Ted Williams

@GuntherEagleman Deep respect for the Guard.

🚨 GOOD! National Guard is now out enforcing the juvenile curfew at Waterfront DC. After weeks of rowdy teen takeovers, chaos, and disruptions in the Navy Yard/Waterfront area, Mayor Bowser had to reinstate the curfew because the kids wouldn’t behave.

@RedWavePress So we just tear up the Camp David Accord? It requires the US to provide some annual defense financial support to both Egypt and Israel.

Rahm Emanuel: “No more U.S. military aid—financial assistance from the taxpayers for Israel. You’re a country like all other allies of ours, Japan, South Korea, the Brits, the Germans. You’re going to pay full price; you can buy what you want, but you have to abide by the laws that should be it.” “No more U.S. taxpayer support... I was in the room when President Obama’s largest assistance was under President Obama. We did the funding for the Iron Dome. But here, the days of taxpayer subsidizing Israel are over.” “No more financial aid.”

@Kristinartz Reader’s Digest was/is great.

Did anyone in your family ever read Reader's Digest? That little magazine was always around - on the table, in the bathroom, tucked in a drawer. Short stories, jokes, and advice you somehow always read. Who remembers it?

@OnDisasters GCAP headed for same fate?

"All aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right". Quote by aeronautical engineer and designer of the Hawker Hurricane, Sir Sydney Camm, on the cancellation of the type.

@AmericaFirsst Yes

🚨 DEVELOPING: Do you support Daniel Penny suing Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for malicious prosecution? YES or NO?

@Matt_Pinner Courageous and a true inspiration.

How would you describe JK Rowling in one word?

@zachmelloh26 I avoid IRMAA by never having filed for Medicare Part B. FEHB instead!

Most retirees don’t plan for the tax bomb. Or IRMAA. Until both hit… at the same time. John and Lisa retire at 65 with ~$2M: (Thread below)

@amuse Wow. Great essay. I once watched Judge Laster in action in a case where I was an interested party. I thought he was impressive and I’m very disappointed to read of his subsequent descent into activism.

DEXIT: Delaware judge’s decision to strip ten years of pay from an African American immigrant has resulted in the departure of $3 trillion worth of companies. Companies can’t trust DE judges to follow the law anymore.

@ick_real Hortense

I'm looking for a ridiculously old-fashioned girl's name for our new born . Think great-grandma name. Very old and rare. Any suggestions asap pls?

@harukaawake There’s a reason.

🇯🇵 An African lady in Japan explains that Japanese women are "too feminine" and "child-like". She said she wanted to model in Japan but they only chose her for roles such as a security guard or a factory worker and not for her femininity.

@AwartaniBasil @TheDMVLive Well done!

@TheDMVLive Washington DC after 7pm

Buckle up, folks. Several critical incidents coming out in Washington DC. #DCCrime

@ericswalwell @cdrsalamander WTF

I am suspending my campaign for Governor. To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past. I will fight the serious, false allegations that have been made — but that’s my fight, not a campaign’s.

@ClaudiaYadette1 @AstroVicGlover @NASA @csa_asc Glover for President 2028.

@AstroVicGlover @NASA @csa_asc God Bless you and Family !! 🙏🙏🇺🇸🇺🇸

Home, again! Mission complete. I hope we glorified God, humanity, our families and our terrific teams a @NASA and @csa_asc. Time to share the good news!

@AstroVicGlover @NASA @csa_asc All Hail this American hero!

@WesternLensman The amount of lawsuits will be epic.

Mamdani: “Findings have shown that the wealth of a median white household in the city is more than $200,000, while that of a black household is less than $20,000." "Our commitment now is to act upon these findings."

@Boenau Utterly false and ridiculous.

This is so important for Americans to understand.

@RudyTakala Utter insanity.

Overlooked part of the NY Times article on student loan debt. The State Department has an initiative that is STILL ACTIVE to bring foreign students to elite universities in the USA. They receive full scholarships. They pay nothing but a tax bill. They come, major in Spanish, and then flee abroad to avoid paying: "For Enrique Zúñiga, debt wasn’t on his mind when he began his studies. He received a full scholarship to Princeton and was grateful to avoid having student debt — until he received a $16,000 tax bill. Mr. Zúñiga, 25, comes from a working-class family in Tiltil, Chile. In his final year of high school, EducationUSA, a State Department initiative to recruit international students to the United States, came to his class and handed him pamphlets for Princeton, where he applied to study chemistry and later switched to majoring in Spanish and Portuguese. Mr. Zúñiga was living in university accommodations while dishwashing part time, with his scholarship covering both his tuition and his living expenses. But Mr. Zúñiga didn’t realize that all funding exceeding his academic costs represented “nonqualified” funding, meaning that it was taxable. Princeton states on its website that most nonacademic funding (including for international students) is taxable, but Mr. Zúñiga did not recall being told this. When he received his first tax bill from the university at the beginning of his second year of studies, he panicked. “I walked into the financial aid office, and I told them: ‘I don’t have this money, so what do I do? I need to enroll in my classes,’” he recalled. Princeton offered him a private loan to cover the tax bill. Mr. Zúñiga had hoped to stay in the United States after graduating and find a good job with his Ivy League degree. With these plans in mind, he took on additional private loans to cover his tax bills until graduation. TICAS has advocated for all scholarship funding to be nontaxable to prevent students from taking on tax-related debts. However, Ms. Zampini said she had never seen a situation like Mr. Zúñiga’s, where the university provided loans to cover the taxes. The student newspaper has also published an opinion article highlighting the issue. In July 2022, Mr. Zúñiga graduated with $16,736 in loans to Princeton. He received letters and emails demanding payment almost immediately. After months of unemployment and couch-surfing, Mr. Zúñiga found work as a legal assistant and interpreter at a legal charity in Philadelphia, but he was still unable to afford payments. By November 2023, Mr. Zúñiga had paid back less than $1,500, and loan servicers began demanding he make more payments. He was then offered a job in Shanghai as a college admissions counselor. “I thought to myself: ‘Well, they can’t enforce any judgments against my debts. I might as well go,’” he said. Before moving to China, he tried to negotiate with the loan servicers, but he said they were unwilling to budge. Even in Shanghai, a Chinese loan recovery organization began contacting Mr. Zúñiga almost daily throughout 2024, urging him to pay his debt to Princeton. “I was depressed,” he said, describing a cycle of receiving daily phone calls and blocking numbers. Today, Mr. Zúñiga still receives emails about his debt, which has grown to $28,196.13, but he has no plans to pay it back.

@BillAckman @X This is without question the right approach. It may kickstart similar decisions from other CEOs faced with similar outrageous claims, or it may not. But I think the odds are that it will, given your prominence. Stay strong on this — you are doing a very good thing.

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?

@Mr_Husky1 Is she a “Vietnamese woman” or an American woman?

In her final semester at Harvard, Amanda Nguyen was raped. She did everything survivors are told to do. Then she discovered that the physical evidence collected from her own body would be destroyed in 6 months — unless she filed paperwork to stop it. And then filed it again. Every 6 months. Forever. She was 22 years old. She decided to change federal law instead. 🌟 Amanda had interned at NASA. She had big plans. The kind of future that takes years of hard work to build was finally within reach. Then everything shattered. She went to the hospital. She reported the assault to police. She endured the forensic exam. She made the careful decision to file her rape kit anonymously — worried that an open case could affect security clearance applications for her dream careers. That's when the system revealed how broken it truly was. Because she was anonymous, Massachusetts law gave her only 6 months before her rape kit — physical evidence collected from her own body — would be permanently destroyed. Not the 15 years the state allowed for pressing charges. Six months. No official process to extend it. No clear instructions. No one to guide her. She had to figure it out herself, every 6 months, forcing herself to relive the worst experience of her life just to preserve her right to eventually seek justice. She started researching rape kit laws in all 50 states. What she found was staggering. Some states kept kits for years. Others destroyed them in as little as 30 days. Some states charged survivors for the cost of their own kit collection. Others never notified survivors what happened to their evidence. No consistency. No standard. *"Justice should not depend on geography,"* she said. But it did. In November 2014, Amanda founded Rise — a nonprofit dedicated to changing that reality. Everyone who worked with Rise was a volunteer. They fundraised through crowdfunding. Their goal was rewriting federal law. She met with lawmakers across Washington. Staffers told her it wasn't a priority. Some questioned her story. She kept going. She learned that the most powerful thing she could do was stop being abstract — to walk into a room, look a senator in the eyes, and say: *this happened to me. I am sitting in front of you.* Together with Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act — proposing that survivors should never be charged for their rape kit collection, should receive testing results, and must be notified at least 60 days before their evidence was scheduled for destruction. In February 2016, the bill was introduced. It passed the Senate unanimously. It passed the House unanimously. Not a single vote against. On October 7, 2016, President Obama signed the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act into federal law. Amanda Nguyen was 24 years old. Rise continued working state by state. To date, Rise has helped pass 33 laws across the United States, covering protections for over 84 million rape survivors. A movement started in spare time, with no budget and only volunteers, became one of the most effective civil rights campaigns of its generation. And Amanda never stopped reaching for the stars — literally. In 2024, Blue Origin announced she would be the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space. The young woman who had once feared that fighting for justice would cost her a future in space proved the two didn't have to be a choice. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Named a Time Woman of the Year. She wrote a memoir called *Saving Five.* But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Amanda Nguyen's story is not any single achievement. It is the fact that she turned the most painful moment of her life into something that made the world more just for millions of people who will never know her name. She was a college student who needed the system to work. When it didn't, she rebuilt it herself. **At 24 years old.

@OnDisasters Hopelessly obsolete before it ever flew. The Soviet bomber threat was rapidly disappearing.

This will sell like hot cakes. This was Canada´s lost jet: In a controversial decision, the promising Arrow was cancelled in favor of missiles, as some similar high-performance interceptors from the US. But experience showed "manned craft" still were the way to go. Regardless, it looked fantastic. 📹Crosscut Films