The Conscience of David French

Pretty sure Sotomayor or Jackson contact progressive media and ask them how they are going to spin a Supreme Court decision in the most legally stupid way and then they legitimize it in their dissent.

It annoys me the zero flexibility policies for the training for Sacraments. Parent's go to daily mass, teach religious education, volunteer routinely...nope still have to go to Baptism class alongside the parents who are only baptising the child to make the abuela happy and won't be seen again until Abuela makes them do Confirmation.

If the Catholic Church wants you to baptize your baby then parishes should probably be more welcoming to those babies. Filling out a baptism form and this is so rude 💀 we don’t have to take a class bc this isn’t our first rodeo but what do they expect first-time parents to do if they can’t bring their baby along with them especially if the child is still young and breast-fed? Absolutely crazy to me

@Robert45348939 @DominicMcGregor GDP absolutely accounts for government provided services. In fact, it is one of the ways governments smooth out the business cycle through stimulus.

@DominicMcGregor GDP is a terrible measure of economic performance. An efficient economy should have a lower GDP due to less waste, less infrustructure maintenance and so on. Also this doesn't take into account cost of living and Government provided services that are private in the US.

If the UK joined the US as the 51st state. We would be the poorest state in the entire union. Mississippi which is portrayed at swamp dwelling hillbillies in majority of international media is above us. I don’t think people grasp how far we’ve fallen in real terms when it comes to GDP per capita. We’ve seen no growth for almost an entire generations. We’ve seen our productivity decrease and our tax increases. The average person on the UK, on £50,000 is less well off than your average Mississippi swamp dweller.

@om_patel5 I asked gemma 3.5 on a 5060ti to do a haiku. It created a haiku in about 1 minute, but then looped forever trying to make it better. I ended the process with no answer after 4 minutes. It is really great at image recognition though.

this guy tried running LLMs locally to save on API costs and waited 13 minutes for a single response lets be honest we've all thought about it "why am i paying for Claude when i can just run an open source model locally for free?" so he tried it and ran Gemma 4 to avoid API costs 13 minutes to get this response: "I am a large language model, trained by Google." tools like Claude Code and OpenClaw have system prompts over 20,000 tokens. so even your first message isn't starting from a clean slate. your local model is choking on context before you even ask it anything the API bill hurts but time is money

@McFranchisee Another possibility, BBQ and tex mex are on the rise culturally. Americans are never going to not like a hamburger, but it is now just standard americana. Also, ignoring the other distractions. Bucees for food is probably faster.

New Buc-ee's drops $1M in sales on opening day. Where do you think those sales pull from? A few months ago I talked to a $mcd owner who had a Buc-ee’s open 10 miles away, and it impacted him. While I don’t get the allure: clean ‘80s-looking bathrooms with cheap drinks and overpriced everything else, they are a major competitor in the food space. I’ve never seen a competitor impact others from the distance they do. What’s your thoughts on the Beaver?

Right about what? Political theater stuff that just reflects typical mid term voter behavior? Blaming Trump for what should be blamed on Congress? Fuentes would have us in a world where everything he supposedly cares about would be worse off. I'll take the first net negative migration and illegal migration since the Great Depression over Kamala allowing another 5 million illegals in in 2 years, ever increasing H1Bs, NGO funding scams continuing under the table, and no effort at all to stop public benefit fraud. I'll take 10 more Iran's for all the progress domestically. Burn it all down is a historically illiterate strategy of cowards and just cements the power of the people the cowards supposedly oppose.

@Dion2a2 Except he was actually right. MAGA is in shambles now. He called it.

Say what you will about Fuentes, but he's got his finger directly on a region of the Zeitgeist that has no other outlet. Half of being a celeb pundit consists of giving a voice to a thing that many are already thinking but nobody seems to get away with saying. It's not hard to imagine his movement gaining a startling degree of real influence very quickly, especially as Trump decides to destroy MAGA, make the GOP lose all credibility, and generally make his second term one unmitigated string of ghastly embarrassments. Nick channels the ancient and unkillable spirit of the 70's "Blue Dog" Democrat. There are millions of Americans who basically want to be Dems but are sick of the rainbow flag, the abortion, the white guilt, the anti-Christian energy, the photo-ops with the yarmulkes at the Wall, and so on -- and Fuentes is currently their only "guy." Like it or not, I think his whole movement is probably about to kick into hyper-drive. He's no longer a niche character simply because all of the "normal politicos" are so unwilling to go where Fuentes goes (and where millions of Americans want to go).

AI exists to do x-ray interpretation, however, all industry inspection codes require a person to also interpret the shot. But to actually set up the shots and expose the film or digital receiver has many many variables to getting it right. Not worth automating unless it is the same weld geometry over and over again. Not something that will be economic for most shop fab or field fab.

Who is training AI to do weld inspections? We have robot welders, we should have robot welders inspectors by now, where are they? Why can’t I give a robot an X-ray gun and have it check the welding its little friend just did? A lot of robot welding is very high quality, but the autonomous inspection is lagging behind. Also, who has a robot that can check simple weld preparations? This is pretty simple stuff, but we need robots to do a lot of this low value donkey work and not just the highly repeatable process stuff. Also also, why are laser scanners still expensive? We should have quality inspection bays that look like a laser disco and report the position of every surface to 50 nm. Where is this? I’m sure it exists and someone is making 5 units a year, but that doesn’t count. Who is making 1,500 units / year? Do 1 process extremely well, scale into it.

@nickgerli1 Wouldn't another explanation be housing costs? Buyers at max capacity at 3% can't move if it means a 6% rate. I would need to find a comparison between mortgage payment as a percent of income between the states.

Some interesting differences are showing up in mortgage rates by state. California: 28% of mortgaged houses are at sub-3% rate Florida: 16% only before pandemic, they both were similar. But now, there's a big gap. California's sub-3% mortgage rates are one of the reasons why prices have held firmer. In Florida, there's now more 6%+ rates, which is leading to higher inventory and cheaper prices. Pay attention to these breakdowns in effective mortgage rates by state, because I think it will have a large impact on the future direction of prices in 2026-27. (overall - the trend is more and more owners taking on a 6%+ rate, but in California the adoption will be slower and Florida faster, likely due to overall sales turnover - Florida has more people moving in and out, so it will have more owners at newer rates)

@IsaacPunts Minor leaguers who realized their ceiling was never the MLB.

Okay I have a legitimate question as a football guy who doesn’t watch baseball. How good at baseball are these guys actually? Like is this college level ball? Minor league level? Somewhere in between? Outside the gimmick how good is the play here?

@FranchiseMnA @sbabmarks You can do all kinds of things to juice the most recent quarter. It is meaningless.

@sbabmarks If the offer was based on 4x, they should be willing to accept it. Goes both ways. I'm sure buyer would be doing the same if it was a soft Q1

A borrower, with a signed LOI for $7,900,000 and who's deal is in credit right now, called me to tell me that the Seller just reached out and wants to "re-negotiate". Apparently, EBITDA grew tremendously in Q1 2026 and he wants more for the business at the same 4X multiple.

@ShaleTier7 What is the email of your Mythos agent? I got some bags I need to offload, I mean early ground floor investment opportunities.

This is incorrect. Commodities are traded on future delivery. When their is a price shock and high uncertainty, contracts for delivery +1,+2,+3...months out all rise. Buyers of those contracts lock in the higher price even though delivery is in the future. Now when the risk uncertainty goes away and prices fall, new contracts reset to the lower price but all the already bought contracts remain at the higher price.

Because gas wholesalers take advantage of bad news and the fear over diminishing supplies to immediately jack of the price in trading, but when the fear turns out to be unfounded there is not competitive need to lead the market in prices coming down. It's a windfall in pricing they can manage, and only move prices down as they see risk of losing market-share.

The toddler loves me to draw stuff for him. Having @grok animate my drawings takes it to the next level.

@sigilstone18 @DailyGondor Tulkas came down just to fight Melkor and Melkor was not his equal in combat. By the way he married Nessa.

@DailyGondor Wasn't it they couldn't do anything about him at first because he was more powerful than all of them together and after the Lamps thing he was weaker than Manwë's bitch ass because he literally poured himself into the planet?

Fun fact: After Melkor destroyed the Two Lamps and ruined much of Middle-earth for the first time, the Valar eventually got fed up and actually imprisoned him, something they could've done right away but didn't want to "make a fuss" at first and thus left him to corrupt and despoil the continent while they retreated to the heavenly realm. Anyway, they got him and after a period of captivity, Nienna, the Vala of sorrow and crying, spoke on Melkor's behalf and argued for his pardon because "he said he was sorry" and "keeping him chained would be very mean and it makes me feel bad". So in essence: the release of the Great Satan, untold misery for countless beings and repeated devastation of the world which resulted its breaking and fading of magic was made possible because a liberal female judge who liked to cry all the time felt bad that the Vala were mean to the Great Satan. Make of that information what you will.

My family has a single branch bank in a small town with a low per capita income. The town has 2 other single branch family owned banks. All 3 print money. The large town nearby, very wealthy because a college town, has a bunch of regional banks competing. None of those branches make money and change hands every few years as the regional banks merge or spin off.

Estate attorney in Tennessee was doing routine due diligence. Buyer said he was a “regional investor.” Drove a 2009 Camry with a cracked windshield. Had a Subway loyalty card in his breast pocket. Attorney pulled his entity filings. Expected a duplex. Maybe a self-storage unit. 47 banks. FORTY. SEVEN. BANKS. Attorney called his associate in. Associate thought someone died. Nobody died. It was worse. It was a guy from Elizabethtown, Kentucky who owns 47 banks and still clips coupons. The portfolio: only places Google Maps calls “a 14 hour drive from relevance.” Towns where the Dairy Queen IS the economy. First National Bank of Harlan County. Bought for $2.1 million in 2013. Now printing $890,000 a year. The loan officer has worked there since Reagan. The carpet hasn’t been replaced since Carter. Doesn’t matter. Deposits don’t leave. Where are they gonna go? The next town is 40 miles away and it has TWO fewer stoplights. He figured something out that McKinsey has 4,000 consultants and cannot figure out: When a big bank leaves a small town, the deposits stay. The customers stay. The need stays. Only the bank leaves. So he just… stays. 47 times. Net interest margin: obscene. Return on equity: embarrassing. Number of Bloomberg terminals in his office: zero. He uses a Dell from 2014. It has a Garfield sticker on it. $180 million in equity. Built in towns that CNBC cannot find on a map. While wearing New Balance 608s. Private equity found him eventually. They always do. Sent a guy in a fleece vest with a pitch deck. He offered 6x earnings. The banker laughed so hard he had to sit down. Then he offered 7x. Same laugh. The banker said: Son, I have a waiting list of farmers who’ve been banking with me for three generations. You’re offering me a number. I’m sitting on a moat. The fleece vest guy flew home. Filed the meeting as “exploratory.” Billed 4 hours. The banker went to the Lions Club dinner. Had the chicken. Drove home in the Camry. The cracked windshield is still cracked. It is a reminder that nobody who sees it will ever guess what he’s worth. That’s the point. That was always the point.

@Gunny_SukumoHQ Unfortunately no. Though there is merit to this idea. I would love for the all branches of the military to film their war games, screen out an information that could be used against us, and release the videos to the public.

そういえばアメリカのみなさんに聞いてみたい事があったんだけども 米空軍はエアショー、米海軍はフリートウィーク等のイベントがあるけど、米陸軍ってイベントあるんですか？ 一度エイブラムス戦車を見てみたいんだ 日本では陸上自衛隊の駐屯地で開放行事があって、パレードや模擬戦を見学できます

@FrankCurzio There is a lot of LNG other than the US. Australia, Russia, Malaysia for example.

🚨 JUST IN: Trump just told the world to take the Strait of Hormuz without US help. US LNG just became the only guaranteed supply for nations that... show more

If meat brings the Japanese and Americans together, does cheese and dairy tear us apart? 🤔

Heh, we use both for ammo. We even have .223 (inches) and 5.56 (mm) which are basically the same round but 5.56 has come to mean military/NATO specification and .223 is the private sector round based on the 5.56. The 5.56 is basically based on the .222 (inches) Remington but named in metric to please the Euros. I can see why this unit confusion seems insane to outsiders. We even crashed a Mars rover on Mars cause of it.

Americans only know how to use the metric systems for gun ammunition.

@Dongurihou We know and are jealous if it and try to replicate it with various degrees of success.

アメリカのBBQも悪くないけど、ジャパンの新鮮な魚もアメリカ人に知って欲しいな