Businessman, programmer for 50 years, retired physical chemist. Proud Husband, Dad, and Granddad (x10!). AB Chemistry + Physics, MS P-Chem (Nuclear).
Sacramento, CA
Joined March 2024
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Today I'm going to explain why socialism can never work, even if you're 8 years old.
Not with statistics. Not with the body count, even though it runs into the tens of millions. With a school playground and a bag of marbles.
By the end, you'll understand what Mises, Hayek and the whole Austrian School proved more than a hundred years ago, and what the Soviet Union then spent seventy years confirming.
Picture a schoolyard. Thirty kids. Marbles.
There are clay marbles, glass marbles, agates, big shooters, and a few cat's eyes that everybody fights over.
Nobody ever decided what a shooter is worth. And yet every kid knows: a shooter is worth about five glass marbles. An agate, three. A clay marble, almost nothing.
Who set those prices? Nobody. They appeared on their own, through trading. Every trade is a kid saying: "I want that thing more than what I've got in my hand." Thousands of little trades like that end up creating a "marble exchange rate" that everyone knows, even though nobody ever wrote it down anywhere.
And that rate is alive. A new kid shows up in September and he's crazy about agates? The price of agates goes up. The other kids notice, and that night they dig through their drawers at home to bring more in. Nobody asked them to. The price told them.
Keep that in mind. That's the whole story.
Now a new teacher arrives. She's kind. She means well. And she finds it deeply unfair that Kevin has 200 marbles while Lily has 3.
So she collects every marble in the playground and announces: "From now on, I manage the marbles. I'll distribute them fairly, for the good of everyone."
On paper, it's beautiful. Watch what happens.
First problem: she doesn't know who wants what.
Lily loves blue marbles. Tom doesn't care about marbles at all, he just wants to play soccer. Emma has collected cat's eyes since kindergarten. None of this is written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of thirty kids, and often the kids themselves only discover it at the moment someone offers them a trade.
So the teacher distributes "fairly." And everyone ends up with marbles they don't want.
Second problem: nobody knows what anything is worth anymore.
Before, the exchange rate would have told her that cat's eyes were rare and precious. Now that trading is banned, there is no rate. She's blind. How many agates should she order for next year? How many shooters? No idea. She guesses. She guesses wrong. Next year there are crates of clay marbles nobody wants and not a single cat's eye.
Third problem: nobody makes an effort anymore.
Why bring marbles from home if they end up in the big common bag? Why take care of them if they're not really yours? After a month, there are fewer marbles in the playground than on day one.
Fourth problem, the most important one: the kids start trading again. In secret. Behind the gym.
Because Lily still wants her blue marbles, and Tom would happily hand his over for half a cookie. Trading is natural. You can ban it, but you can't stop people from wanting things.
So the teacher has to choose. Either she lets it happen and her system collapses. Or she starts watching. She searches pockets. She hands out punishments. She appoints "monitors" whose job is to report anyone caught trading.
She hasn't turned evil. She simply has no choice anymore. The plan cannot survive without coercion.
And guess who ends up with the nicest marbles? Not Lily. Not Emma. The monitors. The kids who are close to the teacher.
That's it. You now understand socialism.
Now replace the playground with a country. The thirty kids with hundreds of millions of people. The marbles with millions of different products: steel, wheat, bolts, medicine, size 10 shoes. And the teacher with a planning bureau in Moscow.
That is exactly what the Soviet Union was. The bureau was called Gosplan.
What I just told you isn't a hunch. It's a handful of the strongest arguments in the history of economic thought.
Carl Menger, 1871, founder of the Austrian School: value isn't in the object. It's in the head of the person who wants it. A shooter has no "objective" value. It's worth whatever a kid is willing to give up to get it. Sounds obvious, but it undercuts the foundation of Marxism, which claims value comes from the amount of labor that went into something. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, another Austrian, took Marx apart on exactly this point back in 1896.
Ludwig von Mises, 1920: that's the second problem, calculation. In an essay called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he shows that if the state owns all the means of production, there's no market for factories, machines or raw materials. So no prices for them. So no way to know whether it's smarter to put that steel into railroads, tractors or bridges. Without prices, the planner isn't evil. He's blind. Mises wrote this just three years after the Russian Revolution.
Friedrich Hayek, 1945: that's the first problem, knowledge. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he explains that the information that runs an economy doesn't exist in any one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows his oven runs cold, the farmer who can feel the rain coming, the truck driver who knows the shortcut. No bureau can collect all of that.
His example is brilliant. A source of tin dries up somewhere in the world. The price of tin rises. And everywhere, millions of people start using less tin, without knowing why, without anyone explaining anything to them. The price carried the information to the entire planet. Hayek compares the price system to a telecommunications system. The price is the marble exchange rate.
Hayek again, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom": that's the fourth problem, coercion. A central plan requires the plans of millions of people to be subordinated to a single one. And since people don't go along willingly, they have to be forced. One chapter of the book is titled "Why the Worst Get on Top": in a system where power decides everything, the people who love power most end up winning. The playground monitors.
Which is exactly what Solzhenitsyn said: socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. It's not an accident along the way. It's mechanical. It's not that bad people took over a good system. It's that the system needs force to hold together.
The Soviets themselves joked about it. An old joke goes like this: a nail factory is given a quota in number of nails, so it produces millions of tiny, useless nails. Gosplan switches the quota to weight, and the factory produces a single one-ton nail. It's a joke, but it's also the calculation problem summed up in two sentences.
Now you're going to tell me: "Sure, but it's 2026. We have AI. A supercomputer can do the teacher's job."
That's the fashionable argument, and it misses the point entirely. The problem was never computing power. The problem is that the information doesn't exist before the trade. Lily herself didn't know how much she cared about blue marbles until someone offered to swap. Preferences change every day. People lie to the planner to get more. And above all, no algorithm can plan for what hasn't been invented yet. Gosplan would never have ordered the iPhone.
And no, Sweden and Denmark are not counterexamples. They're market economies, with private property, free prices and companies that go bankrupt, plus a big welfare state on top. You can debate the right level of taxes. But that's not the socialism Mises and Hayek were talking about: the state owning and planning production.
So, for the 8-year-old, here's the summary.
Nobody knows better than you what you want. Prices are how millions of people talk to each other without ever meeting. Get rid of prices and everyone goes deaf and blind. And when people refuse to follow the plan, there's only one option left: force them.
And for the 80-year-old grandpa who remembers the Berlin Wall, I don't even need to explain. He saw both sides.
Socialism doesn't fail because it was badly implemented. It fails because it asks one brain to do the work of millions of brains. And when it fails, all it has left is force.
Grandpa Joe retweeted
Hollywood actor makes a SHOCKING admission. #metoo
Grandpa Joe retweeted
My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step.
Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.
What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation.
College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices.
Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode.
Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no.
So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same.
That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.
In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.
If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation.
If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.
Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Grandpa Joe retweeted
They taught you snow is black.
Trump didn’t ban the press for sport. He hit a propaganda machine Bertrand Russell wrote the manual for — mass psychology so you never ask where your convictions came from.
$6 diesel isn’t “Trump broke it.” It’s thirty years of zero-growth policy.
Why Trump Banned the Press (They Taught You Snow is Black):
Grandpa Joe retweeted
“Standard Time, originally set to more or less match up with normal sunrise and sunset patterns, is the only way to go.” 👏 Thank you, @thenewmexican!
ALT Santa Fe New Mexican Our View Daylight saving time push should go dark Sep 1, 2026 Year-round daylight saving time in the United States? We tried that. It’s a bad idea. There is a reason why it is called standard time. In 1883, when the United States established the idea of standardized time zones, the intent was to accommodate the growing amount of the newly speedy passenger rail travel…
President Trump has to get off this stupid savings time decision.
Eastern Standard Time is closer to the honest sundial time in Miami, Florida. Eastern Daylight Time is more than an hour too fast!
ALT Title reads “Standard Time is closer to nature”. Three clocks are shown, one for Miami mean solar time (set to 12:00), one for Eastern Standard Time (set to 12:21), one for Eastern Daylight Time (set to 1:21). Subtitle reads “Alignment to solar time naturally benefits health, safety, education, economy.”
Grandpa Joe retweeted
SpaceXAI engineers just released a 1-hour workshop on running Grok 4.6 in Cursor the way their own team does it - from scratch:
• 02:18 · how the context engine works
• 11:42 · agents and plan mode
• 24:05 · context across big repos
• 37:30 · picking the right model
• 48:53 · multi-repo without losing it
This 1-hour workshop is worth more than 100 articles on Cursor
Skip Netflix tonight, give it an hour, then read the article below on wiring Cursor into a GrokBot stack
Please, please, please, please do X. The bugginess has gotten unacceptable and the absence of support is just not OK.
Can’t reply to your post cause teslaboomer mama blocked me because I called her out on something. But I’m wondering, does satellite really penetrate into buildings as well as local cellular? I’m not sure it’s a direct replacement. @grok what’s the answer to this?
This looks fantastic. It works in 18% humidity? That’s amazing. These would be a good thing for anybody’s emergency kit or camping kit. Wow..
Scientists make new material that pulls 60 ounces of drinking water from air everyday | Sujita Sinha, Interesting Engineering
A new porous material harvests up to 0.5 gallons of water from air per day per 2.2 pounds while also improving energy-efficient cooling systems.Scientists at Kiel University in Germany have developed a sponge-like material that can extract drinking water from the air and have now demonstrated that it can be produced on a much larger scale. The findings describe a system that could help supply water in dry regions around the Mediterranean and improve energy-efficient cooling technologies.
Researchers say the material captures moisture from the air even at low humidity and releases it with relatively low heat, making it suitable for repeated water-harvesting cycles. The latest work also shows that production has moved beyond laboratory batches, bringing the technology closer to commercial use.
“Regions like these are facing rising temperatures and declining rainfall. Our goal is to develop an environmentally friendly technology that converts water molecules from the air into drinking water,” stated Professor Norbert Stock from CAU’s Institute of Inorganic Chemistry.
“Two new studies, published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A and Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, describe how large quantities of the material can be produced and the efficiency of cooling devices can be improved.”
Material captures moisture in dry air
The research focuses on metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, which are highly porous materials capable of absorbing and releasing large amounts of water. Their microscopic network of interconnected pores allows them to trap moisture quickly, much like a sponge absorbs water.
The Kiel team is improving a MOF known as CAU-10-H, named after Kiel University, where it was first discovered. The material absorbs water from the air at room temperature when relative humidity reaches at least 18 percent. It then releases the stored water when heated to about 158°F (70°C).
Researchers also combined the MOF with conductive carbon structures. This allows the material to be heated efficiently using electricity or sunlight, helping it release water more quickly and complete repeated operating cycles within only a few hours.
Producing drinking water and efficient cooling
Tests showed that the composite material can absorb up to 0.17 grams of water for every gram of material. Under dry conditions, 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) of the material could produce up to 1.8 liters (60.8 ounces) of drinking water per day.
“This makes the material particularly attractive for producing drinking water, even in arid regions,” said first author Lasse Wegner.
Beyond water production, the researchers found the material could also improve cooling systems. In adsorption cooling applications, CAU-10-H delivered up to three times the cooling performance of conventional silica gel, a commonly used moisture-absorbing material.
The team believes future cooling systems could use waste heat from facilities such as data centers or bakeries to power the process, reducing the energy needed for air conditioning.
Production expands beyond laboratory scale
The researchers have also made progress in manufacturing the material in larger quantities, an important step toward commercial deployment.
“We discovered CAU-10-H around 15 years ago, and since then its potential applications have been investigated around the world,” revealed Stock, who has researched MOFs for more than 20 years.
Led by researcher Kalle Mertin, the team increased production to about 66 pounds (30 kilograms), around 60 times more than previous laboratory batches. They also conducted a techno-economic analysis indicating that the material can be manufactured for approximately $12-$14 per kilogram.
“This brings practical applications of our materials within reach,” added Stock. “We have shown that they not only work in the laboratory but can also be produced on an economically viable scale.”
Read more:
interestingengineering.com/i…
Grandpa Joe retweeted
Our founders staked their lives on a radical idea, that free men and women could govern themselves without a king or a distant bureaucracy telling them how to live. That idea built the freest, most prosperous nation in history.
On America’s 250th birthday, let's recommit to the Constitution and the liberty it protects. Happy Independence Day.
Grandpa Joe retweeted
"There is a phrase in the Catholic Church for a certain kind of believer: the cradle Catholic. It means the one who was born into the faith, baptized before he could speak, raised inside the rituals so completely that he never had to choose them. He did not convert. He did not study his way in or have a come-to-Jesus moment that brought him to the church door as a grown man. The cradle Catholic was simply always there. And the church has a quiet worry about him, an insecurity, because the thing you are handed in the cradle is the thing you are most likely to take for granted. The convert had to earn the faith and so he knows exactly what it is. The cradle Catholic risks practicing out of habit a thing he has never once had to defend.
"I have come to think there is such a thing as a cradle American, and that many of us now are one. We were born into freedom the way the cradle Catholic was born into the faith. We did not convert to freedom. Most of us under seventy did not serve in the armed forces or march for it or risk our families. We were born into this land where the rights were already written down and the laws made. And like the cradle Catholic, we are in danger of losing the greatest thing we have ever been given, because a freedom you have never had to defend is a freedom you do not know how to defend."
Link below.
