Dad, veteran, anti-communist, observer of life, the universe, and everything!
Evaluating my options based on freedom
Joined April 2012
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Cognitive bias has little to do with rhetoric.
The "actual numbers" are what you think you remember from over four years ago and other times.
You stick to "your truth", and ignore the historical data.
Then people will realize which one of us has the shortcoming.
Tim retweeted
ABOUT LAKE AMERICA
What's the name of the river that separates Texas from Mexico?
The Rio Grande?
That's right. The Rio Grande.
If you're standing on the north bank.
But if you wade across and stand on the south bank, what's its name then?
If you say, "The Rio Grande," you're an American.
But if you say, "The Rio Bravo," you're a Mexican.
Because that one river has two names. One officially recognized by the American government and one officially recognized by the Mexican government.
Kind of like the Persian Gulf.
On its eastern shores it is the Persian Gulf, on its western shores it is the Arabian Gulf. One body of water, two names, reflecting the values, heritage and pride of the nations which surround it.
A last example: The South China Sea. One body of water, officially known as the South China Sea to China, the East Sea to Vietnam and the West Sea to the Philippines.
Which means if Canada wants to call the easternmost body of fresh water between itself and the United States Lake Ontario, and the United States wants to call that same body of fresh water Lake America, it would be in keeping with a practice established around the world for centuries.
Kind of like the practice of governments changing the names of geographical features for political reasons, like Presidents Obama and Biden did some 650 times.
You knew that, right?
In the last two Democrat administrations, the federal government went on a spree, scrubbing the map of names, people, words and races it found politically unacceptable.
Remember Mount McKinley, Point Barrow, Squaw Peak and Fort Polk?
So, the precedent is broadly and repeatedly established by Barack Obama and Joe Biden -- a president can name any damn thing any damn thing for any damn reason.
Like Trump did.
Like Trump trolled Democrats into believing he did.
It's like he's got a laser pointer and they're a roomful of cats. He plays them like a fish.
He posts on Truth Social and they shit their pants. He scribbles with his giant Sharpie and their heads explode.
He says something about Lake Ontario and they completely forget the six-month anniversary of the Iran War. The Democrats and their puppets on the evening news.
Moron politicians with social media posts from the shore, breathless reporters doing Man On The Street with men on the beach, indignant Canadians spitting on America, earnest Native Americans explaining etymology.
He leads them around by the nose.
"Republicans take Trump seriously, but not literally," a smart man said. "Democrats take Trump literally, not not seriously."
And so he trolls them, for fun and sport. And distraction.
Because the same Democrats and reporters who seem to believe Trump gives a damn what Lake Ontario is called are completely oblivious to the real issue at hand -- which is how the Canadians have lived like leeches off American prosperity for generations.
Take 2025, for example.
Last year, Canada's trade surplus with the United States was about $150 billion. That means that as a result of trade between the two nations, they ended up $150 billion richer and we ended up $150 billion poorer.
That happens because they rip us off. They rig the game to enrich themselves and impoverish us.
That grabbing of American cash becomes more galling when you look at the rest of Canada's top-10 trading relationships, in which it runs a trade deficit with every nation except the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
In fact, if it wasn't ripping the United States off for $150 billion a year, Canada would run a net trade deficit with the world, meaning that each year it would export wealth and become poorer and poorer. But it takes our money to paper over its weakness.
If it wasn't siphoning off America's prosperity through unfair trade practices, Canada would fall on its financial face.
We carry it on our backs, at the expense of American jobs and prosperity.
And that's what has Trump pissed off. That is what he cares about.
No matter what you call the lake.
13.9% is coincidentally the portion of Canadians that somehow have enough savings after monstrous taxes but haven't found a cure for stage five TDS, since the wait for a specialist is so long with "free" healthcare.
Thirteen years and five days ago, thus post has achieved evergreen status.
@patdollard @fishingmaniac That makes 7/7 mass violence crimes by Dems or leftists. #DisarmDemocrats
Tim retweeted
Helen Andrews drops two bold, provocative claims on feminization's impact on civilization:
1. Feminization isn't neutral—in key institutions, it's actively harmful.
- Rule of law crumbles when judges prioritize "context & relationships" over strict, objective rules (even if outcomes feel harsh).
- Academia loses its purpose when it censors "dangerous" ideas instead of pursuing truth relentlessly.
- Business innovation stalls when HR-compliant niceness trumps bold, disruptive leadership.
- Immigration policy becomes paralyzed: laws exist on paper, but enforcement is blocked if it might "make someone sad."
Without rule of law, truth-seeking, secure borders, and innovation, a fully feminized society risks collapse.
2. Demographic feminization → substantive feminization
Can we have majority-female professions (lawyers, judges, professors) while keeping the old uncompromising standards?
Andrews says no—not enough women consistently embody the hard-edged, truth-first, outcome-over-feelings ethos that historically defined those fields. Some women absolutely do, but scaling to majority-female shifts the institutional culture inevitably.
She calls it difficult but true: "A thoroughly feminized civilization will set itself on the road to collapse."
Uncomfortable, politically incorrect, and worth debating.
What do you think—does she overstate the case, or is there truth here?
Tim retweeted
Just spoke with a guy who owns a small business. Complaining about the fact that that he pays his employees $18-20hr (minimum) but the people who hire illegal aliens pay them $6.50 an hour and hurt his business.
Many of the people threatening law enforcement and interfering with deportations are just mad that this system is coming to an end.
Tim retweeted
Arguably Scott Adams’ greatest livestream video ever- The User Interface for Reality.
If you know, you know.
Catching up on my
@theallinpod
from 10 October.
@Jason
stated, as fact "the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers brought tons of guns to the Capitol and ran January 6th" This is delusional. This is not the statement of a moderate or a centrist. This is a statement of irrational person not rooted in fact or reality.
Tim retweeted
The media said they were a nonpartisan check on power. They weren't. The US govt. is the largest source of funding for "independent media" worldwide. Many sought partisan regime change. They got away with it by hiding the money & threatening to sue journalists who exposed them.
USAID's defenders say it's about charity and development in poor nations. It's not. It's a $40 billion driver of regime change abroad. And now the evidence suggests that it, along with the CIA, were behind the 2019 impeachment of Trump — an illegal regime change effort at home.
Tim retweeted
Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment
Marc Andreessen
Reposted Jan 24, 2025
"In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of [running] a business." -- George McGovern
Fears about new technology replacing human labor and causing overall unemployment have raged across industrialized societies for hundreds of years, despite a nearly continual rise in both jobs and wages in capitalist economies. The jobs apocalypse is always right around the corner; just ask the Luddites.
We had two such anti-technology jobs moral panics in the last 20 years — “outsourcing” enabled by the Internet in the 2000’s, and “robots” in the 2010’s. The result was the best national and global economy in human history in pre-COVID 2019, with the most jobs at the highest wages ever.
Now we’re heading into the third such panic of the new century with AI, coupled with a continuous drumbeat of demand for Communist-inspired Universal Basic Income. “This time is different; AI is different,” they say, but is it?
Normally I would make the standard arguments against technologically-driven unemployment — see good summaries by Henry Hazlitt (chapter 7) and Frédéric Bastiat (his metaphor directly relevant to AI). And I will come back and make those arguments soon. But I don’t even think the standand arguments are needed, since another problem will block the progress of AI across most of the economy first.
Which is: AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy.
How do I know that? Because technology is already illegal in most of the economy, and that is becoming steadily more true over time.
How do I know that? Because, [see chart].
This chart shows price changes, adjusted for inflation, across a dozen major sectors of the economy.
As you can see, we actually live in two different economies.
The lines in blue are the sectors where technological innovation is allowed to push down prices while increasing quality. The lines in red are the sectors where technological innovation is not permitted to push down prices; in fact, the prices of education, health care, and housing as well as anything provided or controlled by the government are going to the moon, even as those sectors are technologically stagnant.
We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.
Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now.
Whereas the sectors in blue are less regulated, technology whips through them, pushing down prices and raising quality every year.
Note the emotional loading of the interplay of production and consumption here. What do we get mad about? With our consumer hat on, we get mad about price increases — the red sectors. With our producer hat on, we get mad about technological disruption — the blue sectors. Well, pick one; as this chart shows, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Now think about what happens over time. The prices of regulated, non-technological products rise; the prices of less regulated, technologically-powered products fall. Which eats the economy? The regulated sectors continuously grow as a percentage of GDP; the less regulated sectors shrink. At the limit, 99% of the economy will be the regulated, non-technological sectors, which is precisely where we are headed.
Therefore AI cannot cause overall unemployment to rise, even if the Luddite arguments are right this time. AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.
Free advice for those with TDS:
"it is better to put the phone down and let people think you are a fool than to post and remove all doubt, with documentation, for eternity."
#BILLSMAFIA should rethink the theme song.
Mr. Brightside is a song about being cheated on.
It's the opposite of a positive affirmation.
Tim retweeted
#OTD in 1999 "Slinky for a spine" featuring Buffalo Sabres Dominik Hasek in a MasterCard commercial debuts