Gavin Newsom tweete sa rage. Le FT le compare à un méchant de James Bond. Le Globe and Mail publie un guide pour le détester. Tout ça le même jour. Vous voulez comprendre pourquoi la fourmilière s'agite à ce point ? Suivez-moi, c'est fascinant. Ce matin, Elon Musk est devenu le premier trillionnaire de l'histoire. Pas en héritant. Pas en taxant. Pas en régulant. En construisant des fusées réutilisables, des voitures électriques et un réseau de satellites qui connecte la planète. Et regardez bien qui panique : ce ne sont jamais les ingénieurs, les artisans, les entrepreneurs, les soignants, les agriculteurs. Ce sont les politiciens, les éditorialistes, les bureaucrates, les activistes professionnels. Bref, tous ceux dont le métier consiste à commenter, taxer ou redistribuer la valeur créée par les autres. Leur terreur n'est pas morale. Elle est existentielle. Consciemment ou inconsciemment, ils savent une chose qu'ils ne peuvent avouer à personne, pas même à eux-mêmes : leur action publique ne crée strictement aucune valeur nette. Tout leur statut repose sur un mensonge confortable, celui du socialiste bureaucrate : "la richesse existe par magie, le problème c'est juste de la répartir, et il faut des gens comme nous pour le faire." Ce mensonge tenait tant que la création de richesse restait abstraite. Mais Elon est un contre-exemple vivant à l'échelle planétaire. Mille milliards de dollars créés à partir de rien, sous les yeux de tout le monde, en temps réel. Chaque lancement de Starship est une réfutation publique de leur vision du monde. C'est insupportable. D'où la rage. "Le système est truqué", dit Newsom. Non Gavin. Le système truqué, c'est celui où l'on devient puissant en distribuant l'argent des autres. Le système d'Elon, c'est celui où l'on devient riche en rendant le lancement spatial 100 fois moins cher. Et voilà ce qui les terrifie vraiment : dans le monde qu'Elon est en train de construire, le statut ne s'obtient plus par la posture, le diplôme ou la tribune. Il s'obtient en créant quelque chose. Ils vont devoir apprendre un métier. Développer des compétences. Produire. L'agitation que vous observez, ce n'est pas de l'indignation. C'est le bruit d'une classe sociale entière qui réalise que sa rente touche à sa fin. Mais je vais finir sur un truc rassurant, parce qu'au fond je les aime bien. Ne vous inquiétez pas. Dans le monde d'Elon, le gâteau grossit. C'est toute la différence avec votre monde à somme nulle : il y aura de la place pour tout le monde, y compris pour vous. Vous êtes l'enfant qui pleure parce qu'il a peur de ne pas avoir de Kinder Bueno. Respirez. Il y aura des Kinder Bueno pour tout le monde.

History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

I really don’t understand true greed. If I was worth $1 trillion, you’d have to physically stop me from solving as many of the world’s problems as possible. Everyone would have access to cheap spaceflight, satellite coms, solar energy, electric cars, AI. I just don’t get it.

The USS Liberty conspiracy theory asks you to accept that Israel, a nation of 2.5 million people fighting for its literal survival on six fronts simultaneously against 110 million Arabs equipped with Soviet tanks, Soviet aircraft, and Soviet warships, and with no formal American alliance, no American weapons, and no guarantee that anyone was coming to save them, is chose day four of that existential war to deliberately attack the one country on earth that might eventually become their ally, in broad daylight, in international waters, leaving 174 survivors who could identify the attacking forces, while fourteen separate investigations across two governments found zero evidence of intent, while Israel’s own military had accidentally bombed its own armored column the day before proving how catastrophically identification fails in wartime chaos, and while not a single one of the conspiracy theory’s proponents in nearly six decades of trying has ever managed to agree on what Israel was actually trying to accomplish by doing it. Heavy lift.

Currently tubing down Chattahoochee River🌊

Hi, it's me.

This woman is a fraud who doesn't know we can fact-check her. I found where she made the claim, and it provides some specifics: "If I had vaccinated the 6000 patients I treated for C0VID, I would have made $1.5 million." This means she would've had to have been reimbursed $250 per patient. She attributed this number to a Blue Cross Blue Shield incentive program. But, the program she cites does not apply to her practice, which is in Houston, TX. The program she's referring to is for participating Kentucky primary-care providers with an Anthem Medicaid panel of at least 25 members, and it involves tiered bonuses if the practice meets vaccination rate thresholds, with the highest final bonus being $250 per newly-vaccinated Anthem member, if the practice reaches a 75% vaccination threshold. She's trying to claim that a Houston ENT could "vaccinate all her patients" and automatically collect $250 a piece. But she got the state wrong and she detailed how the program works incorrectly, too. She's even foolishly making these mistakes again in the comments section of this post. To make matters worse, her own site says it's not possible for this to have applied to her. On her page, it says: "BreatheMD is a cash-pay facility, and Dr Bowden has opted out of all insurance plans". The website currently, and for the past few years, has shown this, and the patient numbers given on the site do not match up with the timing of this program's existence either. There's no way to make her claims work, and her claims are about gross earnings, too. In reality, she still wouldn't have made $1.5m net with $250/person * 6,000 patients. She's just a complete and obvious liar! Now, if we're exceedingly generous, we can check what standard Medicare COVID reimbursement payments would've grossed her. The Biden-Harris administration upped payments to about $40 per dose, or $80 for a two-dose series. Thus, with 6,000 people and assuming everyone gets two doses, she'd have just grossed $480,000. And you know what? I'm feeling really generous. The highest-paying commercial private insurer bonus -- which, again, her practice would not have been eligible for -- is $64. But reimbursements cluster near the Medicare rate of $40, and often below it. If you add the Medicare in-home add-on, then payments can go up to $75/dose for qualifying home vaccination visits, but this would not even apply to her office-based rates. Good luck getting to $1.5 million! This woman is a delusional liar who doesn't expect anyone to fact-check her. Joe did not bother fact-checking her; instead, he seems to have just believed her obvious lying. Links: linkedin.com/posts/mary-tall… providers.anthem.com/docs/gp… archive.md/nwLQ2 web.archive.org/web/20211107… archive.md/4ACnP web.archive.org/web/20230518… cms.gov/newsroom/press-relea… cms.gov/files/document/covid…

There's a lot of commentary on this so I'd like to clarify what the law does, which is not exactly what the tweet says. It sets the minimum PBM reimbursement for prescriptions to ~wholesale cost $10.18.

The Cybertruck reminds me of a 7,000 lb, armored, 80’s Lamborghini Countach, Except with better acceleration.

"Overall, this study concludes that the back-in/pull-out parking maneuver is safer than the pull-in/back-out maneuver and is the recommended approach to 90° parking." researchgate.net/publication…

What a great concept. "The Force Files"

A Canadian doctor met a mentally ill guy with bowel problems at a Tim Hortons, told him the best treatment option for him was to die, and then drove him to the hospital to be euthanized. Not even memes can capture the level of retardation Canada has achieved in real life

call me "mr cynical paws" but when i read this, all i can think is: "which one of your constituents is a bath mat company any how much did they donate?"

I am once again telling you, young conservatives, that if you turned against Israel in the last couple of years, you are the victim of an Islamo-Leftist psyop and the sociopathic grifting of influencers who don't care about you or anything but their grift. Useful idiots, all.

The New York Times falsely reported that Israel shelled a Gaza hospital - turned out to be a Hamas rocket. It ran a front-page story portraying a child with cerebral palsy as evidence of mass starvation. And now: “rape dogs.” The @nytimes long ago stopped being a paper of record. It rushes to print sensational claims hoping their readers are stupid.

NYT's excreter: JEWS HAVE TRAINED DOGS TO RAPE PRISONERS! Literally everyone else whose default isn't anti-Jewish: Evidence? Proof? You kind of need those for such allegations. NYT: HE WON TWO PULITZERS WRITING FOR US! Literally everyone else whose default isn't anti-Jewish: So did Walter Duranty, you soulless pieces of debris. Fantastical claims require more than "trust me, bro."

The challenge with healthcare is not that markets fail. It is that the US of A has created a system wherein no one behaves like a buyer or seller and almost no one is allowed to know the price. Then they blame “capitalism,” which is rather like blaming aviation for a railway accident. Healthcare is peculiar, yes. And peculiarity is not an argument for central planning. Food is peculiar. Housing is peculiar. Childcare is peculiar. Funerals are peculiar. In every case, the correct question is not “market or state?” They could, in the other hand, include the following: Who decides? Who pays? Who benefits from confusion? Who profits when comparison becomes impossible? Why do Red states support CON laws just like Blue states? The current American healthcare system is not a free market with a few imperfections. It is a regulatory capture turned central planning horror show (see bill Gurley on regulatory capture). The patient does not know the price. The physician does not control the economics. The employer funds the risk. The insurer controls the network. The PBM controls the spread. The health system receives 5 to 10x for the same work as an independent by statute. The regulator protects the incumbent. And then some clever person looks at this Rube Goldberg machine and says: “See? Markets don’t work.” No. It is merely more market prevention. A humane society ought to fund care for the poor, the sick, and the unlucky. Of course! And funding need is not the same thing as nationalizing choice. You can subsidize the person without cartelizing the industry. You can protect the vulnerable without protecting the incumbent. You can have compassion without designing a system where every transaction requires a billing priesthood, a claims tribunal, and three lobbyists. The great trick in healthcare has been to make people believe that opacity is morality.

So just so we're clear on things. October 7, 2023 was the largest mass murder of Jews since the holocaust including execution of children and animals and innocent concerts goers. Innocent people were RPG rocket killed in their cars. They were executed in their homes. Hamas and Hamas adjacent filmed and kidnapped several females and repeatedly sexually assaulted them over and over and over. And then executed them. There were literal dead baby parades from Hamas. They did the whole foot clan soldier in green headband thing and everything. And the only time that the New York Times or @NickKristof, a proven serial fabulist took any interest in all of this was so that he could write a story about how the IDF trained rape dogs. Dogs that rape. Rape dogs. Dogs. Dogs that do not give consent. This was an idea that the New York Times actually said yes let's run with this.

Just finished Magic and Bullets, the second of what I hope will be a girthy series from @monsterhunter45. Interesting world building, fun characters, an interesting magic system and an excellent reading by Garrett Michael Brown make for a good time.

There's a clay tablet with the founding charter of a 12-partner company on it. Twelve merchants pooled 33 pounds of gold to start the firm. The contract has the partner names, the starting capital, the profit split, and the penalty for cashing out early. The tablet is nearly 4,000 years old. It was found at a site called Kanesh, in central Turkey. Archaeologists have dug up 23,500 of these clay records there, most of them business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, lawsuits. The houses they were stored in eventually burned. The fire baked the clay solid and preserved every record. The merchants came from Assur, in modern-day Iraq. They loaded donkeys with tin and cloth and walked them 1,000 kilometers across mountain passes to Kanesh, roughly the distance from New York to Atlanta. Each donkey carried about 180 pounds and the trip took two to three months. They came home with silver and gold. The company ran for twelve years under a merchant named Amur Ishtar. A third of the profits went back to the investors. Pull your share out early and the firm gave you four kilos of silver per kilo of gold, half the normal rate. Locked-up money was meant to stay locked up. That one company was just a tiny piece. The tablets show a complete economy with partners suing each other in commercial court, husbands writing home about prices, and wives writing back complaining the husband had been gone too long. A woman named Ahatum quietly lent silver to four different men over nine years. People bought up other people's loan documents and used them as collateral for new loans, the same thing Wall Street does today with mortgage-backed securities. One merchant got caught smuggling tin in his underwear to dodge a 10% import tax. In 2019, four economists from Harvard, Sciences Po, Chicago, and Virginia ran the tablet numbers through a gravity model, the math economists use today to predict how much two countries will trade based on size and distance. The Bronze Age numbers matched modern trade numbers almost exactly. Trade fell off with distance at nearly the same rate it does between countries today. The paper ran in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. There was no economic theory yet. The idea didn't even have a name. The word "capitalism" wouldn't be coined for another 3,800 years, and Adam Smith was 3,700 years away from writing a sentence about markets. Just a guy named Pushu-ken writing a clay tablet to his business partner about a shipment of cloth, and a woman in Assur recording who owed her how much silver. Capitalism was already there, doing its full job, almost four thousand years before anyone wrote down a theory of how it worked.