Creating order out of chaos, or reverse (as needed).
Austin, TX
Joined October 2009
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Holy shit, it is so bad they had to use a logarithmic scale.
The Economist's estimate of Britain's age- and sex-standardised conviction rates for sexual offences by the offender's nationality
economist.com/britain/2026/1…
Apparently 1/3 of Californians are idiots
> Poll: Two-Thirds of Californians Know Wealth Tax Will Not be a “one-time-tax”
atr.org/poll-two-thirds-of-c…
Dmitry Grinberg retweeted
Imagine your net worth is $200,000. One day an armed gang comes up to your house and demands $10,000.
“Don’t worry!” the leader says. “I’m only going to do this one time. Plus, it’s only 5% of your net worth. What’s the big deal ?”
After he leaves, you call the cops, but they aren’t interested in investigating the matter. “What’s the big deal?” they tell you. “After all, it’s only 5% of your net worth!”
As you’re preparing to flee the city for a place where you cannot be robbed, Gabriel Zucman appears on your doorstep.
“Why are you leaving?” he asks.
“Somebody just robbed me and the police aren’t going to do anything. I want to live somewhere I can’t be robbed!”
“But sir,” says Mr Zucman, “Have you considered the fact that the man told you it was a one-time tax ? Have you considered that you gain nothing by leaving since the tax is already paid ? There’s no economic reason for you to leave anymore.”
What amazes me is the attitude of so many of the centibillionaires.
A 5% tax will not make any difference to the way they live. Their spending may be extravagant, but it is still much less than their (correctly measured) income.
They know that, as gifted as some of them indeed are, they have benefited from extreme luck (and the help of the state, and, to speak like an economist, monopoly rents).
They know that their effective tax rate is low, relative to what many others pay.
They know that extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, and can lead to political unrest, backlash, or worse.
They must admit that, morally, it is hard to argue for a society in which some become obscenely wealthy, while so many are poor and see their income stagnate.
They typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.
But they are still willing to fight the tax, spending hundreds of millions in California to avoid paying the tax. Why?
They simply think what is theirs is theirs, end of story.
They believe in the slippery slope, and if they do not take a stand on this levy, the government will come back for more.
They hate the state and the notion that their money will be misused?
Or?
Dmitry Grinberg retweeted
The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean. buff.ly/5cLtnha
Dmitry Grinberg retweeted
If the Top 1% of Americans disappeared tomorrow, the 99% would face a catastrophe.
If the Bottom 1% of Americans disappeared tomorrow, the 99% would see an immediate improvement in their day-to-day quality of life and our country would be in a fundamentally better position.
Dmitry Grinberg retweeted
I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road.
France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything.
In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism.
It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything.
Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street."
We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed.
At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.
And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue.
Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home.
Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live.
The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system.
In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us.
Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine.
We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build.
But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap.
Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise.
Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
They want everyone to be equal…ly poor rather than allow anyone to be successful.
I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you.
I come from your future.
In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream.
Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them.
The promise was protection. The result is stagnation.
The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe.
I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has.
Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France?
Trust me. You don’t want to be France.
Not surprising, but thanks for doing the legwork.
We all knew, but I guess better late than never that you admit it too. Welcome to the conversation, BBC.
Nord Stream trial: How German police followed the evidence - to Ukraine bbc.in/3UebPb3
Uhhhhh..
viewfromthewing.com/united-p…
Fuck this guy!
I hope he meets one of his out-on-bail-the-same-day criminals in a dark alley one day.
SEAN KENNEDY to the Texas House Select Committee on Oversight: “I have disturbing news for you...
Not one of you, nor the governor, nor the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court, nor the Lieutenant Governor, nor the Attorney General are the most important or influential person in Texas criminal justice system right now.
That woman is named Jessica Brand.
It's not Jose Garza, it's not John Creuzot, it's not Joe Gonzalez, it's Jessica Brand.
And I'll tell you why. My name is Sean Kennedy, and I'm the policy director of the nonprofit Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, and I'm the principal author of the September 2025 report, Outsourcing Justice: How Donors and Activists Control Progressive Prosecutors and Corrupt the Justice System.
That report, based on 50,000 pages of open records requests, including the five DAs called the Texas Five here in Texas... and across 22 states, we identified 40 different DAs that were the advisees or clients of the Wren Collective.
And I'll explain. In 2019, the Office of Dallas's newly elected district attorney, John Creuzot, signed a non-disclosure agreement with a group called the Justice Collaborative, which received $500,000 the year before in 2018 from George Soros' Open Society Policy Center.
That same year, Mr. Creuzot's campaign received $1 million from the Texas Justice and Public Safety Political Action Committee and the Texas Organizing Project, whose almost sole donor was George Soros.
The Justice Collaboratives, Jessica Brand, and a woman you may be familiar with here in Travis County, Trudy Straussberger, then provided Mr. Creuzot with policies on bail, marijuana, criminal trespassing, and theft.
Tellingly, Mr. Straussberger told Mr. Creuzot's own personal assistant what policies he would be announcing at the press conference to follow.
And then Ms. Brand provided Mr. Creuzot with final line edits on the letter he sent to the county judges and magistrates about his new bail policy. Ms. Brand and Ms. Strausberger arranged a briefing call over those policies with activist groups before the announcement, including the Creuzot donor, the Texas Organizing Project. Ms. Straussberger, who now serves as first assistant to Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza and Ms. Brand, also engaged with the Bexar County new district attorney, Joe Gonzalez. Ms. Brand communicated directly with Mr. Gonzalez and his first assistant, Ken Christian Hendrickson, providing policies on marijuana bail, sentencing, and plea guidelines, and directing them to even drop a specific death penalty case, as well as the charges against a man who assaulted a police officer and was then shot by that officer. But that free advice from Ms. Brand under the guise of her new consulting firm included communications help, policy prescriptions, and direct level advice that wasn't truly free.
The way that Ms. Brand operates is not to provide free advice to her clients because somebody is paying her. It's just not the taxpayers, the people of Texas, or even directly the office that employs her.
It is her donors. And her donors are very powerful and more importantly, are overlapping with the campaign donors to these same district attorneys.
When Miss Straussberger moved on to Travis County in 2021, she also took on a new role as the board secretary for another major campaign donor to all these prosecutors, the Real Justice PAC and the its parent organization, the Grassroots Law Project.
Together, those two groups at the same time paid Ms. Brand's firm over $1.1 million on behalf of these district attorneys, including direct compensation in 2021, the year after Mr. Garza took office for campaign work on behalf of Mr. Garza's campaign...”
(LELDF Policy Director Sean Kennedy testifying today before the Texas House Select Committee on Oversight on the malign influence of radical third-party groups on DA Jose Garza's office in Travis County.)