard, I don’t care. But I do care that so many people can be instantly riled up on social media to attack a potentially innocent person or business simply because their celebrity idol tells them to.

There are not any so-called “fingerprints” of man-made global warming. None. All warming, natural or man-made, looks about the same. Scientists claim to have found “fingerprints” that are “consistent with” man-made global warming, but they fail to mention that said patterns are also “consistent with” natural variability. For instance, natural global warming would cause the poles to warm faster than the mid-latitudes and tropics. That would occur due to insolation changes and it would occur due to natural reductions in cloud cover increasing the amount of absorbed solar radiation, which would increase the humidity and higher water vapor concentrations would cause cold, dry regions to warm faster. The same effect would cause nights to warm faster than days. And while an increase in insolation can be ruled out as the cause of global warming, natural reductions in cloud cover cannot be ruled out. Cloud albedo has decreased in recent decades. It is often assumed that said reduction is a positive feedback response to global warming, but it may actually be a cause.

This you?

Researcher @curryja was once a “rock star” in the climate change movement. Then she discovered that some scientists conspire to hide data. “A lot of really ugly things,” she tells me. She reveals the “manufactured consensus” about climate change:

Marc Andreessen reveals why housing, health care, and education keep getting more expensive while everything else gets cheaper "There's basically three components to the American dream. A house near great job opportunities, great health care for you and your family, and sending your kids to good schools" "If you disaggregate the economy over the last 25 years, everything that technology touches basically collapses in price. Television sets, computer games, anything with electronics in it. But if you chart housing, education, and health care, the prices of those things are skyrocketing" "The government restricts supply, zoning laws and university certifications. And then the government responds to the political pressure caused by the rising prices by subsidizing demand. And of course, if you subsidize demand and a fixed supply, you get skyrocketing prices"

@ABC News continues to lie, this time privately to their friends in the press. This was a coordinated influence operation planted by our competition, not "premature publication". 7:01 AM October 7th, story goes live. Within minutes, dozens of high-profile commentators, politicians, and news outlets are sharing it with tens of millions of followers. We immediately contact ABC and demand they correct their false claims - after multiple rounds of refusal, they finally make a single one-word grammar edit. The editors stand by the reporting and insist the false claims are true. Finally, eight hours after I was forced to call them out publicly, they delete everything. The editors hide all the comments, the author deletes his X account, and the story is completely wiped from their website without any explanation, directly violating SPJ ethics standards and ABC's own internal rules. ABC is currently running a coverup operation, ignoring all of our requests for correction/retraction while telling their buddies to spread the word that this was nothing more than a CMS publication timeline error.

At 47 he paid the SEC $20 million for a tweet a jury later found him not guilty for. If he hadn't paid, Tesla would have gone bankrupt the same day: His CFO told him the banks would pull every credit line instantly. He calls it a hostage negotiation. Then he explains why the SEC never touches hedge funds. Save this.

10 years ago, you were constantly told Great Barrier Reef was essentially dead Wrong at the time Today, spectacularly wrong, with last 5 years top 5 for coral cover Sources: x.com/BjornLomborg/status/21… Wrong already then: theconversation.com/great-ba…

I never knew this was how our states got their abbreviations! 😅 This guy is hilarious!! 😂🤣 I was laughing out loud!😂 Enjoy, if you need a laugh!👊🏻😂

Every time. The wealth tax results would be even more disastrous on a scale unfathomable

Pres Christofferson in footnotes: “Investments tend to make money on average over time, while bets tend to lose money. The returns on investment come from the creation of value to others. In contrast, the winnings from betting come from the losses of someone else.” #ldsconf

חבייר מיליי הוריד בחדות את שיעורי המס בארגנטינה. ומה קרה להכנסות המדינה ממסים? הן עלו ב-4% בשנה האחרונה! עקומת לאפר בפעולה.

America has the cheapest food in the world. So maybe you should support capitalism????

Cerno knows.