“Elon Musk is a trillionaire.” As a securities law attorney, please allow me to explain how anyone who says this is basically lying to you: 1. The Securities and Exchange Commission has a myriad of laws that prevent founders and other large stockholders of publicly traded companies from dumping their shares. There are substantial holding period requirements, volume of sales limitations and public reporting obligations for stock sales. Basically, Elon holds largely illiquid shares, he is a “trillionaire” on paper only, and the best analogy is when people peg your net worth based on your home’s market price. That’s not money in your pocket, that’s the house you live in. 2. All that money raised in the IPO? That’s not going into Elon’s pocket like the lying socialist idiots want you to believe. It’s a capital influx that will be used to make more rockets and get more payloads into orbit. It’s a CAPITAL investment—that money is like a business loan, it’s not your money to keep, it’s your money to grow the business. 3. If it WERE legal for Elon to dump his shares, the share price would crash basically instantly and the company could very well fail. If you bought SpaceX shares in the IPO, congrats. You just bought a lottery ticket, just like Elon. May the odds ever be in your favor. So the next time someone screeches about how unfair it is that Elon Musk creates wealth that benefits all of humanity, throw the truth back in their faces.

Saving LA - Phase III

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day. 400 of them are now worth over $100 million. These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries. Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000. Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous." The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before. Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

For whoever needs to hear this: youtube.com/shorts/O6VoVsa8H…

I get it. I'm supposed to be upset, right? "They" are stealing the election! Well of course "they" are. "They" are bad, very bad, very very bad. Whatever. Not what I want to read about, because honestly, that's just complaining for clicks. What are the next reasonable steps to do something about it and not just whine. And don't get me started on the distortions. "Sufficient for each day is its own badness." No need to make things up. But that's the point isn't it. The people wanting us to feel everything is horrible don't want us to fix things. "They" want us demoralized, disconnected, in our own little outrage bubbles. Use Grok to find out whether the truth is being shaded. When you start seeing post after post about how awful something is, take a step back and ask why someone would want you to feel that way. Think. If you really care, investigate. How does the system work? How can you operate with it, or change it? How can you support someone who might do these things? Don't let the algorithm drive your emotional being. Get back in the driver's seat and decide for yourself. Reconnect with actual people outside of these little text boxes. Yeah, I know. I'm barking at the wind.

E pluribus unum. America was never intended as a mosaic, a pastiche, or Frankenstein's monster of disparate parts jammed together. America is the world's melting pot. But that has implications. That metaphor was not one of melting cheese in a cook pot. It's one of melting pieces of metal down, refining them into a uniform consistency, leaving behind the waste material, and coming out with a stronger whole. That process of refining means embracing the values and the value-system that made America the most successful country in the world. It means leaving behind ideologies and values incompatible with liberty and freedom; leaving behind those impulses to control and compel. The melting pot produces a people united behind the ideas espoused in the Declaration of Independence, guarded by the Constitution. Our strength is our unity behind these ideas. We hold all people to be equal in the eyes of God, not all ideas, and not all cultures. Divided we fall. We do not tell ourselves stories of virtue hierarchies separated by degree of victim-hood. We champion the rights of the individual over the state, over the group. We champion the ideals of Western society; liberty, free speech, consent of the governed, equal justice under rule of law. We champion our strength through unity; of purpose, of values, and of how each individual ought to be treated, not how they're categorized or pigeon-holed. We celebrate that no matter where you came from, when you came here, melted into the refined steel of the American value system, that while you honored the traditions from your place of origin, you held those of America above them, alongside your fellow Americans. Out of many, One.

I wondered what that was. We heard a loud doubled boom and the whole house shook. My wife immediately shouted at kiddo: "What did you do?" It was a freaking meteor! boston25news.com/news/local/…

[2/2] Since I don't ever make this kind of video, I'm sure it could be done a lot better, but hopefully it gets the point across. I'd love it if people who specialize in this kind of video started looking at the broader issue. Here's the link: youtube.com/watch?v=tlQ7EoJD…

Plato held forth against the harms to memorization skills of writing and reading. We know this many thousands of years later, because he wrote it down. Learning to use AI tools is the same as learning to use heavy construction equipment. I can dig an absolutely perfect precise small hole with a garden spade, true. But getting good with a bulldozer is a different skill, and I can dig a far larger hole, far faster with one than without. Being effective means being aware and able to use the right tools well. A paintbrush and a can of spray paint do different things. An artist may use either, and it doesn't make what they produce lesser. AI art, unguided, is much like arranging stickers on a piece of paper, or coloring in a coloring book. But artists may use AI in combination with other tools to produce something that isn't the same. As for illustration, that's more like painting a room. You're getting work done. Is the job better or worse if you use a pressured paint gun? A roller? A brush? A pro may use all three to finish a large area. I imagine much the same will happen with graphics artists that are illustrating as opposed to creating art. Getting the work done will mean knowing all the tools at your disposal. Writing is another area. I can't bring myself to use AI to produce the text in the first place for fiction writing, but I can and will use it to analyze what I write. And in a business setting, I will use it to summarize information, as I need to deal with literally thousands of documents some very short, many multi-page, and surf the facts to digest and decide. LLMs are the bulldozer, the jackhammer, the paint sprayer in these situations. I'm not going to use it to sign my name with my fountain pen, but for moving large quantities of "earth" or covering hundreds of square feet with paint. Yes. Learn the tech. Engage with our world as it is, perhaps you can help it become what it should be.

Hello Representative Levin, I'd like to introduce you to an organization called the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. NDI is one of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy, established by Congress in 1983. It is the Democratic Party's official international arm. Its board members include Stacey Abrams, Donna Brazile, and Michael McFaul. Its previous chair was Madeleine Albright, who served until her death in 2022. Also on the board: Eric Kessler, founder of Arabella Advisors, the largest dark money network in Democratic politics. NDI reported $181.5 million in revenue in fiscal year 2023, nearly all in government grants. NDI's mission, for four decades, has been to tell countries around the world how to run democratic elections. And what NDI consistently tells them, across dozens of countries, is that voter identification is a fundamental pillar of election integrity, and that proving citizenship is a basic prerequisite for participation. Here is what NDI has demanded of other countries: NDI's foundational guide, Building Confidence in the Voter Registration Process (2001), describes voter ID systems as standard democratic infrastructure. It states that voter registries should contain "voters' photographs and even their fingerprints" and that registered voters should be issued "a voter or other ID card that serves as proof of their right to vote." NDI explains that "issuing ID cards, either national or voting, requires a second point of contact between election officials and voters, which introduces an additional safeguard into the system." (pp. 10–11, 15) NDI's 2015 study of voter registration across the Middle East and North Africa goes further, laying out that voters must "prove their identity, essentially demonstrating that they are who they say they are" and must "affirm their citizenship and age." (p. 11) That same 2001 guide identifies married name changes as a routine voter roll maintenance challenge: "Election officials must update information about people who have moved or who have married and changed their surname." NDI also notes that voter lists "may omit information about changes of address or name for those eligible people who have recently moved or married." NDI's recommendation is not to eliminate voter ID. It is to maintain clean, continuously updated voter rolls that accommodate name changes within the system. In its 2009 Bangladesh report, NDI praised the country's new photo-voter list and national ID card system, noting that the ID cards gave "a sense of empowerment and belonging to the disadvantaged and marginalized people of the country, particularly women." Read that again. NDI itself called voter identification empowering for WOMEN! In every case, NDI's position was identical: marriage-related name changes are a solvable administrative problem. The solution is better record-keeping and updated systems. Not fewer safeguards. Not the elimination of voter ID. Your party's own international arm has already solved the problem you bring up. The answer is: maintain the rolls. Update the records. Issue the IDs. Accommodate name changes within the system, don't use them as a reason to have no system at all. The exact opposite of what you push here - refusing to clean voter rolls. By NDI’s own standards, by the standards of your own international soft power branch, YOUR position is the anti-feminist position. The SAVE America Act asks Americans to do less than what NDI demands of Nicaragua, less than what NDI praises in Morocco, and far less than the biometric fingerprint-and-facial-recognition system NDI supervised in Nigeria. Eighty-four percent of Americans support photo ID to vote. Two-thirds of Democrats support it. Jimmy Carter's own 2005 bipartisan commission recommended it. You voted no. Your party's international arm, funded with taxpayer money, chaired by your party's former Senate leader (Tom Daschle), staffed by your party's most prominent voting-rights advocate, says yes. For everyone else. NDI's guides are publicly available on their website. You might consider reading them before you spout mindless drivel to protect your own grift.

Preference is not identity. Perception is not identity. What we assert or claim is not automatically true; not about the world and not about ourselves. Such statements must be evaluated and compared to reality. We are all Ships of Theseus. We are the sum of our actions. We change ourselves by changing what we do.

Liberals are more likely than Conservatives and Moderates to think it's justified for citizens to use violence to achieve political goals. Young Liberals are especially open to violence.

LISTEN JIM. NO, SHUT UP AND LISTEN. NOT ONLY ARE YOU 48 HOURS LATE ON THIS STORY, BUT YOU ARE MORE THAN 24 HOURS LATE ON SPREADING A LIE WHEN IT WAS ALREADY DEBUNKED. JIMMY MY BOY, THE DAD FLED AN ICE IMMIGRATION OPERATION, LEAVING HIS SON OUT IN THE SNOW BY HIMSELF. YES JIM, HE LEFT THE BOY ALONE IN THE SNOW. SO WHEN OFFICERS MADE SURE THAT KID DID NOT TURN INTO A LITTLE HUMAN SLUSHIE, THAT’S WHAT WE CALL… NORMAL. HUMAN. BEHAVIOR. ISN’T THAT NICE OF THEM, JIM? ISN’T THAT LITERALLY THE THING YOU WOULD DEMAND THEY DO IF YOU HAD A SHRED OF HONESTY? SO ANYWAY, BACK TO THE DAD. WHAT KIND OF FATHER BOLTS AND LEAVES HIS OWN SON OUTSIDE IN THE SNOW???? YOU COULD COME AT ME WITH AN ARMY AND I WOULDN'T RUN AND LEAVE MY SON. NOTHING IN THE WORLD COULD MAKE ME DO THAT. SO CAN YOU PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY YOU LEFT ALL OF THIS VERY IMPORTANT, VERY USEFUL INFORMATION OUT OF YOUR INSANELY RETARDED POST? WE ARE ALL WAITING.

Hobo - Someone who moves from place to place, has no home, is willing to work. Tramp - Someone who moves from place to place, has no home, and avoids work. Bum - Someone who has no home, does not work, and goes nowhere. Vagrant - A bum with extra syllables. Words for clarity.

If you wish to avoid creating a hellhole where you live, stop voting for people who create hellholes. It's also on you to figure out which policies do that, and it isn't a feeling. You have to do it based on actual outcomes.

Plus immigration in reality isn’t helping them at all! Those countries need to fix their own countries and their people who are better educated there need to take over in their own country! Thats the only way we can actually help is by not allowing them in America! 🇺🇸 Check this video out