Various_Autists retweeted
If you want to understand what Elon Musk is really fighting, and who is really fighting him, this is the clearest map I can give you :
🚨 I spend an enormous amount of time trying to understand the chaos we're living through. Not the headlines. The machine behind them. 🚨
If you want to understand what Elon Musk is really fighting, and who is really fighting him, this is the clearest map I can give you.
Expensive houses. Expensive schools. Expensive healthcare. Taxes that rise every year while everything gets worse. Borders nobody voted to open. Speech rules nobody voted for.
Most people look at this and blame capitalism. The market failed, they say, so the state has to step in and fix it.
They have it exactly backwards. What they want to fix it with is what broke it. This isn't chaos, and it isn't capitalism. It has a direction, a method, and a hundred-year history. Let me reverse-engineer it.
In 1926, Mussolini's regime threw Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, into prison. From his cell he asked the question that would shape the next century: why did the revolution win in Russia but fail in the West, where Marx said it was inevitable?
His answer: in Russia, the state was everything, so seizing it was enough. In the West, the state was only the outer wall. Behind it stood the real fortress: the church, the family, the school, the press, the culture. Western workers never revolted because the culture held them.
So the conclusion was simple. Don't storm the palace. Capture the culture. Win the institutions and you never have to win the argument, because you decide which arguments are allowed.
In 1967, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke gave it a slogan: the long march through the institutions. Paris supplied the intellectual software, and I've already apologized for my country's part in that.
Then came the most patient operation in modern history. The students of the 60s became the professors of the 80s. Their students became the journalists, judges, civil servants and HR directors of the 2000s. Their students now run the foundations, the NGOs and the agencies. No single step looked like a revolution. That's exactly why it worked.
The method was communist. The ambition became global. And it grew like a cancer. A cancer never attacks the body head-on. It hijacks the body's own cells and feeds on the body's own resources. This system never had to defeat the West. It just had to make the West pay for it.
In America, the machine found a political home: the Democratic Party. Not the millions of decent people who vote for it. The apparatus. The donor networks, the activist groups, the consultants, the captured agencies that keep moving in the same direction whoever wins.
In Europe, it found something even better. The EU's founders, Schuman, Adenauer, De Gasperi, were Catholic anti-communists who wanted to make war impossible. But they built exactly what the long march dreams of: power that never has to face a voter. A Commission nobody directly elects holds the right to propose laws for 450 million people. Chat Control. The digital euro. Speech rules written in Brussels. Nobody stormed anything. They just drafted it.
Add the World Economic Forum, the UN agencies and the global foundation circuit, and you have the full map. You don't need a secret meeting when everyone went to the same schools, reads the same papers, funds the same NGOs and flies to the same conference in Davos every January. It's not a conspiracy. It's a class with shared incentives. That's harder to fight, because there's no headquarters to raid.
And the billionaires? Most people who became the richest in the world got absorbed. They built something real, then traded it for an aura. Bill Gates is the perfect example: he built the software that ran the world, then became the bankroller of global health bureaucracies and the funder of newsrooms covering his own causes. Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. Benioff bought Time. You're not buying a business. You're buying the right to be called good by the people who decide who is good. That's the corruption. Not suitcases of cash. Money for aura, grants for loyalty, NGOs for policy. All legal. All invisible.
Here's the proof it's one system and not a hundred separate problems. Look at what happened to prices over the last 25 years. Everything exposed to markets and technology got cheaper: TVs, software, phones, clothing. Everything controlled by institutions exploded: college, healthcare, childcare. And housing, where you need a committee's permission to build anything. Same country, same economy, same decades. The difference isn't the product. It's who controls it.
Taxes go up and services get worse, because the money doesn't reach the services. It feeds the layers. Immigration happens at a scale no electorate clearly chose, because for a system that lives on managing problems, more problems means more budget. And a two-income family today can't buy the house their parents bought on one salary. That's real poverty, manufactured by a machine that is rewarded for looking good, never for being good.
MAGA isn't the cause of the chaos. It's the immune response. Brexit, the farmers' revolts, the votes shaking every European capital: same thing. The body finally noticed the tumor.
So what we're living through is not a normal political cycle. It's a fight to the death between two models. One runs on the perception of goodness. The other runs on reality.
And it had to be the richest man in the world. Anyone smaller would have been bought, sued or cancelled. Every billionaire before him took the deal. Elon walked out of the club and turned the lights on.
He bought Twitter for $44 billion, opened the Twitter Files and gave the world back a public square where any narrative can be checked in real time. He went inside the government and helped shut down USAID. Now Politico announces that the Democrats' gavels are coming for him. His answer: he'll find out who is really pulling the strings and go after them, not just their puppets.
He has one line he keeps coming back to: he cares about the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. That sentence is the whole war.
Now the part that makes me certain of how it ends.
A lie is expensive to maintain. It needs gatekeepers, censors, fact-checkers, friendly journalists, a budget, and constant repairs every time reality contradicts it. The truth costs nothing to maintain. It just keeps being true.
AI is driving the cost of checking anything toward zero. Any budget, any study, any statistic, any promise, audited in seconds by anyone with a phone. Yes, AI can generate lies at scale too. But producing a lie is cheap. Defending it against a billion instant audits is impossible.
That's what acceleration really means. It doesn't pick sides. It speeds up feedback loops. Systems aligned with reality compound. Systems built on lies hit the wall faster. And you cannot build rockets, design chips or cure diseases with a false model of the world. Physics doesn't read op-eds. The more intelligence we pour into the world, the more expensive every lie becomes.
You cannot scale a lie. You can only scale what's true.
We are close to the collapse of the old order and the birth of a new one. Not the one from the WEF's own 2016 video, "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy." The opposite. An order built on truth-seeking, efficiency, science, private property and free markets. You will own things. You will build things. And you'll be happy, because it will be real.
Gramsci's long march took a century. Its collapse will take years.
History will remember this moment. A man walked into the most powerful machine ever built, refused the deal everyone else took, and chose reality over perception.
I have never been more optimistic.
Various_Autists retweeted
Whitehall Inside the BBC: Who Really Shapes the News?
For years the BBC has insisted that its journalism is independent of government. Now we learn that serving civil servants have been working inside its newsroom, helping shape coverage of politically sensitive issues in Britain. Migration, crime, elections, Covid and public spending. A woman seconded from the Welsh government during the pandemic acknowledged that her advice had led to BBC news lines being changed and new stories being told. That raises the question: how far should serving government officials be involved in shaping the editorial output of a broadcaster whose independence from the state is supposed to be sacrosanct?
Another secondee drafted material on migration and crime statistics. Officials from Defra and other departments helped prepare coverage of Budgets and government figures. These are subjects on which Whitehall has its own institutional interests, preferred explanations and its reputation to protect. Yet civil servants were helping the national broadcaster decide how the numbers should be understood and presented to millions of viewers.
The recruitment advert for the 2027 intake sought candidates able to influence decision-making. That wording alone does not prove political interference, but it makes the BBC's blanket assurances deserving of scrutiny. Government statisticians have described helping journalists select figures, develop explanations and shape reports. Some have been credited under BBC News or BBC Verify bylines without their civil service positions being sufficiently clear. The public was entitled to know who was contributing to these stories. Instead, the BBC has promised to amend bylines only after The Telegraph began asking questions.
The financial arrangement deepens the concern. The secondees remain on salaries paid by their government departments while working inside the BBC. Taxpayers therefore fund officials who help produce coverage of policies, statistics and controversies involving the institutions employing them. Nobody needs to allege secret instructions from ministers to recognise the conflict this creates. The permanent state is capable of shaping public debate through shared assumptions, professional habits and institutional loyalties. When those responsible for producing official figures also help shape how the national broadcaster explains them, the separation between government and journalism becomes dangerously blurred.
Professor Carl Heneghan, director of Oxford University's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, has questioned whether officials with competing interests can remain impartial. His concern goes to the heart of the matter. A civil servant may act conscientiously, correct genuine errors and still approach a controversy through the assumptions of the institution in which their career has been formed. The BBC argues that statistical expertise improves accuracy and that its journalists retain final editorial control. That defence deserves examination, not automatic acceptance. Who checked the secondees' contributions? Who decided which interpretations were challenged? And how often did advice from Whitehall change the story that reached the public?
Thirty-nine civil servants have passed through this scheme in eight years. The BBC now promises greater disclosure while maintaining that editorial independence was never compromised. But independence requires more than an assurance from the institution whose conduct is being questioned. It requires visible safeguards, honest attribution and scrutiny of how stories are produced. As ministers consider extending compulsory BBC funding to streaming households, the public discovers that serving officials have been helping shape its news. The corporation asks Britain to trust its independence. It must now explain why serving officials from Whitehall were helping shape its journalism, and why the public was not clearly told who they were.
Various_Autists retweeted
非洲真的很缺水吗？其实“懒”才是他们穷的根本原因。有数据显示，非洲地下水储量是地表的100倍，为何他们不挖井，而是到处找水？
我之前跟着一支海外工程队在那边待了快八个月，亲眼见过太多让人匪夷所思的事，说出来真的好多人都不敢信。我们当时的营地建在一片开阔的草地上，刚过去的时候要解决用水问题，队里找了个测水的师傅随便找了个地方打井，打到不到十二米就出了清水，水质甜得很，除了供我们队四十多个人吃喝洗澡，还能引出一垄水浇我们开出来的小菜园，天天浇水都用不完。
而离我们营地不到两公里的地方，就有一个百十来口人的部落村子，我第一次跟着采购去村里的时候，就看见全村人都围着一个半米深的泥坑接水，那水浑得放半小时都澄清不了，水面上还飘着虫子和牲畜的粪便，小孩渴了蹲下来直接舀了就喝，大人也不管，不少小孩隔三差五就拉肚子，缺药耽误着能拖出大病，看着真的让人心疼。我当时就问翻译，咱们这边打井出了这么多水，他们咋不来打一口？翻译笑笑说，你往后看就知道了，不是水的事。
没过多久工程闲下来，队长说反正咱们设备人都有，不如免费帮他们打一口井，也算做件好事，结果第一步就卡壳了。村长带着一群人堵在我们选好的井址，说这块地是他们部落的公用土地，要打井就得给他们十袋面粉五桶食用油外加两箱汽水，不然别想动土。我们队里想着反正也不多，给就给了，就当换一口井给村里人用，这点东西对我们来说不算什么。
接下来要找几个当地人帮忙打下手搬东西，我们说好一天给一斤玉米面两瓶汽水，这个待遇在当地已经够一个三口之家吃饱喝足了，比他们自己瞎晃赚得多太多，结果来了五个人，干了不到四十分钟，全都撂挑子坐到树底下乘凉去了，说太阳太晒，会晒伤皮肤，祖宗规矩就是正午不能干活，要等太阳落山再干活。我们想着入乡随俗那就等，结果太阳落山之后，连个人影都没见着，第二天上午好不容易来了三个，还要求必须先给汽水玉米面，不给就不动手，我们给了之后，三个人晃悠着挖了不到半米，又坐下来歇着聊天了，一聊就是一上午，第三天干脆全都不来了，托人带话来说拿到的吃的够喝够吃好几天，先回家休息，吃完了再来。
最后没办法，我们工程队自己上手，不到十天就打出了一口出水稳定的井，还给他们在井口安了简易的提水架，放了两个大木桶，跟村长说以后大家随便来打水，只要别往井里扔垃圾就行。一开始村里人可开心了，天天排着队来打水，结果半个月不到，井口就堵了，我们过去一看，大大小小的树枝石头烂叶子堵了小半井，原来大家打完水垃圾随手就扔在井口边上，下雨一冲全进去了。我们免费帮他们清干净，反复跟村长和村民说不要扔垃圾，要保持井口干净，结果不到两个月，又堵了，之后村长干脆来找我们，说井坏了，你们再帮我们打一口新的吧，那语气说得理所当然，好像我们就该天天给他们收拾烂摊子。
我之前还碰到过一次，营地的围墙坏了一段，找了四个当地工人来修，说好一天干完给对应的工钱，结果四个工人八点开工，九点就歇着喝茶，十点吃早饭，十二点要睡午觉，睡到下午三点才起来，干了不到一小时又说要回家喂孩子，一天下来只码了不到五块砖，第二天还过来要全额工钱，说我们没给他们提供茶和饼，所以干得慢，钱不能少给，当时给我们队长气得直接把他们赶走了。
待得久了我才发现，这种事真的不是个例。有个二十多岁的小伙子天天来我们营地卖野果，我们看他挺活络，就说你干脆天天给我们营地送菜，我们一个月给你固定的工钱，比你卖野果稳定多了，结果他干了三天，第四天就不见了，过了一周晃悠过来，问他为啥不来，他说前三天赚的钱够花了，在家歇着花完了再来。还有国际援助组织免费给他们发蔬菜种子，教他们开荒种地，说种好了够全村吃大半年，结果一半种子被他们煮着吃了，剩下的随便往地里一撒，既不浇水也不除草，长不出来就接着等着发援助。
真的，很多人说非洲穷是因为气候不好历史遗留问题，可我们明明看到脚底下十几米就是清水，储量够整个村子用几十年，有人免费帮你打出来，就只要随手维护一下都做不到。他们不是没有力气，跑出去找野果跳篝火舞能折腾一整天，一说到干活赚饭吃，半小时就喊累；也不是没有资源，地下水摆在那，援助摆在那，就是不肯伸手去动。
我待了八个月见过好多口废弃的援助井，全都是打完没两年没人维护废了，当地人宁愿背着水桶走三四公里去接脏雨水，也不肯花半天时间清一清堵了的井口。你说这到底是延续了几千年的靠天吃饭的生活方式已经刻进骨子里改不了，还是真的就是“懒”才导致一直摆脱不了穷呢？你怎么看这件事？
Various_Autists retweeted
Eric Weinstein: 100% of the population has gone completely insane — And here’s the proof
Not a metaphor.
He says you can pretty much prove it.
Biden spent four years with the nuclear football while declining. Almost nobody treated it as a crisis. Stage-managed, like Roosevelt.
The entire management of COVID was completely fake.
We still can’t “get to the bottom” of Jeffrey Epstein.
Nobody trusts Harvard. People are losing faith in CNN.
Everything is bananas, fictionalized, managed wall-to-wall.
We’re living in what he calls managed reality.
Most people have accepted it.
He’s stuck watching it.
Various_Autists retweeted
If you are feeling poorer since Labour gained power. This is why..
Employer National Insurance increased from 13.8% to 15%.
• The employer NI threshold cut from £9,100 to £5,000.
• Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds frozen until 2031.
• Capital Gains Tax increased from 10% and 20% to 18% and 24%.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief increased from 10% to 14%, then 18%.
• Investors Relief increased and its lifetime allowance cut from £10 million to £1 million.
• Carried interest taxation increased and moved towards the Income Tax regime.
• Dividend tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Savings income tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Property income tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Most unused pension funds brought into the Inheritance Tax net.
• Agricultural Property Relief restricted.
• Business Property Relief restricted.
• Inheritance Tax thresholds frozen for longer.
• The non-dom regime replaced with a more extensive residence based system.
• VAT imposed on private school fees.
• Business rates relief removed from private schools.
• Stamp Duty increased on second homes and buy to let properties.
• The Furnished Holiday Lettings tax regime abolished.
• Pension salary sacrifice benefits capped at £2,000 before National Insurance applies.
• The Cash ISA allowance cut to £12,000 for most under 65s.
• A 22% charge introduced on interest from cash held inside non cash ISAs.
• Restrictions introduced on transfers and cash like holdings within ISAs.
• The Energy Profits Levy increased and extended.
• Investment allowances for oil and gas producers reduced.
• A new Vaping Products Duty introduced.
• Tobacco duties increased above inflation.
• Vehicle Excise Duty increased for many new cars.
• Electric vehicles brought into the Vehicle Excise Duty system.
• A new mileage tax announced for electric and plug in hybrid cars.
• Air Passenger Duty increased.
• Climate Change Levy rates increased.
• Plastic Packaging Tax increased.
• A new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism introduced.
• Making Tax Digital extended to more landlords and self employed people.
Various_Autists retweeted
The Steak Bake Battalions
I have said it for years.
The men who will save this country can be found every morning, from six until half past eight, at almost every Greggs in the land.
They are there before the office lights come on. Before the besuited pen-pushers arrive for their lattes. Before the morning fills with pushchairs, school runs and meetings about meetings.
They are already awake. Already moving. Already at work.
You will know them.
Men in high-vis and cargo shorts. In battered work trousers and steel toe-capped boots. Sometimes in hard hats. Paint-spattered. Plaster-caked. Oil beneath their fingernails. Bags beneath their eyes.
They queue for coffee, bacon rolls and Steak Bakes.
The banter is merciless. The humour is dark. The language is occasionally appalling. But the fellowship is real.
They are the grafters.
Tradesmen. Engineers. Drivers. Fitters. Welders. Bricklayers. Scaffolders. Electricians. Plumbers. Mechanics. Machine operators. Small businessmen. Employers and employees.
Working-class men. Middle-class men. Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and Northern Irishmen.
British men.
While much of the country still sleeps, they are leaving their wives, their children and their warm homes. They climb into cold vans. They drive through darkness and rain. They go where the work is.
They build Britain.
They keep the lights on and the water flowing. They repair the roads. Raise the scaffolding. Lay the bricks. Weld the steel. Fix the boilers. Clear the drains. Restore the roofs. Mend what is broken.
They rarely appear on television.
Nobody invites them onto fashionable panels. Nobody asks what they think. Nobody in Whitehall seems particularly interested in whether they can afford another van, another apprentice or another year of taxes, regulations and rising costs.
Yet without them, the country stops.
Completely.
These are the descendants of the men of Agincourt and Waterloo. Of the Somme and Dunkirk. Of D-Day, Korea, the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not trained soldiers, most of them. But recognisably of the same temper.
The same stubbornness. The same humour in adversity. The same refusal to make a song and dance of hardship. The same instinct to shoulder the load, finish the job and look after the man beside them.
They carry an inheritance shaped across centuries. Celt and Pict. Roman and Saxon. Viking and Norman. Generations forged by cold seas, hard ground, long winters, dangerous work and war.
Their forebears built ships, railways, bridges, factories and cities. They crossed oceans. They defeated Napoleon, Hitler and Galtieri. They created an empire of extraordinary reach and consequence, and then spent British blood and treasure destroying the slave trade across much of the world.
They were not flawless men. No nation is flawless.
But they were formidable.
And these men are formidable still.
They are not extremists. They are not fanatics. They do not spend their days raging online. Most ask for very little.
A fair wage. A decent home. Safe streets. A future for their children. The freedom to speak plainly. And a country that remembers who built it.
But beneath the dust, the laughter and the apparent indifference, something remains.
A deep attachment to home.
A quiet patriotism.
A line that can be pushed only so far.
When this country finally decides that mass immigration must end, that integration must mean something, that borders must be real and that Britain must remain recognisably British, it will not be delivered by consultants, commentators or career politicians.
It will be delivered by the people who already carry Britain on their backs.
They are out there every morning.
Millions of them.
Waiting patiently in the half-light. Vans lined along the kerb. Engines ticking. Reflective jackets catching the first grey light of dawn.
Coffee in one hand. Steak Bake in the other.
The backbone of Britain.
The Steak Bake Battalions.
Various_Autists retweeted
In the 24 months since Labour came to power, we've seen;
• Employer National Insurance increased from 13.8% to 15%.
• The employer NI threshold cut from £9,100 to £5,000.
• Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds frozen until 2031.
• Capital Gains Tax increased from 10% and 20% to 18% and 24%.
• Business Asset Disposal Relief increased from 10% to 14%, then 18%.
• Investors’ Relief increased and its lifetime allowance cut from £10 million to £1 million.
• Carried interest taxation increased and moved towards the Income Tax regime.
• Dividend tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Savings-income tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Property-income tax rates increased by two percentage points.
• Most unused pension funds brought into the Inheritance Tax net.
• Agricultural Property Relief restricted.
• Business Property Relief restricted.
• Inheritance Tax thresholds frozen for longer.
• The non-dom regime replaced with a more extensive residence-based system.
• VAT imposed on private school fees.
• Business-rates relief removed from private schools.
• Stamp Duty increased on second homes and buy-to-let properties.
• The Furnished Holiday Lettings tax regime abolished.
• Pension salary-sacrifice benefits capped at £2,000 before National Insurance applies.
• The Cash ISA allowance cut to £12,000 for most under-65s.
• A 22% charge introduced on interest from cash held inside non-cash ISAs.
• Restrictions introduced on transfers and cash-like holdings within ISAs.
• The Energy Profits Levy increased and extended.
• Investment allowances for oil and gas producers reduced.
• A new Vaping Products Duty introduced.
• Tobacco duties increased above inflation.
• Vehicle Excise Duty increased for many new cars.
• Electric vehicles brought into the Vehicle Excise Duty system.
• A new mileage tax announced for electric and plug-in hybrid cars.
• Air Passenger Duty increased.
• Climate Change Levy rates increased.
• Plastic Packaging Tax increased.
• A new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism introduced.
• Making Tax Digital extended to more landlords and self-employed people.
Together they represent one of the biggest transfers of wealth from households and businesses to the Treasury in decades - with no noticeable improvement in public services.
Whether you're a business owner employing staff, a parent paying school fees, a farmer planning succession, an entrepreneur building wealth or simply someone trying to save for retirement...
You keep less of what you earn.
You keep less of what you invest.
You leave less to your family.
Death by a thousand cuts is becoming tax policy.
Various_Autists retweeted
Sozialismus ist das perfekte Geschäftsmodell für Politiker: Er erzeugt Abhängigkeit, und Abhängigkeit erzeugt Wähler. Wer vom Staat lebt – durch Transferleistungen, Subventionen, „soziale“ Absicherung, planwirtschaftliche Privilegien – wählt denjenigen, der die Hähne aufdreht. Der Politiker wird zum Versorger, der Bürger zum Klienten. Je größer die Abhängigkeit, desto größer die Macht. Deshalb lieben sie ihn. Nicht aus Ideologie, sondern aus nacktem Eigeninteresse.
Kapitalismus hingegen ist für die politische Klasse eine existenzielle Bedrohung. Er belohnt Eigenverantwortung, Risiko, Innovation und private Initiative. Er macht Menschen unabhängig vom Staat – und damit unkontrollierbar. Wer seinen Lebensunterhalt selbst verdient, seine Entscheidungen selbst trifft und seinen Wohlstand selbst schafft, braucht keine Gönner in Berlin, Brüssel oder sonstwo.
Jede Regulierung, die „den Markt zähmen“ soll, ist in Wahrheit ein Instrument, um Wettbewerb zu ersticken und etablierte Interessen zu schützen. Der freie Markt braucht keinen Politiker als Mittler. Der Politiker braucht den freien Markt als Feindbild.
Deshalb die ewige Rhetorik: Kapitalismus wird als „gierig“, „ungerecht“, „unsozial“ gebrandmarkt – während der Staat, der mit Gewalt monopolisiert, umverteilt und kontrolliert, als moralische Instanz auftritt. Es ist die älteste Strategie der Macht: die Abhängigkeit als Tugend verkaufen und die Unabhängigkeit als Gefahr.
Der Staat hat kein Interesse an freien Menschen. Er hat Interesse an Untertanen, die ihm dankbar sind. Sozialismus liefert die Untertanen. Kapitalismus liefert die Freien.
#FreiheitstattKnechtschaft #SteuernsindRaub #Eigentum #Freiheit #ParasitenwegmitEuremZwang
Various_Autists retweeted
Guy tries DMT from toad venom and found out.
Shit hits straight to the brain control room 🤯🤯🤯
Various_Autists retweeted
Milei choque le monde avec une première mondiale!
Désormais, si l'Etat entre en déficit et que ce déficit n'est pas résolu en quelques semaines, alors ne seront plus payés les salaires:
- du président
- des ministres
- des principaux fonctionnaires du pays
- des députés
- des sénateurs
Et toutes les dépenses non-essentielles de l'Etat seront purement et simplement gelées.
Une mesure forte, brutale mais tellement logique.
Avec ce système, les dirigeants et les bureaucrates n'auront plus le choix que de maintenir un budget à l'équilibre.
Il est temps qu'ils arrêtent de jouer avec notre argent et notre futur en nous endettant sans limites.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
La mesure décrite est un projet de loi annoncé par le président Milei, qui doit encore être approuvé par le Congrès et n'est pas en vigueur. infobae.com/economia/2026/… nden.com.ar/nota/37558/mil…
Various_Autists retweeted
Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence.
You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram.
The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will.
Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move.
The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.
Various_Autists retweeted
There’s more drama, human interest and authentic storytelling in this Ring footage of a cat saving a chicken from a fox, than in Hollywood’s entire output over the last decade.
I've taken the Free Speech Union's survey on free speech and the Online Safety Act, one year on. Add your experience: freespeechunion.org/campaign…
Various_Autists retweeted
J'en peux plus des mecs de plus de 20 ans qui croient encore au Père Noël.
Alors je vais t'expliquer, comme à un gosse, à quel point c'est attardé de croire au socialisme.
T'es dans une classe de 30 élèves. Un élève bosse comme un fou et a 18 de moyenne. Un autre fait rien et a 4. Le prof décide que c'est injuste et donne à tout le monde la moyenne de la classe : 11.
Celui qui avait 18 arrête de bosser. Pourquoi se fatiguer si ça change rien ? Celui qui avait 4 continue de rien faire. Pourquoi bosser si on te donne 11 gratuitement ?
L'année suivante la moyenne de la classe est à 7. Puis 5. Puis 3.
Le prof ne comprend pas. Il pense que le problème c'est que les élèves ne sont pas assez solidaires. Alors il met en place des punitions pour ceux qui ne font pas assez d'efforts. Il surveille tout le monde. Il décide qui étudie quoi. Il interdit de changer de classe.
C'est exactement ce qui s'est passé. À chaque fois. Dans chaque pays. Sans exception.
URSS, Chine, Cuba, Venezuela, Corée du Nord, Cambodge, Éthiopie, Allemagne de l'Est. 40 tentatives. Même résultat. À chaque fois.
Le socialisme punit ceux qui produisent et récompense ceux qui ne produisent pas. Tout le monde finit par ne plus produire. Et quand plus personne ne produit, le gouvernement utilise la force pour obliger les gens à travailler.
C'est pas un accident. C'est le design.
Le Père Noël, au moins, t'arrêtes d'y croire vers 8 ans.
Various_Autists retweeted
Karl Marx wrote the communist manifesto 7 years before the creation of Limited Liability Companies.
Before then, if you wanted to set up a business you have to be seriously rich because anything the business did could impact your entire net worth. If your business got sued, you could lose your entire estate. Only the very rich had businesses and they ran their businesses like every decision could be financially catastrophic.
Then in 1855, the Limited Liabilities Companies Act was passed into British Law and the game changed.
Suddenly anyone could set up a business, raise investment and trade. There was separation between ownership and control.
This wasn’t lost on Karl Marx either. He wrote good things about this change. He was even a company director at one point.
Essentially, it means that under capitalism you can be a socialist if you want to.
A socialist can set up a company, give shares to all the workers, put workers on the board, pay executives the same as everyone else and if there’s any profit remaining they can freely donate it to the government.
There is absolutely nothing stopping any socialist from living according to these values under a capitalist system.
Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and most of the employees own shares. Many are millionaires. In the UK, John Lewis and Waitrose are owned by their workers and are much loved successful businesses. Capitalism has no problem with workers owning the means of production.
Under capitalism, anyone with an idea can set up a company, pitch to investors and launch it. Starting with nothing, they can be a millionaire (on paper) within a month.
Socialists can lead by example; the fact that they almost never do this tells you a lot about socialists and human nature.
The same is not true under socialism. It is not possible for a capitalist to live according to their values. Under socialism, if I believe in small government, self-sufficiency, low regulations I must leave the country - if it’s even possible to do so. It’s not enough for a socialist to live their values, they need everyone to do it too.
