Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
At 8 a.m. every Wednesday, my team in Tokyo has a Zoom call with our team in Salt Lake City, Utah. For them, it's Tuesday at 4 p.m.
After three years, our side started a shared file. The title: "Things the Utah team does that we still don't understand."
They said I could share some of it.
"The first five minutes are about nothing. Weather. Somebody's dog. Somebody's kid's soccer game. Our manager timed it once. Five minutes and forty seconds, every week. He used to call it waste. Now he logs on early so he won't miss it."
"A three-year-old walked into the frame and announced he had used the potty by himself. Fourteen adults in Utah cheered. Our manager said 'Congratulations' in English. Best moment of the quarter."
"When someone shares an idea, three people unmute just to say 'Love it.' In three years, our side had never unmuted for anything but a problem. Mr. Hoshino now says 'Love it' at home. His wife is suspicious."
"Kenzie ends every call with 'You guys are crushing it.' We were not crushing it. We were six weeks behind. She said it anyway. Every week. We caught up in five."
"They sang Happy Birthday to our oldest engineer at 4:57 p.m. their time. Three minutes before they could go home. Fourteen people. Wildly off-key. He is 61. He said nobody had sung it to him since he was a boy."
The last entry is about Mizuki.
Mizuki is our youngest engineer. He's so quiet that Utah once asked if his camera was a photo.
In March, as a call was ending, after everyone had said bye, he typed one small line in the chat: "My son was born yesterday." Then he left the meeting.
The next Wednesday, Mizuki logged on, and fourteen cameras in Utah turned on at once.
Every single person was holding a sheet of paper. On each one, in marker, copied off the internet: おめでとう. Congratulations.
One of them was upside down. Nobody fixed it.
Fourteen days later, our office got a package. Inside was a tiny onesie with the shape of Utah on it. Fourteen signatures on the box.
His son is eight months old. He has never been outside Japan. He has fourteen aunts and uncles in Utah who have never held him.
Every week, they ask how he's doing.
First five minutes.
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
When I was an Immigration Judge this was my experience. Many of those subject to deportation proceedings had free healthcare in Minnesota.
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
None of this is new. PPO prevented me from hiring Elliot back c. 2017 bc of his Cruz support. Trump came to see that Elliot’s talents outweigh his prior opposition, thus making him more statesmanlike than Cornyn—who seems to take the view that political grudges outweigh merits.
NEW: New Trump judicial nominee Elliot Gaiser backed Ted Cruz in 2016 presidential race, called Trump a "stale" candidate who did not understand policy. via Patrick McNeil nominationnotes.substack.com…
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
Dead zombie economy, in the most literal sense.
I was surprised at how much Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security are now propping up local economies and personal incomes
If you look through the data, Medicare/Medicaid have become the biggest sources of income for particularly non-metropolitan areas. Some stats in the data:
- Government transfers are now 17.6% of all personal income in the US, up from about 8% in 1970. Medicare and Medicaid are 46% of all government transfer dollars!
- 53% of counties get more than 25%+ of their income from government transfers (this covers about 72M people).
- Kentucky seems to be the home of the Colonel and government transfer programs. Twelve of the top fifteen counties receiving government transfers are there. Owsley County gets 63% of personal income from transfers, and Medicaid alone is 32% of all income in the county.
Those government transfers via Medicaid/Medicare get transmuted alchemically into jobs. Phoebe Putney Health System has 6000+ workers and is the largest employer in southwest Georgia. Dougherty County, where it's based, gets 34% of its personal income from government transfers.
In New York we have a program that pays friends and family as caregivers. In 2023 it grew by 57,000 jobs and became 38% of all job growth in the state (they’ve made changes to the program now that have flattened it).
We have become a country of healthcare jobs with a propping of government dollars. Is that fine?
I think this grand bargain worked for a while. We were still seeing economic productivity, government spending hadn’t yet gotten too crazy, etc. But a few things are happening now that suggest the bargain is falling apart.
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
Hasan Piker says that single-payer healthcare is "the only solution."
Ezra Klein asks Piker what happened when Vermont tried to implement single-payer.
Piker is not familiar with it.
Klein explains that it fell apart because the hidden costs of the system suddenly become taxes.
Vermont abandoned its single-payer plan in 2014 after finding that it required an 11.5% payroll tax and income taxes as high as 9.5%.
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
American workers bust their asses in steel toes and hard hats.
The government confiscates their earnings and uses it to buy free housing for non citizens.
Residents of federally funded public housing will be required to show proof of U.S. citizenship or eligible immigration status under a new rule published Thursday. cbsn.ws/4jdWOQ7
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
Je vous présente une des pires pays d'extrême-droite d'Europe, le Danemark 🇩🇰
- 10 points de moins de dépenses publiques que la France
- Excédents budgétaires et dette publique de 29% du PIB
- Licenciement sur simple lettre du patron. Taux de chômage de 3%.
- Pas de SMIC imposé par l'Etat
- Age de départ à la retraite à 67 ans, bientôt 68
- Retraite partition limitée à un minimum vieillesse égal pour tous. Les compléments de retraite se font uniquement par capitalisation
- Environ 48 % de la population a une assurance santé privée
- Politique d’immigration très restrictive : protection temporaire par défaut, regroupement familial difficile, obligation d’intégration réelle
- Résidence permanente seulement après 8 ans + langue + preuve d’emploi soutenu
- Fin du visa automatique pour les migrants au chômage depuis plus de 3 mois
- « Paradigm shift » sur l’asile : protection temporaire par défaut, objectif prioritaire de retour au pays plutôt que d’intégration définitive
- Contrat ordinaire pour l'immense majorité des employés du service public
- Durée de travail limitée à 48h par semaine par l'Etat. Majorité des conventions collectives à 37h par semaine.
- Un des taux d'activité les plus élevés au monde
- Allocation chômage conditionnée à une recherche d’emploi très active : au moins 2 candidatures par semaine, obligation d’accepter des jobs hors de son domaine, risque de perte des droits si on ne prouve pas sa disponibilité
- Interdiction du droit de grève pour certains fonctionnaires
- Impôts sur les bénéfices parmi les plus faibles d'Europe
- Aucun impôt sur la fortune
- Protection de la propriété et justice parmi les meilleures du monde
- Création d’entreprise en 1 jour, entièrement en ligne.
- Classé 7e à l'indice de liberté économique contre 65e pour la France.
- Classé 4e pays de l'OCDE où il est le plus simple de faire des affaires. La France est avant-dernière.
Ça fait peur, très peur. Un véritable enfer néolibéral.
Les heures les plus sombres, à 1 heure de Paris en avion.
😐
Look at the contempt in the eyes of the civil servants. They are stunned that they’re being questioned “why can’t a combat engineer change a lightbulb?”.
This is an example of why we know government spending is the most wasteful and unproductive use of funds in the economy.
Hard working people pay a fortune in tax so these bureaucrats can cook up insane spending programs.
If you’re a tax payer, watch this video and consider how little they care about the money they take from you.
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Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
The fastest way to lower housing prices in America would be to add a comment section to Zillow.
“Oh, you bought this house in 2021 for $287K at 2.5% interest, did ZERO renovations, and now you want $450K because you painted the kitchen cabinets gray?”
Let the internet bully the housing market back into reality.
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
One major revelation from the recent release of a full text message timeline from the sexual assault case at Cornell is that the gang rape narrative originated entirely with Jane Doe’s sorority sisters, who preferred it for obvious reasons. My latest at @thefp:
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
We simply can’t share a country like this
🚨 They didn't lose the child's age. They were trained to leave it out.
Under federal immigration law, sexual abuse of a minor is an aggravated felony. For a noncitizen, it means mandatory detention, deportation and a permanent bar from ever coming back. In my 24 years at ICE ERO, those were the cases we never let slide.
The key element is the child's age. Take the age out of the conviction and you take out the aggravated felony.
According to the House Judiciary Committee report, the Bronx DA's 2019 plea-bargaining guide told prosecutors in these cases to "offer something that does not have the child's age as an element."
Think about what that means. A grown man commits a sex crime against a child. He pleads to something that, on paper, could have been against an adult. The record that reaches ICE no longer shows a child victim. The removal case falls apart, and he stays here.
The child didn't get a plea deal. The child gets to live with it, and maybe in the same neighborhood as him.
This came out Oct. 26. Two weeks later there's been no outrage from the Bronx DA, the AG or the networks. Nothing. @claudiatenney @JudiciaryGOP @Jim_Jordan @itsyourgov @NMalliotakis @EliseStefanik
foxnews.com/politics/house-r…
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
BONES attributed to Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, kept since 1098 in Saint-Nicolas-de-Port, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, were STOLEN from their reliquary inside the basilica, then DESTROYED.
The suspect, arrested at his home, admitted to SMASHING the display case protecting the reliquary, then stealing its contents, BURNING the bones and CRUSHING them out of a “desire to destroy.”
(Source: L'Est Républicain)
Mike 🇺🇸 retweeted
My jaw dropped when I read this...
Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller says ICE asked the illegals they’ve detained if they were receiving Medicaid. HALF SAID THEY HAD BEEN SIGNED UP.
The illegals that don’t have it say they just go to hospitals and it’s always 100% free.
"What we found since President Trump came into office is that the Democrats have set up a system to funnel hundreds of billions and ultimately trillions of dollars to migrants that are in our country, oftentimes from places like Somalia.
So as an example, ICE recently asked a group of illegal immigrants that were in detention, whether or not they were receiving Medicaid. Half of them raised their hands and volunteered that they were on Medicaid.
They also asked how they pay their medical bills, and they said that if they don't have Medicaid, they go to hospitals, they get free care there, and they bill it to the taxpayers. So they aren't paying for any of their own healthcare in this country.
— We've seen this over and over and over again."
