Socialism is a machine for consuming capital while pretending to create it. Every socialist program starts the same way: a politician identifies something people want, promises to deliver it without a visible price tag, and taxes or prints the money to fund it. Venezuela had this down to an art form by 2015. Price controls on food, nationalized oil revenues redistributed as subsidies, Maduro declaring the supermarket shelves would stay full. By 2017, Venezuelans lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight from hunger. The machine ate the capital, then ate the people. Prices carry information. When a government fixes the price of bread below market, bakers stop baking. When it taxes productive capital to fund consumption, the capital stock shrinks. Ludwig von Mises called this the calculation problem: without genuine price signals, central planners are flying blind, allocating resources based on political pressure rather than actual scarcity. Chronic shortage sits underneath their rhetoric of abundance. Rent is higher because zoning boards and rent stabilization laws choked off housing supply in cities like San Francisco for decades. Your healthcare costs more because Medicare and Medicaid inflate demand while regulatory capture insulates hospitals from competition. Specific politicians passed specific laws that produced specific shortages, then campaigned for re-election by blaming the market. Voting for a slightly less interventionist candidate while holding your savings in dollars is rearranging furniture on a sinking ship. Hard assets held outside the banking system, particularly bitcoin, gold, property, and stocks, remove your stored labor from the reach of the printing press. This is a basic act of self-preservation in a system designed to extract your productivity under the guise of compassion. Stop waiting for permission to opt out.

If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America, $5,000! Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to signing those checks!

Straight bribing and lying doing it 🤦🤡 WTF have we become, WTF have we allowed

Governor Maura Healey (D) wants Massachusetts voters to remember that she is a former attorney general who “prosecuted and put away bad guys. Drug traffickers, human traffickers.” Meanwhile, a Healey staffer is facing drug-trafficking charges, and the state somehow managed to mistakenly pay him $30,000 of taxpayer money after he was fired. You cannot script this level of government incompetence. Healey campaigns as the tough former prosecutor while the government she runs apparently cannot even prevent a fired employee facing serious criminal charges from receiving an erroneous taxpayer-funded payout. Massachusetts does not have an accountability problem because taxpayers are not paying enough. It has an accountability problem because one-party government has become so insulated from consequences that even spectacular failures are treated like routine administrative errors, And Healey wants four more years.

.@swell_school recently asked me “Given what happened to people’s bodies when cheap calories became widely available, what do you think will happen to people’s brains as cheap thinking becomes widely available?” and I cannot stop thinking about it.

Hubris check: I have said multiple times in public that if I hadn’t come up with @SeedSigner, that I would probably have been a coldcard user. I liked their messaging on privacy issues, I liked that they were bitcoin-only, and even I had the impression that rodolfo’s arrogance was the product of some level of expertise and having-your-shit-togetherness. I can’t blame many people for being convinced by the marketing. What matters from here is how people move forward. Dive in. Learn more. Do the work. Ask questions. Trust less. Get to a point where you have failsafes and diversified custody. Learn about multisig and at least give it a try (hint: you just need one SeedSigner to do this). Even if you decide it’s not for you, you’ll feel better about your setup and can share what you’ve learned with others. Take more control, not less — don’t be a cold storage NPC. 🧡

Good morning. Last night at 8:51pm Mountain Time, the Valar Atomics Nuclear Operations team brought Ward 250 to 10kW thermal output. We held this power level throughout the night. This is another historic milestone from the Valar team, marking first nuclear power by a startup.

Donald Trump is right about this: Eliminate the debt limit—its only real function is to threaten an economic crisis. I'm ready to work with both Democratic and Republican Senators to immediately scrap the debt ceiling and protect the economy.