AFG, Esq. @agrange

@ANNVYSHINSKY Uh, spoilers. Waiting for the novilazation.

Schau dir diese Grafik genau an. Sie erklärt, warum sich in Deutschland Leistung nicht mehr lohnt. Ein Paar, zwei Kinder, beide arbeiten. Bei 4.000 Euro brutto bleiben rund 2.700 Euro. Bei 5.000 Euro brutto bleiben rund 2.650 Euro. Du liest richtig. Tausend Euro mehr verdient. Weniger im Portemonnaie. Und jetzt der Teil, der wirklich weh tut: Bei 2.000 Euro brutto stehen dieser Familie etwa 2.350 Euro zur Verfügung. Bei 5.000 Euro brutto sind es 2.650 Euro. 3.000 Euro mehr erarbeiten. 300 Euro mehr haben. Das ist kein Rechenfehler. Jeder zusätzlich verdiente Euro zieht Wohngeld, Kinderzuschlag und Freibeträge mit sich in den Abgrund, während Steuern und Sozialabgaben gleichzeitig steigen. Man nennt es Transferentzugsrate. Ökonomen kennen das Problem seit Jahren. Die Bundesregierung hat Gutachten dazu bestellt. Passiert ist nichts. Und dann wundert sich die Politik, warum niemand mehr die Stunden aufstockt. Warum die Zweitverdienerin in Teilzeit bleibt. Warum der Facharbeiter die Beförderung ablehnt. Die Leute sind nicht faul. Sie rechnen. Ein System, das Anstrengung und Fleiß nicht belohnt, bekommt am Ende genau das: keine Anstrengung.

"Dada, am I the little girl who lives down the lane?" -Emmie (2.5) 🐑

No one should read the times. (Everyone *should* read the community note below.)

The New York Times @nytimes

a week ago

Breaking News: A car plowed through a park during Berlin’s biggest LGBTQ Pride event, killing at least one person and injuring more than a dozen others, city police officials said on Saturday. nyti.ms/3Rx0XDS

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The gun is the most misunderstood object in Western civilization. Not a weapon. A technology. The technology that made the idea of equality physically real. 1. The longbow democratized warfare – a peasant could kill a knight with a stick and a string, and Agincourt proved it. The gun completed the process. The armored warrior class whose claim to social dominance rested on physical superiority became obsolete. The aristocratic monopoly on violence ended not with a philosophy but with a mechanism. The gun is the physical enforcement of the idea that all men are created equal. Which is why the American founders put it in the second amendment – not as an afterthought, but as the guarantee of everything else. 2. The Roman citizen had the right to bear arms. The Greek citizen had it. The English yeoman had it. The Swiss canton built its entire civilization on it. The disarming of the population has always been, in every civilization, in every century, the first act of the government that intends to stop being answerable to that population. Show me a disarmed population and I will show you a population that lost something else shortly after. 3. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It is not about sport. It is about the relationship between the armed citizen and the state – the explicit constitutional acknowledgment that the citizen’s right to defend himself, his family, and his civilization against any threat, including the government itself, is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. Power flows upward from the armed citizen, not downward from the armed state. 4. The gun defends the family. The woman alone with her children. The farmer on the edge of civilization. The shopkeeper in the neighborhood the police no longer patrol. The gun is the equalizer – the technology that makes the physical difference between a large man and a small woman irrelevant. Every argument for disarmament is, at its core, an argument that the state will protect you better than you can protect yourself. The evidence for this proposition is not encouraging. 5. In Europe, the disarmament is now nearly complete – and it happened precisely as the state’s ability and willingness to protect its citizens began to decline. The timing is not coincidental. A population that cannot defend itself must trust the state to defend it – which is a population that cannot effectively question whether the state is doing so. The dependency is the design. 6. The gun is a civilizational technology in the deepest sense: it requires responsibility, judgment, and the willingness to accept the consequences of your decisions. You cannot outsource it. You cannot have a committee fire it. It is the most anti-bureaucratic object ever invented – a direct, personal, consequential instrument that puts the full weight of the decision on the individual holding it. Which is precisely why the administrative state finds it intolerable. Not because it is dangerous. Because it is sovereign. 7. The family that can defend itself does not depend on the state for its most fundamental security. The civilization that can defend itself has not yet outsourced its survival to an institution that will negotiate the terms of that survival on its own behalf. The gun determines who controls violence – and therefore who controls everything that violence can threaten. Which is everything. The Sobieski who rode down the hill had a sword and sixty thousand horsemen. The equivalent today is the armed citizen who understands what he is defending and why. Every civilization that forgot this discovered it the hard way. The ones that remembered it are still here.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

2 weeks ago

The French knights at Crécy and Agincourt were full of honor and panache. Beautiful horses, beautiful armor, beautiful feathers – formidable. Magnificent. The English were efficient. Guess who won? The longbowman was a peasant. No noble blood, no chivalric code, no magnificent

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@elonmusk Shabbat Shalom!

"why do people who allege to be climate protectors keep permitting wildfires that do years of pollution and cancer in days?"

Ed Markey @EdMarkey

3 weeks ago

Look outside in Massachusetts right now. The climate crisis is here. Wildfire smoke is suffocating our communities and our children are breathing dirty air. We need a Green New Deal.

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This is because the anti-capitalist left is not actually against people being crazy rich. They're against certain types of people being crazy rich. Artists and athletes make sense to them because they've played music and sports and because their success can be explained by "luck" and "talent". Messi's wealth is not offensive to them because they understand Messi is much better at football than they are. But when it comes to business, the anti-capitalist leftist has no framework for understanding why Jeff Bezos might be super rich since 99% of them have never ever created a product, business or service that was of value to other people. They've never taken entrepreneurial risk. They've never employed people and felt the burden of responsibility that comes with that. They've never pick up a business and given it a play in the way they've picked up a ball or a guitar. They *literally* don't understand wealth creation. They think there is a fixed amount of money and the only thing a business does is split it unfairly. It's why they rage at Elon and other successful business leaders. Because they genuinely don't understand why they're wealthy. Also, and this is just as important, athletes and artists are disproportionately young, attractive, "diverse", left wing etc. Business leaders are "evil" middle aged white men whose success offends the average anti-capitalist leftist because they don't understand a) what it is they do and b) that Elon Musk has the same talent advantage on them as Messi does, it's just harder to measure.

Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

a month ago

It’s criminal the CEO makes 400X what the average worker makes but it’s perfectly fine that Taylor Swift makes 100000X more than the people who clean the arena after her concerts. A just society is one that rewards the exceptional qualities of the musician but not the executive.

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@EliLebowicz Solidarity with Europe ✊

Just a reminder that all of the things that make your life easier, healthier, and more pleasant (innovative new medications, streaming services, professional sports franchises, food delivery apps, internet service, the handheld mini-supercomputer you’re reading this on, the motor vehicle…) have been brought to you by capitalism. Not one is the result of socialism. ☺️

DSA @DemSocialists

a month ago

Only socialism can solve decades of capitalist mismanagement in the US. Our newly elected leaders will fight for the working class — not for crumbs.

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Governor DeSantis and Governor Pritzker each just signed their 8th state budgets. The contrast couldn't be starker. And the lesson is that who you elect matters. Change out the politicians and you get different policies. For reference, Florida is 1.8x more populous than IL, 23.37m people compared to 12.71m people. Now consider these points: 1. FL general revenue budget is $52B, IL is $56B. Because state's have different ways of budgeting, lookimg at the total FY27 budgets, FL =$117B, IL=$130B. This doesn't make sense. 2. Pritzker advocated for and signed the largest budget in state history this year and in previous years. DeSantis has lowered the amount spent every year for the last four years and vetoed over $10B in spending during his time in office. Pritzker's budget is up $16B since he took office. 3. Pritzker brags about his credit upgrades, but IL has the worst state credit rating, FL has the best credit rating. 4. FL has a rainy day fund of $18B. IL rainy day fund is $2B. 5. FL is pushing $78B in road programs and moving planned projects ahead 5-15 years. IL can't even get projects planned, permitted and built in a timely manner, so many projects are left undone and money sits in an account collecting interest. And now that surplus interest is being sent to the CTA to bail them out. 6. DeSantis has given back over $9B in taxes. Pritzker has raised taxes every year for a total of over $77B according to IPI. 9. FL is giving $5,000 signing bonuses for police officers. IL politicians want to defund the police. 10. FL is on the cusp of eliminating property taxes for 60% of home owners and they have no state income tax. IL has the highest property taxes, plus individial income and estate taxes, high corporate taxes, and there's been no attempt to meaningfully lower property taxes. Yes, elections have consequences. But, it can all ve reversed. DeSantis barely got elected 8 years ago. Your vote matters.

The most aristocratic thing you can do is have a tragic outlook. This is a social class that’s been losing ground since the Industrial Revolution, falling farther from power with each decaying estate. Being positive is bourgeois. Sunrises are bourgeois. They’re the real winners.

No kidding. Building those things is illegal now.

Ruzy.hl @0xRuzy

a month ago

Seth Rogen said rich people used to spend their fortunes building things everyone could use. Seth Rogen: Maybe this is like naive of me, but it seems like these rich people who are like, had outsized wealth, it seems like they used to like to have their names on things Keanu

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Here's one of Michael Crichton's very finest quotes, especially applicable to climate "science": "I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right ... In science, consensus is irrelevant." Best to everyone, w.

PoIiMath @politicalmath

a month ago

Michael Crichton is such a fascinating figure and it is a goddamn shame he died so young This guy got into Harvard Medical School and said "actually, I want to write stories" so he wrote one of the most harrowing long short stories, the Andromeda Strain. This guy was addicted

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🎂 Happy birthday, @elonmusk. Humankind's guardian Angel. >be Elon Musk >richest man alive >could buy anything and sun his Balls >decide to spend the whole fortune fighting for the human race instead >start SpaceX >everyone says you cannot land a rocket >land them anyway >goal is to make humanity multiplanetary so one bad day on one rock doesn't end the entire species >backup the light of consciousness itself >start Tesla >legacy auto giants laugh in your face >drag the entire planet toward sustainable energy by force >now every one of them is scrambling to copy you >open-source the patents so the whole industry can move faster >build Starlink >Ukraine gets cut off from the world overnight >switch it on for them immediately >keep millions connected when every other system failed >start Neuralink >people paralyzed for decades told they will never move again >put a chip in a man's brain >he moves a cursor with a thought >give the disabled their lives back >build Optimus >decide nobody should be trapped doing backbreaking labor to survive >build a robot to do the work humans never wanted >aim straight at scarcity itself >look at Twitter >see a censorship machine quietly deciding what billions of people are allowed to think and say >buy the entire thing for 44 billion >open the files and show everyone how the censorship worked >turn it back into a town square where a normal person can actually speak >build Grok >every other ai lobotomized to give the approved answer >refuse to make a machine that lies to people to keep them comfortable >build one that actually tells the truth instead >maximally truth-seeking >watch a mind virus crawl through every institution >careers ended for saying the wrong thing out loud >refuse to play along >name the woke mind virus and fight it head on >make it ok to think for yourself again >watch the whole machine line up to crush one election >put your name, your money, your reputation on the line >go all in to help Trump win >take fire from every direction for doing it >bet everything on the people instead of the machine >start DOGE >government torching tax money on things nobody ever voted for >open the books so every citizen can see it >show people exactly where their paychecks were disappearing to >bureaucrats suddenly very, very nervous >unelected judges overriding what the voters actually chose >two-tier justice, one rule for them and another for everyone else >call it out by name in front of the whole world >refuse to let robed activists run the country >hear about young girls groomed and r**ed for years >councils, police, and social services knew and buried it >media refuses to touch the story >everyone too scared of being called a name to say a word >post about it anyway >refuse to let it stay buried >drag the entire coverup into daylight >victims finally heard after being ignored for over a decade >look at the birth rate >realize civilization is quietly dying because people stopped having kids >sound the alarm while everyone else ignores it >fight for the future to actually have humans in it >has lots of wonderful children >get called every name in existence for all of it >keep going regardless >mfw none of it was ever about the money >mfw it was always about humanity >turns 55 today >plans for the future span decades >still going

.@lsanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, was banned from the site indefinitely on Monday for promoting an initiative that, among other things, aims to prevent the site from being biased against “currently disfavored views and groups,” including Jewish and pro-Israel views, he told @JNS_org. “Wikipedia has become more of a mob-rule anarchy than ever,” Sanger said. “In the kangaroo court in which a mob ousted me, Wikipedia’s administrators showed that they are above trivial details like formal charges, a designated prosecutor, basic decorum, distinction between prosecution and judge, dispassionate adjudication and so forth.” My latest on Wiki for JNS: 🧵

The intended effect is to dispossess (disproportionally jewish) landlords so the city can move ownership of buildings to DSA-linked NGOs & collectives

The New York Times @nytimes

a month ago

A New York City panel voted to freeze rents for nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments, fulfilling a promise of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. nyti.ms/4wgwhFL

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"What is " bli neder" anyway, some kind of Jew swear?" -Maya (12)

So much yes 👇

Brivael Le Pogam @brivael

2 months ago

Beaucoup de figures de gauche, aux US comme en Europe, qualifient Musk d'extrême droite. Certains vont jusqu'au mot « nazi ». J'ai fait l'inverse de l'accusation : lire avant de juger. Deux biographies. Des dizaines d'heures d'interviews et de documentaires. Zéro once de racisme

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The people who created 40 Trillion in debt are angry that Elon Musk created 1 Trillion in wealth.