Alex Kotov

@txgermanbre Shouldn't you as a Texan be proud of electing this administration of assholes?

You have no idea how bad this hurts my soul to see.

@lugaricano I strongly disagree. There are many people with infinite greed (like Trump) and even if you'll pay 1B$/year it will be not enough for them. You can get a good people in power if they can do something. UK and EU are ruled by rentier class who wants to keep(!) status quo.

Countries get the cabinets they pay for. Singapore pays its Foreign Minister about S$1.1m, around US$800,000. The salary is benchmarked to 60% of the median income of the top 1,000 Singaporean earners. That is why you can get Vivian Balakrishnan, former eye surgeon and hospital chief executive, implementing @karpathy's external brain idea (link below). The speech shows deep understanding of AI and fills one with confidence about Singapore's future. The UK Foreign Secretary earns roughly £165,000: the MP salary plus a ministerial salary of about £67,000. The ministerial part is frozen since the crisis and is down by roughly a third in real terms since 2010. This is what a junior Magic Circle lawyer earns. Spain pays its ministers around €85,000. So you do not get a surgeon who has run hospitals. You get a party loyalist who has never run anything.

@JustinWolfers No, he didn't. He deliberately wants to destroy it because sees it as a weakness.

“He failed to understand the interconnectedness of the world economy.” ⁣ ⁣ That was true in the trade war, and it’s true now.

So low IQ Trump let the cat out of the bag today and said he “DIDN’T CARE ABOUT AMERICANS’ FINANCIAL SITUATIONS!” A rare moment of candor on the day inflation reports show prices are OUT OF CONTROL! The only way to fix this mess is to get these sick people OUT!

So Trump is about to pay himself $10 BILLION OF OUR MONEY to settle a fake lawsuit with the IRS. That’s $10 billion of your cash in his pocket. ACTUAL THEFT! AMERICA IS BEING ROBBED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!!!!!!!

Trump campaigned on bringing down the cost of living "starting on day one," and then: started a trade war; deported much of the farm workforce, bombed Iran, allowed healthcare subsidies to expire, cut food assistance, ran an interest-rate boosting deficit, and attacked fed independence.

Here’s the investigation we should have: Who decided to hit 15,000 targets and have so little to show for it except the tragic loss of 13 American servicemembers, higher gas prices for American families, and a depleted stockpile of critical munitions? to.pbs.org/4wsy4sc

Airing Sunday night @ 8pm ET/PT: my latest hour-long @CNN special, “The Imperial Presidency,” examines the history of US presidential power. From Truman to Trump, that power has been expanding—well beyond what the Founders intended—and we are now in unprecedented territory I’ll trace that history & share my own thoughts on what such powerful presidencies mean for American democracy. Tune in to watch

@GermanSimply_ Works only because enforced by law. As soon as non-enforceable (offshore employees) many keep pretending you have to work overtime (and for free).

No emails at 9PM. No "just checking in" on weekends. No performance of busyness to prove you're committed. Your time after Feierabend is yours. Legally. Culturally. Completely. The rest of the world is still in meetings about having fewer meetings.

Germany figured something out that the rest of the world is still pretending it doesn't need to know. 11 things. One thread. Some of these will make you uncomfortable. All of them are true. 🇩🇪🧵

@TheRealThelmaJ1 Well... With all of that you can accomplish whatever you want anywhere (South Africa included). The only difference is that USA has (had?) too much easy money because of too much gullible/naive people.

Elon Musk has taught me that with effort, a strong entreprenueurial spirit, an emerald mine, a lot of exploitation, self-dealing, white privilege, a bad hair transplant, supplemental testosterone, an expired student visa, a charity that gives money to itself, ecstasy, ketamine, weed, cocaine, Ozempic, people loathing you so much they pay you to go away and most of all a sh*tload of government subsidies, you can accomplish whatever you want in America.

@fchollet Thank you, François!

I wrote Deep Learning with Python to be the definitive guide to how deep learning works and how to best make use of it. Tens of thousands of people got their career start via this book. 120,000 copies sold, and downloaded by millions more. And now it's free to read online: deeplearningwithpython.io

@pepel_klaasa Those "fellow Jews and Israelis" are RUSSIAN jews or descendants of russian jews. In ukrainian context they're more RUSSIANS then jews. They don't even care to do basic due diligence for the BS they're spitting.

Well, to fellow Jews and Israelis, I would like to present some small stats In the last 4 years Ukraine killed zero Jewish citizens. Russia killed not less than a dozen, plus bombed: Jewish schools, synagogues and Babi Yar memorial. The Galicia SS unit was 15 000 people. The “Russian Liberation Army” under Vlasov was 120 000. Were there pogroms in Ukraine back in the day? There were. My family members ran from them. Also, the Poles, the Hungarians, the French were often more than happy to get rid of the Jews. Antisemitism is an eternal problem. Does Ukraine have Antisemites? It does, so does every single country in the world, including - surprise - Israel. Were there any chances that Russians ever elect a Jewish president? Not really. Moreover, even the United States has never had a Jewish president, despite the large representation of the Jewish community in politics.

This is categorically false. Not merely a stretch, but a straight-up lie. Congress (not Biden alone) appropriated roughly $188 billion total for Ukraine-related support from 2022–2024. NOT $350 billion. Of that, the bulk (~$110–130B in security/military categories) stayed right here in the U.S., paying American defense contractors & replenishing our own stockpiles. Actual direct financial ("cash") support to Ukraine was roughly $31–38B. Those funds were tracked by the World Bank and were audited by firms like KPMG & Deloitte. We were not writing blank checks. It's extremely frustrating to watch this President demonize an ally while downplaying Putin as the aggressor. This administration has ended new U.S. financial/military support for Ukraine (they can buy via the EU if needed). Combined with eased sanctions on Russia and the President's moral ambiguity on the war, it is just a complete betrayal that I will never, ever understand. Polls show that the vast majority of Americans are very much clear eyed about this — we support Ukraine and we sympathize with Ukraine. Our President does not reflect that majority view.

@MehdiHacks Thinkpad T14/P14. I use ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD myself. Upgraded RAM to 96Gb and SSD to 4Tb myself. With Fedora and Windows (dual boot) it's a breeze. IMHO T14 is better than P14 - it's noticeable that P14 can't dissipate the heat of more power-hungry CPU and likes to throttle.

What's the closest thing to MacBook in quality? My main machine is MB Pro 16. I want a 2nd laptop to run Widows & Linux. I have Dell XPS 15 and older X1 Carbon and I'm not happy with either. Torn between getting a Thinkpad P14s/T14s now, or wait until Framework 13 Pro is released

@ZeitgeistExplo1 (1) "Natural" interest rates for Greece and Italy (as well as Spain and France) must be much higher. It's ECB which puts the cost on Germany. This abuse will end some day. (2) It's not a "tax" for not being a part of eurozone. It's a "tax" for being more risky / unpredictable.

🇵🇱Poland (white) and 🇷🇴Romania (red) pay 5.8% and 7.35% respectively in interest on public debt (10y). The two Eurozone countries that pay the highest interest are 🇬🇷Greece (light blue) and 🇮🇹Italy (green), both at 3.9%; the eurozone (blue) average is 3%. This means that, at the moment, the “tax” of staying outside the euro amounts to roughly half of the debt service cost, that is, an additional cost corresponding to ≈3% of the public budget of the two countries, or about €350 per average taxpayer in added taxes.

@AdrianP_doc Many israelis have russian origin (are immigrants from Russia/USSR in 1st/2nd/3rd generation). They simply took the russian side. It's not just grain.

It's a reasonable take. However the hatred against Ukraine coming out of Israel while THEY ARE STEALING their grain is absolutely shameful.

@CraigMurrayOrg The increase you've noticed is due to X pushed your BS to much more people than usual. You're just a greedy dumb old man. Foreign aid to UA regularly audited, you can join next audit team if you have doubts.

The responses to this are fascinating. I have noticed a massive, step change increase in pro-Ukrainian troll activity on Twitter since the EU announced it was releasing the 90 billion dollars to the Kyiv seat of corruption.

Timely.

@AdrianP_doc @Average_NY_Guy He knows that he's posting BS and that's why he hides his real name.

This history is nitpicked and not much different from oher countries. The distinction is that for most of the time you mentioned, Ukraine was under the control of the Russian empire and during WW2 it was under Nazi Occupation - under which 5.000.000 Ukrainians were killed. As for today: you are just uneducated ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/study-ukrai…

Ukraine has one of the darkest track records when it comes to Jews, and it goes back a long time. It didn’t start with the Holocaust. In the 1600s, during the Cossack uprisings under Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Jewish communities were wiped out one after the other. Tens of thousands were slaughtered. For Jews in Eastern Europe, these events became part of how they understood their place in the world. But it didn’t stop there. Late 1800s into the early 1900s, pogrom after pogrom. It was not in just one city, or just one moment. Repeated waves of violence. Looting, killings, entire towns terrorized. Estimates run between 30,000 and 100,000 Jews murdered in those years, with some historians putting it even higher. When something repeats like that across decades, it’s not random anymore, it’s a pattern. Then the Holocaust, and Ukraine became one of the main killing grounds. Around 1.5 million Jews were murdered there. It wasn’t in gas chambers for the most part, but face to face. Forests, pits, ravines. The “Holocaust by bullets.” The most known example is Babi Yar, where over 33,000 Jews were shot in two days. Two days. That scale is hard to even process. And it wasn’t done by only the Germans. There was widespread local collaboration. Auxiliary police, nationalist groups, civilians helping identify Jews, round them up, sometimes taking part themselves. That fact gets people uncomfortable, but leaving it out doesn’t change what happened. After the war, it didn’t disappear. Under Soviet rule it was pushed under the rug, but it stayed there. After independence, it shows up in different forms. Polls over the years have found a meaningful percentage of people still buying into the same old ideas about Jews and power, influence, money. You also have the continued honoring of figures like Stepan Bandera. For many Ukrainians he’s a nationalist hero. For Jews and Poles, his movement is tied to collaboration and mass violence. Add to that far-right groups that use symbols and rhetoric straight out of the neo-Nazi playbook. They aren't a majority, but they exist, and they’re not exactly hiding. Now to be fair, Ukraine today is not Nazi Germany. They elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish. There are laws against antisemitism. You’re not seeing mass violence against Jews in the streets. But that doesn’t mean the deeper issue is gone. Attitudes don’t just vanish because laws change. And when you zoom out, it’s not just history or fringe groups. Ukraine has consistently voted against Israel in the UN, including after October 7. You can argue politics, alignments, or legacy voting blocs, but it still shows where things tend to land in practice. I traveled through Europe a few years ago, went to about 9 countries. Different places, different people, no issues. The one place where we got yelled at and even ran after a few times was Ukraine. That’s one experience, not a dataset. But at a certain point, when the history is this long and the signals keep lining up, it stops feeling like coincidence.

We are the donors #ballroom #taxpayers