Thinking, Morality, Logic, Humor, Engineering, Free Enterprise, Technology, Flying, Wisdom, Culture, Mountains, Forests… hold on… somebody left the gate open.
Joined June 2021
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Why isn’t this obvious to half the electorate?
One would think that the median intellect would exclude first-order thinkers.
Premise:
Incentives drive all human behavior.
The corollary:
How to destroy a country:
A vast social security and support system that serves as a magnet for those who would rather not work.
An open immigration policy that does not screen immigrants to determine their ability and willingness to provide for themselves and their families.
An open immigration policy that does not screen for political and/or religious ideologies that are a threat to the country.
Economic incentives large enough to incentivize immigrants on the state dole to have large numbers of children, but insufficient for educated and economically productive mothers to be able to quit to raise a family.
The declining fertility of the most educated and productive women due to their delay to begin a family as a result of their desire and/or need to advance their careers, among other reasons, to live a life they deem consistent with their educational achievements and/or to repay their student debts.
Amnesty programs that give citizenship and voting power to illegal immigrants without consideration of their economic productivity or their threat to the country due to their religious or political ideologies.
The changing demographics and increased population due to the above factors.
The state responding to protests by increasing social support.
The continued failure to punish and hold accountable violent and looting rioters.
Government managed by a massive and growing unelected bureaucracy.
Government fraud, waste, and abuse contributed to ballooning budgets.
Anti-business legislation that makes it difficult for businesses to compete in a global marketplace being disrupted by AI, including restrictions on firing even poorly performing employees.
Overly burdensome, globally uncompetitive, corporate taxation.
Continuous increases in personal taxes to raise funds to provide for the rapidly growing welfare state.
The substantial majority of the tax burden levied on a small percentage of the population.
A growing percentage of the electorate paying no taxes and receiving welfare.
The introduction or threat of a wealth tax including the taxation of unrealized gains, i.e., taxes on paper wealth.
The flight of the most productive business builders and highest taxpayers to lower tax countries with lesser security concerns.
A growing percentage of the electorate voting for candidates that support increased welfare and laws favorable to, and/or that match the cultural and ideological needs and desires of a growing unproductive immigrant population.
The rapid rise in anti-semitism and inadequate efforts to address this hatred.
Increased borrowing by the state to fund the growing social burden.
Higher sovereign interest rates due to all of the above.
The resulting need to reduce expenditures to make the math work.
Increasingly violent protests that make life less livable for the productive and law abiding citizens leading to their accelerated departure.
And so on…
It’s clear why Kennedy’s speech wasn’t in the news…
As some of you know, Bobby Kennedy @RobertKennedyJr is one of my oldest and best friends. I am so proud to know him. I was involved in his Presidential compaign and it's one of the high points of my life. I truly have seen him deliver over well over two hundred speeches, including one of the best I ever saw in Boston as he announced his run. I have lost many of what I thought were friends for supporting him, and tonight I truly do not care. His speech tonight laid it all out as purely and cleanly as anyone could will ever do. Where were are, and what we are up against, in a way no other former Democrat has been able, or has had the courage to say. Please, if you didn't see it. Watch it. I am so proud of this great American and so glad we all have him in our camp and on our side. All of us Democrats and Republicans.
The Angry Labrador retweeted
1955, A Look At Capitalism.
This film was seen by most high school students in that era.
The Angry Labrador retweeted
Atlas Shrugged made simple:
1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.
2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.
3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.
4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.
5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.
6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.
7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.
You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻♂️
The Road to Serfdom made simple:
1. Plan the whole economy: someone must decide what gets made and who gets what, since people don’t naturally agree on one set of priorities.
2. These decisions are too big and detailed for normal democratic debate, so power shifts to a smaller group who can just act – technocrats.
3. Fixed laws everyone can rely on get replaced by case-by-case rulings, because a plan needs flexibility, not predictability.
4. Dissent becomes a problem to manage, not an opinion to vote on – the plan can’t work if people are free to ignore it.
5. Enforcing all that selects for people most willing to be ruthless – Hayek’s “worst get on top” – i.e. negative moral selection.
6. Since economics touches everything (your job, home, speech), controlling the economy ends up controlling your whole life.
That’s the "serfdom."
The Angry Labrador retweeted
Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital.
Cette phrase change tout.
L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ?
Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible.
Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur.
Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé.
Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire.
L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants.
Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution.
Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain.
Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée.
Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien.
La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose.
Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins.
Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires.
La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.
The Angry Labrador retweeted
America before Pearl Harbor was reluctant, divided, and largely protected. Most Americans did not want to enter another world war. Europe and Asia were burning, but the average American still lived in a country with intact towns, working farms, open movie theaters, churches, schools, beaches, baseball fields, diners, factories, and family homes untouched by enemy occupation or mass bombing.
Then Pearl Harbor happened, and in less than four years the United States transformed itself into the greatest military-industrial force in history.
Roughly 16 million Americans served in uniform. American factories produced around 300,000 aircraft, 86,000 tanks, thousands of ships, millions of rifles and machine guns, billions of rounds of ammunition, mountains of uniforms, radios, engines, trucks, landing craft, medical supplies, fuel, and food. Car factories became tank plants. Typewriter companies made weapons. Shipyards launched Liberty ships at astonishing speed. Ford’s Willow Run plant reached the point where it could turn out a B-24 bomber at roughly one per hour. At the same time, America built the Manhattan Project, creating the atomic bomb in secret while also supplying Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and other allies.
But the deepest part is not just what America built. It is what American men left behind.
Many American soldiers left a safe land. They left mothers, fathers, wives, girlfriends, children, farms, small towns, city neighborhoods, Saturday movies, ballgames, bicycles, beaches, church pews, dinner tables, and ordinary American life. They crossed oceans to fight in ruined places for people they had never met and freedoms they themselves were not yet directly losing at home.
Many of America’s allies had no real choice. The British were being bombed. The Soviets were being invaded and slaughtered. The Poles, French, Dutch, Chinese, Filipinos, and many others were fighting occupation, starvation, terror, and conquest on their own soil. For them, the war was already at the front door.
For Americans, the war was an ocean away. Pearl Harbor gave them reason to fight, but the mainland stood untouched. Their towns were not burning. Their children were not under occupation. They left families and safety behind and crossed oceans to fight a war that had not come to their doorstep.
America became the arsenal, shipyard, farm, laboratory, bank, and supply depot of the free world. But it also sent its sons out of comfort into horror. They went from movie houses and baseball diamonds to Normandy, Iwo Jima, the Bulge, Okinawa, Anzio, Guadalcanal, and the skies over Europe. They left a country still laughing, working, dancing, worshiping, building, and dreaming, and many never came home.
Then, after helping win the war, America helped rebuild much of what had been destroyed. It rebuilt former allies and former enemies alike, including Western Europe and Japan. That was America at its best… a country that crushed tyranny and restored the civilization tyranny destroyed.
In under four years, a reluctant and mostly safe nation became the decisive force in the greatest war in history. It built the machines, fed the armies, armed the allies, invented the bomb, crossed the oceans, buried its dead, defeated empires, and then helped rebuild the world. And it did all of that while ordinary American life at home, though burdened by grief and sacrifice, remained spared from the devastation that consumed so many others.
The Angry Labrador retweeted
Fantastic. These people had beautiful voices. Such a loss to go from this to the "music" we have today.
The Angry Labrador retweeted
THE FIRST VACUUM TUBE INTEGRATED CITCUT WAS INVENTED TO BEAT UNFAIR TAXES.
The 1926 German Radio Tax: How One Clever Tube Beat the Bureaucrats (And Why Governments Will Repeat the Mistake with Robots)
~
In 1926, the German government had a brilliant idea for raising revenue from the exciting new world of radio broadcasting: tax the radios themselves. Not by their price, size, or even their power consumption. No. They taxed them by the number of vacuum tubes (or, more precisely, by the number of valveholders or sockets they contained).
The more tubes your receiver had, the higher the Rundfunksteuer (radio tax) you paid. It was a classic case of early 20th century bureaucracy trying to squeeze money out of technology it barely understood.
Enter Loewe Audion GmbH, a German radio manufacturer. They were not about to let a silly per tube tax kill their business. In 1926, they introduced the Loewe 3NF.
A single glass envelope that packed three triode vacuum tubes, plus two fixed capacitors and four fixed resistors, all sealed inside one unit. It was essentially a complete radio receiver circuit in one tube.
A full featured three stage radio now only needed one socket, so it was taxed as a humble single tube set.
The 3NF let Loewe undercut competitors dramatically, and roughly one million of these ingenious devices were produced.
It was, quite literally, one of the worlds first integrated circuits. Decades before the silicon chip. But born not from Moores Law, but from tax evasion.
When one filament eventually burned out (as tubes did back then), the whole expensive assembly had to be replaced, but Loewe even offered a repair service. Innovation driven by government overreach?
Sounds familiar.
Governments Never Learn
Fast forward a century. Radio tubes are long gone, replaced by transistors, microchips, and now AI powered robots and autonomous systems. Yet the bureaucratic impulse remains exactly the same: when something new and productive emerges, tax it by counting its parts in the most literal, outdated way possible.
Imagine the future headlines: New EU Robot Tax Bill: Levy Based on Number of Actuators, Sensors, or AI Cores or how large the parameters. Or an American proposal: Tax robots per motor or per teraflop of compute.
Policymakers, desperate for revenue as automation displaces traditional jobs, will inevitably reach for the same blunt instrument Germany used in 1926.
They will ignore value created, economic output, or societal benefit, and instead fixate on something countable and physical. Just like counting glowing glass envelopes in a wooden radio cabinet.
The 3NF proved that clever engineers will always find a workaround. Companies will design single actuator humanoid robots that somehow perform like multi limbed ones, or cloud based AI systems that minimize on device taxable hardware. Innovation will be diverted into tax dodging contortions rather than genuine progress. Meanwhile, the tax collectors will be left scratching their heads, just as they were when the first 3NF equipped Loewe radios flooded the market.
History does not repeat, but it rhymes. In 1926, the German state tried to meter the future with 19th century logic and got outmaneuvered by a single brilliant tube.
A hundred years later, when robots roam factories, homes, and streets, the same shortsightedness will return. Because governments, like bad comedians, only have one joke.
The Loewe 3NF was not just a radio part. It was a warning: tax the technology stupidly, and the technology will tax you right back.
Needlessly highfalutin, but worth a read…
Food for thought.
Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride
For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.
The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.
Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.
In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.
In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.
A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.
By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.
In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.
The Angry Labrador retweeted
We’re going back to the Moon on February 6, and no one is talking about it
Artemis II is NASA’s first crewed Moon flyby mission in decades, sending four astronauts around the Moon and back in a ~10-day test flight before future lunar landings
Who excited?
The Angry Labrador retweeted
“There has never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free market.”
— Milton Friedman
The Angry Labrador retweeted
We cannot let them stay.
Debates regarding illegal immigration often focus on policy issues like welfare, healthcare, crime, economic contribution, etc. That is a distraction.
Democracy is the real issue. Status quo is that any city or state desirous of greater power can declare a suspension of federal law and import millions of illegal aliens for the purpose of inflating their electoral votes and Congressional representation.
Arguments about illegal immigrants voting directly in elections fraudulently usually miss this point. If you offer the political architects of these rebellions a trade, permanent amnesty and residency for all aliens with clear agreement that they cannot be counted for the purposes of electing our President or Congress, they will adamantly refuse.
Why? Because the people pushing this do not want immigrants from socially-conservative countries in Latin America to actually vote. They want to vote on their behalf via census representation, much like reconstruction-era Southern states demanded for newly-freed slaves. Their ideal situation is an urban core of deeply aligned ideologues voting with the power of millions of illegal aliens, currently worth dozens of Congressman and eight states worth of electoral votes.
There is an effectively unlimited supply of poor people from poor countries that want to live in the United States who can be used to fuel this strategy. Some might be net positive to the US economy, some might not be, but that is beside the point - all would equally contribute to a future where minority rules the majority with no recourse.
Rewarding states that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of American law ensures other states will use these same tactics, if only to maintain their own relative power. It will end our republic.