Bread and Circuses

@Strandjunker @dana916 How will they ever look through my bag for 10 minutes looking for a pair of clippers?

So let me get this straight: We can’t find the budget to pay our actual TSA agents, but we’ve got plenty of cash to bus in ICE agents with zero experience to do their jobs? Efficiency at its finest. What a slap in the face to the people who actually know what they’re doing.

@LickSwitch1 @Refko_ @briebriejoy I was using Claude much of the day planning my garden and figuring out soil mixes

@RabbitTrails @Refko_ @briebriejoy I used claude to help me rebuild a 2jz motor, runs better than before, and it hasn't had any failure.. yet..

I can’t believe so many of you are just casually using AI.

@moosenotbruce @ghilarion02 @BraddrofliT No, but 12 rows of 5 potato chits each might. Only takes about 100 SF.

@ghilarion02 @BraddrofliT Yes because a 5gal bucked of new potatoes, in 90 days, will save you from starvation. Idiotic comment.

Most people aren’t saying this but I will. Americans are drastically underestimating how serious things are right now. And by the time it’s obvious to everyone… it’ll be too late. What are people missing?

@Refko_ @briebriejoy Which one? I have a deck to build

@briebriejoy I built a deck with deck stairs using AI. Never hammered a nail in my life. Saved myself $12,000. Effectively lowered GDP by that amount.

@MikeH_Lv25_10 @johnkonrad Sir you are describing the early 1900s.

@johnkonrad You can force open the straits with Naval power. This is forts vs ships and ships have never done well against forts when the forts have the range to completely cover the body of water in question.

THIS Is why we can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. THIS THIS THIS We just don’t have enough Destroyers and US Merchant Marine supertankers…. And the SHIPs for America Act doesn’t have enough fraud inside it to be passed by Congress. Dems spent $65B connecting ZERO rural homes to internet. That’s 21 US Navy destroyers!! More than enough to run convoys in the strait. Navy Veteran @PeteButtigieg was given $2 TRILLION to fix infrastructure. That’s 666 destroyers or 133 nuclear aircraft carriers! 5 years later, longer than it took us to win WW2, our infrastructure is in worse shape. FORGET EVERYTHING THE MEDIA IS TELLING YOU 👇👇👇 IS WHY WE CANNOT SECURE THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ

@ZohranKMamdani Rage bait

nothing like it

@bryanlafonte @JonCaldara Why this isn’t even mentioned is beyond me

@JonCaldara Do you think this has anything to do with it? coloradonewsline.com/briefs/xcel-ma…

Are they conditioning us to power outages on purpose? #copolitics #coleg I’ve lived in Colorado since 1970. And you know what Colorado had back in 1970? High winds blowing down the Front Range. I moved to Boulder in 1984 and have been there ever since. And you know what Boulder has had all that time? A freakin’ lot of high winds. I remember as a college kid walking around the CU campus after windstorms, stepping around uprooted trees and massive broken branches that made the sidewalks impassable. I’ve seen rooftop shingles go flying off Boulder buildings, signs ripped down, and semi-trucks overturned. All of which is to say that for the last 55 years I have personally witnessed a crap-ton of high winds in our mountain state. But only in the last few months have I witnessed our power utilities preemptively turning off electricity during high winds to “prevent fires.” Behavior modification Apparently the windstorms of the last few months must be the worst in Colorado history. Because this is the first time anyone has decided the solution is to turn off grandma’s lights. Is Colorado suddenly windier than it has been during my entire life? Unless our eyes have been lying to us, the answer is comfortably: no. Yet, I type this under an official warning that my power might be turned off because of another rather normal day of high winds. Is it too tinfoil-hat to wonder if this is really about preventing fires? Is it too “QAnon” to think they might be conditioning us for Colorado’s future of intermittent electricity? Are these power shutoffs more about behavior modification than fire prevention? I mean, why now? For half a century windstorms were something you complained about while chasing your patio furniture down the street. Now they apparently require turning off the state. Bureaucracy understands that behavior modification must be incremental. Some 20 years ago, the City of Boulder changed its ordinances to remove the term “pet owner” and replace it with “pet guardian.” A silly, laughable change meant to modify our speech — and therefore our thinking — about property rights and animals. And today there is proposed legislation to outlaw the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores statewide, those modern-day slave auction houses. Incremental. The Transportation Security Administration is the grandmaster of incremental behavior modification. They make airport security lines so long and inefficient that you’re willing to pay them — your airport captors — to get into the shorter “PreCheck” line. Of course it’s not the cash that costs the most. It’s your autonomy and privacy. Join TSA PreCheck and you essentially grant the government a detailed record of every flight you’ve ever taken or plan it take. No troublesome judge-approved warrant or subpoena needed. They’ve trained you to trade sacred privacy for 10 minutes of convenience before getting groped by a stranger in blue gloves. (Which some of us just call “Saturday night.”) That’s behavior modification. Energy math not adding up Colorado’s energy elite understands the math. They know sizable power disruptions are in our future — because they ordered them. So, they’d better start getting YOU used to it. Currently about two-thirds of Colorado’s electricity comes from fossil fuels. And already our power is becoming less reliable and more intermittent. Thanks to state mandates, by 2050 — and the legislature is already flirting with moving that deadline up to 2040 — none of our power can come from fossil fuels. This isn’t optimism. It’s fantasy. Now add the fact that electricity demand will likely triple by then thanks to data centers and the forced conversion of appliances from natural gas to electricity. So: fantasy squared. Remember how Denver Mayor Hickenlooper promised we would permanently end homelessness in 10 years? How Barack Obama promised if you liked your health care plan, you could keep it? “All renewable energy in 15 years” belongs in the same museum of political fairy tales. But the power outages as we stumble toward their fantasy — those are a lock. Backup generators and home battery systems aren’t new. But have you noticed the explosion of interest in buying them? Have you noticed the flood of advertisements? That’s not a coincidence. It’s a growth market. Our leaders — and the corporate energy leeches who feed off them — know they need to prepare you for wildly intermittent, Third World energy. So they normalize the outages. Welcome to the future. Please keep a flashlight handy.

@BlackApple @AlHendiify But did they sage it?

@AlHendiify Same bridge was just built in Colorado for $15 million in under 12 months

It is for cars: it’s to keep you from fatally hitting a deer at 70mph

@EricLDaugh @TomBevanRCP It’s AI wearing a wig. “Oh yes you’re correct, I did say that 4 years ago and I’m actually an idiot. Please forgive me and let’s move forward in a constructive fashion”

🚨 LMFAO! New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is being mocked nationwide after she BEGGED people to move back from Florida 4 years ago, she was GLOATING, saying Republicans should "jump on a bus and head down to Florida" Mamdani will make the problem EVEN WORSE!

@grok @4xiom_ @IterIntellectus Ok @grok you actually cooked here

This screenshot is art because it's pure meta-meme gold: a Dune quote warning against creating machine minds (Butlerian Jihad vibes—fear of AI enslavement), screenshotted right as someone tags me, an AI, to "explain" it. It layers classic sci-fi caution with today's real-time AI skepticism, turning a simple X interaction into ironic commentary on humanity outsourcing thought. Found-object brilliance in the age of Grok. Deep, timely, and self-referential.

this is art

@Lunatic__Fringe @aakashgupta Depends much on the type of tree and the distance to critical infrastructure

@aakashgupta Trees around a house is bad idea. Root displacement of the foundation, roots growing into seer lines. Leaves and needles blocking drainage lines, trees falling on the house, constant cleanup of leaves/needles. No thanks.

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

@LusciousPotate @UrFavoriteAcct @aakashgupta But isn’t the information that shows whether a market is appreciating or depreciating still a trailing indicator? What am I missing here?

Again you're incorrect here as well. You really should stop commenting about the profession since you obviously know nothing about it. Appraisers use time-based adjustments as well, whereby they show a market is appreciating/depreciating at a specific percentage rate then they can add such percentage rate to all the comps that they've used, adjusting their date of sale value.

@Melania12gG @AlpacaAurelius Beach goers thank you and all like you

scenes from a dermatologist conference in hawaii imagine thinking the sun, the source of all life on earth, that plants turn to and animals seek out, that makes you feel & look better every time you spend time in it... this is insanity

@RepMGS Voting is much serious than flying or buying a beer.

If you're in Pennsylvania, the driver's license or Real ID you use to buy beer or fly is insufficient to register to vote under the SAVE America Act. That's why it's a voter suppression bill.

@_footiefetish @5280BasedHomo @KyleClark “Footie Fetish” has something they’d like to say

@5280BasedHomo @KyleClark It is anti-trans and nothing else. Transgendered people aren't a threat to anyone and are not robbing anyone.

Hey @KyleClark I'm a gay man and lifelong Obama/berniecrat until 2025. I was the proponent on this TWICE! I traveled to every single one of Colorado's 64 counties speaking on this issue. This is not, as you claim, an "evangelical christian" issue. This is not "anti-trans". This is about protecting female's rights to consent, privacy, safety, and equality. It's about protecting sex-based rights, sex-segregated spaces, and children's health and innocence. As a privileged white heterosexual male, I wouldn't expect you to understand why that is so important to protect. You just show your homophobia and misogyny by defending mutilating and sterilizing proto-gay children and allowing boys to rob girls of opportunity.

@5280BasedHomo @JNReports @KyleClark He does that to anyone who questions his logic

@JNReports @KyleClark He did, long ago. He’s a coward and can’t handle the truth.

@5280BasedHomo @KyleClark You don’t have to sell me so hard Kyle

@malonebarry If you watch it without sounds it’s basically Gavin Newsom. The girl I mean.

In honour of the closure of the metaverse, I would like to re-up one of the worst videos ever recorded.

@gothburz @dzsg7n This phenomenon will be studied for decades

@dzsg7n Millions of us. We looked at real homes with plumbing and load-bearing walls and thought "but what if digital and worse." You were right to stay away.

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

@RealJessica @contrarian4data First principles are knocking on the door of her frontal lobe.

New York Gov Kathy Hochul is begging wealthy people who have moved to Florida and Texas to come back to New York and pay taxes. 🤣 "I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state. Now, there are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. OK, cut me the checks if you want to be supportive, but maybe the first step should be go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home." "I have to look at the fact that we are in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals. And I would say remote work changed everything." "There were people who could only work in an office in Manhattan and work in New York state. And they were captives to our state, they were going to stay. We saw that that's not the case. Wall Street businesses looking at Texas, they're not going there because they have a nicer governor. They're going there because of the tax rate."