It shouldn’t be tough to make a watchable flying video automatically. Speed up taxi by 10X. Cut any portions where the aircraft is on the ground and not moving for more than 5 seconds. Do takeoff at 1X, gradually increasing to 10X as the aircraft climbs to cruising altitude, then slowing back down to 1X for landing. A one-hour start-to-shutdown trip to the beach thus turns into a 7-minute video.
There are some transportation machines with integrated cameras, notably Tesla cars. The machines are also bristling with onboard AI (not SI because Elon’s keeps delaying the AI5 chip; now “late 2027” (which means 2029?) after being announced in June 2024 and promised for January 2026; a Tesla delivered with the sluggish HW4 silicon might never reach anything like autonomy because Tesla put a more powerful processor into its Cybercab (source)).
Why can’t the Tesla’s fancy computers look for aesthetic and/or interesting photos to capture during every drive and offer the owner a highlights photo album to browse and share? It could be customized. Someone interested in fashion who drives around a city could tell the Tesla to take pictures of pedestrians in high-fashion outfits. Someone interested in architecture could tell the Tesla to take labeled pictures of historically important buildings, including those on the National Register of Historic Places and in the SAH Archipedia (from the Society of Architectural Historians; founded at Harvard in 1940 (if it were started today at Harvard would the focus be entirely on buildings in Gaza?)). A horticulture hobbyist could ask the Tesla to look for unusual trees and label them.
Here’s a photo taken from a car that a Tesla should have been able to figure out was worth keeping:
Garry Winogrand famously used a car as a rolling photo platform in Los Angeles starting in the 1950s. Sadly, he didn’t have AI5 to sort through the pictures and, therefore, died with “2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made” (times 36 pictures for each roll for those of you who aren’t old enough to remember the film days). Examples highlighting just how realistic Adobe Photoshop’s “add film grain” filters can be:
Most American drives are on ugly and/or boring roads that the owner is forced to use repetitively, e.g., to commute to work? Well, our AI overlords haven’t snarfed up every last SSD (yet) and the retention period doesn’t have to be infinite. If Tesla wants to cheap out on data center resources, it could have the owner configure a cloud service to which the albums would be uploaded whenever the vehicle got into a good WiFi coverage area.
What’s an example of a drive where one wouldn’t expect to want a memory, but something interesting appeared anyway? A friend recently took the trouble to capture a photo of a bumper sticker collection (below) on a highway leading into Boston, which ordinarily has nothing to offer aesthetically.
(Mexican flag because the American flag is a symbol of hate, oppression, slavery, and settler colonialism; University of Michigan directly above because taxpayers in the Islamic Republic of Michigan, such as Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, should be enthusiastic about subsidizing education for Mexicans; a non-compliant Rainbow flag on the opposite side (no trans-enhancement as displayed on the Biden White House); a Resist Fascism tableaux; and an infinity symbol that ChatGPT can’t identify, but Claude says “This is commonly used as a symbol for neurodiversity, particularly autism acceptance.”)
The Tesla could be told to include pictures of any interesting decorations, including bumper stickers and holiday decor. Floridians do amazing things with Jeeps at Halloween and Christmas.
Loosely related… Edward Weston pointed out that “Anything more than 500 yards from the car just isn’t photogenic.” (sometimes the distance is quoted as 100 yards, which is about as far as I would want to carry an 8×10 view camera and the surveyor’s tripod)
Like Greta Thunberg, I don’t like to hear officials mouthing “empty words”. Here’s a recent example of an expression that is all too common in my view: “something bad has no place here”. A governor whose own house was torched by a pro-Hamas Jew-hater says “Hate and antisemitism have no place in our Commonwealth”:
My Administration has been in touch with local officials in Philadelphia ahead of the planned protest on Sunday that’s designed to intimidate and drive Jewish businesses out of our communities.
Hate and antisemitism have no place in our Commonwealth. And I’m grateful to state…
Why are empty words like this problematic? The first step in any 12-step program is admitting that you have a problem. Mx. Shapiro here denies that Pennsylvania and his/her/zir/their fellow Democrats contain any Jew-haters (“hate has no place”). Failure to admit that the problem exists will inevitably lead to a failure to take effective action.
Admittedly, it is unclear what effective action American elected officials could take, other than halting immigration from countries where Jew-hatred is the norm. A negative obsession with the world’s one majority-Jewish country seems to be a path to electoral success in the U.S. now, just as it has been a path to obtaining and holding high office at the United Nations (“António Guterres has posted about Gaza and the Palestinians 262 times since October 7, 2023. Eleven other major crises, combined: 185.” (X, October 26, 2026)). If they were willing to sacrifice some votes, Democrats could simply expel progressives from their party, I guess.
Where is today’s place for hate in Pennsylvania? Rittenhouse Square, Filthadelphia, according to the organizers. It’s not officially a “Jew-hate” rally, but rather hate for “Zionists”, except that the only businesses being boycotted are those owned by Jews (at least one of whom was apparently born in raised in the Philadelphia suburbs). Businesses owned by non-Jews who’ve expressed support for Israel’s existence aren’t being targeted. They’re going to “roll” in 5 minutes, fortunately not in violation of the sacred “I don’t roll on Shabbos” rule.
The bad news is that a majority of California voters so far have rejected a 5% wealth tax on noxious billionaires, the people who make our neighborhoods unsafe, clutter the roads with traffic, and call/text us all the time with various financial scams. (Our Jupiter, Florida neighborhood is afflicted by being close to Michael Jordan’s house in a gated community nearby and I blame most of our problems on him.) The good news, according to the New York Times, is that 28% of the vote has yet to be counted. It is four days after the purported election and there is still plenty of time for the righteous to find enough Yes votes to strike a blow against inequality.
I saw headlines about Russell Brand being convicted in the UK of various acts that allegedly occurred between 17 and 22 years ago (2004-2009). Since I don’t usually have the patience to read about 17-year-old encounters between individuals, I asked ChatGPT to summarize it for me. The most serious crime of which he was convicted was rape and ChatGPT’s summary begins as follows:
[The survivor] attended Brand’s comedy performance at London’s Hammersmith Apollo, accepted an invitation for drinks afterward, and participated in a sexual encounter with Brand and another woman in his dressing room. Subsequently, she agreed to visit Brand at his London home and have consensual intercourse.
Then something happened while the two of them were in bed. Although there was no physical evidence or any witness to corroborate any part of the survivor’s story, what added credibility to her dramatic tale, according to ChatGPT, was that Brand texted her an apology in 2009. I asked how a text message had been preserved for 17 years, which seems like a long retention period for a mobile carrier.
(ChatGPT says that a big factor in Brand’s conviction was that he wasn’t consistent in trying to recall events from 2009, e.g., where exactly he was on certain dates, whether he recognized the survivors or not.)
One question for today is why the Islamic Republic of the UK allows women to be victimized in this manner. Under Sharia law, none of the above could have happened. Brand and survivor couldn’t have been drinking alcohol (haram). Brand and the survivor and some other woman couldn’t have been meeting in private in Brand’s dressing room (also haram; both women would have needed escorts from male relatives as well as burqas). The survivor couldn’t have gone to Brand’s house and been alone with him there (haram).
The second question is why Brand didn’t flee. ChatGPT says that he was actually living in Florida in April 2025 and had a valid passport in his hands. Gemini says that Brand has a net worth of approximately $20 million. He could have gone to one of the countries that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the Islamic Republic of the UK. ChatGPT says that Russia, for example, has no extradition treaty with the UK, bars prosecution for rape after 10 years, and “Russia’s extradition law expressly prohibits extradition when the prosecution is barred by Russia’s statute of limitations.” If Brand had secured Russian citizenship, his extradition would have been barred by Article 61 of the Russian constitution. ChatGPT can’t find a single example of anyone accused of rape ever having been extradited from Russia to the UK. ChatGPT prepared a table of all of the warnings that Brand had:
A summary on X that predicts Brand will be imprisoned for 8-15 years (summarized on X as “Russell Brand will get more time in prison for a “rape” that allegedly occurred 20 years ago than Pakistani men who raped British girls for 20 years. Why does Britain hate its own people so much?”):
These are the details of Russell Brand's rape conviction:
– Brand met a fan at one of his gigs in 2009 and invited her backstage
– She had a consensual threesome with him – "used her tongue on his anus" "within moments" of meeting him
Finally, while we’re at it, how about Sharia law for Massachusetts, where people say that they want to (1) protect survivors, and (2) welcome Muslim immigrants. The Whitehead Institute and MIT would have been operating separate labs for men and women. Survivor Kristin Knouse could never have been alone with David Sabatini and, therefore, could never have suffered the victimization that she says she suffered at David Sabatini’s hands (so to speak). Prof. Dr. Knouse, Ph.D. wouldn’t have been able to go to Sabatini’s hotel room in the middle of the night and be alone with him there (“Evidently, we did end up having sex” says Knouse, after reviewing the text message history at her deposition, below (a message history that the Whitehead’s crack legal “independent” investigators didn’t find and never noticed that it was missing, thus revealing inferior electronic forensic skills vs. our 11-year-old)).
🤯🎯
“Why were you trying to confirm the room number of his door at 1:35 in the morning???”
Here is MIT’s MeToo hoaxer Kristin Knouse evading questions and pretending not to understand them in her cross-examination by David Sabatini’s lawyer.
Email from Vanguard with “important information related to one or more of your holdings”:
The annual report of a fund that can invest only in U.S. government short-term instruments certainly would make for fascinating/important reading. What caught my eye, however, was the expense ratio of 0.11%. That’s huge compared to S&P 500 index funds (0.015% to 0.03% expense ratio is typical). Gemini:
These are actively managed portfolios. Fund managers must constantly buy short-term debt securities (like Commercial Paper or Treasury Bills) that mature in days or weeks. Every single day, a massive volume of these securities expires, and managers must actively find and buy new ones to replace them while keeping the fund safe.
If this is truly a big part of the cost, why can’t a robot deal with the $376 billion in assets that Vanguard customers have in this fund?
I asked a friend who managed $billions on and off Wall Street about this. He said, “One reason that stock mutual funds can offer low fees is that they have the opportunity to make money by lending shares to short sellers,” and added, “When I worked at Goldman, our money market was one of the firm’s most profitable activities.” So maybe there is room for an AI-based competitor? A new direction for Binance?
Speaking of money markets, the 6% yield available from Elon Musk has been nerfed. (See Life with X Money (do you get wiped out when the world wakes up to Starship being a total failure?) from just a month ago.) A recent notice on the site says “Effective December 1, 2026, accounts that are eligible to earn 6.00% APY will earn that rate on the first $150,000 of deposits. Any amount greater than $150,000 will earn 4.00% APY.”
(The 4% number beats a Bank of America savings account, for sure, but it falls short of market-leading (NerdWallet has a list).)
It’s not a “replacement”, but Nithya Raman, “born in Kerala, India”, will be replacing Karen Bass, “the first African-American woman in United States history to serve as a speaker of a state legislative body”, as mayor of Los Angeles. In conceding the race, Karen Bass’s very first sentence stressed her own skin color: “Four years ago, you elected me as the first Black woman mayor in the history of Los Angeles.” This is yet another example of how wrong President Trump was when he famously said that immigrants were “taking Black jobs” (see below).
Let’s compare the native-born American and the immigrant who is not her replacement.
Karen Bass (not replaced, but soon to be unemployed)
Nithya Raman (not a replacement, but will have Bass’s job)
One month after the Gazans mostly peacefully crossed the border to kill and kidnap Thai Buddhists, American citizens, EU citizens, Israelis, et al: “In November 2023, Raman adjourned a city council meeting to memorialize “the many civilian lives that have now been lost in Gaza”.” Also, “In June 2024, she and Councilmembers Hernandez and Soto-Martinez introduced a municipal resolution to call for an “immediate and permanent ceasefire” in the Gaza war.” (the ceasefire that Hamas, UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad sought for rearmament)
Housing is a Human Right
Wanted to restrict camping near schools and parks.
Wanted to allow camping wherever the unhoused wished to house themselves.
What’s the incoming (not “replacement”) immigrant mayor’s plan? Bring in more immigrants to intensify the competitions for jobs (lower wages for African-Americans) and apartments (higher rents for African-Americans).
What about Jewish political power in Los Angeles? Actual Jewish Jews have so little relevance now that Candidate Raman felt free to tell a Jewish audience in LA that Israel was guilty of “genocide” (Fox, below). It’s interesting that Nithya Raman was able to enhance her chances of winning a city office by saying negative things about a foreign country that she’s never visited. What is the possible relevance to running Los Angeles? (Same question about her 2023 and 2024 city council advocacy for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and other Arab fighters who call themselves “Palestinian”)
(Let’s not forget that the Gazans are simultaneously suffering from both genocide and the challenge of managing rapid population growth.)
How about the overall number of Black voters in Los Angeles? Gemini says that Blacks were 13.5-15% of the city’s population in 1965 when Congress opened U.S. borders via Hart-Celler. The Black population today is about 8%. Again, remember that this is not a “replacement”.
Related:
“What’s a ‘Black Job’? Trump’s Anti-Immigration Remarks Are Met With Derision” (New York Times, June 2024) about the completely false information being spread by a president whose election was completely illegitimate: ““They’re taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs and you haven’t seen it yet but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday, speaking of migrants crossing the southern U.S. border. He then repeated the reference during a campaign rally in Virginia on Friday, adding that Black Americans who have had jobs “for a long time” are losing employment to immigrants.” (Karen Bass had been collecting a government paycheck for 22 years (since 2004) before she was “not replaced” by an immigrant.)
Below, Nithya Raman’s campaign site promises that Black Americans who work in brick-and-mortar stores and restaurants will face increased competition from street vendors who are “overwhelmingly immigrants and women”.
South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mini-tigers, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, are facing flat domestic demand in key industrial countries, inventory corrections in the U.S., oversupply in the electronics industry, U.S. dollar strength and tight monetary conditions at home. These are cyclical problems that will reverse themselves soon enough. Down the line, the tigers may start facing structural constraints if they don’t educate their work force better, start investing more on R&D and become more receptive to skilled foreign workers. But for the time being, much of the present fear is misplaced.
Not everyone shares this view. Among the most famous critics of the “economic miracle” is U.S. economist Paul Krugman, who says that the region’s economies have prospered because of an exceptionally rapid expansion of inputs–labor and capital–rather than robust growth in output per unit of input, also known as productivity gains.
The Krugman thesis rests on the old-fashioned assumption that economic growth can be accounted for in terms of three distinct factors: labor, capital and technological progress. The third factor is considered independent of the other two; technological progress simply descends on an economy like “manna from heaven” instead of being the result of deliberate actions of profit-seeking agents. The thesis also holds that there is no tangible link between investment–in both human and physical capital–and technological progress. Underpinning much of Mr. Krugman’s claim that the input-driven expansion seen in East Asia is subject to constraints is the phenomenon of “diminishing returns.” The advantages derived from progress lessen with each passing day.
Imagine an investor who took Nobel laureate Krugman’s advice and shorted the following stocks in 1996: TSMC, Foxconn, ASUS (all were public companies at the time, ASUS having gone public exactly 30 years ago). How would such a Science-informed investor have done?
I asked ChatGPT to look into this.
Thirty years later, Taiwan’s economic performance presents a substantial challenge to the pessimistic interpretation of Paul Krugman’s 1994 argument about the Asian economic miracle. The interesting question isn’t simply whether Taiwan continued growing. It did. The more important question is whether Taiwan managed to sustain economic growth through productivity improvements rather than merely accumulating more capital and labor. And on that question, we now have nearly three decades of evidence.
Between 1995 and 2025, Taiwan’s real GDP per worker increased by 160%, compared with 59% in the United States, 118% in South Korea, and just 18% in Japan. … In 1995, Taiwanese workers produced about 56% as much output per worker as Americans. By 2025, that figure had risen to approximately 92%. What does this say about Krugman’s prediction? It provides strong evidence against the idea that Taiwan’s growth would soon run into a severe productivity-related ceiling.
Taiwan sustained 3.24% annual growth in real output per worker for 30 years, during a period when the United States managed 1.56%.
The growth story is remarkable because we’re informed that importing humans from all of the world’s poorest, most violent, and most dysfunctional societies has been the basis for U.S. economic growth. Taiwan has had some temporary workers from functional societies, such as Thailand, but they weren’t invited to immigrate. Taiwan does not offer asylum. Taiwan has accepted no refugees during the 30 years covered. Taiwan will barely accept the Haitians and Somalis who built Boston and Minneapolis as visitors and certainly not as immigrants. While 25% of the world’s Mexicans live in the U.S., ChatGPT can’t find even one example of a Mexican emigrating to Taiwan.
What about the specific inspired-by-Krugman short seller. If he/she/ze/they (the trans have always been with us, even in 1996) had shorted $1,000 each of TSMC, Foxconn, and ASUS at the end of 1996 would currently be down $816,257:
One tweak: “For an American investor, we should also account for the Taiwan dollar’s depreciation against the U.S. dollar.” The loss after currency adjustment would be only $681,185 on the $3,000 short. On the other hand, the loss is understated because ChatGPT thinks that it couldn’t fully account for stock dividends, ASUS’s Pegatron spinoff (2010), and the borrowing costs for the shares.
Asked to explain how Taiwan could have thrived with a workforce that grew older and almost no low-skill immigration, ChatGPT cites a Congressional Budget Office study from 2024 that predicted the Biden-Harris immigration surge would result in lower U.S. GDP per capita:
What about the strategy of importing welfare-dependent young people as a means of dealing with the challenge of providing for a growing number of welfare-dependent old people? That’s supposedly necessary to avoid economic decline due to an increasing median age. Over the 30 years covered by this analysis, Taiwan’s median age went from 29.8 to 45.7. The Taiwanese are growing much faster than we are right now, especially per capita, despite having a higher median age population (the U.S. is at 39.4 years). Here are the aggregate numbers (per-capita would make the U.S. look worse):
What will change for you personally as a result of yesterday’s election? (unless you’re a California, I guess, in which case the full results might not be known for a few weeks)
(The second part of this post covers the question of why it took so long for “socialism” to become popular. My best guess is that the welfare state expansion during coronapanic tipped us from “almost half the voters are dependent on government” to “more than half the voters are dependent on government or at least don’t pay for government.”)
One big change in Florida is the loss of Ron DeSantis, albeit to term limits rather than to the election per se. He was a once-in-a-generation administrative talent and I’m sure that substituting almost anyone else would inevitably result in paying more in taxes and/or getting less in services (Florida state taxes are primarily consumption taxes, e.g., the 6% sales tax, though there is a 5.5 percent income tax on C corporations that do business within the state). DeSantis was instrumental in hardening the power grid here in Florida and also in organizing and motivating amazingly swift post-hurricane restoration, e.g., of bridges, local power lines, etc. DeSantis is being replaced by Byron Donalds. I wasn’t too excited about this race because his opponent, Democrat David Jolly, wasn’t an AOC/Mamdani/El-Sayed-style Democrat. I guess Byron Donalds is preferable because he happens to be Black and it will be entertaining to see white Democrats attacking a Black man as stupid, racist, Science-denying, etc. (They already do that with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, a Harvard M.D./Ph.D.)
I have to say that the election results in Florida demonstrate the power of promising voters free stuff. Democratic Socialist Angie Nixon came within 1% of winning the Senate race against the perfectly pleasant Ashley Moody. Nixon is a high-income person ($270,000/year) who hasn’t paid her federal taxes or federally-guaranteed student loans and, moreover, says that she shouldn’t have to because someone with a yet-higher income should pay for her education and her government-provided services (“I don’t wanna pay it back. Education supposed to be free.”; source). Voters overwhelming approved an amendment to the state constitution to increase the homestead exemption for general property taxes, i.e., shifting the burden of local/county government to renters, seasonal residents, commercial property owners, and, generally, “other people.” The amendment puts no per-capita spending growth limits on counties and those who are entirely exempt from paying tax can vote for increased services to be paid for by “other people”. (This could conceivably save us some money because we are homeowners and year-round residents entitled to the homestead exemption, but I still voted against it and think it is a terrible idea.)
You can see from the map below that our 50/50 county (lower right, 3rd up) voted for Angie Nixon, the above-referenced “socialist” (a label that is unfair to the Soviets because under Soviet socialism every able-bodied adult was required to work):
Ron DeSantis really should get credit for all of these narrow Republican victories in Florida. DeSantis reshaped the Florida electorate by rejecting lockdowns, mask orders, and forced vaccinations. The people who moved to Florida since 2020 have been overwhelmingly Republican, so much so that this has even overpowered the nationwide reshaping of the electorate via low-skill immigration.
One strange election outcome is that people voted to shift the burden of state government away from wealthy farm owners and onto themselves. Amendment 2, which “Exempts tangible personal property used in agricultural production” passed overwhelmingly:
Only about 1.5 percent of Floridians work in agriculture. Maybe 0.15 percent of Floridians, therefore, actually own a farm or other agricultural business. I am deeply confused by this vote. Maybe the voters think that the tax fairy will pay when the farmers stop paying an admittedly modest annual sum? How hard is it to figure out that, aside for some tourists, the state government doesn’t have a source of money other than us?
Now that government is perceived as free (“someone else will pay”), I guess it makes sense that voters approved three Palm Beach County ballot questions that will be paid for by the property tax that they are no longer paying. One is to continue “an existing 1-mill property tax for four more years to support school safety, mental-health services, teachers and other programs” (if it is for the schools, actually, it might not be covered by the new Amendment 3 exemption). Voters also approved $280 million in bonds for parks and $175 million in bonds for new and renovated libraries. These will be paid back by property taxes that homesteaders think they won’t have to be part of.
One silver lining of Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed becoming a senator is that finally my proposals to reintroduce nationwide alcohol prohibition will have a chance. (See Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.? (2016) and Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? (2020), for example.) Keep in mind that the Cornell Genocide wouldn’t have occurred if the U.S. had adopted Sharia law. Jane Doe/Lucy Craig wouldn’t have been guzzling alcohol as she says in her cash-seeking complaint to have done (the defendants dispute that she was intoxicated, incidentally), she wouldn’t have gone out in public without a burqa, and she wouldn’t have been at a party with men, at least not without the supervision of a male relative.
My big takeaway from the national election is confusion regarding why the cheat codes of “socialism” and Jew-hatred didn’t work for U.S. politicians until recently. Why couldn’t progressives win elections in 1960 with the same pitches that they’re using to win right now? Did the electorate change through immigration? Did Americans evolve to become more progressive as a result of increased overall prosperity? Did progressivism become an easier sell due to increased envy levels due to more people hitting spectacular levels of personal wealth? The Jew-hatred angle is also a little baffling. George Orwell noted that humans love to experience socially acceptable hate. I can certainly understand why white male Americans might hate liberal Jews (see White men correctly perceive American Jews as their enemies?), but legacy American white men aren’t the core of today’s Jew-hating groups. ChatGPT put together a list of 68 attacks by Arabs calling themselves “Palestinian” on Americans and they’re spread out over decades. In other words, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about our time and place that would make joining forces with “Palestinian” fighters more appealing today vs. 20 or 40 years ago. My best theory right now: Mitt Romney famously pointed out in 2012 that 47 percent of Americans weren’t net federal taxpayers. The welfare state was substantially expanded during coronapanic and, therefore, the majority of Americans are either dependent on the federal government or receive government services at no cost. Why would people vote against a bigger more caring government if they don’t have to pay for any of it? Can this explain the Jew-hatred as well? Maybe. Government isn’t very good at delivering on its promises. If the promised high standard of living doesn’t materialize for median voters, it becomes necessary to find a scapegoat. It would be “racism” to blame low-skill low-/no-income immigrants living in public housing or any low-income high-crime ethnic native-born ethnic group for running up the government’s welfare and police/prison tabs. But one can’t be attacked as “prejudiced” if one blames Israel (i.e., International Jewry), e.g., in the ad for Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed where two native English speakers blame their inability to afford eggs and bananas on U.S. aid to Israel (about 0.05% of the U.S. federal budget, says Gemini).
I’m not surprised by the election outcome because I’ve learned that my political views aren’t widely shared (starting with the idea that Americans should have to work for 8 years before voting, returning us to the system that prevailed circa 1800 (men started work at 13 and cast their first vote at 21; there was no welfare state and, therefore, nearly every able-bodied man worked; I wouldn’t impose a gender ID restriction for a modernized version, incidentally, since there are plenty of 21st century women who work and pay taxes)). I guess I’m comforted by the fact that California is nominally run by progressives on behalf of the working class, but in fact they have taken decent care of people with money. Peasants are hit with 10% sales tax while elites don’t have to pay any state estate tax, for example. They’ll even need to find a lot of mail-in ballots to get Amendment 40 (this year’s billionaire wealth tax) over the hump.
There might be a silver lining for Florida if the federal government goes deeper into transferism. Suppose that Democrats take over Congress right now or after two more years of “socialism” pitches. They then raise federal income tax rates by 10%, e.g., from 37% to 47%. Some financially successful people who want to recover their former spending power might move to Florida in order to shed their state income tax (often around 10%) and that will boost the economy here. But this probably falls into the category of “desperate rationalization”.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s leader gives us a pithy summary of the election outcome: “The process of the US’s collapse has accelerated.” (screen shot also in case the Democrat-controlled Congress shuts down X in January 2027)
We were informed in 2024 that if Donald Trump were to become president that would be the end of our democracy and we wouldn’t have any future elections. The Nakba actually did occur in November 2024 and the hated dictator entered the White House in January 2025. Have you seen any evidence of an election going on in your state right now?
From Kamala Harris, the major cognitive ability upgrade from Biden installed by party elites protecting democracy:
Even before these intellectuals weighed in, Republican Liz Cheney told NBC viewers that a Trump election “may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in.”
Separately, officials in Palm Beach County failed to get the “no more elections” memo. There is some crazy stuff on the ballot and I’m sorry to say that the Republican party is officially supporting all of it. They want to narrow the tax base by exempting $250,000 of house value from general property taxes (Amendment 3). The people who pay no tax will still be able to vote, e.g., to increase county spending to be paid for by taxing other people. It’s the same system that has resulted in epic federal budget deficits. The Republicans also want to narrow the tax base by exempting farm equipment from a tax that currently applies to every business (Amendment 2). Finally, they want to let the state keep a huge rainy-day fund (Amendment 1; opposed by Ron DeSantis, who pointed out “We already have a maxed-out rainy-day fund and have run the largest surpluses in state history”).
It won’t be the end of Florida if these amendments pass, but even if they were good ideas getting people accustomed to the idea of amending the state constitution seems risky. What if Democrats return to power here in Florida and win the necessary 60% of the votes by telling people that they’ll get all government services without paying because the top 10% of Floridians will be hit with a massive income tax (currently barred by the constitution) and a massive wealth tax (also barred beyond 0.2%; Florida actually did tax “intangible property” at very small percentages from 1931-2006)? Who could be opposed to the idea of living off Ken Griffin? Could he live comfortably on $30 billion? If so, why not a one-time wealth tax of 50%, inspired by California’s one-time 5% tax?
Loosely related, some advice on voting from the dictator who supposedly was guaranteed to suspend elections:
Today is the 50th anniversary of the election of Jimmy Carter, the most depressing American president. How about if we all listen to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which was completed 50 years ago this month?
Readers: What are you doing to celebrate this anniversary?
