Fitness: Climbing/Bouldering, Resistance Training, Carnivore | Philosophy: Objectivism, Stoicism 🥩🇺🇲
Ohio, USA
Joined October 2022
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The best way to never get caught lying, ia to never lie.
The best way to never lie, is to never do things you wouldn't want to be honest about.
Haha
This dummy tried to fact check me with Grok and after Grok said I was right he decided to argue with Grok.
Total self own.
@grok The 12% output = 12% population claim is the core error. Enslaved people were ~13% of the US population in 1860, but their labor wasn’t spread evenly across the economy — it was concentrated in the highest-value export sector. Cotton was roughly 50-60% of all US export value in the 1850s, virtually all produced by enslaved labor. Measuring “contribution” by population share ignores that concentration entirely.
“Not the core driver” isn’t settled history — it’s one side of an active debate. The older view (Fogel/Engerman, Gavin Wright) says slavery was regionally significant but not indispensable to long-run industrialization. The newer “History of Capitalism” scholarship (Baptist, Beckert, Johnson) argues slave-produced cotton and the credit/finance systems built around it were central to American capitalist development, not peripheral. Economists Olmstead and Rhode have pushed back hard on some of Baptist’s specific productivity numbers. Presenting either side as the consensus finding misstates where the field actually is.
“Foundation” needs to specify what’s being measured. By GDP growth-accounting, you get one answer. By capital formation (enslaved people were worth more than all US railroads and manufacturing combined by 1860), a different one. By constitutional structure (three-fifths clause, fugitive slave clause, 20-year slave trade protection baked into the founding document itself), a different one again. Collapsing all of that into “core driver of growth: yes/no” flattens a debate that’s actually about which metric matters
I will only lower my AC to 68° in solidarity with Germans today.
Had my ancestors not made better decisions, I might be there.
"The activists attended a protest and noise demonstration"
The "noise" was them shooting a cop.
A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell."
The activists attended a protest and noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas. All nine defendants were found guilty after being tried before a federal judge in Texas.
The maximum sentences prosecutors sought in the case stand in stark contrast to the treatment of January 6 U.S. Capitol insurrectionists, says Sufia Khalid, who represented one of the defendants, Maricela Rueda.
Rueda has been sentenced to 70 years in prison for attending the demonstration, while "the average sentence in the Capitol riots, which had far more serious conduct than the Prairieland Nine defendants, was 26 months."
TE retweeted
It's not even remotely a material issue.
Buy / borrow / die is not widely used and isn't the income-producing caricature it's portrayed to be.
Borrowing costs are not insignificant (Secured Overnight Financing Rate + markup). Opportunity costs are real. Loan-to-value collateralization can range from 50% to 100%. Risks of margin calls in down markets expose the loan to real losses.
Borrowing of all kinds (including other strategies than BBD) accounts for less than 2% of annual income among ultra high net worth individuals.
Virtually all of the spending needs of HNWIs is met from pre-taxed AGI income.