George Carty

It's not crazy. Data centers can be built anywhere. If one jurisdiction is run by Luddites, developers go to the next one. Location is commoditized this way, enabling economic growth. Rail has to go in specific places, which can extract surplus or even destroy it due to anti-development ideology.

So many motherfuckers historically say "Humble Farmer" to mean "Plantation Owner". Cincinnatus wasn't out in the damn fields.

Ukraine hits one or two Russian data-centers, and all of a sudden the tune Elon's long been humming grows much more pronounced. One might almost begin to think his propaganda-based business model remains critically dependent on Russian bot farms?

“I wish we could go back in time to when white people were 1/3 of the earth’s population, things were better then!”

With abusive, compromised men being deliberately vetted into positions of power again, I'd like to reprint an orphaned Twitter thread by @phill.hallambaker.com from a little over 3 years ago about how Russia recruits foreign agents. 🧵

Realistically, I think it would be unwise to nationalize SpaceX - we have national SpaceX, we call it NASA - but I imagine creative application of the president's national security industrial policy powers might be able to force it to go public on an 1-vote-1-share structure with Musk forced out.

Tbh I think it’s more complicated than that. Most Americans *do* think that if only we cut foreign aid and kicked out all the corrupt bureaucrats and the illegals stealing welfare we’d be able to hack social security up to 6 figures per year *and* cut taxes

In the medieval Holy Roman Empire runaway serfs could become free if they fled to a city and avoided recapture for a year and a day: they called it "Stadtluft macht frei".

ultimately it's shit like this that makes the decline of birth rates and resulting demographic skewing towards old people self-reinforcing. Greedy, wealthy retired people voting to destroy the funding for public services they relied on throughout their life now that they no longer need them

Tbh I don’t know if it’s the media or just the politics around EVs are rancid: 1. Our EV national champion is run by TEMU Albert Speer 2. Republicans think climate change is fake and gay 3. Dems think EV strategy should satisfy a UAW wishlist first

Unfettered, unanswered Russian psy-ops against the American public began in 2014. The national security people knew then and know now. The problem is there is no deterrent force to prevent it. Our nukes cannot & will not stop Putin's attack on our nation. 1/

Vance's endgame (put Europe in Russia's sphere of influence) is remarkable. Suffice it to say, an earlier generation of "Western Civilization" Catholics would be rather put out by the idea of subordinating "the West" to violent Orthodox nationalism and in the process crippling the Roman church.

In a perverse way Hegseth's "revamping" of public execution is just as much a part of this as "Bowling Alone." An institution once as public and social as drinking fountains and libraries converted into an atomized, individual Internet experience almost perfectly encapsulates the modern far right.

Genuinely kinda crazy that in an era where shien/temu/amazon are clearly eating a decent chunk of mall sales, this is still being treated as the end all be all of economic health

The average person in Iran in 1979 could not read (only 37% of the population was literate) and did not have access to electricity (available only to 43% of the population) or indoor plumbing (just 33% of Iranians did, including a mere 8% in rural areas). Pahlavi Iran should not be romanticized.

I wonder what has driven the Tories into climate change denial under Badenoch: is it more about chasing car-brained voters, or more about chasing fossil fuel industry and petrostate donors?

There was apparently a conversation between Arafat and Ho Chi Minh that went something like this HCM: So you want to throw the Jews out. YA: Yes HCM: Do they have anywhere else to go? YA: No. HCM: Well, you’re going to lose then.

A thing that was very clear at the time is that while it’s true that the United States has a lot of leverage, Israel is a sovereign nation with its own politics, and Netanyahu was, in addition to leading a coalition of aspiring genocidaires, literally going to go prison if the war stopped

Biden literally did the mythical One Phone Call that would stop Israel in it's tracks, &... it didn't stop Israel in it's tracks.

"Civil Rights were unpopular" and "people enacted the 1960's land use regime out of good-faith concern about out of control capitalism" is a weirdly common set of beliefs

“If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’” crazy how much Mamdani speaks my language

in an insane world only the insane are sane

Failing to keep your construction industry in good working order has consequences! Serious, devastating consequences! In many ways, it's even worse than everyone's boogeyman of deindustrialization (though one feeds the other) because while you can import goods, you can't import buildings.

So much of Silicon Valley has the need to cloak themselves in a mystique of one form or another, when the truth is that Thiel got lucky during the dot-com bubble making a direct-to-pay app. He has no special moral or intellectual authority, he just wrote some code for PayPal.

I'm sad to see LC fall for this. These ideas are fundamentally illiberal, and if implemented would result in yet another form of regulation which _guarantees_ that only the incumbents in the space can afford to comply. Maybe get Techdirt or the EFF to write a rebuttal to this essay?

There is no better world to "RETVRN" to, there's only bad plumbing, tuberculosis, and racism. The US in 1950 had roughly the same GDP per capita as modern Malaysia. Nazi Germany was poorer than today's Libya. Great Britain, at the apex of the British Empire in 1900, was poorer than modern Vietnam!

The far right's commitment to short-lived racist states that flopped (Rhodesia, Nazi Germany) really is something to behold. You'd think they would want to emulate more successful regimes like the British Raj or even Leopold's Congo (goodness knows they don't care about mass murder) but no.

I cannot stress enough the extent to which it appeared the US was about to lose the Cold War by 1979. There is a reason the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and it was because the US seemed on the verge of total economic and military defeat.

Why the US "pro-life" movement has no interest in supporting women with unplanned pregnancies _after_ the birth.

The price of Urals oil peaked back above $120 a barrel. Trump's stupid war against Iran is helping Putin.

they blame billionaires so you won't blame NIMBYs

And make no mistake, these ideas *are* insane. A Huntington-style belief that Muslim immigration is somehow more of a threat to the US and its allies than the PLA and the FSB is not a serious ideology, it is a joke. These are luxury beliefs that could only come from bored racists in the unipolar era

Darkly ironic that 70 years on, Ayn Rand's archetypal "proof that capitalism works" in *Atlas Shrugged* (a high speed rail line) is the province of self-described socialists, while the right has wholly embraced cronyism and become the home of looters, snake-oil salesmen, and scammers.

Heres another question. Who here honestly thinks moderating on trans rights is a key to winning an election? Like real talk. Put your anger at online fighting down and think with your mind. This is not a salent issue to the median voter, who put Trump into office because of the price of eggs.

"We will not prosecute the abusers named in the Epstein files or reveal their names to the public."says Todd Blanche, US Attorney General. This is THE reason he was nominated by Trump and republicans signed off and confirmed him. If you support a single republican candidate, you approve this too

Republicans spent 25 years branding themselves as the party of gas-guzzling Ford F150s and "drill baby drill" and then they ... ... start a war with Iran that sends oil prices soaring, spiking inflation and jacking bond yields into the stratosphere? No wonder they don't want to face the voters.

On Mohamed Atta's hatred of tall buildings...