Call me crazy, but I think parents should determine what their teenagers do online rather than the government. And that governments shouldn't use system-level ID checks to identify and monitor everything.

If history rhymes we will see gold stagnation or even fall with nominal GDP exploding... This is not what the gold bugs hope for

Few Truer Words Spoken Insiders Don’t Sell At Bottoms

Just a man with his ego

„Gewalt ist keine Lösung.“ Doch, Gewalt ist im Zweifel immer die letzte Lösungsoption. Um diese möglichst selten anwenden zu müssen, wurde das Gewaltmonopol des Staates erfunden. Füllt dieser das nicht aus, erhält man den Naturzustand, in dem jeder gegen jeden Gewalt nach Gutdünken übt. Der Eingangssatz ist eine fundamentale Fehlannahme.

Abuse by politicians is far too common, and I, for one, will not tolerate it.

Milton Friedman's greatest regret. The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous. Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time. Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude. This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent. Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began. The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start. Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have. If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

Seit 20 Jahren hören wir, die EU wolle die illegale Masseneinwanderung „endlich” beenden. Es ist bloße Täuschung, wie auch dieses neue Urteil beweist. Selbst rechtskräftig festgestellte Illegale haben Anspruch auf einen höheren Standard als in ihrer Heimat. #Dexit Hintergrund: Diese Woche wurden wir mit der großen Einigung auf Abschiebezentren im Ausland bespaßt, die es gar nicht gibt. Und mit „interessanten” Vandalismusvideos aus Paris und Brüssel. Nun zeigt der EuGH erneut, was er von Zuwanderungsbegrenzung hält und bestätigt, dass wir KEINES unserer Probleme innerhalb der EU lösen können. Bei einem Austritt Deutschlands würde dieses Monster aufhören zu existieren, und wir könnten mit unseren Nachbarn eine Freihandelszone errichten.

🚨 BREAKING: LILY PHILLIPS ACCUSES MICHAEL SAYLOR OF STEALING HER IDEA OF FUCKING 100'000 MEN IN A DAY

Der Lügenfritz, der Lügenfritz, der klammert sich an seinen Sitz, er wollt so gerne Kanzler sein, doch ist nur ein Mimosilein, und Prozessieren macht ihn spitz.

Why are people still voting at all....

Vous imaginez tout ce que LREM aurait pu faire ces 10 dernières années s'ils avaient eu le pouvoir ?

« The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. … if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth. »

The thing about these kinds of Gen AI use cases is that the BBC could have easily made this video before these tools existed - you could do it with actors in makeup, you could do it with traditional VFX. The fact that you're only doing it now means you only thought it was worth doing once the cost was essentially zero. That is to say, the content's existence has become a tacit acknowledgement of its own worthlessness.

Rechtsstaat adé: Wer als 🇩🇪Staatsbürger in 🇩🇪lebend EU-sanktioniert ist & dagegen klagen will, darf einen Anwalt nur bezahlen, wenn eine staatliche Bundesbehörde dem zustimmt. Dazu hatte ich 1,2 Fragen @AuswaertigesAmt. Außerdem wollte ich wissen, wieso bei @hussedogru, die #Bundesregierung mutmaßlich bewusst falsche Angaben zu dessen Staatsbürgerschaft gemacht hat - mit weitreichenden Konsequenzen.

OG Burj Khalifa

Claude Mellan's Face of Christ, also known as The Sudarium of Saint Veronica (1649), is one of the most technically extraordinary works in art history... The entire portrait is rendered using a single, continuous spiralling line that begins at the tip of Christ's nose and expands outward to the edges of the cloth. Mellan achieved the illusion of depth, shadow, and facial features without any cross-hatching or traditional shading. Instead, he precisely varied the thickness and pressure of the burin (his engraving tool) as he rotated the copper plate, creating "swelling" lines that darken the image where needed. The spiralling line is estimated to be approximately 150m (about 500ft) long if it were stretched out.

I am 95% done with a deal to buy a new house. The remaining 5% of negotiations are focused on the price and whether the owners are actually willing to sell

Et si vous utilisez Waltio, vous n'aurez peut être que 9 doigts... Mais pas d'amende