Independent, data-driven, puzzler - No Dms.
Florida
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SMiller retweeted
Navarro: The Jobs Report Reveals Federal Reserve Election Interference zerohedge.com/economics/jobs…
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Exactly
.@AGToddBlanche to @business on Election Integrity:
“We’re not making this a partisan issue. The people that we have charged with illegally voting—I don’t know whether they voted for Republican or Democrat. The point here is that you can only be a citizen and vote. You cannot be here illegally, and you cannot be an LPR and vote. So, it’s a big focus of what we’re doing, and we’re going to keep on doing it.”
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SMiller retweeted
This is one of the most important messages that Republican voters need to hear.
Scott Jennings just laid it out on the CNN panel — right in front of Jake Tapper — and used a shovel analogy to drive it home.
His point was brutally simple: the people who dug the hole are now asking voters to hand them the shovels again.
JENNINGS: “I mean, I think it’s pretty simple. If I were running a campaign right now, I’d say the people who dug a very deep hole are making you one promise: Go back to the shovels.”
“And I wouldn’t let them do it.”
“I think the Republicans have great points to make. I think they’ve passed legislation. I’ve not heard a single Democrat campaign argue what bill or policy they would change!”
“They want to go back to the way they were doing it, and most of the cost of living in this country that people are mad about, came under Democrats.”
That shovel line is brutal but brilliant.
They dug the hole. Now they want the shovels back.
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A new piece in the Financial Times created a great visualization of the results from this study.
TL;DR: Rent control helps people whose rents get limited, but it hurts everyone else. It pushes up rents, pushes down new building, and makes cities worse.
It is horrible policy.
What do studies say about "freezing the rent"?
Let's have a thread🧵
First thing's first: Most studies agree that rent controlled units have lower rents, but also the supply of rentable units goes down and un-controlled units see their rents increase.
Uh-oh!
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As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.
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“The slow decision to treat the family as a wallet instead of a guest” eroded trust and damaged the brand.
🤔Do CEOs need more long-run incentives?
DISNEY SAYS THE LAYOFFS ARE EXTREMELY PAINFUL. SO WAS THE TICKET.
When I was a kid, my parents trusted one company without reading the fine print.
If it said Disney on the box, it went in the VCR. No research, no screening, no checking a parents guide. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. The Lion King. My mother put them on and went to make dinner because she knew exactly what was coming out of that television.
That trust was the most valuable asset the company ever owned. It was not the castle. It was not the mouse. It was a mother in a kitchen who did not have to check.
Then they spent it.
They decided the movies were a place to deliver messages instead of stories, and parents noticed. Even Bob Iger admitted in 2023 that the studio had lost sight of entertaining first. You do not usually get the CEO confessing.
Then they priced the family out of the parks.
This year, a single day at Magic Kingdom crossed 200 dollars for the first time in its 55 year history. Peak days hit 209. That is up roughly 38 percent since 2020.
And waiting in line, the one thing that used to be free, became a product. FastPass cost nothing. It became Genie Plus at 15 dollars in 2021. Now the Multi Pass runs up to 45 a person at Magic Kingdom and the Premier Pass runs as high as 449.
Four hundred and forty nine dollars. Per person. To skip lines at a park you already paid to enter.
A family of four can spend more than 800 dollars on admission alone for one day, before a churro.
Then they let ESPN and ABC drift. ESPN went from roughly 100 million homes in 2011 to about 55 million, and the answer was to raise the streaming price to 31.99.
And now the president of the company says the layoffs are extremely painful. Three hundred more this week, mostly in HR and IT, after a thousand in April. She says technology set its sights on their business.
No. Technology did not empty those park lines and those living rooms. The pricing did. The lectures did. The slow decision to treat the family as a wallet instead of a guest did.
Every brand that tries this learns the same lesson.
Bud Light offended the people who bought it and lost its spot as the best selling beer in America.
Pepsi raised prices until people stopped buying the volume, and an activist investor showed up.
Nike walked away from the stores its customers shopped in, chased margin, and watched the stock fall by more than half.
McDonald's took out the playgrounds, raised the prices, and is now spending 8.5 billion dollars to figure out where the families went.
Annoy your customers, price them out, and sell them something that offends the people who can still afford you. It ends the same way every single time.
So here is the call.
Your wallet is a vote and you cast it every week. Spend it with companies that remember who they work for. Be the mom in the kitchen again, just with more questions this time.
They built that trust over sixty years.
They can earn it back the same way they lost it. One family at a time.
🦋
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SMiller retweeted
DISNEY SAYS THE LAYOFFS ARE EXTREMELY PAINFUL. SO WAS THE TICKET.
When I was a kid, my parents trusted one company without reading the fine print.
If it said Disney on the box, it went in the VCR. No research, no screening, no checking a parents guide. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. The Lion King. My mother put them on and went to make dinner because she knew exactly what was coming out of that television.
That trust was the most valuable asset the company ever owned. It was not the castle. It was not the mouse. It was a mother in a kitchen who did not have to check.
Then they spent it.
They decided the movies were a place to deliver messages instead of stories, and parents noticed. Even Bob Iger admitted in 2023 that the studio had lost sight of entertaining first. You do not usually get the CEO confessing.
Then they priced the family out of the parks.
This year, a single day at Magic Kingdom crossed 200 dollars for the first time in its 55 year history. Peak days hit 209. That is up roughly 38 percent since 2020.
And waiting in line, the one thing that used to be free, became a product. FastPass cost nothing. It became Genie Plus at 15 dollars in 2021. Now the Multi Pass runs up to 45 a person at Magic Kingdom and the Premier Pass runs as high as 449.
Four hundred and forty nine dollars. Per person. To skip lines at a park you already paid to enter.
A family of four can spend more than 800 dollars on admission alone for one day, before a churro.
Then they let ESPN and ABC drift. ESPN went from roughly 100 million homes in 2011 to about 55 million, and the answer was to raise the streaming price to 31.99.
And now the president of the company says the layoffs are extremely painful. Three hundred more this week, mostly in HR and IT, after a thousand in April. She says technology set its sights on their business.
No. Technology did not empty those park lines and those living rooms. The pricing did. The lectures did. The slow decision to treat the family as a wallet instead of a guest did.
Every brand that tries this learns the same lesson.
Bud Light offended the people who bought it and lost its spot as the best selling beer in America.
Pepsi raised prices until people stopped buying the volume, and an activist investor showed up.
Nike walked away from the stores its customers shopped in, chased margin, and watched the stock fall by more than half.
McDonald's took out the playgrounds, raised the prices, and is now spending 8.5 billion dollars to figure out where the families went.
Annoy your customers, price them out, and sell them something that offends the people who can still afford you. It ends the same way every single time.
So here is the call.
Your wallet is a vote and you cast it every week. Spend it with companies that remember who they work for. Be the mom in the kitchen again, just with more questions this time.
They built that trust over sixty years.
They can earn it back the same way they lost it. One family at a time.
🦋
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SMiller retweeted
⚡️The state is beginning to give children a balance sheet before they have an income statement.
That is a profound shift.
For most of modern capitalism, ownership came after labor. You worked, saved, then maybe became an investor. This flips the sequence. A child enters the system already holding a claim on future productive output.
That means the government is trying to turn capital ownership from a privilege acquired later into a default feature of citizenship.
The deeper logic is almost radical in its simplicity:
If compounding is one of the main engines of wealth inequality, start the compounding clock earlier for everyone.
And automatic enrollment matters more than the initial amount. Defaults shape civilization. Once an account exists from childhood, families can add to it, employers can eventually interact with it, policy can build around it, and the child grows up seeing ownership as normal.
That changes identity.
A generation raised with investment accounts from birth may come to see themselves less as outsiders to capital markets and more as participants in them.
Then politics changes too.
If tens of millions of citizens own financial assets from childhood, asset performance becomes more broadly distributed through the population. The stock market starts mattering to more people personally. Corporate growth, productivity, inflation, taxation, and interest rates become household balance-sheet questions earlier in life.
And there is a deeper systemic consequence:
The state starts tying social stability to broad participation in capital appreciation.
That can be powerful, but it also means the political system becomes even more sensitive to whether asset markets continue compounding.
So the highest-level read is:
This is an attempt to solve part of the ownership problem by changing the starting condition of the citizen.
Instead of waiting for people to become capital owners after decades of labor, the system tries to make them owners first.
That is much bigger than a savings account.
It is the beginning of a model where citizenship itself carries a financial asset relationship from birth.
Millions of children have already enrolled in Trump Accounts. With automatic enrollment, over 60 million more eligible children now have an account ready to be claimed.
This is a transformative milestone in the Trump Administration's effort to give every American child the opportunity to build generational wealth and jump-start their financial future.
home.treasury.gov/news/press…
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SMiller retweeted
Advocating for change starts with action. Thank you, @ShellyArnoldi, for signing the #termlimits on Congress pledge.
termlimits.com/wp-content/up…
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Grok estimates $28 trillion in market value represented by the companies around this table. That’s greater than the GDP of every country except the United States.
President Trump’s Super Intelligence Luncheon seating chart…
$1.8 trillion in net worth.
$2.5 million people employed.
Builders. Creators. Innovators.
Bernie Sanders is going to sh1t his pants.
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SMiller retweeted
I was a big-government liberal. My consumer reporting found problems I thought only government could fix…
But economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises made me question what I thought I knew about government policy.
@ryanmcmaken of @mises explains their ideas:
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SMiller retweeted
The funniest thing about this is that you know Trump has not only watched it and laughed his ass off, he’s probably also showed it to everyone visiting the Oval Office today and had to be talked out of posting it on Truth Social
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SMiller retweeted
⚡️Humanity is moving toward abundance in production while scarcity migrates into control.
AI and robotics are going to make intelligence, software, design, coordination, manufacturing, logistics, and eventually large parts of physical labor dramatically cheaper.
That means a growing share of ordinary life can become absurdly inexpensive relative to today.
Food production becomes more automated.
Transportation becomes autonomous.
Healthcare becomes increasingly machine-assisted.
Software becomes effectively free to create.
Education becomes personalized and abundant.
Entertainment becomes infinite.
Manufacturing becomes more automated.
A huge amount of economic output gets detached from human labor.
That is real.
But money does not disappear because abundance does not eliminate hierarchy.
Scarcity moves upward.
Energy.
Land.
Compute.
Robotics fleets.
Strategic minerals.
Prime physical locations.
Network access.
Infrastructure.
Political influence.
Authentic human attention.
Ownership.
Those become the real battlegrounds.
So the future probably looks strange by current standards:
A person can have access to technology and services that would look luxurious today while owning very little of the systems producing them.
That is the core tension.
Consumption becomes abundant before ownership becomes abundant.
And that changes the entire meaning of class.
Today, class is heavily tied to income.
In a machine economy, class becomes more tied to ownership of productive systems and access to scarce assets.
That is why “universal high income” is plausible while extreme wealth concentration can still exist at the same time.
Everybody gets access to more output.
A smaller group owns more of the machinery.
The really profound break comes when human labor stops being the primary ticket granting people access to the economy.
For thousands of years, the implicit bargain was:
work → income → claim on output.
AI breaks that chain.
If machines do most of the productive work, society eventually needs a new mechanism for distributing claims on output.
That can take the form of dividends, public ownership, capital grants, robot taxes, sovereign funds, universal income, or some hybrid.
That transition will be politically enormous because the productive system will be able to generate more than enough while the old distribution mechanism stops functioning properly.
And there is another layer deeper than economics.
Human meaning has been partially organized around scarcity.
Work.
Achievement.
Status.
Expertise.
Production.
Competition.
Once intelligence and labor become abundant, people are forced to answer a different question:
What remains valuable when competence itself is no longer scarce?
Elon thinks humanity could be heading somewhere almost unimaginable: a world where money barely matters
“My prediction is that there will be effectively universal high income.
In fact, it’s not clear to me that money will even matter in the future.”
Production could eventually become so enormous that humanity simply cannot consume everything available, turning thousands of years of scarcity on their head.
But a future built around abundance instead of survival would change almost everything about how we live for the better.
Writer: Val
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SMiller retweeted
Personally? Oh man.
This is just a tweak on Peter’s question which most of you know:
“What is something you feel is good and needs to be done, but on which almost no institution agrees with you and will fight to destroy you with their full force at a deeply personal level?”
Where to begin??
Undermining faith in Anthony Fauci’s and Francis Collins’ scientific behavior during a pandemic.
Calling attention to the fact that the president of the United States with launch code responsibility was obviously demented during his presidency.
Opposing high levels of immigration for completley non-xenophobic reasons.
Openly discussing asymmetries in patterns of religious martyrdom attacks.
Fighting the loss of the word “Genocide” via coordinated social campaigns.
Pointing out that the history of Peer Review is retconned and fictitious and obviously false.
Fighting irreversible surgeries pushed on children leading to a reproductive holocaust.
Calling for an end to Diverisity-Equity-Inclusion and opposing “Black Lives Matter”, despite their branding genius, even during the Summer of Floyd.
Pointing out that conspiracies are well documented and ubiquitous and fighting for responsible conspiracy theorizing.
Promoting my own technical work and insisting that scientists get paid handsomely.
Etc. Etc.
You’re asking the wrong person. It seems I stand up for what I believe is deeply good and what is misperceived as evil all day, every day. This has stupidly become close to my whole life at times. I’m so bored by how silent everyone is. I can’t fathom it. “Managed Reality” has turned evil.
Something is pushing pure evil, disguised as “good” down our throats 24/7 via the institutions. And almost everyone puts up with it. I do not.
But: Thanks for the question.
A great one!
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NOBODY tells Americans this part of the story.
March 11, 2011.
A black, 30-foot wall of ocean swallowed Northeast Japan.
Our government froze. The Pentagon had no orders.
Communications were dead.
You know what Captain Thom Burke and Rear Admiral Robert Girrier did on the USS Ronald Reagan?
They didn't wait for the White House.
They didn't wait for paperwork.
They looked at the TV screen, saw their friend drowning, and committed the ultimate military sin:
UNAUTHORIZED ADVANCE.
“We’re going. NOW.”
They turned the massive nuclear carrier full throttle straight into the disaster zone.
Then came the hydrogen explosions at Fukushima.
Radiation plumes drifted across the Pacific.
Every foreign embassy told their citizens: RUN.
The US Embassy ordered an evacuation zone: STAY 50 MILES AWAY.
Did the Ronald Reagan turn around?
DID YOUR SAILORS RUN?
NOT. ONE. INCH.
Nineteen-year-old kids from Texas and Ohio stood on a freezing flight deck, radiation detectors in hand, launching helicopters into blizzards.
They hovered over submerged rooftops, pulling shivering mothers and babies out of the black water.
When Japanese refugees were brought aboard shivering in shock, your sailors gave up their own warm bunks and slept on the cold steel floor.
While the rest of the world ran away from Japan,
AMERICA CHARGED STRAIGHT INTO THE FIRE.
You didn't do it for a treaty.
You didn't do it for politicians.
You saw your friend bleeding, and you kicked the doors down to save us.
Happy 250th, America.
Japan will remember your boys forever. 🇺🇸🤝🇯🇵
Made with AI
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SMiller retweeted
University debate, "Were humans built to eat meat?", same two chairs, same clock.
Vegan: "Anatomically we're closer to the gorilla than the lion. Flat molars, long gut. A gentle plant-eater with delusions."
Paleoanthropologist: "Then explain the acid."
Vegan: "Which acid?"
Paleoanthropologist: "Your stomach runs at a pH of about 1.5. A lion's sits nearer 3.6. Yours is stronger than the animal you've just been contrasted with, by a factor of about a hundred."
Vegan: "Stomach acid digests food."
Paleoanthropologist: "A cow's rumen sits at about 6.5. That's a compost heap with a pulse. Yours strips the zinc off a coin. Why would a gentle plant-eater carry that?"
Vegan: "Protection."
Paleoanthropologist: "From what? Lettuce doesn't fight back."
Vegan: "Bacteria."
Paleoanthropologist: "Which bacteria live in a leaf at a level that needs a pH of 1.5? Name the salad."
Vegan: "..."
Paleoanthropologist: "The animals that run acid as low as ours are the scavengers. Vultures. Things that arrive at a carcass on the second day and need to kill what's already living in it. We're not built like the lion. We're built like the bird that waits for the lion to finish."
Vegan: "Flattering."
Paleoanthropologist: "It's a picture of a species with a rock, a sharp flake and no claws. You don't get the fresh kill. You get the femur nobody could open, forty hours late, and you'd better have the acid for it."
Vegan: "Acid that strong is dangerous. Look how many people are on tablets for it."
Paleoanthropologist: "The only animal on earth that pays to switch its stomach off. You've spent sixty years pouring cereal onto a carcass digester and now you're medicating the digester for doing its job."
Vegan: "So your argument is that we're vultures."
Paleoanthropologist: "My argument is a number. Yours is a feeling about gorillas. The gorilla eats for most of the day and its gut is a fermentation tank. Yours is done in a few hours and runs on acid. One of you is designed for leaves."
Moderator: "Thirty seconds."
Paleoanthropologist: "She can keep them. I'm still waiting on the salad."
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