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Where a Saudi company pumps desert groundwater, Arizona considers imposing limits latimes.com/environment/st…

🙏 My wonderful brother, would you kindly allow me to share my experiences that they might contribute to your opinion. I'll discuss Wall St, my first home, and investments Wall Street: When I first arrived on Wall Street it was just months before the October ‘87 crash. Many old timers and finance aspirants didn't have the pain tolerance, nor risk appetite, and they left the industry. Of course I inherited their books and held the hands of their, now my, clients. Optimism and perseverance is a type of intelligence. Those old timers who stayed on had much wisdom, but perhaps none greater than the advice they gave all newbies “have kids, buy a home, take on debt, pay it off, you’ll be set for life”. As @jposhaughnessy would have been the older more experienced guy had I worked for him at the time, I’m sure he told this to countless young people entering the biz. Real estate/first homes: When I was shopping for my first home it was the usual regimen in that era that prosepctive buyers would meet the current owners, it was a 'vibes of history of the home' check for me, and for them it had similar intentions carried to the next owner. This was a this was a time before real estate speculation and the anonymity of today’s real estate marketplace. The potential seller would share with me all that went into their home, not just the love, cos obv, but also the financial hardships of buying a home as they experienced it. As this was around 1992, I was speaking with people who bought their homes right after War War 2. This was a transformational era in America, the nostalgia you have for the 30 year loan neglects that it was a fairly recent creation and they were its early customers. Prior to much needed government intervention in the mortgage market home ownership was the domain of the already well off, there was no lower class to upper class wealth trajectory as we know it today. Wealthy people owned homes, poor people didn't, it was that simple. The horror stories I would hear about balloon payments, loans that were for interest only and then the principal had to be satisfied with these huge payments 😱 Until around the 1960s there was essentially zero secondary/tertiary market for mortgage debt. The regional bank lent to the top tier credit worthy who could afford to make the required huge up front payment and service 10%+ interest rates. The bank held the loan and if you couldn't pay, it got really, really bleak. Have you ever seen It’s A Wonderful Life? Lending was very exploitative and regionally cartelized The Middle Class, as we know it is a totally modern invention and was uniquely American, it was the product of wide distribution of home ownership and the liquidity of Real Estate. People then got 15yr loans, then 30 year loans because banks were able to manage the risk by carving the loans for resale into secondary and tertiary markets, banks held some of the risk and offset other parts of the risk. Those people who got the loans did so because they wanted a place they could call home, a place where they expected their kids would grow up, and when it was time for their parents to move into and become the babysitters and such for the family, win-win. Millions of people followed this schema and enormous communities were created miles away from the center of town, and as such transportation became a big thing so they could get to their city jobs, and those homeowners also needed new cars, or reliable used cars, and this necessitated car repair shops and diners along the way and so on and so on. Housing is an intricate supply chain far beyond just lumber and construction and carpentry, it's sim world but real. When I used to talk to those wishful prospective sellers these were the stories they would tell me, about how they moved to the town before the movie theater was there and so on and so on. A 50 year mortgage didn't exist prior - because there was no market for the debt instruments, and there was no way for banks to offset the risk. For the last decades if people had low credit scoring either they couldn't get a mortgage period - or they had to go to hard money lenders who charged WELL above prime bank rates. And those people getting those loans serviced them at the exorbitant rate - then after a few years they refinanced, that's the schema. Now there is banking appetite for 50 year loans and a Gov created/incentized/backstopped ecosystem for holding and offloading chunks of the risk. For so many home ownership had been foreclosed on, now the doors are once again being opened for business Investments You owned Bitcoin in its early days, you held that risk and perserevered through its tumults and tribulations, such as when bit developers gave up on it in its early days because it was unable to perform merchant chargebacks, and when the Chinese mining farms were dumping on the market and so on and so on. I bought Bitcoin in December 2020, it was around $20,000 at the time. I didn’t bemoan those people who bought it cheaper, I didn't condemn the bitcoin owners who drove up its price as "greedy Bitcoin boomers" - although arguably that's a fair characterization, no? Isn’t it the same? You are awesome, you have a beautiful family and you’re so very generous with your time and the wisdom you’ve shared for others to improve their health and the benefits that improvement bestows. We can’t foreclose on the future that others, and we, need and deserve. 50 year mortgages are not debt slavery, let others flourish. Wealth is a supply chain, be a link as this long tweets is thematically a continuation of an earlier long tweet, I'm cc'ing those that had engaged, thank you, and thank you X for permitting productive discourse @Cernovich @Molson_Hart @Alec_Mazo @pulte @nejatian @johnfreehayes @AmericanDebunk et al 🙏 I'll include the prior long tweet in the reply

Thousands of federal jobs in Virginia are on the line because of Trump's shutdown – and @JasonMiyaresVA is silent. Virginians deserve leaders who will put our jobs and economy first, not bow to Trump’s chaos. govexec.com/workforce/2025…

And there you have it. $3.3 MILLION from left-wing NGO The MacArthur Foundation went to Mecklenburg County to “reduce the jail population”, the very county that released career criminal DeCarlos Brown 14 times. Insane. Follow the money. Democrats want criminals on the loose. H/t: @megbasham