LizTK

1/ Our financial system is failing ordinary Americans

🗺🍕🥳 Bitcoin Pizza Day is in just over two months. Get ready, world. Pizza inbound!

I worked at Epic Games for two years. This is real, and the strategy behind it is smarter than most people realize. Tim Sweeney has spent nearly two decades buying North Carolina forest land. 50,000+ acres across 15 counties. He’s now one of the largest private landowners in the state. The purchases started in 2008, right after the real estate collapse wiped out developers who had been planning golf resorts and luxury communities on biodiverse wilderness. Sweeney paid $15 million for Box Creek Wilderness, a 7,000-acre stretch in the Blue Ridge foothills containing 130+ rare and threatened species. Developers had owned 5,000 of those acres before the crash. He bought them for conservation prices when nobody else was bidding. He runs the acquisitions through an LLC called “130 of Chatham.” He buys the land, holds it for years, then either donates it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In 2021, he donated 7,500 acres in the Roan Highlands to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. Largest private land donation in North Carolina history. The part people miss: he told the News & Observer that since 2021, land got too expensive to keep buying. So he shifted focus to converting his existing 50,000 acres into permanent conservation status. He’s locking the land into legal structures that make development impossible regardless of who owns it in the future. A billionaire worth roughly $6 billion is spending tens of millions acquiring wilderness specifically during economic downturns, then giving it away or placing it under permanent legal protection. The land will outlast him, Epic Games, and Fortnite. That’s the part that separates Sweeney from billionaires who write checks to get their name on a building. The building depreciates. The forest compounds.

Number of people who go bankrupt a year due to medical debt: Germany: 0 France: 0 UK: 0 Japan: 0 Norway: 0 Denmark: 0 Finland: 0 Sweden: 0 Italy: 0 Australia: 0 Canada: 0 Spain: 0 Portugal: 0 Iceland: 0 Netherlands: 0 United States: 530,000 Yes. We need Medicare for All — NOW.

@MPtherealmvp Pretty sure the rave will be more fun than giving birth. Yet! I’m sure the birth will be far more memorable. Sending joy + love + health. May your minion be strong, creative and happy.

Not gonna be at Devconnect Buenos Aires. I'm birthing a girl (a real one) in a few weeks (wouldn't expect a lot of you to understand anyway) so please don't DM me asking me where I am (im birthing the girl, ok) you'll most likely get aired because ill be with the girl (again I don't expect you to understand) shes actually really interested in me and its not a situation i can pass up for some fun weeks with crypto people and asado (because ill be birthing a girl, not that you really are going to understand) this is my life now. Birthing a girl and not wasting my precious time in conferences, I have to move on from such simple things and branch out (you wouldnt understand)

@Geiger_Capital You committed a federal crime. This is like saying I have $400 in my bank account and wrote 4-checks @ $400 each at 4-different grocery stores. What’s going to happen, your votes will bounce just like a check.

Just voted 4 times in NYC. Four different locations and none of them asked me for ID. I even told one poll worker that I was "technically an illegal immigrant but, like, no violent crimes". She just smiled and gave me an I Voted sticker. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Debt traps Americans in a vicious cycle of housing insecurity. The result is a shortfall of seven million affordable housing units that will require an estimated $300 billion to address. It’s a herculean imbalance, and the catalyst behind Lane3. “The US is not considered one of the top ‘financially free’ countries in the world,” Lane3 founder Elizabeth “Liz” Kukka (KB9) told Kernel, highlighting systemic exclusion and barriers to capital. Lane3 is a marketplace that connects affordable housing developers with investors on mutually beneficial terms. They provide crucial bridge financing through transparent, on-chain debt instruments and community staking mechanisms. It’s the culmination of a story rooted in activism – one that began in public schools and gained form on-chain. With Lane3, @Venture_This is helping bring people home.

@Rothmus Food is expensive because it takes a lot to produce and there’s intermediaries: farmers <> market who take a slice along the way. Remove the $B in SNAP which provides revenue to grocery stores and prices will go up further. Remove the $$, supply goes down, and prices up.

@MW4Liberty Is it any worse than millionaires and billionaires filing for bankruptcy? How about a single person filing 6x? What if that person had over $4B in debt across the 6 filings.

My friend just told me his coworker was on the job site pissed about SNAP going away, saying “man now what am I going to do?” My friend asks “Don’t you make too much money for that anyway.” The reply? “I buy $2000 worth of SNAP a month for $500 from so and so. Now I have to pay full price for groceries.” Is this common? How common?

@AndrewKolvet This is the stupidest thing that I have ever heard. You can’t vote in state or federal elections unless you’re a citizen .

Elon Musk just left Joe Rogan absolutely STUNNED after explaining the real reason Dems refuse to open the government: MUSK: The reason you have this standoff is because if the $ hundreds of billions to create a financial incentive to have this giant magnet to attract illegals from every part of Earth to these states, if that is turned off the illegals will leave because they're no longer being paid to come to the U.S. and stay here. ROGAN:🤯 MUSK: Then the Democrat Party will lose a lot of voters. Bingo, Elon. The Democrat Party cares about unfettered immigration to America more than any other issue because they want to import voters and dilute America's traditional capitalistic European heritage.

@pendle_fi - Who do I connect with about a partnership re: leveraging futures contracts

@RepFine 12.8 M green card holders in the US Immigrants (including green card) paid $651B in taxes in 23’ How it works in: Germany: Financial Assistance, Housing, Health Insurance Canada (refugees): Language assistance, employment, community integration Mexico: Healthcare, legal aid

I am going to introduce a bill to ban all non-citizens from any form of welfare. No Food Stamps. No Section 8 housing. No Medicaid. No Cash Assistance. Not one penny. Not one. If you want free stuff, go home.

@scrowder business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news…

@scrowder $1,000/month on groceries for a family of 4. Its the same that my husband and I spend for a family of 2 (organic + local + vegetarian). If the comp is Walmart its about impossible to compete with slave (prison labor) to keep costs remarkably cheap.

SNAP costs taxpayers $145 billion a year. Recipients spend TWICE what the average worker does on groceries. That’s not “helping the poor.” It’s rewarding people who abuse the system.

@lsferguson Grocery store prices would skyrocket to make-up for the losses.

If SNAP disappeared, grocery store prices would plummet

@PeterMcCormack Taxes fund infrastructure like electrical grids, waterways, sewage systems, roads, firefighters, public health professionals, teachers, and police officers. To date, the highest quality of living is in countries w/very high levels of social welfare > Nordics..

You have it the wrong way round fella, tax is theft.

@TonyLaneNV cbpp.org/research/food-…

@TonyLaneNV This is fake news. SNAP collects broad race or ethnicity groups (white, black, hispanic..). From: Food Research & Action Center: in fiscal year 2023 SNAP households were headed by: ~42 % non-Latinx White, ~25 % non-Latinx Black, ~23 % Latinx (of any race), ~4 % non-Latinx Asian.

NEW: Food stamp usage by ethnicity is shocking. Nearly half of Afghan & Somali households are on welfare — while Americans who built this country rank near the bottom. We’re rewarding dependency while punishing hard work. When did that become “equity”? Thoughts? ⬇️ 🇺🇸

@TABYTCHI SNAP benefits, for working age adults, only last for 3-months w/in a 3-year period unless the recipient is taking qualified work training @ 20-hours/week. Recipients have paid taxes in their life and are therefore utilizing a benefit they have paid into.

In a few short days, 40 million people are going to lose access to other people’s money 🥹

@mrddmia 60% of people on food-stamps are children 0-17 and over 60. Another 10% are non-elderly disabled. That leaves 12M people or 3.4% of the US population.

We should only help people who can’t help themselves. It’s outrageous 40MM people get food stamps. Get off your fat, ghetto asses. Get a job. Stop reproducing. Change your shitty culture. Stop giving food stamps to immigrants. We don’t want you here, if you won’t work.

@MarcLobliner 40 million = 11.5% of the US population. Almost 60% of food stamps are for persons 0-17 years old and persons over 60. That means 16 million people OR 4.5% of the working adult population. Its a pretty low number.

Why the hell are we giving food stamps to 40 million people? Does anyone work anymore?