CIO Armored Wolf Family Holdings, Inflation, Deflation, Commodities, and Minutia. Bryn-Yolf’s-Son (Armored Wolf’s Son)
Orange County, CA
Joined June 2009
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When advocates claim that wealth taxes and levies on capital touch only a few billionaires, the mobility of businesses, people, capital and—most of all—ideas supplies a harsh corrective.
Rather, the supposed free lunch accrues to jurisdictions such as Ireland, Luxembourg and Shenzhen that have achieved rapid growth, rising incomes and broad prosperity precisely by keeping taxes on success lower than neighbors! These jurisdictions invite entrepreneurs, investors and high earners directly; high tax jurisdictions suffer the resulting erosion of jobs, investment and the tax base. Pain is borne by workers and communities that remain.
Not complicated.
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Christine Lagarde is stepping down early so the current pro-EU club can install her successor before French voters might elect Marine Le Pen.
Call it “Le Pen-proofing” the ECB.
Nothing says independent central bank quite like timing your exit to keep the right sort of people in charge, regardless of who wins the next election.
This is the sort of transparent institutional chess that hands critics their best lines: European power is exercised in back rooms by people who treat elections as an inconvenience to be managed, not a constraint to be respected. Best kept in the gin-soaked libraries where the real decisions are made, far from the actual voters.
This is among the most critically acclaimed film launches ever. Nathan Fielder is a deadpan comic, so I dont know what to expect...
youtu.be/HvW_N5p1q44?is=hstu…
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"A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
"
Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."
It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.
First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.
So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"
And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.
Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.
Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.
Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.
Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?
The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?
A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.
Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.
The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.
The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."
Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.
Government is the fourth box. By design.
Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.
And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.
The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.
Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.
So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.
China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.
India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.
South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.
Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.
Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.
No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.
And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.
Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.
Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.
A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.
Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.
One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.
Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.
If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.
It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.
And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.
You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.
Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.
The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.
Choose.
Factcheck Mostly True.
I have a question for Hollywood.
You wore the keffiyeh on the red carpet, signed boycott pledges, gave speeches at award shows and used your platforms to tell the rest of us what justice looks like.
Macklemore. Susan Sarandon. Mark Ruffalo. Javier Bardem. Emma Stone. Joaquin Phoenix. Olivia Colman. Tilda Swinton. Riz Ahmed. Andrew Garfield. Ayo Edebiri. Bella Hadid. Hannah Einbinder. Melissa Barrera. Cynthia Nixon.
Now the UN itself has documented what is happening in the camps in Gaza. Girls handed over for food. Rape victims pushed into marrying the man who attacked them. A father gave away his 14-year-old daughter for two bags of flour. Forced marriages more than doubled in a single quarter.
No Israeli soldier arranged those weddings. Fathers did. Uncles, brothers-in-law, clan elders and camp leaders did. And a Hamas regime lets it happen.
The same regime shot one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, after holding him for a year. Hamas announced he had been executed for "moral turpitude," its term for homosexuality. Hamas documents later found in a tunnel in Gaza describe what happened and show that Hamas kept torturing members it believed were gay.
Every summer the same regime gathers tens of thousands of children and teenagers in camps. There they learn to take weapons apart and put them back together, and they practice kidnapping Israeli soldiers.
In earlier years they were trained to stab and stone police officers, while instructors celebrated the dead as martyrs. Much of the training takes place in schoolyards and classrooms, where children should be learning to read.
On Hamas's own TV channel, little kids in military uniforms are interviewed about the fight. A child in Gaza learns early that the greatest thing it can achieve is to die.
You march for women's rights and for gay people's right to live freely. You talk about every child's right to a childhood. In Gaza you stand shoulder to shoulder with the people crushing all of it.
As long as they fight Israel, you look the other way.
Can you really not see the double standard? Or are you just playing dumb to get attention at any cost?
You call Israel genocidal. No court has ruled that it is, and the death tolls behind the accusation come from Hamas's own health ministry. You cheer for "the resistance." But in Gaza the resistance has a name, and the name is Hamas. You just won't say it out loud.
Look at the leaders the Palestinians have been given. The Grand Mufti who sat down with Hitler. Arafat, who hijacked planes and funneled hundreds of millions into accounts he controlled. Abbas, elected for four years and still in power more than twenty years later.
And then Hamas, whose leaders lived in luxury in Qatar while sending their own people to die.
You defend a people and close your eyes to the tyrants who have kept it down for a hundred years.
Where are your posts now? Where is the speech from the stage?
Macklemore, you wrote an entire song for Gaza. Where is the verse about a 14-year-old girl sold for flour?
The girls of Gaza only mattered as long as they fit your story. The moment reality stopped fitting, you went quiet.
You were never fighting for them, only for yourselves and your own reputation. A reputation that will soon be put to shame. Because the truth always wins, and it takes down those who stayed silent when it mattered.
Now sit down and shut up.
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Before asking US Congress to regulate AI, think about what the regulated innovation cycle looks like.
Dot-matrix printers still clack away at DMVs, banks, airlines, and city halls—the places where Washington regulated forms, and Centrex landlines, make musuems redundant.
On my list of modern anachronisms is also the modern American 2026 classroom. Its layout is still defined by an 1843 Prussian vision: one teacher, one age group, one room. 183 years.
Simply put central planning, outside of China, doesn't do innovation.
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Headline YoY inflation shows pressure from energy prices and knock-on effects. Core slightly elevated.
Probably Fed should "tap" on brakes with +0.25 hike. But +0.25 more (0.50 this year), or less (on hold) are entirely reasonable.
I agree with experts, Congress must cut deficit. Cut spending! #CPIREPORT
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This interview, backs up fluffy observations about jobs and AI with real research and data. Erik nails it. Includes practical advice. #workhelix youtu.be/72duHF7iZiU?is=7uT9…
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What do you call a D who works hard to lift the working class, while celebrating successful innovators who generate trillions for employees, customers, suppliers, investors and tax collectors?
A Republican.
Americans are struggling to pay for groceries and gas while Elon Musk becomes a TRILLIONAIRE.
When the federal government is for sale, the rich get richer and everyone else gets shafted.
The system is rigged.
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CA Dem "leadership" when AI, EVs & growth are doubling demand: close refineries & power plants :
(1) San Onofre Nuclear, 2013; (2) Inland Empire Energy, 2017-2019; (3) Encina Power, 2018; (4) Mandalay Generating, 2018; (5) Etiwanda Generating, 2018; (6) Ivanpah Solar (partial), 2026.
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@bubbawatson jams wrist hitting out of pinestraw just left of first fairway at ANGC. Leaves him short right of green, hitting 3 out of gallery. Shaking wrist out...
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Precisely. This is also the rationale behind the existence of the Giving Pledge.
Elon Musk a résumé en une phrase pourquoi il est devenu l'homme le plus riche du monde : "Ça n'a aucun sens de retirer le travail d'allocation du capital à des gens qui ont démontré une grande compétence en allocation de capital, pour le donner à une entité qui a démontré une très faible compétence en allocation de capital, c'est-à-dire le gouvernement."
Quand tu comprends cette phrase, tu comprends tout.
Tout le débat politique se résume à une seule question que personne ne pose : qui décide où va l'argent ? Parce que dans n'importe quel système, quelqu'un doit décider. Combien pour les routes, combien pour les hôpitaux, combien pour la recherche. Cette décision s'appelle l'allocation de capital. Et le vrai débat c'est pas "capitalisme vs socialisme", c'est "qui on choisit pour faire cette allocation".
Option 1 : le marché. Les allocateurs sont sélectionnés par la compétition. Tu crées un produit, les gens achètent ou pas. Si t'es bon, tu grandis, on te confie plus de ressources. Si t'es mauvais, tu fais faillite, le capital passe à quelqu'un de meilleur. La correction est automatique et impitoyable. C'est exactement ce qu'a fait Musk : il a mis 180 millions de dollars sur la table après PayPal, tout dans SpaceX et Tesla, au bord de la faillite en 2008. Le marché l'a validé parce que ses fusées atterrissent et ses voitures roulent.
Option 2 : la bureaucratie. Les allocateurs sont sélectionnés par le vote, le concours administratif, le jeu politique. Des gens qui n'ont jamais créé un service, jamais risqué un euro, jamais affronté un client. Quand ils allouent mal, personne n'est éliminé. Le budget est renouvelé. Le service dysfonctionne pendant des décennies.
La France met 57% de son PIB entre les mains de l'option 2. Et on s'étonne que les services publics se dégradent alors que les budgets augmentent chaque année.
Un entrepreneur avec 1 euro produit plus de valeur qu'un bureaucrate avec 10. Pas parce qu'il est plus intelligent, mais parce que c'est son euro. Et c'est toute la différence.
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"WSJ: Tesla Finally Has Its First Semi-Truck and It’s Already a Hit With Truckers."
Hit & Run Over, to be exact.
KiDDING! That was low-hanging fruit.
Actually, AI will lift billions out of poverty into the middle class. Lower cost & better food, healthcare & education.
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Did you know, the boiling frog parable is not about complacent frogs? They're not.
The takeaway is truth gradually gets distorted by agenda-driven repetition. The story is a self-referential warning that intellectual complacency allows truth to boil away in our cultural pot.
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As an Augusta, and golf enthusiast, I wanted to share my perspective on Gary Player created controversy.
Understanding Augusta National's Guest Play Rules and Past Champion Privileges
Augusta National Golf Club is one of the most exclusive private clubs in the world, with very strict policies on who can play the course outside of tournament week.
These rules help preserve its unique character and have remained consistent for decades.
Membership is required to host guests. Only current members of Augusta National can invite non-members to play. A member must typically be present and part of the group during the round.
Non-members — even legendary past champions — cannot independently book tee times or host unaccompanied groups.
Past Masters champions are honorary starters and lifetime invitees to the tournament, but they do not receive full membership privileges.
This means they cannot extend guest invitations on their own. Instead, like other non-members, they would need to arrange play through a current member who agrees to host and join the group. Reports indicate that past champions have occasionally played as guests this way, but it's at the discretion of members and subject to the club's availability and guidelines.
Unaccompanied foursomes or large family groups without a member present are not permitted under standard rules. Requests for a foursome consisting solely of a past champion and family members (e.g., three grandsons), or even a fivesome with a member only "tagging along" without full participation, fall outside typical protocol. In the club's 92+ year history, such arrangements have not been granted as a matter of course.
Additional context on family access. In 2021, during the Honorary Starters ceremony honoring Lee Elder (the first Black golfer to play in the Masters), Gary Player's son Wayne — who was caddying and standing nearby — held up a sleeve of OnCore golf balls for cameras during a solemn moment. This was viewed as unauthorized promotion, especially since major sponsors (like Cadillac, Rolex, and AT&T) pay significant sums for official, discreet branding rights and are not allowed ambush marketing.
Augusta National responded with a lifetime ban for Wayne from the property, which may influence broader family-related requests.
Gary Player, a three-time Masters champion (1961, 1974, 1978) and honorary starter since 2012, recently shared in a Golf Monthly interview his disappointment that a requested round with three of his grandsons was not approved. He expressed sadness, noting he'd hoped to share personal stories from the course with them, and mentioned that venues for the other majors (The Open, U.S. Open, PGA Championship) might be more flexible in similar situations.
He accepted the decision gracefully while highlighting his long affection for Augusta despite not liking "all the rules."
Player has also previously ranked the Masters as the "youngest" and least historically steeped of the four majors in some comments, though he remains deeply tied to the event through his record 52 starts and ongoing role.
These protocols aren't unique to Player — they apply uniformly to ensure fairness and tradition. Past champions who wish to play recreationally often build relationships with members to facilitate guest rounds (potentially a few times a year if arrangements align), but special exceptions for unaccompanied family play remain unlikely.