CosmicTang

@felix_sull20671 If he had already been captured, sure. But we don't leave people behind if we can help it. This is basic loyalty.

@CosmicTang They are a normal part of the world. I ain't seeing much of an argument to say why not use them.

I’m noticing a lot of foreigners who seem to not understand why we’d risk hundreds of lives, spend millions of dollars, and sacrifice several aircraft to rescue one guy. And the reason they don’t understand is also the reason people can’t be made American by a piece of paper.

@felix_sull20671 @shortmagsmle You have some rather intelligent posts and reposts…then whatever this mess is.

@shortmagsmle You do know prisoner swaps are things, and the US uses them all the time, right? Maybe keep the planes and get the pilot back via this path.

@BillAckman @X For that kind of money, I’d let you call me pig all day.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@flexkavana05 @YungPeary @OnlyInBOS @TaylorTwellman Even if it was just for the lot, does that lot look like it's worth 800k? Even if someone tore it down and cleaned it up for free?

@YungPeary @OnlyInBOS @TaylorTwellman Stop lying about what? Guarantee they tore the house down.

This house in Boston had a fire two years ago and just went on the market for $776,000 in case anyone is wondering what real estate is like here...

The point being that the mere presence of guns means nothing. America has far more guns than ever. About 400-500 million, with well over 100 million owners. In fact, the number of guns and gun ownership since 1985 has increased dramatically, while gun deaths fell by half by 2014. It rose again during COVID (nowhere near 80s/90s levels), but has fallen again since. 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, so set those aside. A huge chunk of them are gang-related, so, criminal activity. The instance of a 'mass shooter' is exceedingly rare, but it gets all the coverage. No one cares about the amount of violence in Chicago or any other big city every weekend. No one wants to talk about links between violence and psychopharmacology. Mental health is big issue. People have been conditioned to fear/hate guns, gun owners, and think that somehow an inanimate object is the problem. Case in point, of ALL gun homicides, there are fewer than 500 in a year attributable to ALL types of rifles, which includes shotguns, hunting rifles, sporting rifles, and those oh-so-scary semiautomatic rifles the idiot press mistakenly calls 'assault rifles'. In a country of 360 million people, it's statistically insignificant (although we recognize the horrible loss for victims and their families). Some would like you to believe it's a pandemic.

@CosmicTang @aceinatx @GPAIndiana Point being?

The Whole World Needs to Hear This Story!! 🫵

@I_legalthinker @EricLDaugh Subject to the jurisdiction thereof. You’re being obtuse.

@CosmicTang @EricLDaugh 14A It’s being understood exactly as is written. Doesn’t mention alliance, domicile nor parents status. Just focus on the newborn. We cannot create superstition out of thin air. Imagine if killer could do that with the law.

🚨 BREAKING: It was just revealed that the Chinese suspects who tried detonating an IED at a US Air Force Base were BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENS of ILLEGAL ALIENS Omg. This is EXACTLY what Justice Sam Alito tried telling everyone at the Supreme Court! STRIKE DOWN BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP for illegals. Per Daily Wire: The two's parents were arrested on March 18 for illegal entry, they tried getting asylum in 1993, but ultimately got a deportation order in 1998. It was the CHILDREN of Qiu Qin Zou and Jia Zhang Zheng who tried bombing MacDill Air Force Base Visitor’s Center in Tampa FL. Justice Alito LITERALLY warned that the children of foreigners would have allegiance to our enemies. He was right. At least FIVE JUSTICES need to see the writing on the wall and do the right thing! H/t @MaryMargOlohan @realDailyWire

@SemiRespect @NealB4zodd @GPAIndiana Wanna bet? Give it a few. We’ll see something dumber.

@NealB4zodd @GPAIndiana No one could be as stupid as what you just wrote

@Spannerball @aceinatx @GPAIndiana Australia has more guns now than it did before Port Arthur.

@aceinatx @GPAIndiana Tell me, when was the last school shooting in Australia?

@EndWokeness Is there anything that has aged this badly?

6 YEARS AGO: Celebrities join together and sing Imagine to help us with the lockdown

@EricBur64256003 @I_legalthinker @EricLDaugh Clear and present danger...

@I_legalthinker @CosmicTang @EricLDaugh Or Trump could classify illegal Immigration as a national security threat, and designate illegal immigrants enemies of the state. Then we can bring up all the assholes who give them aid and comfort on TREASON charges.

@I_legalthinker @EricLDaugh I disagree. I think it's being misinterpreted. But go ahead, hide behind it as the country circles the drain.

@CosmicTang @EricLDaugh As Tom Human said: you don’t like the law? Got o congress and change it. As long as it remains the law of the land it must be respected. Although 14th is obsolete and many May consider it harmful, you cannot just ignore or violate it. You must change it

@Will_Tanner_1 Cities are headed downhill even faster now.

It is now effectively legal for blacks in blue cities to murder whites Why? Because juror ethnic in-group preference amongst non-whites, particularly blacks, means it is essentially impossible to get a jury to agree to hold a black on white crime defendant accountable So some career criminal in a fetid city known for being full of his sort can get away with murdering a cop because an illiterate, third world jury supported what he did

@eMPutnam7777 @libsoftiktok @DoorDash Churchill didn't say it, but it's correct nonetheless.

@libsoftiktok @DoorDash I am SHOCKED!! You mean @DoorDash doesn't want to piss off half of America?! What a concept. 😅😂🤣eM

BREAKING: A Leftist was SUSPENDED from @DoorDash after he posted a video saying he'd destroy your food if you support Trump, and he’s now reduced to begging for likes on social media FAFO

Deepshit? Moi? Pot meet kettle. No one has the right to come here illegally and steal citizenship for their kids. Those kids never should have been here. They clearly don't have any allegiance to the US. The US doesn't just need to deport people; we need to denaturalize people as well.

@EricLDaugh They are citizens deepshit, their parents are completely different and autonomous beings. It’s stupid, ignorant and extremely illiterate try to link an individual action to the national origin of their parents. It’s like judging kids for parents sins and viceversa.

@devana1125 @EricLDaugh How many incidents do you need? What's the number? They don't have a right to come here and certainly don't have a right to anchor themselves here with make-believe citizenship attained illegally.

@EricLDaugh Using one incident to justify stripping rights from millions is wild.

@GodIsGodKnows @LELDF A judge can set aside a guilty verdict in some very limited situations, but not an acquittal.

@LELDF Cant the judge change the verdict. I know I've seen it done recently.

A heartbreaking photo of Stephanie Diller reacting to her husband’s murderer being ACQUITTED of first-degree murder by a functionally illiterate jury. God help us.

@MrAndyNgo @StephenM This is one remedy. Make it so cost-prohibitive that it isn't worth coming here. The problem is that many of these countries rely on remittances to prop up their economies.

@StephenM Why aren’t the remittances heavily taxed to disincentivize foreigners taking U.S. funds out of the U.S. economy?

Everyone involved in the asylum system knows and understands the claims are all fake: the aliens who make them, the free NGO lawyers who file them, the judges who hear them, the federal officers who process them. Everyone. Everyone knows the real reason these migrants come. Even a small amount of US welfare is 10x what they would earn in their home countries. If they have a “birthright” child it’s enough welfare to support their entire family back home for a lifetime. Entire foreign economies are sustained by US welfare remittances. It’s industrial-scale remittance farming.

@EricLDaugh Our squish justices will rule on politics, not law or common sense.

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. Justice Sam Alito just sounded the alarm that unlimited birthright citizenship means a Chinese, Iranian or Russian foreigner can have a child in America, and that US citizen owes MILITARY ALLEGIANCE to a foreign adversary "They have the duty of military service. It seems that makes them subject to a FOREIGN POWER!" 🔥 Gosh he is so good. "Not subject to any foreign power is pretty straightforward. So let me give you these examples. A boy is born here to an Iranian father who has entered the country illegally." "That boy is automatically an Iranian national at birth and he has a duty to provide military service to the Iranian government, is he not subject to any foreign power?" "What I said about a boy born to an Iranian father is true of children born here to parents who were nationals of other countries. It's true to a child who's born here to Russian parents." The framers of 14A did not intend for this!

@shortmagsmle God help us.

The fate of the Republic hinges on whether or not one specific middle-aged white woman is willing to be slightly mean to minorities

@CoffeeTyme2 @greg_price11 But not Maize Hirono!

🚨 BREAKING: The Supreme Court just ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado's law banning "conversation therapy" for sexual orientation or gender identity is unconstitutional. Jackson was the lone dissent.